Your Landlord Should Offer On-prem Cloud, Suggests Immersed Datacenter Upstart

Building owners should consider an on-site datacenter an amenity they need to offer tenants – according to an Australian outfit that hopes to provide those same datacenters.

Aspiring cloud operator ResetData offers datacenter pods it's named Hyperdrives that use liquid immersion to reduce energy consumption and heat output. The startup modifies Dell servers to operate while immersed – and as it's a partner of the hardware giant is able to retain the manufacturer's warranty. Like others of its ilk, ResetData can capture waste heat and use it to warm water that can be piped into an office building's taps.

One wrinkle with immersion tech is that it's obviously heavier than conventional datacenter racks – sometimes too heavy for easy installation in a datacenter or office building.

But ResetData co-founder Marcel Zalloua, who has spent 20 years building datacenters, knows an immersed rack is not uncomfortably heavy in a concrete-lined basement. Such spaces are also dark, cool, and close to power and plumbing.

He figures building operators could therefore consider installing an immersed datacenter to handle their own workloads, and also to rent compute and storage capacity to tenants – with a pitch that an immersed datacenter in the basement offers low latency and a good sustainability story. Liquid-cooled kit also allows denser deployments, so ResetData is able to operate the equivalent of a full-height rack in its Hyperdrives. That's enough resource to matter for many clients.

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Zalloua thinks real estate outfits that own or operate multiple buildings could even see the opportunity to offer their tenants resilience – by housing multiple immersed pods on different premises.

ResetData is also open to having building owners host its rigs so it can build a distributed and resilient cloud of its own. The Aussie upstart has created an OpenStack-based hybrid cloud platform to run in its pods, and also supports AzureStack HCI. Both offer bare metal or virtual servers. Support for other popular hybrid cloud vendors such as Red Hat, Citrix, and VMware is on the way.

If tenants are looking to handle AI workloads (and who isn't?), Hyperdrives can house Nvidia's A40 datacenter GPUs and rent them as-a-service – with or without the Omniverse 3D platform. Again, ResetData has all the necessary certs to allow immersed operation of the GPUs without voiding warranties. ®