Isn’t the first rule in data centers not to get the servers wet? They’re kind of like Gremlins in that way. But someone forgot to tell Daniel Pope this fact.

Pope, the CEO of Submer, thinks data servers belong submerged in liquid. He was thrilled to speak to host Raymond Hawkins about his immersion cooling technology, which provides a new green approach to data centers, on this episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center.

Born and raised in England and now residing in Barcelona, Pope began his career at 16 when he started his first data center. Beginning with a single server in his bedroom, Pope grew his business to more than 20,000 servers. With his expertise in data centers set, Pope now loves the challenge of pushing technology and the industry further.

Today’s increasing demands on data centers pose a cooling challenge – one Pope knew he wanted to solve. And that set him off to help develop immersion cooling technology, the solution Submer focuses on today.

“Instead of cooling the electronics and the server components with air, we leverage a dielectric fluid, a nonconductive fluid, which captures and transports the heat in a much more efficient way than air,” Pope said.

The initial challenge for Pope was how to use this technology to cool the racks without disrupting the rest of the data haul and data center design. “And, now, further into this journey, we’re looking at it from the whole data center point of view,” Pope said.

Pope’s immersion cooling system works for solid-state drives, NVMe, flash drives and helium-sealed drives.

Immersion cooling reduces IT power load in the center by removing all the fans from the servers. And, from a density perspective, the density is ten-fold. “We are deploying immersion tanks that are in the range of 100kw that operate with extremely warm water, which means the overall facility PUE (power usage effectiveness) is reduced to around 1.04 to 1.05,” Pope said. And that PUE number is before the energy savings from the fan removal are calculated.

On this episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center, a Compass Datacenters Podcast, host Raymond Hawkins talked with Dr. Robert Sutor, Chief Quantum Exponent at IBM Research, about how quantum computing will partner with modern computing and what changes this will have for the world.

On this episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center, a podcast From Compass Data Centers, host Raymond Hawkins talked with Rich Miller, Founder and Editor of Data Center Frontier, a digital publication that covers the data center industry and “tells the story of the digital economy through the facilities that power the cloud and the people who build them.”

In the data center world, when one mentions a backup power generator, one assumes diesel. Enchanted Rock Chief Commercial Officer Allan Schurr said it’s time to think differently. Enchanted Rock’s solution is one powered by natural gas.

It is hard to believe, but there is a significant amount of megawatts that goes unused in global data centers. On this episode of the Not Your Father's Data Center Podcast, Host Raymond Hawkins of Compass Data Centers talked with Dean Nelson, the CEO of Virtual Power Systems.

Nelson talked about his work at Uber and Sun Systems. This led down the path of Nelson's work at Virtual Power Systems, where they "believe that digital infrastructure is the foundation for an equitable and inclusive world, where every person on the planet participates in the digital economy."

In acting upon this vision, VPS unlocks stranded power in data centers.

What's staggering to Nelson – and why he thinks this is such important work – is that, through research, VPS found 35,000 megawatts of capacity globally in the data center industry. They checked this data through multiple vectors. Of the capacity, 10,000 megawatts are stranded. This leads to a host of issues, one of which is increasing the carbon footprint unnecessarily.

"How much embedded carbon do we add every time we perpetuate that problem and build another data center that's 50% utilized?," Nelson asked.

The goal through technology at Virtual Power Systems is to utilize this space. Data centers build such an extensive infrastructure with low utilization to make headroom and safety create into the center. They want to make sure they have the buffer room when things don't go right in the system.

"It's the cumulative effect of everyone's buffer," Hawkins said, referring to the sheer amount of space unused.

Host Raymond Hawkins found time to pull himself away from watching The Masters to chat with Schneider Electric’s Vice President of Innovation and Data Centers, Steven Carlini, for an insider’s peek at Schneider’s approach to data centers and innovation.

The phrase, ‘The future is now,’ without question, applies to quantum computers. What was not so long ago a science fiction fantasy is now a reality that’s not only closer than one might think, it’s here. Dr. Bob Sutor, a technical leader in the IT industry, working for IBM for over thirty years, joined Raymond Hawkins for an exciting talk about quantum computing, how it works, and how this revolutionary technology is poised to change the future of computing.

The modern world is driven by data and our ability to analyze it, and the final frontier – space – provides an overwhelming amount of data just waiting to help us understand and commercialize what lies beyond our planet.

However, the current infrastructure needs a boost to help us get there.

At OrbitsEdge, CTO and Co-founder Rick Ward and the rest of the team think they’ve identified the missing link. Just as edge network solutions are empowering robust connectivity and data capture on earth, the company believes it could do the same in space.

AI and machine learning are common terms, but they are complex with many applications. Understanding this is critical, and Not Your Father’s Data Center Podcast is back to unpack the terms with guest Zachary Lipton.

Lipton is an Assistant Professor of Operations Research and Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon, where he runs the Approximately Correct Machine Intelligence Lab.