The former infrastructure head at eBay and Uber talks about his first year on the vendor side, VPS’s technology vision, the largest data center operators' efforts to get to zero carbon, and Infrastructure Masons' work to improve the industry's new-talent pipeline.

VPS CEO Dean Nelson on Flipping Data Centers’ Wasteful Status Quo

Hello there, or shall I say, welcome back? Six months after our last episode with DCK’s illustrious Yevgeniy Sverdlik, we are relaunching the podcast, under the working title ‘Uptime with DCK.’

The mission is the same: find out what industry leaders think of the latest trends in data center design and operation, and share their hard-won industry expertise.

In the first episode of the new season, editor Max Smolaks (that’s me) chats with Dominic Ward, CEO of data center operator Verne Global, and Lindsay Smart, head of sustainability at Triple Point – the investment management company working on behalf of Digital 9 Infrastructure, which acquired Verne Global last September. 

Verne runs an unusual data center campus in Iceland, located on a site previously used as a military base by the US Navy, and then by NATO.  It is powered by 100% renewable electricity from hydroelectric and geothermal sources. 

The business is going well: earlier this year, Verne announced it would more than double the size of the campus to 40MW.

We discuss the evolving role of data centers that are located far from the end-users, but close to renewable energy sources. We also find out what Verne learned from that one time they were mining cryptocurrencies. And of course, we talk about the recent acquisition of the company by D9 in a deal worth £231 million (~$313m).

Uptime with DCK: Sustainability pays off

In the latest episode of Uptime with DCK, we investigate the skills crisis facing the data center industry with Nabeel Mahmood, an experienced IT executive, keynote speaker, and one of the hosts of the Nomad Futurist podcast.

We look at data center culture, and approaches to attracting a new generation of talent into the wonderful world of mission-critical infrastructure.

According to Nabeel, the main main challenge for the industry is awareness – data center degrees are still few and far between, and industry professionals are too busy with their job of connecting the world to spend time on extolling the virtues of a data center career.

Long term, trade schools for data center engineers might hold the answer. But in the short term, data centers could try to capture some of the workforce that left their jobs in recent months as part of a social phenomenon dubbed ‘the great resignation.’

Uptime with DCK: Why don’t you get a job (in a data center)

In the latest episode of Uptime with DCK, we take a detailed look at liquid cooling with Dattatri Mattur, director of hardware engineering at Cisco.

With upcoming server CPUs expected to consume around 400W of power, GPUs already consuming more than that (Nvidia’s H100 requires ~700W per board), and with terabytes of memory per server, the cutting-edge IT workloads of the future will be almost impossible to cool with air alone.

In this podcast, we discuss thermal design points of modern processors, the cooling requirements of edge computing, and the impact of new technologies on power consumption. 

We also look at some of the barriers facing the wider deployment of liquid cooling, and the enduring importance of server fans.

“This is going to take some time,” Mattur told Data Center Knowledge. “This is not an overnight, forklift change to the entire data center.”

Uptime with DCK: Is liquid cooling inevitable?

In the latest episode of Uptime with Data Center Knowledge, we look at the evolution of bare metal servers.

To find out more about the subject, we chat to bothers Jacob and Zachary Smith – co-founders of Packet, a bare metal hosting service that was acquired by data center giant Equinix in 2020, in a deal worth $335 million. Packet became the foundation of the new Equinix Metal business, led by Zac as its managing director, and Jacob – as the VP of bare metal strategy and marketing

Correction: Soon after we recorded this episode, Zac was promoted to head of edge infrastructure services at Equinix, and Jacob – to interim lead of the digital services go-to-market. 

According to the Smiths, the key attractions of bare metal are speed and performance: Equinix Metal can be set up in any supported facility in as little as 15 minutes, to run almost any workload on dedicated, physical servers. The process is considerably different from handling servers used to run public cloud applications, where the hardware is often shared between multiple users.

Jacob himself jokes that “no one really cares about servers” – but there are plenty of applications that benefit from bare metal, especially in organizations that value automation and are heavily invested in custom software stacks. 

For such customers, bare metal represents choice – a dedicated server is a blank canvas, unburdened by multiple layers of complex software that enables typical cloud workloads. The customer alone will decide what the machine will do, and how it will do it.

We also discuss:

    • Open Source software development at Equinix
    • Why Equinix Metal doesn’t manage Kubernetes
    • How to improve sustainability at the server level

Uptime with DCK:  Can’t kill the Metal

The Data Center Podcast is produced by Data Center Knowledge, the leading information source for all things data center. In our podcast we interview technology and business leaders in the data center industry to get to know them better and to ask for their take on where things are going in the constantly changing world of cloud, internet, and enterprise infrastructure, which are increasingly becoming one thing.

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