The Good Data Podcast

Sean Patrick Tario was our guest this week. Sean is a consultant, professional trainer, analyst and sales professional within the data center industry. He is the CEO of Open Spectrum which is a data center consultation firm that provides training and resources to help demystify this industry and create standard for selling and brokering honest and transparent deals. They’ve negotiated and closed hundreds of data center and hosting contracts with service providers around the world. He’s also the VP of the Cloud Elements Division of Microcorp, a master agency for telecom and cloud services. Sean wrote the “Data Center Colocation Industry Playbook” which gives a fantastic overview of the colo industry from the perspective of what channel partners and brokers actually need to know about the industry. You can get that on Amazon. Lastly, he’s the host of the I Love Data Centers podcast which is a great resource for anyone interested in where the industry is going. Sean was a great guest and we were so lucky to have him on the show.

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

We’re taking the holidays off to focus on family, friends, food, drink, song, dance and fun. I just want to wish all our listeners a happy, healthy holiday. I wish you success, joy, peace and contentment. We will be back with some episodes that I’m really looking forward to. First we will be talking with Sean Patrick Tario – that’s dropping on the 8th of January. Here’s a quick taste of that conversation.

And after that we will be dropping the first of several green tech themed episodes. I’m very excited for those. We’ll be talking about immersion cooled servers, energy efficient coding, the importance of the latest and greatest hardware, the complexity of backup generation and the hope that we can figure out how to optimize the 3% of earth’s electrical production used to power data centers.

Thank you to everyone who has listened to the show. Thank you to our wonderful guests. Thanks to everyone who made this podcast possible. We’re looking forward to a great 2019. To everyone out there, be safe, have fun and be good.

Todd Finnegan was our guest for this episode. Todd is CEO of ACS Services, a data center and mission critical systems company that focuses on automation, integration and service. Todd has worked in the high-stakes world of data center service for years including many marathon fix-it sessions where he had to white knuckle his way through intensely complicated and hugely consequential repairs for 24 hours plus. You’ll hear how his background in high stakes teams like his collegiate rowing career at Princeton helped him to handle the pressures of the data center industry better than just about anybody I’ve ever met. Todd is the kind of guy who you meet and think, “ok, this guy is going to do the job, whatever it is.” There aren’t that many people like him. So happy to have him on the show.

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.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/todd-finnegan-48242b5/

For today’s episode we’re talking about a topic that has come up a number of times since our data center call-in show. The question is: “What do I do with my overbuilt data center?”

So what happened, what has happened over and over again, is that companies in the nineties and aughts started to move into an all-digital strategy and at the time they thought that the only way to do that was to build their own data centers. Now, when you build a data center you tend to build it with some room to grow, like, I have 200kW of IT equipment today but who knows, ten years from now I might have 500kW and I don’t want to have to build another data center. So what companies did was they built the data center to accommodate that 500kW. And for a while that made sense, especially in the nineties. At that time colocation, that is putting equipment in a shared facility like equinix or digital realty, colocation wasn’t very popular with a lot of companies. It was much more expensive than it is today and a lot of IT managers and CIOs saw that they would save money by housing their data centers at their own facilities.

Now technology got bigger and bigger in the nineties and into the aughts, culminating somewhere around 2008 or 2010 with these large enterprise data centers that held big hunking SANs and acres of servers. But by then virtualization, storage consolidation and cloud storage had all begun to infiltrate. After that moment, data centers, almost in unison, began to shrink, to pull into themselves and get smaller and smaller.

So what we had was, instead of 200kW growing into 500kW, we had 200kW shrinking into 150kW. So you had data centers served by infrastructure designed for over three times the current load. And in reality since then there has been even more consolidation and more companies saying to themselves, “I don’t want to be in the data center business anymore.”

Well, on today’s show we are going to investigate that very phenomenon. We are going to look at why data centers shrank and what companies are doing with that extra space, power and cooling. Also, we’re going to look at what to do in the future to avoid being stuck with the bill for that entire data center that you’re not actually using.

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 pulled a clip from SP Homerun for our little newsflash. You can find SP Homerun at http://www.sphomerun.com/data-center-sales-and-marketing-blog/why-data-center-liquidations-spread-far-and-wide

We also licensed the newsflash music from jobro. You can find the song here: https://freesound.org/people/jobro/sounds/88022/

This week we are taking a break from the podcast for Thanksgiving. A big thanks to all of our listeners!

Our sponsor 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.

Partial Transcript:

Welcome everybody to the good data podcast. We are taking this week off from interviews because of the thanksgiving holiday but we will be returning next week with another episode.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all of our listeners out there. We are so appreciative of the positive feedback that we have received. Also, I want to thank all of the great guests that we’ve had on the show. I am so happy to have been given the chance to speak with John Diamond, Nebeel Mahmood, Garrick Sturgill, Owen Osborne… Every one of our guests has been great in their own way and I’ve loved having those conversations.

I also want to set out, in public, one of our big goals for this show, namely putting the “good” in good data. I am really interested in what technology means for real people. Basically, I think this boils down to digital value… like, what is the point of any of this technology if not to make the world better… But also like… let’s stop implying that technology always makes the world better. There is so much hype out there in the world regarding the promise of technology.

Let’s take the decentralization of trust systems we find in crypto. That has yet to truly make a dent in trust systems even after burning through millions of kwh of electricity.

Let’s take social media. We’ve seen billions of people able to coordinate guests lists for parties at the same time that social media has enabled genocide.

Let’s take online learning. There are millions of hours of online instruction that have allowed just about anybody to learn just about anything… like… there are some great courses out there for free. I was going to include like a counterpoint but actually this is probably the best use of the internet that we have regardless of whatever fake educational content there is – it’s totally overshadowed by good content.

Digital value has always been in the dna of this podcast and I’m planning to lean into it even more in the coming episodes. We’re still going to be talking data centers but now that we have our feet under us, I hope that you come along with me to look at what we’re actually doing with all that computation. Like, we have these huge buildings that generate more information per hour than was produced in the entire twentieth century…

But for what end?

I’m so excited to continue this podcast and I’m so thankful for our wonderful listeners. Looking forward to some more great episodes of good data. We’ll see you next time on the podcast.

For Today's show Garrick Sturgill will be our guest. Garrick is senior Director at IsoFusion which, if you haven’t heard of it, is a colocation, cloud and networking company in the Pacific Northwest. He works in strategy and planning for network buildouts which include last mile fiber to the home which is a business that can use all the competition it can get in my opinion so I’m glad to see them moving into that market. Our conversation goes all over the place from the beginnings of the internet and Arpanet through Garrick’s work in the iconic Westin building in Seattle all the way up to the current bleeding edge of networking and low earth orbit satellites.

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.

Partial Transcript:

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Paul Bemis is our guest on Good Data. Paul is the president of Applied Math Modeling makers of Coolsim computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. You can find them at http://www.coolsimsoftware.com. They have been making CFD software for data centers for many years and before that Paul was working in the computational modeling industry for much of his career. We get into server design, containment methodologies and we get far into the weeds regarding the ideal gas law. If I have any advice to share with listeners to this podcast it is that they should learn about the Bernoulli Principle and the Ideal Gas Law. It will make your lives so much better.

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 on the program we have Owen Osborn, CEO of Critter and Guitari. Owen founded the company with Chris Kucinski in 2007 and they have been building avante gard musical instruments ever since. Their creations have been used by Taylor Swift, Bon Iver, the Flaming Lips, Magnetic Fields and OK Go. They have a collaboration with Jack White and Third Man Records to produce custom synths and amplifiers. They're known for allowing just about anybody to create music just by pressing a few buttons because they have devised algorithms that will build music with very little input from the user. I feel very lucky to have sat down with Owen.

Also mentioned in the podcast (though I forgot his name) was Ray Li. Ray is one of the founders of the musical collaboration Veserium which you can find at https://www.veserium.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.