DIGITAL REALTY INNOVATION LAB, ASHBURN, VA – Seeing is believing. That’s the whole idea behind Digital Realty’s new Innovation Lab (DRIL), which aims to give enterprise customers a place to test AI setups and hands on experience with the liquid cooling technology that will enable the chips of the future.
The lab includes a range of gear from Digital Realty’s vendor partners, including systems from Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, Lenovo, Vertiv, Motivair, ePlus and Telescent. But it also features floor cutouts that expose the pipes feeding the liquid cooling systems in its experimental racks, sample racks that showcase what the tubing inside a liquid cooled rack looks like, and a deconstructed server blade fitted with cold plate technology.
In other words, DRIL doesn’t just offer clients a test environment, it aims to demystify a critical emerging technology.
We’ve written plenty about the liquid cooling wave sweeping the data center realm. But adoption is moving much more quickly among hyperscalers than it is with enterprise customers. Why?
“I think a lot of enterprise customers are still hesitant to proceed with liquid cooling. The DRIL Lab helps them visualize what a liquid cooled suite or data center looks like,” Digital Realty Senior Solutions Architect Okey Keke explained during Fierce’s tour of the lab. “We’ve been doing liquid cooling for decades, but those footprints are behind locked doors. So, we want to give customers an opportunity to see it up close.”
That bit about locked doors isn’t an exaggeration.
Digital Fort Knox
Before the lab tour, Digital Realty took Fierce on a tour of one of its data center facilities in Ashburn, Va. This involved not only a LOT of walking but a first-hand look at the nearly comical amount of security applied to the windowless behemoths that dot the Northern Virginia landscape.
According to Digital Realty Solutions Engineer Constance Deering, there are five layers of security before a client can access their servers.
First, there’s the drive up gate that all visitors must provide an ID to pass through. Then, once you enter the building, there’s a required check in with front desk security and a walk through what is called the “man trap” door. This is essentially a giant person-sized tube with a front and rear door. You badge in, wait for the front door to close behind you and then the back door opens to let you pass through. Yes, we tried it and yes, it was kind of fun.
After making it through the man trap and winding your way to your assigned suite (which may take a while – the building we viewed was a quarter-mile from end to end), there’s a biometrics checkpoint to get into the server suite. The fourth layer is a badge into the server cage and the fifth is the key required to actually open the door to the racks.
That whole shebang is just the standard security Digital Realty provides. Cages are generally floor to ceiling, but some clients ask to have their server enclosures extended into the floor and ceiling crawlspaces reserved for air ducts and piping. You know, just in case someone tries to Mission Impossible their way in.
Others are so secretive about their server setups that they install frosted screens on all the walls of the server cage to prevent nosy nellies from sneaking a peek. Of course, there are also some with static cameras and still others who install their own cages within the cages Digital Realty provides.
All of this is to say – it’s no wonder no one really knows what liquid cooling looks like in a real-world rack.
DRIL-ing down
In addition to pulling back the curtain on liquid cooling tech, Keke said the lab will allow customers to run proof-of-concept trials for AI workloads. These can even be done side by side using different hardware so customers can really home in on what they want their deployments to look like.
“It’s a significant investment to deploy an AI solution. Here they can come and test and make sure they will get the business outcomes they need,” Brian Cade, Digital Realty’s Director of Partner Solutions, said.
Options on offer at DRIL include liquid cooling systems from Lenovo, Motivair and Vertiv; Cisco full-stack AI pods with compute, storage and networking gear that can simulate inferencing and how workloads will run spread across different metro areas; and an Oracle Solution Center setup that allows customers to validate hybrid, multi-cloud and on-prem systems.
The Ashburn location is the only DRIL site for now, but Digital Realty is already working to bring another online in London next year.