Infrastructure Masons published on their blog a series of concerns related to the talent gap developing in the digital infrastructure industry:
Continue reading “Nurturing talent in the rapidly growing digital infrastructure industry”
Confinement gives enterprises a massive push towards the Cloud
As more and more people are forced to work from home, many enterprises have had to deal with undersized VPNs and private servers that weren’t designed to handle these kinds of workloads. This has pushed many enterprises toward “software as a service” or SaaS platforms and other cloud-based solutions. As work gets reorganized to the pandemic, some CTOs have to learn on the job how to redeploy their onsite servers as VMs on cloud-based datacenters built to handle these kinds of loads.
EU wants datacenters to be carbon neutral in the next decade
As the energy footprint of the ICT sector is estimated to be between 5 to 9 % of the global electricity resources, the EU Commission noted that datacenters and telecoms “can and should become climate neutral by 2030”.
As noted by the DCD Magazine, two initiatives are already on their way:
Supercomputers and Cloud technology used to battle Covid-19
A consortium led by IBM and the White House aims to accelerate the research for a cure to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Using datacenters like IBM’s Summit supercomputer, a consortium composed of the department of energy, national research laboratories, NASA, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Google and Amazon are crunching the numbers in different domains of research related to epidemiology, bioengineering and molecular modeling.
A week of training for our students but not only !
This week was a day of training for our Irish students but not only ! Our electrical trainer Xavier Donnet went to Atlantic Language Galway Dublin to improve his English for the electrical labs of It Sligo and HELHa datacenter students and to learn how to introduce English in his electrical class for HELHa youngest students.
After a 1-Day warm-up in General English, I’ve joined the CLIL for Educators course. CLIL – Content & Language Integrated Learning – considers the essential needs and challenges faced by users of the English language in teaching a subject’s content in parallel with a foreign language. In other world, how to teach a content in English when you are not a native speaker…
Future collaboration with a college from Danemark
The Datacenter Engineering HELHa team met a delegation from a Danish college, Fredericia Maskinmesterkole. It was the first step of a new collaboration to create a pathway between their students trained in datacenter facilities to continue their training in HELHa Master degree. They visited the labs, they discussed with HELHa trainer. It was interesting to compare their education system to ours !
It was an international week between the Irish training and the Danish visit !
Thermic training of Google’s employee
About ten people from Google are training the laboratories of the CeREF Technique building. A training course created especially for them covers the operating principles of cooling systems used in data centers.
We present cooling equipements used in datacenters to remove heat from the hot air in the computer room and rejected to the atmosfer. We propose to do experiments on real sized devices : heat exchangers, refrigeration cycles and cooling towers. From measurement of temperature, pressure and flow rate, we try to identify the performances and the possible sources of trouble shootings. The module covers the use of water in cooling process and the water characterisation to understand the principles of the operation of water treatment technologies and water chemistry that are core to the field of data centers facilities engineering.
This training is integrated in a 3-days training of Google team. Their profils come from electronic team from Finland, Irland, Holland and Belgium.
They are talking about our training…
Un article sur la formation dans le Trends Tendance du 20 novembre, “A l’heure des formations 2.0”
… “HELHa, la Haute Ecole Louvain en Hainaut, propose sur sept campus des formations de type court et de type long dans de nombreux domaines. Elle dispose ainsi d’une école d’ingénieurs à Mons. Sa proximité avec l’implantation belge de Google va l’amener à développer un master 100% digital qui forme des ingénieurs spécialisés en maintenance et design de data centers. ” L’idée vient de Google qui cherchait un partenaire local pour développer cette formation spécifique où les profils sont rares, explique Valérie Seront, la directrice de l’Ecole d’Ingénieurs de la HELHa. Nous sommes les seuls à avoir répondu favorablement. Et pour cause, cela correspond tout à fait à nos compétences et à notre manière d’enseigner, très applicative. Il nous a fallu près de deux ans de travail pour mettre en ligne un cours très complet qui comporte, dans sa forme certifiante de deux ans, des périodes d’une semaine dans nos labos de Mons. Ce fut un projet très enrichissant où nous avons mis nos propres compétences en avant. ”
A l’arrivée, après une première année de rodage, la formation vient de connaître ses véritables débuts à la rentrée de septembre. Quinze étudiants sont inscrits. Ils viennent d’un peu partout en Europe. Pas mal pour un concept novateur qui requiert des prérequis assez précis. Outre Google, la formation s’est mise en place grâce à des partenaires belges comme Agora, Engie Cofely ou ABB. ” Google a fourni un véritable travail d’accompagnement sans influencer le contenu de la formation, poursuit Valérie Seront. Nos autres partenaires interviennent à des degrés divers, certains sont conférenciers,
d’autres supervisent les travaux demandés aux étudiants ou utilisent nos labos pour former leur personnel. “…
Visit of Imasons Director at HELHa labs
After DCD in London, Jeff Omelchuck, Executive Director of Infrastructure Masons came in Belgium where he visited HELHa. To remninder, iMasons provides scholarships for the HELHa Data Center Engineering program, our DC Facilities Engineering training.
3 of our students are currently receiving scholarships, we currently have 18 students enrolled, including some from Google, Facebook, etc… He toured our different labs of cooling, power distribution, BMS, etc. , taking time to discuss with all trainers. It was a great occasion for our trainers to have a different point of view on our labs, to create contacts for the future of our training !
HELHa team at DCD London
HELHa team was present to DCD London 2019 thank to Infrastructure Masons invitation. We assist to conferences on security or sustainibility, we discover new technologies as HPC immesion cooled from Submer solutions : an immersion fluid specially crafted for optimal heat transfer and hardware compatibility. We creates contacts with industry working in the datacenter area as EkkoSense or Innovative Research, working both in cooling management.
