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 significant trends in the data storage space since his last visit that he was itching to discuss.

“If you think about our industry, today we have 7 million data center locations,” Nelson said. “These are places that have some type of compute in them. And there’s about 104 gigawatts of capacity built. That’s capacity that could be used. From a consumption standpoint, there’s 594 terawatt-hours of consumption. If you now equate that, that’s 2.4% of the total energy draw globally. Through iMasons, we created this baseline on purpose. And what it includes is three categories. So, digital infrastructure, in general, is providers, networks, and crypto.” Breaking down these categories helps define where the energy usage is going and how Nelson and his iMasons can find new ways to maximize the consumption of that capacity.

Even within the 594 terawatt-hours of consumption, Nelson said not all of that energy is consumed at once. Only roughly 67 gigawatts of the 104 gigawatts of power get consumed. That leaves at least 37 gigawatts unused around the globe. “And why is that,” Nelson asked. “That’s because of buffers and buffers, and everything else that happens from enterprise applications to cloud to data centers and everybody saving to ensure that they don’t have an issue.”

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 Centers in Space” on Not Your Father’s Data Center Podcast.   

Orbits Edge uses high-power compute in space before sending data to Earth. Mass amounts of data are captured, but there is a bottleneck in the transportation. Ward said, “Image capture is haystack generation, compute is needle finding,” said Ward. If you can only transport a fraction of the data haystack, it needs to be the high-quality “needles.”  

Data is shipped to countries through bands that have varying reliabilities and throughputs. A low-orbit satellite may conduct with a ground station for a certain distance, then have a fuzzy connection for another distance, and finally have no connectivity for several kilometers until it reaches the next ground station. High, dry locations are best for ground station connectivity. “What it comes down to is intermittent connectivity of variable throughputs of various windows of connectivity,” said Ward. 

Data is then transported from the ground station to a data center. Some ground stations have antennas to reduce the fiber run distance.  

Orbits Edge satellites range from the size of a dorm mini-fridge to the size of a regular fridge and weigh about 200 kilos. Despite the small size, Ward predicted that satellite data will play an increasingly heavy role in space and research stations, crystallography, space metallurgy, and ceramics.   

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 Centers in Space” on Not Your Father’s Data Center Podcast.   

Orbits Edge uses high-power compute in space before sending data to Earth. Mass amounts of data are captured, but there is a bottleneck in the transportation. Ward said, “Image capture is haystack generation, compute is needle finding,” said Ward. If you can only transport a fraction of the data haystack, it needs to be the high-quality “needles.”  

Data is shipped to countries through bands that have varying reliabilities and throughputs. A low-orbit satellite may conduct with a ground station for a certain distance, then have a fuzzy connection for another distance, and finally have no connectivity for several kilometers until it reaches the next ground station. High, dry locations are best for ground station connectivity. “What it comes down to is intermittent connectivity of variable throughputs of various windows of connectivity,” said Ward. 

Data is then transported from the ground station to a data center. Some ground stations have antennas to reduce the fiber run distance.  

Orbits Edge satellites range from the size of a dorm mini-fridge to the size of a regular fridge and weigh about 200 kilos. Despite the small size, Ward predicted that satellite data will play an increasingly heavy role in space and research stations, crystallography, space metallurgy, and ceramics.   

International trade law expert reveals the difficult yet satisfying work that the CCIA performs to keep tech at consumers’ fingertips. 

Host Raymond Hawkins switches up the usual topic of data to bring listeners a lively discussion of March Madness picks. 

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.

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.

Data center businesses serve clients in acquisitions, dispositions, and buying and selling centers and land. They also help tenants find buildings, negotiate location agreements, select sites, and manage facilities.

The level of investment in data centers and where the investments come from has grown exponentially; money is not necessarily coming from data center buyers. The real estate community has become increasingly involved. “We see more money and more diversity in the money, whether it’s geographical or what kind of buyer are they,” Huffman explained.

Businesses received wake-up calls during the pandemic—clients in facilities or office buildings didn’t have their network story up when everything went remote. Now, centers are working on perfecting it. CBRE even has a network team now to manage this.

While the power output necessary to keep data centers running is enormous, the efficiency compensates. “Data centers, even though they consume an inordinate of power per square foot, our efficiency with it is incredibly sophisticated and candidly much better than office or retail,” stated Huffman. This is feasible partly because cooling is used as a metric to improve utilization efficiency the data center businesses are driving opportunities to purchase green energy. “Sometimes what we’re doing is a baseline understanding of a customer’s data center footprints and helping them find efficiencies, consolidate, recontract, buy, and sell,” said Huffman.

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