The Data Center Podcast

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

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.”

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.'

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).

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.

Vertiv's CEO reflects on early days of the pandemic and shares thoughts on where the company finds itself today in relation to the global crisis. We also talked about the global supply chain issues and their impact on Vertiv and its customers, the company's strategy for growing in the hyperscale data center market, and which areas of data center technology its hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D spend has been going.

Equinix has been leveraging its position at the top of the data center service provider market to expand into new areas, such as data center infrastructure for next-gen mobile applications, subsea-cable landing stations, and hyperscale facilities. On the latest episode of The Data Center Podcast, we interview Jim Poole, VP of business development at Equinix, about these initiatives, as well as its strategy around expanding in emerging markets, reaching data center sustainability, and more.

The Data Center Podcast: After a nervous pause at the start of the pandemic, the major North American data center provider's business skyrocketed.

Charlie Boyle, general manager of the Nvidia DGX unit, on AI hardware and data centers.

Alex Rabbetts leads the European Data Center Association, the lobbying organization behind the recent Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact. In the interview we try to learn why EUDCA thinks a voluntary pact -- as opposed to regulation -- wouldn't put the industry's interests ahead of what's best for the environment.

Bryan Cantrill, CTO and co-founder of Oxide Computer Company, tells us how his startup is designing a rack-scale computer for enterprise IT shops that have “good reasons” to run applications in their own data centers.

Some of the largest data center operators have been ramping up investment in renewable energy and other measures aimed at reducing their impact on climate change. Overall, however, creating a truly sustainable data center industry -- which as a sector is of the fastest-growing energy consumers -- will require regulation.

Tim Hughes, director of strategy and development at Stack Infrastructure, takes us inside the booming business of building and leasing massive computing facilities to the world's largest cloud platforms.

Alan Mauldin, who tracks the submarine cable market at TeleGeography, joins us on The Data Center Podcast to talk about hyperscalers' massive influence on how cables are funded, where they land, and how they're designed.

Veteran data center real estate broker Jim Kerrigan explains the state of play in the US data center leasing market and shares some tips for data center tenants.

The networking giant's CTO explains its opportunity for a SaaS play and his vision of data center automation.

Chris Crosby, founder and CEO of Compass Datacenters, on business, diversity, and sustainability.

The Data Center Podcast: Jabez Tan, head of research at Structure Research, on the state of play in the global colocation market, including an overview of the top emerging markets, where most of the growth is going to happen over the next few years.

The Data Center Podcast: Deepak Patil, head of Dell's cloud business, on building a platform and supply chain for consuming private cloud infrastructure that feels, as much as possible, like consuming public cloud services.

Kentik's Avi Freedman on the internet's resiliency, ‘edgefication' of everything, and the rise of the internet bypass.

Jeff Wittich, who until recently led the Intel unit that designs and sells processors for cloud data centers, joins us to talk about his new gig as VP of products at Ampere Computing, the Arm processor startup founded by former Intel president Renee James that's focused squarely on eating Intel's lunch in the cloud provider data center market.

Zahl Limbuwala, executive director, CBRE - Romonet, joins us on The Data Center Podcast to talk about what's coming after CBRE's acquisition of his company Romonet earlier this year, to reflect on the UK's cabon tax on data center operators, cost considerations for liquid cooling, and Brexit.

Peter Gross, Bloom Energy's VP of mission critical, says he hasn't seen anything more disruptive after decades in the business.

Roland Acra, the man in charge of Cisco's Data Center Business Group, joins us on The Data Center Podcast.

At Juniper, Bikash Koley is using the things he learned while building Google's infrastructure to give enterprises the cloud-native environments they want. In this episode of The Data Center Podcast, we talk with Koley about the technology stack he's building at Juniper to get there and about his expectations for getting Juniper back to growth.

In this episode, we ask Packet's Jacob Smith about the company's business model, its recent project to launch an edge computing cloud service for 5G applications, and why he isn't worried about AWS.

Ihab Tarazi left Equinix, where he served as CTO, last fall and joined Sutter Hill Ventures, the Palo Alto, California, VC firm, as entrepreneur in residence. He spends his time there thinking about what the future of edge computing will look like in terms of technology, business models, and use cases. Tarazi shared some of his thoughts on the subject in this interview on The Data Center Podcast.

Virtual Power Systems wants to disrupt the traditional data center reliability ratings, enable colos to compete with hyper-scale cloud providers, and tackle the problem of over-provisioning in data center design.

Rackspace is nothing if not ready to change with the market. Since its brief stint in the dedicated server space when the company first launched, it's gone through many transformations, both in terms of business and technology capabilities. It's also gone public and back to being privately held. But in a way, despite all those changes, its fundamental value proposition has remained the same.

Prasanna Sundararajan, founder and CEO of rENIAC, joins us to talk about his startup's FPGA-based acceleration technology for big data analytics. rENIAC recently gained financial backing from Intel Capital.

Kash Iftikhar, VP of IaaS, for Oracle's Public Cloud Services business, talks cloud and data center strategy in an interview at Oracle OpenWorld 2017 in San Francisco.

Cole Crawford, founder and CEO of Vapor IO, joins us to talk about edge computing and why he thinks there will soon be small data centers everywhere. Vapor recently partnered with Crown Castle, the largest wireless tower company in the US, to launch a service that provides data center colocation space at wireless towers and a host of other consulting services and technologies for companies building out this ultra-distributed next-generation computing network.

Ravi Pendekanti, who is currently senior VP for server solutions product management and marketing at Dell EMC, and who previously spent many years in senior product and marketing roles at Sun Microsystems, SGI, Juniper, and Oracle, says the next generation of technologies, such as self-driving cars and the Internet of Things, as well as commoditization of data center network hardware driven by software-defined networking, will drive that next wave of growth in the server market.

The Data Center Podcast featuring Bill Stein, CEO of Digital Realty Trust

VMware VP John Gilmartin joins us on the latest episode of The Data Center Podcast.

We interview Mesosphere co-founder and CEO Florian Leibert about his company being named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and about the role Mesosphere and its Data Center Operating System fit in the vision of an interconnected future, where cars drive themselves and where data from every device is collected and put to use.

Equinix's Peter Ferris not only witnessed the birth of the internet data center business, he was one of the key players in its early days. In this inaugural Data Center Podcast by Data Center Knowledge Ferris tells us about those early days, when Netscape and Playboy used the same data center, and about Equinix's role in the internet infrastructure today, which of course is now referred to as the Cloud.