In the latest installment of our DCD>Talks series, Alex Dickins chats to Herb Villa, senior solutions architect at Rittal, a specialist in infrastructure for industrial settings, including data centers. Together, they explore the potential threats to uptime that come along with the advent of the artificial intelligence (AI) era.

Villa begins by pointing out that old paradigms of “good enough” no longer apply in the modern era, and that 100 percent uptime is essential, because of the extensive financial impact that outages bring.

As an ex-Navy submariner, he points out that “good enough” would certainly not apply to a nuclear submarine, so why apply it to a data center? He goes on to emphasize that the interconnected nature of our society means that often, we don’t see the impact of an outage on the wider technology ecosystem until it happens:

“We see the deepfake, hacking, and identity theft. This is the interconnectivity that we did not realize we were so dependent upon until one of these outages happened. We can't plan for that, but it shows whether it is a vulnerability or a dependency.

“Now all of a sudden, I'm stuck in an airport because I can't get on a plane, I can't get to my bank. We have to be much more aware of the impact and planning for them because we are connected.”

Dickens asks how stakeholders can keep abreast of the threats to uptime when we are constantly being bombarded by them. Villa explains:

“We have to treat everything to the same highest level of security resiliency and redundancy as our core systems, because today, everything is a core system. My home network can be hacked from a refrigerator or a smartwatch.

"When you are that connected, every opportunity, every IP address, every MAC address, is a door in. They all have to be taken care of. So while we may have the most secure data center for one enterprise or one business, I can't say that every endpoint is as robustly protected.

“That is what we have to plan for. And then we need to make sure that we have a backup plan inside. People are so focused on the cyber threat, that they forget that there is a physical threat – infrastructure has USB ports on it, and that is a doorway in. We have to think of this as one giant connected system.”

He points out the need to recognize convergence as a phenomenon, in an age where we are, as Villa describes it, ‘hyper-connected’:

“Everybody is in the same boat. This is the data center world today. Whether it's AI, cloud, hyperscale, or Edge, all of this is one giant network, and even the slightest opportunity to create havoc will be taken.

“Whether it's identity theft, election interference, malicious actors, deep hacking, deepfake stuff. This is what we have to plan for. It can live on my wrist, it can live on my phone. It lives everywhere. This is going to be all of our responsibility. We're all part of this ‘hyper-connect.”

Villa goes on to demonstrate this theory in the context of the data center:

“We talk about cooling, power, climate control. Well, guess what those do? They all communicate using the same AI to monitor how much heat they're removing, how much water is being pumped through a facility, and how much electricity I am using.”

However, that level of visibility will never be 360, however much preparation we do:

“Can I manage the demand? What if we have a brownout or a blackout? What if there's a water main break? All of that is now communicated. I have to see that. I have to be able to react to that quickly. That's all part of infrastructure now and without it, then all of the best cyber security is going to fail, because if I can't get electricity, or I can't remove the heat, stuff breaks, and that's it.”

The conversation moves to the need for balance between corporate responsibility and environmental responsibility, as Villa passionately emphasizes the need to look beyond the pressure to deliver energy-hungry services:

“We want balance. Yes, we have a corporate responsibility, but we have a global responsibility. Resiliency is critical. We are running out of resources. We must be consciously aware of the environmental impacts that we have, but be able to deliver the services that we need.

"Energy efficiency will be critical, but now, when we hear about AI loads, power demand goes up. There is no gold, silver, or bronze for energy efficiency, there is just energy efficiency. We can still manage our growth, manage these new applications, but plan for the future and hopefully, make it a little bit better for generations to come.”

Finally, Dickens asks Villa what about the secrets to disaster recovery and mitigation in the era of artificial intelligence:

“The first thing to do is admit that this will occur. I've always said that with any idiot-proofing there is an idiot working to prove you wrong, and that is what you have to plan for. Is something going to happen? Yes. Do I know what it will be? No. Learn from the past. Learn from your mistakes.

“It is offloading or offshoring your critical data. It is having that backup, which now has more power. Don't stick your head in the sand. Know that it's going to come. I'm talking about stuff that we will never see until, unfortunately, it fails, and then we see it and say, ‘I didn't know that was even a thing.’ Well, it turns out that it is a thing.”

To watch the full interview with Herb Villa and find out how the lessons of Fukushima can be applied to data center resilience, click here.