DCD Zero Downtime: The Bi-Weekly Data Center Show

What's it like building facilities for Google, in the epicenter of data center construction - Northern Virginia?  Sarah Godbehere has spent the last three years managing construction on a Google campus in Northern Virginia. She tells us what it's like to be a young woman in an industry full of older men, and shares how she turns potential conflicts by asking the right questions.

When a data center firm claims to be 100 percent carbon neutral, can we believe them?  Does every electron used in that data come from a solar panel or a wind farm?   Until we have reliable carbon accounting, we won't know for sure, and operators will continue to rely on renewable energy certificates (RECs) which match energy consumption over a year, instead of hour by hour.

Simone Accornero, CEO of FlexiDAO says we need "RECs on steroids" to move to hourly carbon accounting, and a blockchain-based protocol can deliver this without costing the earth in energy overheads.

Data centers are a small part of the global electricity market, Accornero says they are ideally suited to drive that market to better carbon accounting, and renewable generation which better matches electricity consumption.

As sustainability continues to become an increasingly important issue for data center owners and operators, many are tying their financing into ESG-related goals. The likes of Green Bonds see proceeds going towards specific green projects, while Sustainability-Linked Loans see interest payments tied to specific targets such as PUE or water use.

Such financing options have been adopted by cloud and data center companies including Equinix, Digital Realty, Atos, Baidu, AirTrunk, and telcos such as Telefonica, NTT, and Verizon.   

US operator Aligned’s whole debt pile – more than $3billion –  is entirely made up of sustainable-tied financing. Aligned’s VP of Finance, Matthew Chambliss discusses the company’s reasoning and journey to adopting sustainable financing.

Cryptocurrency valuations are in freefall, causing mining to halve. But Bitcoin still consumes as much power as entire nations, amid a climate emergency. We talk to Digiconomist's Alex de Vries about the history of crypto, the crash, and learn just how much power the sector uses - and what it means for the planet.

Working from home expanded massively during the pandemic - but were we ready for such a massive change? The proportion of remote workers grew from 17% of all employees worldwide in 2019 to 32% but the companies weren't fully ready for the change and collaboration tools were often pushed beyond what they were designed for. 

Alex Cruz Farmer of Cisco ThousandEyes has the tools to look objectively at the user experience and talks to us about how we can improve it.

The world needs hydrogen as part of the replacement for fossil fuels - and data centers could be the catalyst for that.  

Mark Monroe, Principal Engineer at Microsoft, explains how the hydrogen economy works. He shows us that hydrogen is not just a proven alternative to diesel for backup, but brings other benefits with it. 

If data centers switch this small part of their energy needs to hydrogen, this could enable much larger industries to get started - and catalyze a hydrogen economy

In this episode of the Zero Downtime podcast, we speak to Leaseweb general counsel Jacqueline van de Werken about how to encourage more women in the data center and cloud industry, and how to retain those that do join.

It's easy to think that sustainable data centers are all about reducing carbon. In fact the earth faces a biodiversity crisis as big as the climate crisis. Data centers can have a role in fighting to prevent extinctions, and produce a lot of other benefits in the process.

When you build a data center, you have to see the unintended consequences, says Michelle Wallace of data center promotion group Host In Ireland. Build badly, and local species will suffer. But it's also easy to get it wrong, to put in measures that don't help.

Host in Ireland went to Ireland's National Biodiversity Data Centre, found how important pollinators are, and put together a set of action to protect and promote them, DCs for Bees is now having influence beyond Ireland, and beyond the data center industry.

It's being followed up with a scheme to plant orchards - and there are more ideas beyond that.

This is the Zero Downtime episode which could make your data center into a haven for nature, and change your life for the better!

Data center operators who want to be sustainable tend to focus in on carbon - but there are a lot more elements in the Periodic Table, And as we progress towards sustainability, we are going to have to consider all of them.

In this podcast, Astrid Wynne Rogers, sustainability lead at TechBuyer tells us why we should pay close attention to the lifecycle of our physical servers and the other equipment in our facilities.

It takes a lot of materials and energy to make equipment, and keeping it out of the waste stream could avoid wasting those resources. But there's more to it than sticking it in a skip for recycling. The circular economy has to join up. With a value put on refurbished equipment, and people actively working to reuse and extend that kit.

It used to be said that replacing old kit with new always saved energy, because Moore's law meant the new equipment was much faster. That is no longer the case, and TechBuyer did the research to prove it.

TechBuyer's paper is available here from IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing or here from Techbuyer.

Want another reason to increase your hardware's life?  It's a powerful way to reduce "Scope 3" emissions from your supply chain. And you can't get to Net Zero without dealing with Scope 3.

CTOs have traditionally been key positions for research-driven software and technology companies. As colocation companies increasingly move beyond merely serving space and power, the role of the CTO becomes more important.  

Holland Barry, Field CTO for Cyxtera, discusses the role of the CTO and Field CTO at the company, the key skills required, and some of the interesting projects the company is working on.

We also discuss the wider skills market and the shift from ‘dumb colo’ to service provider, and get a boots on the ground view of Cyxtera’s journey to becoming a public company via a SPAC merger.