In association with Ready Server
Walk into a Ready Server data centre in Kallang Way, in the southeast of Singapore, and you almost feel like you’ve entered a greenhouse or a tropical rainforest. The humidity might not as high but certainly the temperature feels like it at 29 deg C.
Here, rack after rack of servers running on AMD and other processors deliver the cloud service that the company has just rolled out early this year.
And unlike many data centres in the past, this place is not too cold to hang around. Instead, it’s rather uncomfortable to be inside for too long because it’s too warm.
The place is run by NewMedia Express, a long-time Singapore-based cloud infrastructure player, which now provides the hardware for Ready Server, a sister company that provides cloud services.
Among Ready Server’s customers are small businesses that depend on affordable yet high-quality cloud services to connect to their customers.
Earlier this year, Ready Server launched new cloud services that charged by the hour and offered unlimited bandwidth, much like a mobile phone plan. It aims to win over customers that balk at the growing costs from bigger hyperscale players.
The tropical data centre for Ready Server is related to an earlier Singapore trial from 2021 that aimed to create more sustainable data centres for the tropics.
One of the things the trial found was that servers could run as high as 29 deg C, which is sometimes higher than the room temperature in the shade in Singapore.
As one of the partners of the earlier testbed, Ready Server bought over some of the technology and equipment. Now, the new tropical data centre is used by Ready Server to deliver 160kW of capacity, at 5kW per rack.
Offered as a cloud service, these rows of servers now provide virtual machines (VMs) for customers to spin up and down, as they are needed.
One server today comes with 128 cores and 1TB of memory, which hosts 100 to 200 VMs, explained Alan Woo, director or Ready Server. “So you don’t need so many servers.”
What the tropical data centre offers Ready Server is a more sustainable way to deliver cloud services in Singapore’s hot climate. Energy, a costly resource in the city-state, is thus one area where it could save money on.
Today, the Kallang Way data centre operates at a power usage efficiency (PUE) of 1.4. That is slightly better than the global average PUE of 1.59 and Asia-Pacific’s 1.68. However, Singapore’s regulator has indicated last year that it aims to bring PUE to under 1.3 in the next 10 years.
In the past two years, many new data centres have explored more advanced liquid cooling, which can help bring down PUE to as low as 1.1.
The “ideal” PUE of 1.0 means all the power consumed by a data centre is used for IT equipment, with nothing extra for cooling or lighting, for example.
In future, liquid cooling is something that Ready Server is exploring, as it looks to bring in the hot-running graphics processing units (GPUs) that are a feature in many data centres running AI workloads today.
Tests might be carried out at a separate disaster recovery data centre, as liquid cooling is more efficient and might be useful for sites that it cannot draw heavily on power from the grid.
As an alternative to GPUs, Ready Server can even host powerful machines like an Apple Mac mini to run a more modest 8 to 9 billions of parameters for training AI models, said Woo.
However, sharing that resource – so that the hardware works hard all the time and not just for a few hours a day – would be difficult because it is not built for sharing like this, he explained.
So, in the long run, the company is still looking to bring in GPUs, though their high prices make them prohibitive to smaller players, he added.
“Customers will be asking for GPUs and we need to see how to incorporate them at a different price from hyperscalers,” he noted.
