Who’s a good bot? As Novva deploys Boston Dynamics’ Spot dog robot at its Utah data center, CEO Wes Swenson says larger data centers need automated security
Dan Swinhoe News Editor
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magine the scenario: you arrive at a data center in Utah around the holiday season. As you walk the aisles of the data hall, a four-legged robot dog in a Christmas jumper walks up to you and greets you by name before returning to its rounds. Such a scene isn’t some poorly-written and far-fetched fan fiction, but a potential reality. Novva data centers, a new firm led by former C7 CEO Wes Swenson and backed by CIM Group, has partnered with Utah’s Brigham Young University to deploy customized Spot dog robots developed by Boston Dynamics in its data center. First announced in September, Novva said the Wire (Wes’ Industrious Robot Employee) machines will fulfill “multiple missioncritical roles” at its Utah campus, including temperature and equipment monitoring, greeting guests, confirming building occupant security clearance via facial scanning and recognition, and other general ‘tasks and missions.’ As we’ve previously written, robots in data centers are often talked about, but rarely progress past the prototype or pilot project stage. But Swenson tells DCD bigger and bigger data centers will need automation and robotics to ensure optimal operations. “We're trying everything we can to build a better data center, so why not give it a shot?” says Swenson. “So far we're actually really happy with what it does - but it is cutting edge. It is not for the light-hearted. You really have to be committed to it.” The promise of robots in the data center Data centers have a long and patchy history with deploying robots. The long-heralded lights-out data center maintained by robots remains out of reach, and deployments of robots cohabiting with humans have had mixed results. Back in 2013, IBM hacked an iRobot (similar to the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner) to travel around a data center tracking temperature and other data. The pilot project was quietly shelved. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology tried a similar idea; its Scout
bot patrolled the KAIST iCubeCloud Data Center using vision-based monitoring to look for issues. A follow-up study promised to attach a robotic arm that could work on servers. It was never published. Naver’s Cloud Ring data center in Sejong City, South Korea, also promised to use a number of robots for maintenance, monitoring, and security. The facility was due to come into operation in 2022. It has made a number of announcements about deploying robots at its offices as well, but the machines don’t appear to have been rolled out yet. However, some companies have seemingly managed to successfully deploy robots at certain facilities. German Internet exchange company DE-CIX has rolled out a family of automated “patch robots," including Patchy McPatchbot, Sir Patchalot, and Margaret Patcher. These are based on X-Y gantries, and can locate a socket in an optical distribution
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frame, similar to a traditional patch panel, and then plug a fiber optic cable into it. “During the 2020 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, Alibaba Cloud data centers had its Tianxun inspection robot upgraded to the second generation,” Wendy Zhao, Senior Director & Principal Engineer, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, previously told DCD. “The second-generation Tianxun robot is AI-powered and can work without human intervention to automatically replace any faulty hard disks. The whole replacement process, including automatic inspection, faulty disk locating, disk replacing, and charging, can be completed quickly and smoothly. The disk can be replaced in four minutes.” Switch is developing its own robot, the Switch Sentry, essentially a 360-degree camera and heat sensors on wheels that can act as a security guard. It travels autonomously, but humans take over remotely when an incident
