Can artificial intelligence and robots help manage the data centers of the future?

In this interview Scott Noteboom, CEO of litbit and former leader of Apple’s global infrastructure team, explains how we can use machine learning to improve various aspects of the data center.

After three years of work where little was known about what they were doing, Litbit has recently lifted the veil on their product: a way to aid big businesses to manage all of their smart devices and machinery or, in other words, a smart way to manage all the different systems found in the IoT.

Today, LitBit is announcing a $7 million funding round led by Storm Ventures, with Illuminate Ventures, Correlation Ventures, and Yang's AME Cloud Ventures also investing.

...to fully recognize the scale of IoT, one must think of its history, recognizing that while there wasn't always such an easy-to-use interface as we are used to today, there were still centralized points at which multiple devices were controlled. The scale of IoT at the infrastructural level is hard to imagine, with one data center alone having hundreds of potential "points" to talk to.

On a sweltering summer day in San Jose, Calif., Scott Noteboom launched a cyberattack by exploiting a networking system vulnerability: the cooling system. An assistant, standing before a collection of networked computer gear plus a cooling fan, plugged a cable into a laptop. Soon a light on one of the boxes started flashing: The fan was in trouble. It clicked, then stuttered, then moaned to a halt.

How do you bring the power of the Internet to underserved emerging markets? Google is floating balloons. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are focused on better mobile connectivity. Scott Noteboom is taking a different approach: finding the right spots to deploy advanced Internet infrastructure that is energy-efficient and affordable. To pursue this mission, he’s giving up one of the best jobs in the data center industry.

This 15-year-depreciation mindset is the reason power and cooling infrastructure technology has not evolved much over the past 50 years, Noteboom said. “Is the data center truly the static thing that must remain the same for 15 years?,” he said. “If it is, to the technology guys it’s a prison.”

"With massive emerging market growth occurring between now and 2025, the timing is right to reflect, disrupt and reinvent current gaps that make development in these parts of the world difficult," said Noteboom. "The coming years will drive the increased simplification of the design/construction process that emerging markets need, while disaggregating that traditional process from the core technologies that needs to advance further and faster for the future."

"LitBit was created to bring next generation converged infrastructure technology into emerging markets that require cleaner environment, greater efficiency and lower economics. Our goal is to enable the next billion users of digital technology to emerge with a 10x lower environmental impact than the first billion," said Noteboom. "At the same time, we are here to navigate the cultural, governmental, language and other complexities that can go along with developing infrastructure in emerging markets, so that our customers can simply focus on executing their business models via infrastructure solutions they are comfortable with and trust."