Yandex (IT infrastructure)

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Data centers

As of the beginning of 2018 , Yandex has four data centers in Moscow and the Moscow region, one data center each in the Ryazan region and Finland, as well as a data center in Vladimir.

In one of the data centers of Yandex

Earlier, Yandex also used data centers in the United States and the Netherlands, but after the commissioning of its own large data center in Finland in 2015, the need to lease these sites disappeared, the company told TAdviser.

At the end of April 2022, against the background of Russia's special operation in Ukraine in Finland, the Yandex data center was disconnected from the power supply. In March, the Finnish energy company Nivos Energia Oy announced that it continues to cooperate with Yandex Oy, registered in Finland, but is ready to stop it if Yandex falls under sanctions. Yandex director Khudaverdyan was sanctioned.

Development of Yandex IT infrastructure

2024

Yandex, HSE and ITMO launch graduate school in artificial intelligence and grants for young scientists

Yandex opens the first graduate school in artificial intelligence with a bias in practice. Its goal is to create new conditions and infrastructure for the development of young scientists in the country. Each year of training, graduate students will receive grants of 800 thousand rubles to create new technologies in the field of artificial intelligence and quickly implement their developments in practice, in the industry. Among the first partners are ITMO and HSE, over the next few years Yandex will increase the number of partners several times. The HSE announced this on July 23, 2024.

The main feature: graduate students will not only engage in theoretical research, but also apply them in real products led by timlids from Yandex. They will have access to technologies from the Yandex Cloud cloud platform and developments in robotics. For 3-4 years, graduate students will take part in level A conferences and undergo internships at foreign universities and laboratories.

The first graduate students will come in the fall of 2024. For admission, you need to undergo entrance tests at the university and interviews with project managers from Yandex. In the first set, they will be Mikhail Levin, senior developer of Yandex autonomous transport, and Dmitry Rybalko, architect of ML services at Yandex Cloud. In addition, graduate students will have scientific leaders - leading researchers at universities.

The more technology develops, the more the market needs high-quality specialists, researchers and innovators. This format of graduate school is our step towards the convergence of science and the product approach, theory and practice. We will share the accumulated expertise, experience of leading practitioners and technological capacities so that graduate students can conduct research in real product problems, "commented Darya Kozlova, director of Yandex Education.

Graduate students will conduct joint experiments with service teams and solve real product problems during training. For example, they will improve and further educate language models, including YandexGPT, improve the safety of autonomous transport and develop methods for using AI in industry and other areas.

The next generation of computational models in physics, chemistry and biology will be developed on the basis of neural networks. However, it is impossible to do this in universities without close collaboration with bigtechs who own data, computing resources and basic language models. Within the framework of a joint graduate school with Yandex, ITMO plans to develop a methodology for industry adaptation of large language models, including based on multi-agent technologies, which in the future will give an impetus to the development of industry systems of vertically oriented AI, - said the head of the research center "Strong Artificial Intelligence in Industry" ITMO Alexander Bukhanovsky.

Postgraduate studies are extremely important for a research university: for example, when establishing contacts with leading foreign universities, one of the main indicators is the number of postgraduate students. Both universities and businesses have a request for industrial graduate school, and together with Yandex we are the first to launch such a format. There is every reason to believe that the project will be successful and will be able to be scaled up to other universities in the future, "commented computer sciences Ivan Arzhantsev, Dean of the HSE Faculty.

Earlier, Yandex, together with Sberbank, launched a bachelor's degree in AI360/II360 for the creators of AI technologies of the future at once in four universities - ITMO, HSE, MIPT and Innopolis University. Bachelors will learn to create AI models, and in the future they will be able to become scientists and continue research in a new graduate school.

Opening of the master's program "Artificial intelligence and big data in media communications" at the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University

Yandex and the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University named after MV Lomonosov open the master's program "Artificial Intelligence and Big Data in Media Communications." Graduates will confidently work with generative tools that are already actively used in the media today. Enrollment will begin in the summer of 2024. Yandex announced this on April 25, 2024. Read more here.

2022: Yandex is building the largest data center

As TAdviser found out in September 2022, Yandex is building a new data center in Kaluga. This was told by a source close to the company, and the information is confirmed by the vacancies that Yandex posted in the public domain. Read more here.

2019: Yandex reduced investment in servers and data centers

In 2019, approximately 60% of capital expenditures Yandex"" fell on servers expansion, data centers follows from the company's annual report on form 20-F, published in April 2020. In absolute terms, these expenses amounted to about 12.3 billion out of rubles the total capital expenditures of 20.5 billion rubles. This is 13% less than in 2018, when about half of Yandex's total capital expenditures went to servers and data center expansion: 14.16 billion rubles out of 28.3 billion rubles. Total capital expenditures of the company in 2019 decreased by about 27%.

The total cost of Yandex servers and network infrastructure in 2019 increased by almost 20%, to 59.4 billion rubles, and "infrastructure systems," which also belong to data centers, increased by 9%, to 9.5 billion rubles. Cost data are presented less accumulated depreciation.

Yandex data center in Finland "(photo - Gigabitmagazine.com)"

Yandex refused to answer TAdviser questions related to data centers. In the annual report, the company associates the expansion of its computing infrastructure with the need to maintain growth in current and new markets for Yandex.

Among the most dynamically growing businesses in 2019 were an experimental direction, including Yandex.Zen, Yandex.Cloud, Yandex.Drive, geoservices and Yandex.Education, as well as media services, which include KinoPoisk, Yandex.Music, Yandex.Afisha, Yandex.Teleprogramm, production center Yandex.Studio and a single subscription to services - Yandex.Plus. These areas showed revenue growth of 168% and 103%, respectively.

In addition to data centers in Moscow and other Russian regions, Yandex also has a platform in Finland. As a year earlier, in 2019, a significant part of capital expenditures fell on the construction of one of the company's large data centers, the annual report said. Earlier, Yandex explained that we are talking about a data center in Sasovo, which was launched in 2014.

In 2019, there were reports of expansion plans for other data centers. So, for 2019-2023. investments in the amount of 6.4 billion rubles are planned in the development of a data center in Vladimir^[1] and the construction of a new building for the Yandex data center in Finland^[2].

In 2020, as before, Yandex plans to continue investing in infrastructure and technology. It is noteworthy that in addition to the growing business, one of the reasons why additional data center capacities may be required, Yandex in its annual report indicates the need to meet the requirements for companies included in the register of "information dissemination organizers." First, Yandex itself got there, and at the end of 2019, its Yandex.Zen project was also introduced there.

Being in the register, among other things, obliges to provide, if necessary, access to equipment and software and hardware, assistance to law enforcement and other authorized authorities in ensuring security. There is also an obligation to "provide information for decoding electronic messages."

2018: IT infrastructure costs rise 41%

In 2018, about 50% of all capital expenditures of Yandex fell on servers and the expansion of data centers to maintain current activities. This follows from the company's annual report on Form 20-F for 2018. In absolute terms, these expenses amounted to approximately 14.16 billion rubles.

In 2017, the share of server costs and the expansion of data centers in capital expenditures was even higher - 81%, but in monetary terms this amounted to about 10 billion rubles. Thus, in 2018, Yandex spent about 41% more on these goals.

Yandex told TAdviser that the need to expand the infrastructure is associated with "the rapid growth of services and business."

Yandex's IT infrastructure is constantly expanding (photo - rb.ru)

A significant part of these costs fell on the construction of one of the company's large data centers, according to the annual report. Yandex explained to TAdviser that this means the data center in Sasovo. It was launched in 2014.

One of the new services deployed on Yandex servers in Russia is Yandex.Cloud, a cloud service that became available to a wide range of users in 2018. According to Yandex, as of February 2019, about 6 thousand companies and individual users are clients of this service.

In 2017, a significant part of capital expenditures on servers and the expansion of data centers was associated with the construction of the Yandex data center in Vladimir. As of 2018, Yandex, in addition to data centers in Russia, also has a data center in Finland.

The total cost of servers and network infrastructure owned by Yandex also increased - by 45% in 2018, to 49.57 billion rubles, follows from the company's annual report. Cost data are presented less accumulated depreciation.

The total cost of Yandex's "infrastructure systems" also increased - by 14.8%, to 8.7 billion rubles. Earlier, Yandex explained that these systems also belong to data centers.

For comparison, the total cost of servers and computers owned by the Mail.ru Group in 2018 amounted to 4.195 billion rubles. This amount does not include the network infrastructure and is shown less accumulated depreciation. Read more here.

2017: Over five years, the cost of Yandex's ICT infrastructure has increased 3.5 times

The total cost of servers and network infrastructure owned by Yandex from 2013 to 2017. increased by more than 3.5 times: from 9.739 billion rubles to 34.165 billion rubles. This follows from Yandex's annual reports on Form 20-F^[3]. The cost data are presented less accumulated amortization charges, indicated in the reports.

The cost of Yandex's engineering systems also increased: from 3.409 billion rubles in 2013 to 7.621 billion rubles in 2017. The reports do not specify which infrastructure systems are meant. Yandex says that this means the company's data centers.

In 2017, Yandex spent about 10 billion rubles on the purchase of servers and the expansion of data centers, which amounted to 81% of all capital expenditures of the company. At the same time, both in 2017 and in 2016. they are largely associated with the creation of a new data center in Vladimir, the launch of which was announced in September.

Server and network equipment costs have historically made up the bulk of Yandex's capital expenditures

From year to year, the amount of costs for servers and equipment fluctuates: for example, in 2013 their volume was 3.850 billion rubles, and in 2015 - about 11 billion rubles.

To optimize our search technologies, the expected increase in Internet traffic, advertising transactions and new services, in 2018 and beyond, we will continue to invest in our data centers, technologies, corporate funds, IT infrastructure, - noted in the report of Yandex for 2017.

The report also states the infrastructure risks facing Yandex. The company notes that its future success depends on the continuous availability, development and support of the Internet infrastructure globally and in the markets where Yandex operates. This includes supporting a reliable backbone network with the right speed, bandwidth, and security to provide reliable Internet services. Any interruption of access to the network provided by third parties, or their inability to support current or increased future volumes of use, could significantly harm Yandex's business. At the same time, the company has already experienced and continues to experience interruptions and delays in these services from time to time.

Internet infrastructure may also be unable to withstand the strain of growing numbers of users or time spent online, or increased bandwidth requirements. State regulation can also limit the company's access to adequate and reliable Internet infrastructure, Yandex said in a report without specifying details.

2016: Yandex reduces data centers in Moscow

Yandex plans to transfer part of the computing power from its data centers in Moscow to the new data center in Vladimir, said Pavel Melnikov, head of the research and development group of the Yandex operation department, speaking at a Mellanox event in March 2016.

As a reason for this, he mentioned the high cost of maintaining data centers in Moscow, mainly due to the high cost of electricity.

We plan to reduce Moscow data centers and migrate to Vladimir, where our next large data center will be. Moscow is a city with very expensive electricity and the difficulty of finding enough of it, "Melnikov said.

The Yandex press service preferred not to delve into the details of the migration, noting only that "the construction of new data center sites in Moscow is now unprofitable, and the cost of electricity here is only one of the factors." Therefore, Yandex is "optimizing" the data center infrastructure.

The company added that the construction of the data center building is now underway in Vladimir. Yandex expects to launch this data center in 2017.

According to Yandex's annual report on the form of 20-F^[4], in 2015 the company's capital expenditures amounted to 13.045 million rubles, of which approximately 84% were expenses for expanding the infrastructure of data centers and servers to support the current growth of the company's activities.

2015

Construction of a data center in Vladimir

In 2015, Yandex began implementing a project to build a data center in the village of Energetik, Vladimir Region. Representatives of the regional administration reported that the volume of investments in the project will be about 4.5 billion rubles.

The data center is being built on a plot of 6 hectares. Its total capacity will be about 40 MW, and the first phase of the data center will be designed for 10 MW. According to the company's plans, the new data center will begin work at the end of 2017.

Opening of a data center in Finland

In 2015, Yandex completed the construction of the first stage of the data center in the Finnish city of Mäntsylä. Yandex acquired a plot for its construction with an area of ​ ​ 8 hectares for 1.5 million euros in 2013. Yandex data centers, as a rule, are located in ready-made buildings - for example, in the buildings of former factories. The company was building a construction site in Mäntsylä from scratch.

Plan of Yandex data center in Finland

The cooling system, which is used in the Finnish data center, allows you to use heat from servers for heating residential buildings. Supplying heat to the city, Yandex was able to reimburse part of the spending on electricity - one of the largest items of expenses for the data center, the company wrote.^[5]

One of Yandex's blogs says that before the design of the Finnish data center began, the company managed to build and partially close 10 data centers.^[6]

2013: Great Server Migration Plan

Yandex plans to build new highly efficient data centers, to which capacities will gradually migrate from old sites, told TAdviser on March 19, 2013. Sergey Krupin, Deputy Director of the Construction and Engineering Systems Department of the Internet company. It is planned to introduce advanced technologies in them, the choice of which will be based on the experience of building and operating previous data centers, he says.

According to Krupin, during the construction of new sites, Yandex will focus on those regions in which, according to climatic parameters, it will be able to build the most efficient cooling system for the data center.

Yandex says that all the latest data centers of the company are built using certain cooling systems with free cooling technologies, including the so-called Full free cooling schemes, which imply cooling of server rooms due to air from the street. The total capacity of such data centers of the company exceeds 15 MW. Similar technologies are planned to be used in future data centers where computing resources migrate.

Full free cooling technology, in particular, is now used in the Yandex data center in the town of Ivanteevka near Moscow, built in 2011, and in the new data center in the Ryazan region, the construction of which was completed in 2012.

It uses an absorption and refrigeration machine that runs on natural gas as additional cooling equipment. According to representatives of the Internet search engine, it allows you to increase the efficiency of using energy resources and reduce electricity consumption.

Sergey Krupnin notes that the introduction of any energy-saving, innovative or "green" technologies implies high capital costs, but significantly reduces operating costs. Therefore, the life of the data center becomes the determining factor. If this is a long-term project (more than 10 years), then energy-saving technologies become payback.

Where exactly the new sites will be located and what their parameters will be, the company chose not to disclose, noting only that as of March 2013, Yandex has six data centers located both in Russia and abroad. The company provides some of the servers in its data centers for free to the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN).

The construction of new sites is one of the directions for the development of Yandex data centers, says the director of the company's construction and engineering systems department.

We are faced with the task of not only improving energy efficiency, but also overall efficiency - that is, the cost of owning a data center. The scale of the new sites will depend on many factors, including depending on the development of the company's new services, as well as the capabilities of server and engineering technologies, "he notes.

According to Sergey Krupnin, other areas for the development of the company's data centers are the optimization of existing solutions and the use of servers and engineering solutions of a non-standard configuration, as well as the development of feedback mechanisms between IT equipment and data center cooling systems.

2012: Construction of a data center in the Ryazan region

In 2012, Yandex began creating a data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Region. The project involves construction in four stages. It is planned to be fully completed by 2020. The total investment in the construction of the data center is 2.7 billion rubles.^[7]

2011: Construction of a data center in Ivanteevka

As of 2011, Yandex in Russia has five data centers, the largest of which is located near Moscow Ivanteevka. In September 2011, Yandex announced the launch of the second stage of its data center in the town of Ivanteevka near Moscow. The total area of ​ ​ its two queues is 4.5 thousand square meters. m, of which 2.2 thousand sq.m. falls on the second stage.

The second stage of the new data center uses a cooling system of Russian development - Full Free Cooling (FFC). It is based on free cooling technology, in which the data center room is cooled due to cooler air from the street.

The developer of this system is the Moscow company Ayaks Engineering. Its representative Andrei Nesterov told CNews that Yandex was their first client to use the FFC system in its data center.

In total, more than 10 thousand servers will be located in the data center, and the total power consumption is 8 MW. Yandex clarified that the energy consumption indicator is given taking into account the new cooling system. "The electricity that we save on cooling, we can put on more useful things - on IT power in the same data center, for example," the search engine argues.

According to the standard TIA-942 the temperature to be maintained in server rooms is + 22 degrees Celsius ± 2 degrees. In one form or another, free cooling technology is used in many Russian data centers, but the main feature of its system in Ayaks Engineering is the temperature threshold, at which equipment for cooling external air is used - it is + 22 degrees. I.e. the cooling system will only turn on after the air temperature exceeds this value.

In standard refrigeration units with free cooling, cooling is turned on at + 5 - + 12 degrees Celsius.

Yandex says that using the Ayaks Engineering system, the new data center needs half as much electricity per year to support the same number of servers. However, some experts believe that in this case this is a dubious advantage.

Evgeny Gromov, technical director of the Data Storage Center, which owns the SafeData data center, told CNews that their company also considered this system: "Its plus is to reduce power supply costs, of the disadvantages - four times higher price compared to classic systems and more expensive maintenance. At current electricity prices in Russia in a commercial data center, such a system is not justified. "

The FFC system consists of two open separate circuits, external and internal. DPC air circulates in the inner circuit, outdoor air is supplied to the outer circuit. The main element of the system is a rotary regenerator, in which heat exchange occurs between external ambient air and air in the data center room. The task of the rotary regenerator is to cool the air in the data center from + 37 to + 24 degrees with outdoor air up to + 22 degrees.

We started experimenting with various cooling technologies at the end of 2009. The main task was to maximize the temperature threshold. As a result, it was possible to raise it from + 13 to + 22 degrees Celsius, "says Gennady Vakhutinsky, director of engineering systems construction at Yandex. - Not only the company will benefit from the use of an economical cooling system in the new data center, but also the environment - less electricity, which means less natural resources for its generation.

Of the cooling systems known in Russia, a similar principle of operation based on a rotary heat exchanger to FFC is also used, for example, in the Kyoto Cooling system developed in Holland.

Early 2000s: First Yandex data centers

When the www.yandex.ru website was opened in 1997, one server under the table of one of the first developers of^[8] was enough for it to work]. Soon after the announcement of the opening, a second server appeared, and when it was necessary to install another one, it turned out that there was not enough space under the table.

Yandex was still far from the idea of ​ ​ creating its own data centers at that moment - the Russian-language Internet index fit entirely on one 4GB SCSI disk, and the entire portal team was about ten people who worked for CompTek. Therefore, Yandex server equipment in the first three years of its operation was placed in the data center of MTU-Intel. By the time Yandex LLC was created in 2000, Yandex rented four racks at MTU-Intel, which housed about 40 of Yandex's own servers.

These few dozen servers became the basis of the first independent Yandex data center, which is located in the first office of the company - in Moscow, on Vavilov Street, in the computing center of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Notes