I Love Data Centers

The Customer Defines The Edge - Episode 53 - Phillip Marangella by I Love Data Centers

The Greenest Electron is the One you Never Need to Use - Episode 52 - Shawn Mills by I Love Data Centers

Data Centers and Interconnection in Omaha - Episode 51 -Todd Cushing by I Love Data Centers

Measuring What Matters on the Edge - Episode 50 - Bruce Lehrman by I Love Data Centers

I Love Underground Data Centers - Episode 49 - Todd Murren by I Love Data Centers

In this episode I spend time talking with Jason Okroy, Co-founder and CEO of Salute Mission Critical, a US military veteran focused data center services company. Having toured hundreds of production data centers over the years, the facilities I have walked through that were the cleanest and with the most educated facilities staff were those operated by veterans of our armed forces. If you think about it for even a few seconds, this starts to make perfect sense given the training, discipline, necessity to perform under pressure and repetition of complex tasks within the military.

Our conversation covers how and why the company was founded in 2013 and a few of the lessons Jason and his company have learned serving the veteran community as well as the facilities and operations side of the data center industry.

Early on in our conversation, Jeff politely made me aware that he has socks older than me. Apart from this telling me that he definitely needs some new socks, I became even more excited to dig into the interview knowing that he has literally been helping to build the infrastructure that runs the digital world longer than my short 40 years on this planet.

We talk through him helping to start the first ISP in Minnesota, how exactly high capacity optical switching gear works and what a day in the life of Jeff looks like at DC Blox. For good measure we threw in some perspectives gained in light of current events through the lens of my rereading Frank Herbert's epic sci-fi DUNE chronicles and Jeff's rewatching the 2004 Battlestar Galactica TV series. Unsurprisingly, I learned a lot from Jeff in our short time together and I am positive you will too.

Staying on topic re: demystifying the Interconnection Services Industry and our recent Interconnection Playbook launch, I spent time with successful data center and managed hosting entrepreneur Rich Lee who is now spearheading Pureport, a multicloud interconnection provider. Rich happens to also live in Raleigh, NC and has obtained a wealth of knowledge to share with us having had direct experience across a number of successful M&A events within the data center and IT Services industry over the past 2 decades.

We walk through a few of these transactions in detail, lessons he's learned scaling a variety of businesses, as well as the unique interconnection features and products Pureport offers. Prepare for some more knowledge bombs my friends and give this a listen ASAP!

Excited to share with you a few stories from Chris Downie on his professional experience growing into the data center industry. His unique perspective as the CEO of both Telx during the acquisition by Digital Realty Trust in 2015 and Peak10 during their acquisition of Viawest in 2017 (now Flexential) makes this interview extremely powerful.

We also touch on what steps Flexential has taken to address concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic, what a day in the life of a CEO of a data center company looks like and some important lessons he's learned over the years.

The Interconnection Services Playbook, which serves as an attempt to demystify the Interconnection Services Industry, is now released into the wild! Keeping with this topic, I thought it appropriate to interview another one of my favorite people in the industry, Misha Cetrone, Sr. Global Director, Cloud Solution Architecture at Megaport.

Misha drops some technical knowledge about why Interconnection Services are important, how they will continue to evolve, what some tangible uses cases are to consider leveraging these services, how to connect to these services and how they operate at their core level. Listen and learn my friends... listen and learn.