Carrie Goetz, Chief Information Technology Officer at StrategITcom, International Keynote Speaker, STEM evangelist and podcaster, turned the tables on host Raymond Hawkins by dubbing this podcast episode “Not Your Mother’s Data Center.” And, in honor of Goetz, a long-time Mississippi resident, Hawkins unveiled his first-ever trivia contest.
Nancy Novak, Chief Innovation Officer, Compass Datacenters is a firm believer that innovation comes in different forms, and she knows it’s people, processes and systems that drive innovations. Those three key focuses drive Novak’s work at Compass Datacenters, and she opened up to host Raymond Hawkins about some of the exciting innovations happening at Compass. Novak’s concentration is on improving the data center construction process. She noted that process efficiencies on the job site hadn’t im...
Digital infrastructure is a common term in the data center industry, but it wasn’t always. So, how did the industry evolve to the notion that technology is infrastructure? It’s been a long journey, buoyed by investment. To talk about the financial aspect of data centers, host Raymond Hawkins spoke with Irtiaz Ahmad, Head of Global Data Center Banking at Barclays. Ahmed has spent the last 15 years focused on the industry as an advisor, investor and operator. Prior to Barclays, he spent time at Ci...
Nancy Novak had made up her mind. She was retired. But, just like her last retirement, this one didn’t stick. This time, however, she was only out of the workforce for one day. After that brief interlude, Novak accepted her current role as Chief Innovation Officer at Compass Datacenters, taking over after serving as the company’s Senior Vice President of Construction. Even that was a job the veteran of the construction industry wasn’t sure she wanted to take when Compass Founder and CEO Chris Cr...
Haynes Strader, Vice President of Data Center Solutions, CBRE, returned to Not Your Father’s Data Center for a look back and assessment of one of the craziest years in recent memory. To summarize the market during the pandemic, Strader said, “CBRE had a really busy first quarter, and then, in March, we saw a big screeching halt as everyone was trying to figure out what was happening.” There was still lots of activity, even with a slump in transactions. “We’ve seen that start to pick back up with...
Lee Kirby, Cofounder and Chairman of Salute Mission Critical, wanted to use his 36 years of military experience to help veterans and their families. Drawing upon 30 years of information systems, strategic business development, planning and human resource experience in private and public sectors, Kirby began Salute Mission Critical. Salute’s mission is to provide military veterans and their spouses with a career path into the data center industry. Kirby sat down with Raymond Hawkins to discuss hi...
To get a perspective on how the data center industry is faring in European markets during the pandemic, host Raymond Hawkins tapped Andrew Jay, Head of EMEA Data Centre Solutions, Advisory & Transaction Services for CBRE, to help him unpack what’s happening. The need for co-location space is growing in Europe, as demands for data storage are at unprecedented levels and have been for several years. Specifically, London is one of the largest areas of need. “There’s an absolute feeding frenzy a...
In the second half of a two-part discussion on technology, Peter Judge, Global Editor for DatacenterDynamics, and host Raymond Hawkins turned their attention on the data center industry, the impact technology advancements have on it and the evolving role of the DatacenterDynamics’ publication. One of the cornerstones of DatacenterDynamics’ success is its events, which they’ve done for years and utilize to bring the data center community together. But the pandemic changed all that, and live event...
Peter Judge may have started his education journey with a degree in physics from Cambridge University, but most will know him from his work as a writer in the technology space. His current role is as the Global Editor for DataCenterDynamics, and he shared his experience and thoughts on technology and datacenters with Raymond Hawkins. Judge started his career in tech journalism back in the 80s at the beginning of the personal computer revolution. “Journalism, when I started, was about phoning peo...
There may still be a stigma around nuclear energy, which can conjure up images like the eerie scene painted in the 2019 HBO mini-series about the Chernobyl disaster. The infamous Three Mile Island incident sparked a series of reforms, though, that led to the creation of a stringent federal oversight body. “That was a pretty serious wake-up for the industry. That set off a path to really emphasize safe operations and make sure these kinds of challenges and threats were not a feature going forward...
Energy use is always a topic that comes up when thinking about data centers and their role in society. As we’ve seen in the coronavirus pandemic, our society will need data centers, but the top two sources of energy used by the United States are still based on fossil fuels. For Matt Crozat, the Senior Director of Strategy and Policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute, a more wholistic approach is needed. “I think as we continue to see the economy evolve and embrace the role of data and digitization...
As governments and corporations look for ways to reduce their carbon footprint, Eric Dunford , Director of Sustainability for CarbonCure , knows of a solution to help these entities meet their needs when it comes to construction projects. Dunford joined host Raymond Hawkins to talk about CarbonCure’s process for introducing recycled CO2 Into fresh concrete to reduce its carbon footprint without compromising performance. One of the challenges to achieving sustainability in concrete is the cementi...
Haynes Strader, Vice President of Data Center Solutions, CBRE, sees the market for data center needs flourishing, even during the pandemic. “It’s been an exciting and crazy 2020, and a challenging one for many of our clients,” Strader said. “From a data center perspective, the COVID-19 crisis created a real sense of urgency for digital transformation for a lot of enterprises, and that’s kick-started a lot of projects in cloud. You have three years of IT planning and planned transformation happen...
With data centers going up quickly all over the country, quality control and the commissioning process are vital steps to making sure everything is getting done correctly. Yet the typically high-touch process has been complicated by social distancing regulations and other health precautions that are part of doing business during the COVID-19 pandemic. When Compass Datacenters wanted to complete testing and certification for TierPoint’s new facility in Raleigh, North Carolina, it knew it needed t...
When choosing a location, data centers often look for a location close to their end customers and one where there’s cheap electricity. Water was an afterthought, said Pedro Sancha , Senior Vice President and General Manager of Nalco Water , but that’s beginning to change. With water needed to cool the data center, companies were bringing in Nalco after realizing they didn’t have the right permits or hadn’t worked out a way to bring in water effectively at all. Now it’s a main consideration when ...
With their constantly whirring server fans and enormous cooling systems in cavernous buildings, data centers seem to be sucking up a lot of energy and contributing more than their fair share to climate change. But are they? Dr. Eric Masanet and several colleagues decided to put it to the test. What they found is that, while demand for compute instances has gone up sixfold, the energy trend is close to flat. With servers becoming more efficient and virtualization coming more into vogue, the data ...
The United States' internet has been put to the test over the last six weeks, as almost the entire country has moved to streaming, learning and communicating from one wireless network. This increase in data need begs the question - what will our Internet look like as we move into a connected future post-pandemic? “Not Your Father’s Data Center” explores this question and how edge data centers fit into Internet architecture with guest Phillip Marangella , CMO at Edge Connects . As data needs goes...
Pedro Matser started KyotoCooling some 15 years ago when he and his colleagues were asked by a data and telecommunications center in the Netherlands to find a more efficient process. “We sat down with a group of people to come up with an energy-efficient solution,” Matser said on this episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center. He and his colleagues ran through their options, including traditional heat recovery, which is a popular strategy in Europe. Traditional heat recovery saves heat in winter ...
On this episode of the Not Your Father's Data Center podcast, guests Buddy Rizer and Dave Liggett join host Raymond Hawkins to look ahead to 2020. Rizer has been in the data center business since the beginning. Before he took the leap, Rizer took time to get to know the industry, then filled the data centers. Rizer said that it was “such a new industry” that he was the only economic developer at trade shows. He also said that he was lucky to have investors and management “give him the budget and...
Cloud computing appeared to experience a bit of a lull in the market in 2019. Raymond Hawkins , the host of Not Your Father’s Data Center and Chief Revenue Officer for Compass Datacenters , noted that the apparent 2019 lull came after a robust year in 2018. There are two primary questions that come from this observation. Was there actually a lull? And what does 2020 look like? Hawkins posed those questions to Ty Miller and Joe Goldsmith on a recent episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center Podcas...
