By providing the infrastructure required to store, process, and transport enormous amounts of data, supporting a wide range of applications and services, data centers in general play a crucial role in the digital economy. The "Data Center Capital of the World" title sometimes makes reference to Loudoun County in Virginia, which is a popular location for data centers. The county has become a desirable location for data center development due to its close proximity to Washington, D.C., its dependa...
Feb 28, 2023•36 min•Ep. 20
Jonathan Friedmann knew the semiconductor business would find its way into his life someday. Friedmann, CEO & Founder of Speedata, spoke to Raymond Hawkins about his career and his latest venture, Speedata, which provides a state-of-the-art Analytics Processing Unit to optimize big data and analytics workloads. While data growth is expanding at an exponential rate, processing speeds are lagging behind. Multiple cores on a single chip were a first-step industry solution, data centers were the...
Feb 14, 2023•39 min•Ep. 17
Born, raised, and educated in Germany, Carsten Baumann, Solution Architect and Director of Strategic Initiatives at Schneider Electric, calls the United States his home these days. Baumann’s travels took many different routes, from a town outside of Frankfurt to the glitz of Los Angeles and now a quiet, more rural ZIP code in Colorado. But one constant remained: engineering. Baumann spoke with Raymond Hawkins about his journey and career in systems engineering. Schneider Electric does some excit...
Jan 31, 2023•48 min•Ep. 16
The world is in an energy crisis caused by many events affecting billions. Yet, while others are focusing on how this might affect oil & gas prices, the critical piece missing from the news is how this will involve a business that helps lift the entire market: data centers. So, what impact will the crisis have on data centers, and what is the forecast for the industry heading into 2023? On the newest episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center podcast, host Raymond Hawkins engages with returnin...
Jan 10, 2023•39 min•Ep. 19
Like most people involved with Data Centers, Andy Lawrence, Executive Director of Research at Uptime Institute, didn’t start his career that way; Lawrence’s beginning was IT. As a journalist covering all things IT, Lawrence gravitated to the economic and ecological impacts, which led to his interest in data centers. He joined ‘the Hawk’, Raymond Hawkins, to talk about his career and discuss some of the power challenges faced in the DC industry. As the head of research at Uptime, Lawrence said th...
Oct 24, 2022•43 min•Ep. 18
Who doesn’t love a sequel? Raymond Hawkins sure does, and back by popular demand for another episode of fantastic industry insights, Fred Thiel, CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings, joined the Hawk to talk about all sorts of things. Top of mind was how current events are shaping the crypto community and how crypto could impact the events unfolding in Europe. The current state of affairs could provide a new test for digital currency. Thiel pointed out in past wars; displaced citizens did not have ma...
Sep 26, 2022•48 min•Ep. 15
The summer of 2021 brought news of Texas and Oklahoma leaving the Big 12 for the SEC. This summer USC and UCLA rocked the landscape of college conferences once again. The schools announced they would leave the Pac-12 to join the Big Ten. The deserted conferences are shifting the narrative to expansion for survival. After the summer 21 news from Texas and Oklahoma, it’s become clear that two conferences are working to separate. Elias Ellefsen said, “I love the move for USC and UCLA. I’m a big fan...
Aug 30, 2022•59 min•Ep. 14
The Hawk’s talk went nuclear again. Raymond Hawkins brought on Dr. Everett Redmond. A Senior Technical Advisor of New Reactors and Advanced Technology at the Nuclear Energy Institute, Dr. Redmond joined the show for a fascinating talk on nuclear energy and energy in general for the data center industry. Dr. Redmond studied nuclear engineering at MIT, and along with scuba diving, his passion is nuclear energy. Diving in, only some pun intended, to the world of bitcoin, Dr. Redmond said there was ...
Jul 26, 2022•37 min•Ep. 13
The hats he wears are many: Chairman & Founder of Infrastructure Masons (iMason,) CEO of Virtual Power Systems, Co-Host of The Next Wave Podcast, and Founder & CEO of a strategic advisory and consulting service for Startups, Fortune 500 companies, and Investment firms. One might call him a living legend in the data storage space. Back by popular demand, Dean Nelson joined Not Your Father’s Data Center for another tremendous conversation with host Raymond Hawkins. Nelson queued up some si...
Jul 12, 2022•42 min•Ep. 12
How did a Texas boy, who swore up and down he’d never leave Texas for Oklahoma, wind up involved with the data storage industry in Oklahoma? Chris Brown, CTO at Uptime Institute, isn’t 100% sure himself, but spending the past 25 years in the Sooner state means something went right. And Brown said the data center life treated him well so far. “I was fortunate enough to get into some different companies in times when they were doing a lot of work and a lot of changes,” Brown said. “So, it allowed ...
May 24, 2022•32 min•Ep. 5
Rick Ward, CTO, and Founder of Orbits Edge, described how space is becoming increasingly accessible to laypeople. “We’re getting more and more to the place where I can see myself there. And that is a big deal. You don’t have a space-bearing civilization when the only people who go up there are less numerous than Olympic gold medalists.” Ward and Raymond Hawkins, Chief Revenue Officer of Compass Data Centers, discussed this increasing accessibility in the context of data on Part Two of “Data Cent...
Apr 26, 2022•37 min•Ep. 11
Rick Ward, CTO, and Founder of Orbits Edge, described how space is becoming increasingly accessible to laypeople. “We’re getting more and more to the place where I can see myself there. And that is a big deal. You don’t have a space-bearing civilization when the only people who go up there are less numerous than Olympic gold medalists.” Ward and Raymond Hawkins, Chief Revenue Officer of Compass Data Centers, discussed this increasing accessibility in the context of data on Part Two of “Data Cent...
Apr 26, 2022•39 min•Ep. 6
Apr 14, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 10
International trade law expert reveals the difficult yet satisfying work that the CCIA performs to keep tech at consumers’ fingertips.
Apr 07, 2022•50 min•Ep. 3
Host Raymond Hawkins switches up the usual topic of data to bring listeners a lively discussion of March Madness picks.
Mar 17, 2022•49 min•Ep. 4
The data center industry is probably not the first industry one would think of when it comes to changes from the pandemic since data is stored virtually. Tim Huffman, Vice President of CBRE, joined Host Raymond Hawkins, Chief Revenue Officer of Compass Datacenters, to discuss the surprising number of shifts that actually occurred in the industry.
Mar 03, 2022•35 min•Ep. 2
Data has moved from the building filling mainframes of the 60's technology to satellite gathering machine learning and AI processing at the speed of light. Megabytes have turned into Petabytes, leaving businesses to absorb the paradigm shift of data collection. In this episode of Not Your Father's Data Center, host Raymond Hawkins and Doug Mohney, Editor-in-Chief of Space IT Bridge, look at the explosive growth of using satellites for data monitoring and collection. The intersection of space and...
Jan 25, 2022•47 min•Ep. 1
Host Raymond Hawkins discovered that despite lacking formal leadership training, Cy Wakeman, President & Founder of Reality Based Leadership, has written a plethora of books in the leadership genre. As a former counselor in human psychology, Wakeman revamped traditional leadership views. She explained, “I saw the world from a viewpoint of shared accountability at the time that most people were seeing the world as the leader was really responsible for the wellbeing of their employees.” Accord...
Nov 30, 2021•38 min•Ep. 1
Fred Thiel, CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings, one of the largest bitcoin mining operations in North America, joined host Raymond Hawkins to discuss cryptocurrency. From blockchain to bitcoin, Thiel covered it all, including all the nooks and crannies in between. “The blockchain is essentially a chain of linked blocks that each block consists of a certain number of transactions,” Thiel said. “If you think about a ledger, like your check register, if you have a checkbook and you write a bunch of c...
Oct 26, 2021•43 min•Ep. 1
On this episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center, a Compass Datacenters Podcast, Host Raymond Hawkins talked with Amit Serper, Vice President of Security Research for North America of Guardicore, the segmentation company disrupting the legacy firewall market, whose software-only approach is decoupled from the physical network, providing a faster alternative to firewalls. While most teenagers were busy worrying about the school dance or making a sports team, Serper was preoccupied with selling se...
Sep 28, 2021•47 min•Ep. 1
When the world thinks about ethical AI, thoughts wander to movie portrayals of intelligent machines used for nefarious reasons. In the real world, that’s still a possibility, but many point to AI as the future of understanding data. Sharing his thoughts on the subject, Peter Judge, Head Editor of Datacenter Dynamics, joined host Raymond Hawkins on Not Your Father’s Data Center. Judge recently authored a feature story in the publication about AI and its problems. Judge explained the concept of et...
Aug 23, 2021•21 min•Ep. 1
Isn’t the first rule in data centers not to get the servers wet? They’re kind of like Gremlins in that way. But someone forgot to tell Daniel Pope this fact. Pope, the CEO of Submer, thinks data servers belong submerged in liquid. He was thrilled to speak to host Raymond Hawkins about his immersion cooling technology, which provides a new green approach to data centers, on this episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center. Born and raised in England and now residing in Barcelona, Pope began his care...
Jul 26, 2021•38 min•Ep. 1
On this episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center, a Compass Datacenters Podcast, host Raymond Hawkins talked with Dr. Robert Sutor, Chief Quantum Exponent at IBM Research, about how quantum computing will partner with modern computing and what changes this will have for the world.
Jul 12, 2021•43 min•Ep. 1
On this episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center, a podcast From Compass Data Centers, host Raymond Hawkins talked with Rich Miller, Founder and Editor of Data Center Frontier, a digital publication that covers the data center industry and “tells the story of the digital economy through the facilities that power the cloud and the people who build them.”
Jun 22, 2021•41 min•Ep. 1
In the data center world, when one mentions a backup power generator, one assumes diesel. Enchanted Rock Chief Commercial Officer Allan Schurr said it’s time to think differently. Enchanted Rock’s solution is one powered by natural gas.
Jun 08, 2021•38 min•Ep. 1
It is hard to believe, but there is a significant amount of megawatts that goes unused in global data centers. On this episode of the Not Your Father's Data Center Podcast, Host Raymond Hawkins of Compass Data Centers talked with Dean Nelson, the CEO of Virtual Power Systems. Nelson talked about his work at Uber and Sun Systems. This led down the path of Nelson's work at Virtual Power Systems, where they "believe that digital infrastructure is the foundation for an equitable and inclusive world,...
May 25, 2021•39 min•Ep. 1
Host Raymond Hawkins found time to pull himself away from watching The Masters to chat with Schneider Electric’s Vice President of Innovation and Data Centers, Steven Carlini, for an insider’s peek at Schneider’s approach to data centers and innovation.
May 11, 2021•37 min•Ep. 1
The phrase, ‘The future is now,’ without question, applies to quantum computers. What was not so long ago a science fiction fantasy is now a reality that’s not only closer than one might think, it’s here. Dr. Bob Sutor, a technical leader in the IT industry, working for IBM for over thirty years, joined Raymond Hawkins for an exciting talk about quantum computing, how it works, and how this revolutionary technology is poised to change the future of computing.
May 11, 2021•48 min•Ep. 1
The modern world is driven by data and our ability to analyze it, and the final frontier – space – provides an overwhelming amount of data just waiting to help us understand and commercialize what lies beyond our planet. However, the current infrastructure needs a boost to help us get there. At OrbitsEdge, CTO and Co-founder Rick Ward and the rest of the team think they’ve identified the missing link. Just as edge network solutions are empowering robust connectivity and data capture on earth, th...
Apr 23, 2021•33 min•Ep. 1
AI and machine learning are common terms, but they are complex with many applications. Understanding this is critical, and Not Your Father’s Data Center Podcast is back to unpack the terms with guest Zachary Lipton. Lipton is an Assistant Professor of Operations Research and Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon, where he runs the Approximately Correct Machine Intelligence Lab.
Apr 05, 2021•31 min•Ep. 1
