Cloud: how IBM supports businesses with its Montpellier data center


Discover the full interview with Hubert Lacaze, Tech Sales & Innovation Director at IBM in Montpellier, and Hélène Quillaud, project manager, in podcast:

When we talk about the cloud market, we immediately think of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. But in the shadow of the three global behemoths in the sector, IBM is in ambush. As part of the group’s restructuring orchestrated by Arvind Krishna, at its head since 2020, the hybrid cloud has become one of the pillars of Big Blue’s growth strategy, alongside artificial intelligence. The Armonk firm can thus count on the good performance generated by the acquisition in 2019 of Red Hat, a company specializing in the hybrid cloud, for 34 billion dollars.

To guide companies in the cloud sector, IBM has several demonstration data centers around the world. In particular, it has one in Montpellier, in order to enable its customers to become aware of the opportunities offered by the cloud and to better understand the functioning of these technological places which host data from the global Web. “The main specificity of our data center in Montpellier is that it is not a production data center for customers. This gives us the advantage of being able to model, to test different types of configuration, but also to visit it and see very closely what a modern cloud data center is, which is not possible in a production data center where we cannot enter“, explains Hubert Lacaze, Tech Sales & Innovation Director at IBM in Montpellier.

In this 400 m² data center near the Mediterranean, IBM performs three main activities: product testing to anticipate any type of business interruption and ensure continuity of service; demonstrations and prototyping to evaluate different configurations, especially to test the hybrid cloud remotely; the establishment of a benchmark allowing to question the performances and the criteria, whether they are functional or not within the framework of the implementation of a large-scale client application, which can be useful in particular for restarting a cold system without loss of data, protect against cyberattacks or even prepare for the production of a solution. So many possibilities which are aimed at all types of companies, in particular insurers, banks and manufacturers for large systems, but not only, the digital transformation of companies having accelerated considerably during the Covid-19 pandemic. .

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Data centers facing the challenge of carbon neutrality

Beyond professional use tests, the Hérault site is also a testing ground for the American group to reduce the carbon footprint of its data centers, which are often singled out for their energy consumption. As a reminder, data centers are responsible for 2% of greenhouse gas emissions, a level comparable to air traffic.

However, Hubert Lacaze believes that the room for improvement of data centers in terms of energy efficiency is encouraging. “In a data center, the majority of greenhouse gases are emitted during production. This is the opposite of what happens with your smartphone or TV, where 80% of greenhouse gases are emitted during construction and 20% during use. It’s quite the opposite with a data center, where less than 20% of greenhouse gases are emitted during the product cycle and 80% during consumption. It is therefore very important to optimize this consumption, because this is where we will be able to make gains“, he underlines.

From this perspective, it is the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), an indicator measuring the energy efficiency of a data center, which acts as a judge of the peace. “A traditional non-optimized data center will have a PUE of 3. This means that for 3 kW that you put in your data center, you take out 1 kW of computing and you throw 2 kW in nature, which is not not good“, indicates the framework of IBM. And to add: “When you work on urbanization techniques for a data center, by aligning the machines well, by making cold and hot zones, by partitioning, you go down quite easily to a PUE of 2. This is already a first not important.“In the case of the Montpellier data center, its PUE is 1.4. The ultimate goal is to go below 1. To do this, we will have to push cooling techniques even further, such as free-cooling or free-chilling by using the outside air.This is the challenge to be met by IBM and its partners in order to offer companies sustainable and efficient data centers.

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