Boston partners with Bytesnet Data Centers to deliver sustainable heating

Boston, provider of cutting-edge, high-performance technology since 1992, has partnered with Bytesnet, a Netherlands-based provider of Colo, HPC and cloud services delivered sustainably to its customers. Working together, the companies will deliver a local sustainability project to provide long-term reliable, affordable and sustainable heat solutions in the Groningen district in the Netherlands.

Bytesnet prides itself on its green credentials, creating efficient energy performance at lower costs, to reduce both its own and its customers’ environmental footprints. HPC workloads necessitate high power density racks. In line with the ethos of driving green computing, Boston worked with Bytesnet to provide a method to recycle energy generated from this environment.

As part of its commitment to WarmteStad, the sustainable utility company behind the Municipality of Groningen project, Bytesnet is working with Boston to take advantage of the firm’s expertise in creating green engineering solutions. Boston has architected a solution with IT hardware from Supermicro and a liquid immersion cooling solution from Asperitas. On top of the infrastructure, Boston has delivered a managed services function using vScaler, software that delivers an OpenStack-based Cloud Solution with a complete AI management platform. The solution will automate processes to reduce administration overhead for Bytesnet and significantly lower costs.

The system being rolled out at WarmteStad will take advantage of the residual heat that is released from the servers and IT equipment at Bytesnet’s new Groningen data centre. The equipment must be cooled to ensure it maintains the optimum temperature for the high performance of the technology. Bytesnet and Boston estimate that this will create enough energy to heat over 10,000 homes and businesses.

Utilising liquid immersion cooling for IT

The method of using liquid immersion cooling to support large scale IT organisations with vast data requirements has been growing in popularity in recent years. The Asperitas AIC24-21” immersion cooling solution features a cooling capacity of 60kW and offers natural convection-driven circulation, full flexibility for high density compute and storage solutions, and integrated monitoring and control.     

The system that has been designed by Boston stretches over more than a single site to ensure data availability, and comprises multiple Supermicro compute systems, fully immersed in liquid, communicating over a high-availability external Mellanox network architecture, to large-scale DDN storage systems.

“For nearly 30 years, we have created incredible technology alliances, and we knew that Asperitas would be the right partner to meet Bytesnet’s requirements,” stated Manoj Nayee, Managing Director at Boston Limited. “With vScaler’s implementation of an OpenStack cloud solution, combined with Asperitas liquid cooling and Supermicro server engineering, we have been able to create a new category solution to support this outstanding sustainability project.”

“Bytesnet wants to be the provider of choice when it comes to a reliable and sustainable IT infrastructure.” commented Jan-Joris van Dijk, Managing Director of Bytesnet. “This approach, designed by Boston, allows us to achieve unparalleled performance in energy efficiency and realise considerable savings in our up-front and operational costs – all whilst providing a higher quality of service to the greater demands of data-driven organisations. Boston has been instrumental in helping us with our journey.”

vScaler provided an OpenStack cloud storage solution and will contribute the provisioning and daily monitoring of systems within a 24/7 SLA for maximum up-time, with their globally distributed team for technical coverage and support.