 the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Skado-Kataya, and on behalf of my team here at JSA, welcome to our monthly virtual roundtable. We are bringing together top industry experts talking about topics important to our industry in our monthly series, available right here on JSA TV YouTube channel, as well as on JSA radio, the only telecom and tech podcast available on iHeart radio. These monthly roundtables lead us up to our onsite CEO roundtables. Next one up is Telecom Exchange, June 21st, 22nd, downtown New York City. And then we'll also have a telecom exchange in LA, right in the fabulous Montage Beverly Hills, and that's November 14th through the 15th. More info is at vtelecomexchange.com. Well, let's get right into it. Today's topic, the evolution of the Green Data Center, has been garnering a lot of support and social media buzz. Thanks, guys, for all those tweets and LinkedIn posts. It is definitely exciting. We have about 80 folks logging in live to have an audience here today. Welcome, welcome. And thank you to those who are watching on demand. This roundtable is brought to you on our JSA video platform, which allows our panelists to log in virtually. And today we were just talking. We're spanning the country from Miami to Seattle, streaming live video feeds, care of our partners, Pinnacle. So thank you, Pinnacle, and let's get started. I'm honored to introduce our guest moderator, Mr. Rich Miller, a dear friend of mine for many years. He's the founder and editor of Data Center Frontier. And one of my personal favorite writers of Data Center space. He's writing on places where the internet lives, the story of data centers, the people who build them. He really makes himself the perfect guest moderator today to talk green data centers with our All Star panel. So Rich, thanks for being with us today and please do us the honors of introducing our expert panelists. I certainly will. Thank you so much, Jamie, for that kind introduction. Excited to be here. Love talking about data centers and this is a great topic. Our format, I'd like to briefly start by introducing the panelists. We have Benjamin Von Seeger, who's the CEO and president of DVS Consulting. Chad Lam, who's the director of engineering at XKL. And Sean Mills, who is the president and CEO and also a founder of greenhouse data. Now, green data centers is a pretty large topic and it might mean different things to different people. The evolution of green data center has kind of been that initially we were focused on saving energy, trying to be as efficient as possible in the construction of data centers to reduce cost and lower the amount of energy being used. Then we have had a big focus on social responsibility lately including the use of renewable energy in powering and sourcing that renewables like solar and wind for the data center. And there's also been recently a lot of focus on other resources that the data center industry uses such as water, which is a big topic in some markets for the data centers. So I'd like to start by asking each of you to take a couple of minutes and talk about what green data center means to you and how the green concepts and principles have been applied in your career and business. And I'll start with Benjamin. Thank you so much, Rich. Thanks so much, Jane, for having me on the program. It's a privilege and I really appreciate it. To dive right into your question, Rich, if you look around the climate change we as professionals in the telecom industry we have to go our part. And since the last 20 years that we've been building data centers starting with telemagnetic Americas, the idea was always to go green because we do need the data centers but also in the process, we cannot go ahead and destroy our planet. So the green idea came from a study that I just read not long ago from all the places Germany where you have a lot of rain every year but they deployed a lot of solar panels and wind energy sources to power all the data centers. If you think in general, how much power we use in a facility, I mean, just taken as the map of the Americas which is 750,000 square feet facility holding 180,000 gallons of fuel, we want to replace that fuel with a green source. It is imperative if you want to keep our planet clean and for the future generations that we move all the data centers towards a green solution. That's my opinion and what the solutions are we can dive later into the conversation but around the world now there are hundreds of data centers and if we look at Asia and other polluted countries, we have to move towards a usage of a green solution. Thanks very much. I'll turn to Sean Mills. You've got green right in the name of your data center company. Talk a little bit about how green is applied in your business. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Rich. It's a pleasure being here. Greenhouse data was founded back in 2007 as a green data center and our whole philosophy around our corporate culture and corporate mantras and march into the space was around operating as energy efficiently as we can. The greenest, I always say, the greenest electron is the electron we never used and so we really focus on not using as many electrons as possible. We've been fortunate over our evolution, we started off as a green state data center and we're really focused on the best practices around operating data centers, around managing data centers and have been focused on that from the beginning but we've seen the evolution as we've grown and taken over data centers that weren't built to be green data centers and that presented a whole nother set of challenges. Today at this point, we're the 25th largest tech and telecom purchaser of renewable energy in the US and so that's one component to it but as we continue to grow, we see opportunities to continue to push the envelope ways that we can be more energy efficient, continue to be socially responsible and helping produce what we see as an industry that is using a ton of electrons and a ton of electricity. We want to help make that industry as energy efficient and green as possible. Thank you, Sean. Chad at XKL, you work with network equipment. How does that play into the green data center equation? And what's your take on the topic? Yeah, thanks, Rich. Well, as an equipment vendor, we have various motivations for how we design our systems. Obviously, functionally, we gotta solve some problems but we also need to sell these solutions and over the last six, seven years now, one of the requirements is low power consumption. These are monthly reoccurring costs that our customers are experiencing and they need to lower them. CAPEX is obviously a big focus but the operating expenses, whether it's for delivering power to run the equipment or the cooling involved in keeping the environment at the right temperature. So we spent a lot of time here at XKL focusing on how to solve the problems and how to do it efficiently. And component selection is critical for us. It's one thing to go out and find solutions to problems and just say, okay, here you go, this is gonna work great. And then after the fact, figure out that the solution you've presented is consuming three times the power it should. I mean, anybody that's walked through a data center space or machine room and you have to put earplugs on, earplugs in your ears to get through all the noise from all the fans, all that cooling, all that heat dissipation. So we're really careful about components. We select operating modes for devices. Everybody wants to be the solution for every application. And when you get into the data center space, the problems are a little bit different. And so you have to have solutions that really meet their needs. And it's no longer the case where you can simply move bits from point A to point B without considering what it costs to move those bits. Things as simple as airflow and heat sinks and how you manage your systems. You go into a data center space and airflow going from a hot aisle to a cold aisle. Well, there are some components and systems out there that the airflow is going in the wrong direction. How does that help folks in the data center to integrate all these pieces and have a hot air aisle, a cold air exchange, et cetera. So it's no longer sufficient to simply produce a solution from whatever space you're in, whether it's optical networking, which is what we do here at X-Gal or other aspects of what goes on in the data center. You have to do it efficiently. You have to think about it and you have to think about it right up front. So that's what we do here and really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this here because most of the time folks in these greed data center discussions don't get down to the level of the systems, the individual systems that go in there. So I appreciate the opportunity to talk here today. Well, I think it's really important that you've raised that it's an issue that exists on lots of facets in many levels. One of the challenges I think in terms of trying to advance mean data center principles has been the motivation of different parties. Is it about economics? Is it about philosophy and corporate social responsibility? So I'll put to the panel, I'll start with Sean and I'm interested in your take on this about institutionally, how do we advance the cause of the green data center? Is it something that has to come from the operators or the, and are the customers providing any pressure and they're changing the landscape at all? You know, it's really interesting that again kind of come back to that topic of the evolution. As a company, our first data center was built very specifically to be as energy efficient and green as possible. We're a co-location and cloud hosting company. So now we have to consider some of the things like the hardware that is going into our data center from a cloud perspective, the hardware we put in there has to be energy efficient. But, you know, it's a pretty complex reality. You know, when we got to build our first data center as a focus solely around being energy efficient, now we've acquired data center. So I have a new appreciation for legacy data centers, right? And so having a keen focus on being energy efficient, being focused on how do you manage airflow, how can you control the airflow, minimize the amount of cooling required for a given amount of computing? That's a new challenge. And what I always thought when I first started was, oh my gosh, why doesn't everybody do this? And I didn't realize exactly how hard it was until you walk into a legacy data center or a data center that was built before being energy efficient or green was important. And so we're starting to see, and we saw it right at the beginning when we first started in 2008, a drive that customers specifically chose us because of our energy efficiency. But then it's interesting. So 2008, it weighing, 2009 weighing, but what we're seeing again is this big uptick in green initiatives, green being written into RFPs, green focus on energy efficiency being a component. And it's really being driven by the boards of these larger companies. And so it's the companies that are now driving us and continuously pushing us to be more and more energy efficient, not only just based on our own corporate philosophy, but it's actually being driven by the companies in the RFPs and the larger enterprises. Thanks, Sean. So Benjamin, you talked about the importance of the environmental and sustainability portion of this. How do you put that passion into practice? Is that a challenge in the data center industry these days? Well, I mean, to follow to Sean's point and also to a chat point, I've seen the pricing 16 years ago when we developed the first big network access points for power. And then if I look at the pricing now, I mean, the increase is especially for DC power, almost over a thousand percent. So as Sean mentioned, a lot of my big carriers, they push back very hard on, and they try to get a power bill which is way much higher than the co-location environment or exceeds all the other managed services that they're purchasing from. I don't want to name any names, but any big data center that provides facilities out there. So my take on this is going green, not only that provides a solution for keeping our work, but also we really have to look after our customers because they, at one point they were gonna be like, okay, I can't pay for a circuit of 20 amps, thousands of dollars for DC power. And chat points, we need equipment which cools those data centers faster and in a much more efficient way. And the only way to go is, as Sean mentioned, we have to go green. Green's not only going to help the environment, but also it's going to reduce the invoices and gain more traction to bring more customers and create an entrepreneurial ecosystem within the data center floors. As long as you keep those expenses very high, the small cloud providers, they cannot afford to go into an equinex or a telemark or one of those big facilities because they just cannot afford their invoices. So we want to provide a solution where everybody can participate in the big players. And Chad, in terms of the equipment buyers, they have a lot of different motivations for their choices. Where does the energy usage fit in that? Is that more front of mind for the folks you're talking to? Yeah, absolutely. Once upon a time, you could present your product and say, look, this is what it does and it works great. It's wonderful, it's magic. Just give us some money, here you go. Deploy it and it's done. That's no longer the case. Right up top, one of the first couple bullet points is what's your power consumption? What's your power consumption per gigabit, for example? It really matters and it's a selling point. And so it comes full circle. These requirements come in earlier in the design cycle for building systems and therefore the designers have to think about it. But we have other motives for doing it too because a lower power consumption system, system that has cooler environment components last longer, the systems are more reliable, it goes on down the chain. So customer support is simplified because you have fewer failures. So it's really a system level approach that we're not just designing so that a customer doesn't have to pay so much to run the equipment. It's also about the lifetime of the equipment, simpler designs, better airflow management. As I said, we deal with a lot of carrier hotels as well and solutions come to them and they have a very restricted space. They're trying to put racks of equipment in place and if you bring a system along that has the airflow going across, right to left, for example, well, how does that work? I mean, you've got equipment right next door that's going front to back and now you've got something blowing hot air onto it. So you have to have good system design, good system approach to all of this and you have to play nice in the environment. There's an awful lot of equipment going into these facilities and it's a hard enough problem trying to cool this equipment without having to have these inconsistent approaches to the design. But from our standpoint, simpler is always better and it's always less power consuming and it costs less to run. I mean, it's really very fundamental if you think about it. So one of the questions and certainly the data center guys I'm interested in your take on this is what are the strategies right now that are making a difference, that are gaining traction and that are really working in terms of improving the sustainability and the energy profile of data centers? Benjamin, why don't you give us your thoughts? Well, as I said at the beginning of the conversation the solar and the wind energies are some that we really have to look at. And again, to compliment what my colleagues are saying and to Chad's point, I've seen data center where we have as you call them, tanking fires. They have stuck a lot of equipment to one rack and they put rectifiers on top and they don't know where the equipment is melting. So moving towards a cutting edge technology, it's not only going to help bring a better solution but also I'm thinking a lot of the idea, what do you do when you have a power outage? Don't rely on that 180,000 gallons of fuel that have out there. We can have a better system and you can have better equipment from Chad which can provide the batteries and CPUs where you can have stored power in preventing a power outage. I mean, again, I build data centers in a lot of cities around the world but if you think Miami has the biggest natural access point in the world, but Miami is also the capital of the hurricane. So I need, with a cutting edge technology, I need system for backups because it's really important for our customers to give them service level that guarantees 100% on pretty much everything and that includes power, connectivity, cooling. So normally towards cutting edge technology, I see a problem that's gonna be sustained there in how to create a backup, how you make sure that your data centers are up and running 100%, how you give SLAs 100% to your customers. And I just see that, you know, having a great data center design as Sean mentioned since 2008, you have much better chances and possibilities with the great data centers to offer almost to your customers. And also it comes to a much more cost effective solution. Sean, to pick up on that point, we've worked with a bunch of data centers and with different kind of energy and green profiles what are the big challenges in making these data centers green and then what's been your experience? You know, what we really focus on is kind of in three areas. Get back to the most important thing which is don't use the electrons in the first place. But from a renewable energy power perspective, we kind of came to the conclusion that, you know, local generation of renewable energy while it's nice, it's still not the most efficient place to generate the renewable energy. So we are really focused on supporting the renewable energy sources where they are the most efficient. So in wind farms, where they are not usually in a city that we're trying to operate a data center in. So we are comfortable and recognize that, again, it's back to efficiency. So if you can go to where the data center, if where a data center can have on-site renewable energy, great. If not buying it helps support and continue to grow those resources out in the areas where you can buy or can produce renewable energy for the right price. So it's sourcing of energy, but then it really comes down to not using the electrons. And I kind of, from a co-location perspective, break that co-location into one component and then cloud posting into another. From the co-location perspective, you know, it's actually going back and using tried and true technologies that are evaporative cooling technologies that drive the PUE way down, you know, to a factor of almost 80% compared to some of the other traditional data centers that we own. So we leverage evaporative cooling to drive our PUE down to the 1.15, 1.2 in our purpose-built data center facilities. But then again, it's just being laser focused on putting the effort into containing the airflow, managing the airflow so that, you know, the airflow isn't being heated up by hot air coming from a piece of hardware that's turned around inappropriately. So it's really, you know, that airflow management, focusing in on your UPSs. UPSs were another place that we were able to get a lot of efficiency out of versus traditional UPSs with the standard conversion. So, and then lastly, from a cloud perspective, we've actually adopted spin-down technologies in our object store so that when our large multi-petabyte object store is just archiving data, we're able to spin-down and again, not use the electricity in the first place. So you put the whole package together from renewable energy to efficient technology to then focus on the hardware itself. You can get a good solid package of delivering the lowest operating costs and the greenest form factor. And Chad, you and John mentioned the airflow, which is if the situation getting better in terms of like the network equipment and seeing progress towards making life a little easier for the data center technician, so we're trying to come up with an airflow that will be really efficient. Well, yes and no. We're trying to make it better, but we continually see find other vendors just trying to get a solution out there and thinking about some of these airflow and cooling issues as a second thought. And some of our partners and our customers that have data centers in remote places because the energy is cheaper and a little bit more difficult to get to perhaps, these kinds of solutions aren't resonating anymore. They're starting to realize that into Sean's point, we can't have that kind of equipment integrated into this environment. Everything matters. And even though a vendor might be providing a very inexpensive solution, that initial CapEx expense is offset very quickly with the OpEx expenses that are occurred either by their power consumption, their cooling or the infrastructure changes that they force upon the data center guys to try to accommodate these airflow issues where they put up a wall in between racks, they leave racks empty because they can't afford to have the next guys over blowing on to them, for example. We've had several customers and this was how we really got into the data center space in the first place. To Sean's point, taking over older data centers, we have some interesting problems to solve and we're finding that some of them, the racks are half full because they can't deliver any more power. So they're forced to move to the adjacent building or to the adjacent area where they can get more land to build the next generation data center. And so we provide the interconnection that's my point and how we're getting there, but it brought us into this space and having to consider the problems that the data center guys are solving, whether it's with reconditioning old spaces or building brand new ones. And so unfortunately, you have to deal with all of this. So there's no one solution fits all but we're still seeing problems in the equipment vendor space where some vendors are not paying attention, not paying attention to what the customer's asking for and that's this discussion right here today is all about. Let's take a couple of minutes and talk about the opportunities going forward. We've identified some of the existing problems and some of the things that are getting traction right now. What excites you in terms of future opportunities to make data centers cleaner and more efficient and sustainable? I'll start with Sean. You know, it's interesting. I think the number is worldwide, there's like 8.6 million data centers. And so the thing that kind of is exciting for us is this march towards the cloud. So what ultimately happens is people start to select cloud, hosting companies, cloud infrastructure, service, platform and service companies. It's shutting down these quote unquote data centers that exist in closets that exist under your desk. And it's this move to the cloud virtualization made a big impact in the amount of electricity consumption. But the thing that's now happening is those inefficient data centers are now being taken out of the market. And so as companies are marching towards the cloud, the opportunity is really great to see an incredible decrease in the amount of power per compute. And so one of the things we really focus on in our cloud is power per compute or power per gigabit per second or power per gigabyte of storage. And so as we start to look at those metrics, that march away from closet data centers, from the 100 KW data centers to larger data centers and into the cloud is really where we think we're gonna see the biggest delta and biggest difference in the amount of electricity consumed across those different units. How about you, Benjamin? What do you see on the horizon? That's exciting in terms of the opportunities going forward. Follow Sean's thought. I do have another venture here, lead factor where we created a SaaS platform which is a very cool product empowering SaaS people. And what I see that, I have my equipment in four different data centers. And as Sean mentioned, I removed the equipment from the garage and I centralized it into the secure environments because I'm required to do so by my customers. So I'm sure a lot of cloud providers are doing the same thing. So having those platforms, it's cutting edge to technology and they're all very low latency products. And for example, I can have equipment in my data center in New York and I can service the customer in Asia. They won't know where my equipment is. So providing these big facilities that are green and cost efficient would attract a lot of companies like mine and will attract a lot of SaaS platforms or whatever cloud technologies you might have. So the centralization is coming in the future is very clear. It's going to come down to the data centers providers how they wanna approach this and how they want to welcome their customers and create that ecosystem on the base and the floor where you have a thousand customer serving services to the customers existing on the floor already and also to the market. And Chad, what are the opportunities that you see? Well, at XKL, working on optical networking solutions has given us a really good understanding of how you're gonna move bits around. It's no longer the case that you can just go buy a 11RU rack that has fans in it that's consuming 200 watts just for the cooling. That doesn't even count all of the line cards and everything else that goes into that product. And so how do we get the power consumption down and still increase the functionality? The cost per gigabits going down, power consumption per gigabits going down, as I said. And so what we're seeing out there is, for example the first generation of 100 gig transport, while it got you from A to B, it was very power hungry. And so the next generation using better modulation techniques discrete multi-tone, I'm thinking of in particular, is really the wave of the future. And this applies specifically to shorter reach applications where you're doing intra or inter data center connectivity. And so those technologies have to continue because it's just not sustainable the way that first generation of this technology came out. So I see that happening and the companies that can integrate this quickly and efficiently are gonna get the market share from folks like Benjamin and Sean because they need these solutions. They can't afford to continue to operate business as usual. And so we recognize this and those that don't should get left behind. So it's the nature of the beast. To be profitable, you have to sell your products and you have to deliver the solutions that customers are asking for. And so these are the focal points right now for us as a network vendor trying to satisfy the requirements both of the data center space and other space as well at the same time. I'm grateful to all of you for the conversation. This was a great discussion. And with that, I'll hand it back to Jamie. Thanks everyone. Thank you. And thank you, Rich Miller, everyone of Data Center Frontier for moderating our round table on the evolution of the Green Data Center. Thanks to our esteemed panelists, Sean, Benjamin, Chad, thank you for your thoughtful insights on the challenges and opportunities that certainly lay before us. Thank you, audience, for joining us. If you want to see this and other monthly virtual round tables on demand, plus the calendar for upcoming round tables, go ahead and check us out, both virtually and at Telecom Exchange. That's jamieskinder.com and the telecomexchange.com. And if you'd like your C-level to be featured right here, go ahead and send us an email to pr at jamieskinder.com. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals, and on JSA radio, your voice for tech and telecom. Until next time, happy networking.