Today’s economy is powered by digital infrastructure. Digital infrastructure must be as efficient and clean as possible to guarantee that today’s digital firms can operate sustainably for many years.

At UnitedLayer, we are conscious that our customers rely on us as partners in their sustainability strategy. This motivated us to make a global climate-neutral pledge for our infrastructure by 2030 and to cut emissions throughout our operations and supply chain.

We have met several milestones aligned with the key pillars discussed below. In this blog, we’ll cover just a few of the many innovations we’re pursuing to make our data centers cleaner and more efficient.

According to Statista, “Given its high energy demand, 45% of total IT carbon footprint is caused by data centers across the globe.” 

Principles driving a Sustainable Data Center:

• Low-carbon energy
• Using Digital Tools
• Software-optimized and automated
• High-efficiency cooling

Low-carbon energy helps us scale data volumes without increasing emissions

While increasing the data centers‘ energy efficiency is a primary focus, we understand that energy use is unavoidable. We have set a goal of using only renewable energy in all our data centers worldwide. By achieving this, we will help our customers’ digital supply chains become greener and reduce our carbon impact.

Use digital tools available to optimize operations

With the introduction of the smart grid, the grid has become more autonomous, giving rise to peer-to-peer networks to facilitate energy flow and prevent disturbance. Digital technologies, such as digital substations for larger data centers, utility, and industrial use, are available to support protection and control requirements. Furthermore, digital asset management platforms can help data center operators evaluate the relative health of their essential power components, allowing them to shift away from planned maintenance or break/fix schemes and toward more proactive and predictive maintenance techniques.

Working smarter toward greater efficiency with software optimization

Using our UnityOneCloud tool, you can track and optimize the data center device’s carbon emissions and energy consumption with remote data center management functionalities. You can also reduce carbon emissions by optimizing the power required by the devices in the data center.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) have become essential IT future-proofing concerns, much like sustainability plans. It only makes sense to employ sustainability and AI/ML since both are crucial to the future of IT. Automated data centers can utilize AI algorithms to collect essential data, analyze it to forecast sustainability indicators under various conditions, and adjust operations as necessary. These algorithms can also be used to automate power-aware workload orchestration, which balances power demand and schedules workloads according to the availability of renewable energy.

High-efficiency cooling helps limit energy waste

GET A CLOSER LOOK AT THE UNITEDLAYER SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGY

We have barely touched the surface of UnitedLayer’s sustainability narrative in this blog. We’re proud of our advancements, but we’re not about to stop anytime soon. The story is being written every day.

We help enterprises get complete visibility and transparency of their carbon footprints and map their journey toward sustainability. To date, we have transformed a few hundred customers into achieving net zero carbon emissions, and the count is increasing daily. Our robust solutions, such as carbon-neutral recommendation engines, cognitive carbon analysis, dashboards, and reports, have already benefitted our customers in reducing their global carbon footprints.

To learn more about our product and services, click here!

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Sustainability with Data Center Carbon Footprint Analysis

Discord experienced outages on Tuesday, according to various user reports, social media accounts, and the website Down Detector. Discord’s outage began around 12 p.m. EST, causing disruptions on the popular chat app.

To fix this problem, Discord officials said that “We are aware of an issue causing message failures and are working on a fix”.

A thorough investigation from Discord started for the “API Errors and Push Notification Errors” at 12:16 p.m. EST and efforts were taken to find and remediate the issues. The incident report stated that a “root cause was also found in their streaming service” at 1:08 p.m. EST, involving a controlled restart, which would have resulted in a “brief disruption of streaming, which leads to the outage.”

Discord has already experienced multiple outages in 2022. This includes one as recently as February and a two-hour outage in January, which prevented users from joining calls or using chat functions. According to “USA Today,” Discord also experienced a major outage earlier in November 2021, along with Spotify, Snapchat, and Etsy, all affected by Google Cloud issues.

Here, in the case of Discord, they could have mitigated this issue if they had hosted their infrastructure on a private cloud. The reason is private clouds such as our G3 private cloud gives them greater control, visibility, and guaranteed up-time of 99.999% as compared to public clouds, which offer an uptime of 99.95%. Also, our G3 private cloud users get control to set up and manage Routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, PDU, WAN configuration, traffic engineering, BGP, security, DDoS mitigation, monitoring, alerting, and WAN optimization for guaranteed performance. Our users can observe and analyze the status of their devices, health, and performance for complete visibility of their infrastructure. This gives them an edge to mitigate issues quickly and not get stuck in vendor lock-ins, similar to what happened previously in the case of discord.

How Unitedlayer can help you?

UnitedLayer offers its users enterprise-grade G3 private cloud solutions where customers can host their application on dedicated private cloud servers powered by OpenStack, VMware, Hyper-V. It comes with all benefits of cloud computing with greater control and security of the enterprise-grade private cloud.

• We guarantee the availability of 99.999% with N+M clusters
• We offer fully flexible vCPU and RAM size configurations without lock-in on specific VM types, along with adaptive resizing.
• We provide high performance compute through all-flash storage ranging from 1K- 100K+ IOPS on 10g/40g/100g network fabric infrastructure.  

On October 4, 2021, Facebook and its other platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, went down globally for close to six hours. As services are restored, questions about what caused the Facebook outage and why it took so long to resolve are raised.

For hours, billions of users could not access Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp as the social media giant worked to restore services.

Why did Facebook go down?

People began to notice they couldn’t access Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger shortly before 5 p.m. UTC. It would take more than five hours for services to be restored.

Facebook issued a statement about the Facebook outage that the cause of the outage was a configuration change to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between the company’s data centers, which had a cascading effect, bringing all Facebook services to a halt. It meant not only was Facebook gone, but everything Facebook runs disappeared too.

It involves two things that sort out how the internet works – that is Domain Name System (DNS) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).
The internet has a lot of connected networks. So that means to keep the order of things, you need something like BGP to tell you where you need to go. DNS is essentially the address system for the location of each website – its IP address – while BGP is the roadmap that finds the most efficient way to get to that IP address.

According to Cloudflare, Facebook made some changes to its BGP configuration on Monday via a series of updates which resulted in the disappearance of routing paths to Facebook servers and causing global facebook outage. But not just for Facebook; it applies to everything Facebook runs. As a result, people attempting to access Facebook were unable to do so.

Why were Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp down?

Not only Facebook but all of its services were affected. It included Facebook’s internal systems, with reports of employees being locked out of offices and unable to access their own internal communications platform.

Can this sort of outage be avoided in the future?

People use Facebook to connect with friends and family and log into other services such as online sales websites. Through services such as WhatsApp, it has become the dominant mode of communication in some countries. The fact that an outage can have such a significant impact on billions of people for several hours must give some pause for thought.

Moving on, UnitedLayer’s disaster recovery solution enables enterprises to be resilient and respond to these critical situations faster and allows them to operate their business without any interruptions. Boasting zero downtime for the last ten years, we also guarantee the availability of 99.999% with high-availability N+2 Clusters.

Our Disaster Recovery Solutions are highly customizable, where customers can build specific Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) according to their business requirements. With on-demand scalability, you can add additional resources to meet the increased replication needs, this helps in reducing cost and improving business flexibility. UnitedLayer’s DR solutions are highly secure and compliant with all the industry-leading compliance standards like HIPAA and PCI.

UnitedLayer also offers setup and management of highly available routers, including setting up WAN configuration, traffic engineering, BGP, security, DDoS mitigation, monitoring, alerting, and WAN optimization for guaranteed performance.

With 20 years of experience in configuring and managing highly available networks globally has resulted in zero network downtime in the last one decade.

About UnitedLayer

UnitedLayer provides the Colocation services from one of the largest data centers in San Francisco, USA, at 200 Paul Ave. Our long list of managed services enables enterprises to modernize their infrastructure and improve their responsiveness, resource utilization, scalability, and agility resulting in better customer experience and faster time to market.

To get a better insight into what else UnitedLayer has got in store, sign up for a free demo today.