We have a great interview. Nabeel Mahmood is our guest. Nabeel was our second ever guest on the show and it’s fantastic to have him back on. Nabeel called in from his home in paradise in the great state of Hawaii so at one point you’ll hear something that sounds like a loud Klaxon going off. It’s actually just a bird. I conducted the interview from the Data Center Dynamics show at the Marriot Marquis in New York. There’s a good chance that if you are listening to this podcast you were there. So if you hear some chatter in the background that might be you.

I find Nabeel so interesting. Being an entrepreneur he’s got a ton of new ventures that he’s working on including the one that we mostly focused on today which is a company called querai that’s spelled q-u-e-r-a-i , so like investigating things with AI. What they’re doing is they’re using AI to improve the performance of monitoring software and they’re starting specifically with batteries which I think is a great place to start. Often batteries are sort of conceived as just a piece of the UPS system when really their a unique component that has completely separate requirements and specifications from the UPS itself. We also talk about the IDCA, the International Data Center Authority where he sits on the technical standards committee. For those of you who don’t know, IDCA is a standards body that is attempting to bridge some of the gaps between what ISO and Uptime and TIA and some other great agencies are doing. I think that just talking with Nabeel they are on their way to helping to unify monitoring and controls, especially by leveraging APIs so that data center software packages talk nicely to each other.

Great Interview today, we have Keith Perry on the show. Keith is the Owner and Managing Member of DAO Technologies LLC. DAO is a technology management and consulting organization that specializes in Free and Open Source Solutions. One of the first things that interested me about Keith is that he has an electrical engineering background – he got an BS from Drexel - which means that he’s got a handle on the full stack of the data center. Then he went into network security & virtual machines and got an MS, also from Drexel. His company focuses on integrating systems from hardware to software for large projects. As always this is a free-flowing discussion. Keith is a proponent of colocation – he’s wary of the public cloud but he’s all in favor of managed services – just don’t call it cloud. Great guy, great conversation. I don’t always get to talk with someone who consults on the front lines with end users, so it was great to get insights into the SMB space with Keith.

Our sponsor this week is Green Lane Design. Green Lane has been designing, engineering and building critical facilities for over ten years including major enterprise customers as well as colocation facilities. GLD has designed and developed an integrated stack of design disciplines. If you would be interested in a free assessment go to http://www.greenlanedesign.com/contact/ and mention the podcast.

Our music is algorithmically generated by Jukedeck. Create your own at http://jukedeck.com. Try it out. It's free.

Today we will be discussing the kinetic edge – that’s a new term to me. It’s the idea of putting small data centers very close to users. You install many or hundreds of these mini data centers and then quickly shifting virtual resources between them. When you do that, each individual one does not need to be particularly robust, but they all must work together to provide reliability. It’s like a wifi mesh concept. We’ve been talking about this concept as a distributed mesh data center for many years but now there is actually some traction in the marketplace and I’ve invited Kevin Farnsworth on to discuss this concept and see what the future might hold for it.

Our sponsor this week is Green Lane Design. Green Lane has been designing, engineering and building critical facilities for over ten years including major enterprise customers as well as colocation facilities. GLD has designed and developed an integrated stack of design disciplines. If you would be interested in a free assessment go to http://www.greenlanedesign.com/contact/ and mention the podcast.

Our music is algorithmically generated by Jukedeck. Create your own at http://jukedeck.com. Try it out. It's free.

Today is episode 7 of our green series. Second to last one one, people. If you stuck it out, this is the one that matters most to almost all of you. Man… It was a long journey but worth it in the end. I’m compiling this entire series into an ebook which will be available on Amazon. Look for that in fall of 2019. Brief overview of the green series: We started with software, zoomed out to the server hardware, to electrical systems to the philosophy behind green data centers, to automation and efficiency and here we are today at green cooling. If you’re interested in reducing your carbon footprint as a data center operator, this is the place to be! You’ve made it. Next week will take off from this topic in order to discuss kinetic edge data centers, then the week after we will be talking with Keith Perry principal at DAO Technologies – that was a great interview. After that will be our last episode in the series: energy reclamation. Really looking forward to that one.

Our sponsor this week is Green Lane Design. Green Lane has been designing, engineering and building critical facilities for over ten years including major enterprise customers as well as colocation facilities. GLD has designed and developed an integrated stack of design disciplines. If you would be interested in a free assessment go to http://www.greenlanedesign.com/contact/ and mention the podcast.

Our music is algorithmically generated by Jukedeck. Create your own at http://jukedeck.com. Try it out. It's free.

Today is episode 6 of our green series. Anyone new to this green data center series of podcasts, welcome – to give a brief overview, we started with the software and how well-written software is actually a green imperative contrary to what a lot of people think. Then we zoomed out to the server hardware and electrical systems. Then last week we took a weird interlude to wax philosophical regarding why anybody should care about green. Now we are looking at an extremely important and often overlooked aspect of green data centers – Automation. We’re going to talk about How data centers are built and commissioned, how PUE gets metered and the problems with that, how building automation works and how that ties into data centers, and finally what is on the horizon to make data centers run more efficiently just by improving automation.

Our sponsor this week is Green Lane Design. Green Lane has been designing, engineering and building critical facilities for over ten years including major enterprise customers as well as colocation facilities. GLD has designed and developed an integrated stack of design disciplines. If you would be interested in a free assessment go to http://www.greenlanedesign.com/contact/ and mention the podcast.

Our music is algorithmically generated by Jukedeck. Create your own at http://jukedeck.com. Try it out. It's free.

Today is episode 4 of our green series. Anyone new to this green data center series of podcasts, welcome – to give a brief overview, we started with the software and how well-written software is actually a green imperative contrary to what a lot of people think. Then we zoomed out to the server hardware, and now we’re zooming out one more level to the electrical systems. Today’s episode is touching on data center electrical infrastructure and how that’s, in a lot of ways, the next most important piece of the green footprint of a data center, or, arguably, the absolute most important piece. If you’re interested in reducing your carbon footprint and not actually about efficiency, then electrical infrastructure is the way to go. If you’re all about efficiency, look someplace other than electrical infrastructure. If you don’t believe that co2 causes global warming or severe environmental impact, feel free not to listen and then do a google search for the atmosphere of venus, the absorption and re-emittance of 2060nm light by co2, and like… a billion other things. It’s complicated so I get that there’s room for debate but before you argue, first read the million pages already written and then give me your opinion.

Our sponsor this week is Green Lane Design. Green Lane has been designing, engineering and building critial facilities for over ten years including major enterprise customers as well as colocation facilities. GLD has designed and developed an integrated stack of design disciplines. If you would be interested in a free assessment go to http://www.greenlanedesign.com/contact/ and mention the podcast.

Our music is algorithmically generated by Jukedeck. Create your own at http://jukedeck.com. Try it out. It's free.

Today is episode 3 of our green series. Last week we had a great interview with Daniel Pope about immersion cooling and the week before that we jumped right in with green software. We started there because it really is the most important piece of the movement to save electricity in computation. Poorly optimized software literally wastes billions of dollars and terawatt hours of electricity every year. So we are zooming out just one level, from the software layer to the physical layer. This episode is about green hardware – servers, networks and racks. This may sound crazy but it’s true. The next biggest savings still isn’t cooling or power systems or anything to do with the large scale data center systems. Server hardware really has the biggest impact next to software. So today we are going to talk about some hardware trends that I would love to see continue. These are things that can be utilized right now – this very day – in your facility.

Our sponsor this week is Green Lane Design. Green Lane has been designing, engineering and building critial facilities for over ten years including major enterprise customers as well as colocation facilities. GLD has designed and developed an integrated stack of design disciplines. If you would be interested in a free assessment go to http://www.greenlanedesign.com/contact/ and mention the podcast.

Our music is algorithmically generated by Jukedeck. Create your own at http://jukedeck.com. Try it out. It's free.

Daniel Pope is our guest. Daniel is the CEO of Submer which is a company that manufactures immersion cooling systems for servers focused on high density solutions. Daniel got his start in the data center industry when he started hosting email on a server in his bedroom when he was sixteen. He took that business all the way to a major sale and exit in 2009. You can find him on linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielpope83/

For more information go to https://submer.com.

Our sponsor this week is Green Lane Design. Green Lane has been designing, engineering and building critial facilities for over ten years including major enterprise customers as well as colocation facilities. GLD has designed and developed an integrated stack of design disciplines. If you would be interested in a free assessment go to http://www.greenlanedesign.com/contact/ and mention the podcast.

Our music is algorithmically generated by Jukedeck. Create your own at http://jukedeck.com. Try it out. It's free.

We have another issues episode this week. Today we’re starting our series on green data centers. I’m really excited about this. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I have spent a lot of time optimizing data centers for energy efficiency and I’ve seen a lot of bone headed stuff as well as some incredibly brilliant engineering around data centers and I can’t wait to talk about it. Since this is the first of our series we’ll start with a bit of an overview and then dive right in with the first topic in the series which is… Software. That’s right, green software. I’m guessing that a lot of people haven’t really thought of software as being a waste of energy but, have you ever accidentally copied a huge directory from one place to another… or maybe even lost it. That was wasted computation. It was a mistake and it maybe took five minutes to finish copying. All of that time and electricity was wasted and so were your nerves while waiting to see if you nuked your whole hard drive. Well take that feeling and multiply it by ten to the tenth because that is the sort of computation that happens every day across the world and if we could stamp that out just a little bit, we’d save billions of dollars, millions of kilowatt hours and probably thousands of jobs.

Our sponsor this week is Green Lane Design. Green Lane has been designing, engineering and building critial facilities for over ten years including major enterprise customers as well as colocation facilities. GLD has designed and developed an integrated stack of design disciplines. If you would be interested in a free assessment go to http://www.greenlanedesign.com/contact/ and mention the podcast.

Our music is algorithmically generated by Jukedeck. Create your own at http://jukedeck.com. Try it out. It's free.

Articles utilized in this episode:

https://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/feature/Overprovisioning-VMs-may-be-safe-but-it-isnt-sound

https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/serverless-architectures-learn-more/

https://hackernoon.com/what-is-serverless-architecture-what-are-its-pros-and-cons-cc4b804022e9