The Latest from ThreeFold - Foundation

🔗Hyperscale realities are very different from what most people think

🔗Myth 1: Bigger data centers are more efficient

There are advantages in building larger-scale data centers, like economies of scale and sheer bulk buying power, but these are not as significant as what people think. The average cost per rack in a hyper-scale data center is $20-35K USD including all energy requirements and safety systems. The cost of hardware per rack is around the $200-300K USD mark.

What is often forgotten is that anything that is of enormous scale and highly concentrated comes with complexity and specific problems to deal with. For example. resource requirements such as investment, operational costs, knowledge, and people increase significantly with size.

In reality, keeping things simple, small, and distributed is much more cost-effective than large complex environments.

🔗Myth 2: Big data centers can be sustainable

The carbon footprint of a big data center is enormous. To improve the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of most data center farmers have adopted wind, hydro, and/or solar power technologies, which indeed helps drop their PUE by an estimated 20%. But is this leading to more sustainability?

This 20% looks great on paper and in the farmers’ corporate social responsibility reports. However, it just represents an improvement in the cooling technology and sourcing of energy. It doesn’t actually impact the energy consumed by the equipment that runs in their data centers (servers, storage chassis, physical disks, etc.) which is the equipment responsible for the carbon footprint. PUE only refers to overhead power consumption, i.e. cooling the facility, opening, and closing doors, maintaining power security systems, etc.

Real improvement lies in deploying technologies that actually consume less power to deliver the actual Internet capacity to run workloads, real CPU chassis, physical disks, and storage cabinets. Improving on how hardware is being more effectively used can have an impact of up to a thousand percent and lead to ten times more power-efficiency.

🔗Myth 3: Redundant systems have better uptime

A lot of us believe that systems need redundancy mechanisms to improve their operational uptime and reliability. While it may make sense to IT experts, let’s translate this for the non-IT world?

To make a car more reliable we add redundancy (as we do in IT). So for the risk of having a puncture, we add one extra tire for all the tires we use continuously. This adds 4 extra tires to the car. Then a decision needs to be made: Do we put those tires in a structure where they are always running along with the primary tires or do we choose not to have them “online” all the time, wearing and tearing in the same way as the primary tires?

Building such a system would take a large number of engineers to come up with a solution, and would change cars as we know them. Wouldn’t it make more sense to think outside the box and solve the root of the problem by making tires un-deflatable?

The IT industry has gone overboard with the concept of redundancy, having forgotten to look at the root cause issues. This has spawned a whole new industry of itself, which has a financial interest in creating complicated and expensive redundant systems.

🔗Myth 4: Big companies optimize better

Big companies with a certain track record will know better how to optimize as they have more people and resources.

At first glance, this sounds logical, but in reality, ninety percent of the innovation within the IT space comes from startups. The giant IT companies have a heritage they hardly can overcome. They are locked in old infrastructure designs, and building outside of that infrastructure would be costly, timely, and probably put the breaks on their businesses.

Real innovation gives way to fix the core symptoms rather than taking the problem pain-killer approach.

🔗Respect Human Rights

• Sustainability: It is important for a very simple reason: we cannot maintain our quality of life as human beings, the diversity of life on our planet, or Earth’s ecosystems unless we embrace and protect its balance.
• Equality: Everyone should have a right to learn, dream, partake and succeed. Equal access also means affordability, not ownership by big greedy companies.
• Decentralization: To better distribute power, value and opportunities, we need more decentralization. Technologies and solutions should be available everywhere to improve equality and sustainability.
• Openness & Interoperability: Allows technologies to work together in an open way, without limitation, and therefore expands the possibilities for innovation and sharing.
• Accessibility: Whatever the location or situation, people should benefit from easy and fast access to information and solutions.
• Security & Privacy: Protect people from being put in situations of danger or exploitation. People should be empowered to be independent and they should be the sole owners of their experiences.

🔗Respect Human Effort

• Reliability: Make sure technologies are reliable and last longer.
• Simplicity: We need to keep things simple: no unnecessary complexity - less is more.
• Transparency: Let people and companies work together in a 100% transparent way.
• Collaboration: It’s all about the greater picture. We are stronger together and have to help each other in reaching our common visions.

🔗Respect Human Experience

• Ergonomy: Products and solutions should empower productivity, safety and comfort, while reducing human error.
• Inclusiveness: Design should always be global and inclusive. We are all equal.
• Design: Products should be visually appealing and should achieve it’s purpose.
• Transparency: Organisational records and strategies should be accessible to everyone.
  
  Photo by Renee Fisher on Unsplash.

🔗An introduction to the problems

• The Internet is no longer the neutral place it used to be. +80% of the Internet capacity is delivered by a handful of companies. This results in a loss of neutrality and openness and breeds inequalities.
• To support the continuous growth of the Internet and connect billions to new Internet Of Things devices, 400 million new servers are needed by 2020. The world therefore needs another 4,000 large-scale data centers that each consume 200 MWe of electricity: see source.
• Today, about 4 billion people have no access to the Internet due to the high costs of connectivity and capacity. We believe these people have the fundamental right to have low-cost access to digital resources such as online identity solutions, education, health information and more. For this to happen, solutions that can lower the cost by a factor of 10 are required.
• Bandwidth does not follow Moore’s law. The growth of bandwidth required is much higher than the speed at which new capacity can be delivered. This is even more important in emerging markets.
• Current blockchain technology is not scalable and not sustainable. Example: the Bitcoin blockchain alone uses more energy today than Croatia.

🔗Current Internet and Cloud capacity

Today, the cloud computing industry represents a 100 billion dollar industry - mostly owned by about 20 global cooperations. Experts such as Bell Labs and Cisco believe the capacity requirements in the next decade will dramatically exceed existing infrastructure - requiring many more data centers and billions, if not trillions in investments.

The spectacular growth and advancements in cloud computing that occurred over the last decade resulted in large part from “hyper-scale” efficiencies - i.e. centralizing Internet infrastructure in very large billion dollar data centers. However, demand for Internet capacity already surpassed the available infrastructure with emerging technologies such as Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology. The existing hyperscale cloud architecture cannot cope with this growing demand as the requirements for land, power and funding are becoming outrageous.


The challenges facing the Internet includes the following:

• Trillions of Investment Required. In the next decade, the global Internet infrastructure requires another 4,000 data centers (250M - 1B dollar investment each) to meet demand which would cost trillions - this money could be better used in education, healthcare, or sustainable innovations.
• Impossible to scale the networks connecting users to the hyperscale data centers. Since hyperscale data centers are built in large “central” locations, the network leading to these data centers is congested. Even more, remote regions that are less connected to the Internet cannot benefit from these data centers’ IT services.
• Non-local data and capacity. Governments around the world are becoming more and more concerned about data leaving their borders. To tackle this centralization issue, they would need local IT infrastructure. Also, IoT workloads need local capacity to deliver constant real-time computing and storage requirements - for certain applications and workloads (e.g. driverless cars), latency is not an option. Hyperscale data centers can simply not match these requirements.
• Not secure / at risk of choke point failures. There are plenty of recent well-publicized problems around security, outages and loss of data. The reason for this is that centralized hyperscale architectures are inherently insecure - and failures at a single hyperscale location can cause widespread contagion and outages.

🔗The ThreeFold Solution

Our solution to these trillion dollar problems is to migrate Internet capacity to the Edge (closer to user location) - i.e. a “hyper-distributed” network architecture, located close to users (in cities, schools, offices, homes and even vehicles).

Edge networks will not necessarily replace the existing hyperscale capacity powering today’s cloud - rather, they will scale to meet the increased capacity demands going forward. However, if the current hyperscale capacity can be decentralized to improve energy consumption and reduce costs, this would be a huge global success.

By 2025, 60% of new Internet infrastructure will be decentralized and located at the edge of operator networks by using alternative locations which have stable (renewable) power and reliable connectivity.

🔗ThreeFold’s technology main benefits:

• Security: The ThreeFold Grid is distributed and benefits from our ItsYou.Online identity management platform - making it much more secure.
• Decentralized: The solution enables to bring capacity closer to where users are located, enabling a Cloud at the Edge.
• Sustainability: The technology removes the need to build huge power hungry datacenters and by decentralizing the architecture enables up-to 1000% energy savings.
• Making IT a true utility: We always approached IT as Energy. Today we provide 3x more uptime and between 3-10x more cost effectiveness.
• Neutrality: The solution enables 100% neutral & private Internet IT capacity. Our blockchain technology provides security, neutrality & scale.

🔗The ThreeFold Zero-Node

The Zero-Node provides compute, network and storage capacity to the internet and ThreeFold’s blockchain. This capacity can be used for any possible workload. Here are some characteristics of ThreeFold’s Zero node:

• Modularity: Scaling from 8 vCPUs and 3.5 TB of storage (smallest) to clusters with 8000 vCPUs and 2 PB of storage (large), there is a range of possibilities at hand.
• Sustainability: Storing the hardware uses about 10x less energy, and about 2-3x for other workloads.
• Decentralized: The Zero Operating System (“Zero OS”) is ideally suited for Edge networking - where automation, self-healing and hyper-distribution are must-haves.
  • The Zero-Nodes are deployed as close as possible to the consumers of Internet IT capacity (IoT, residential, business, government, education, …).
  • This results in massive bandwidth savings, we estimate to be able to keep 99% of the required bandwidth locally which has a huge impact on cost.
  • This is the only viable solution to be able to provide internet to the 3.2 billion people waiting.
• Self healing: The architecture is designed to ensure that workloads and data can be accessed at all times.
• Neutral & private: A lot of work has done using blockchain (technology which powers crypto currency) to guarantee privacy and net neutrality.
  • Designed around simplicity to be used by everyone.
  • The technology provides anyone with the autonomy to deliver complex IT applications without the need for complex integration services.
• Empowers equality: Our technology should be usable by the “other billions” that remain unconnected. Due to the low cost-points, low energy requirements and reduced need of backbone network capacity.