The Challenge

Optimising operational efficiency, minimising GHG footprint and allowing small data center operators easier access to the global market are the main themes in our experiment. The global data center market size was estimated at $220.0 billion in 2021, globally, and demand for computation capacity keeps on growing.

Primary Challenge: Contrasec needs the visibility and capabilities to monitor and control the operations of the data center of Luolakallio to provide reliable services and monitor and control the operations of the data center from their operations center. Currently, these two data centers are not sharing the same data or data models. Sharing sensitive data reliably with a customer of the data center is difficult and requires creating special accesses every time.

Secondary Challenge: Data centers offer different capacities, pricing, and services for their customer. Some of this pricing is confidential. There is no unified way to broker data center services.

The Solution

Primary Solution: Break the data silos between companies and share data while maintaining data sovereignty. Maintain trust by using the i4Trust legal framework and attribute-based access control.

We can standardize the data format and seamless data exchange. By setting up de facto standards, we can offer the same model to other data centers and allow greater accessibility and transparency of data. The data that partners need shall be shared, confidential data to Contrasec or Luolakallio is not shared, and public data can be made publicly available in i4Trust Marketplace. Data centers utilize a lot of energy for operations, especially for cooling. The open data sharing and harmonized data models will allow a competitive edge for those who adopt principles of transparency and for example share the GHG footprint of their data center.

Secondary Solution: We’d use i4Trust mechanisms to strongly authenticate the entities that can see the capacity, pricing, and other data. This data, effectively business offers, could be made available in the marketplace.

Business Projections – Scalability

Bringing the remote management of facilities and data centers to mainstream Profirator can replicate and build the Digital Twins, enabling the seamless and secure exchange of the data to optimize the operations of data centers or any facilities.

As an outcome of the secondary challenge, we see great business potential in developing a standard data model which would describe the data center capacity, pricing, and service offering. This would enable automatic brokering of prices, in a similar manner ads are brokered in webpages. This sort of brokering could be then applied to other domains as well. Once the information is in digital format, brokering can happen in a matter of seconds, instead of days or weeks. Who has the best offer on server capacity? And this can be extended to other domains: Who has the best offer on steel and shipping?