 Live from the JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Welcome to Data Movers. I'm your host, Jamie Scott Okutaya, CEO and founder of JSA, along with my fabulous co-host as always top B2B social media influencer, Mr. Evan Christel. Good morning Evan. Good morning and hey everyone, thanks to Data Movers where we sit down with the most influential men and women of today's leading telco and data center world, supporting the network infrastructure requirements of this new normal. Good morning, Jamie. So have you seen the news about cryptocurrency lately? Yeah, you kind of took a hit, huh? My friend, what's going on? Well, how much money did you lose if you can tell us? I never did Bitcoin. I am a Bitcoin nervous nilly, is that a thing? No, but we do have a new phrase now, I love it. So yeah, I lost about a third of my crypto holdings, which you know, it's planning on for retirement, but that's okay, we'll recover. So there is a great buying opportunity now for the latest coin in the block, it's Evan Christel's own B2B coin. Oh, yeah. You sound skeptical, you sound like, for once I'm actually not even joking. So I'm partnering with Rally, Rally I.O. They're an address and Horowitz backed company creating virtual currencies for creators and influencers. And so I have a coin called B2B that allows me to kind of reward and gamify and incentivize my audience and in turn they can hold B2B coin and it's going cheap. So take those dollars you were gonna put into Bitcoin and get a real cryptocurrency. Interesting. You sound dubious, skeptical to say the least. So why don't we do it? Hey, we've been doing it for years with credit cards, right? Like just calling something value and therefore it is and getting things in return. I mean, it's a great philosophy. I just, oh gosh, what happens the day the SEC is like, yeah, no. Like what do we do then? Yeah, then we're all as they say, royally screwed. But in any case, let's talk about the real world of technology and data centers and it looks like we have a great guest. Oh my gosh. My favorites, of course, our guests, as you know, we love to dive into their background stories, their career highs and lows, unique perspectives and the future of our industry. And I have to say it's been really exciting to getting to know my next guest, Jeff Barber. He's the partner and EVP of Sales and Business Development at Prime data centers. You're gonna hear Prime a heck of a lot these days if you haven't already and Jeff and his insights. I'm just excited. Welcome, Jeff. Jamie and Evan, I'm looking forward to, maybe I'll skip my next copy and get some of that, you know, a few thousand Evan crypto coins here. Now we're talking. So Jeff, in my due diligence, which is basically Googling you. None of it's true. Well, yeah, I was fascinated. I recently, I saw a recent video you did where you're discussing 2021 trends and the wholesale data center leasing space. So turnkey versus powered shell, single tenant versus multi-tenant hybrid versus cloud on-prem, cost consideration, investor profile, sustainability. Can you summarize that conversation in 15 seconds? Absolutely not. But our marketing group is doing a great job of the keywords, obviously. Yeah, I was gonna say it. You hit about every one of them. You're gonna have to add this into all of this. No hashtags needed, apparently. No, we're good. No, I can't do it in 15 seconds, but we could certainly choose one of those topics and dive into it. Great, well, hopefully we'll get some insight through the course of this show. But in all seriousness, you've had a tremendous amount of success and looking at your background and bio, it looks like partnerships might be the key to your success and your team's success at many levels. So tell us about prime data centers and your unique approach to partnering. Sure. So prime, we are what you would call wholesale co-location. We're builders, we're developers of data center space. So if you think of the traditional retail co-location world, as an example, that would actually be my customer, typically. Either retail co-low, such as Six Terror, co-logics or any of the retail co-low partners, or large enterprises. So we can get into that a little bit down the road here, but not every workload and not every enterprise is cloud appropriate, as an example. So the hybrid approach is still extremely popular. How does that fit into our partnership philosophy? Prime is not a REIT, okay? We're not a real estate investment trust. We're a private group, extremely well-funded with some additional announcements coming in the next few weeks on that front as well. So we're able to be extremely flexible. So let's say for instance, an enterprise customer would like a 10 megawatt facility, you know, they want to get out of real estate, they don't want to manage their own facility any longer, but they still want the upside of the real estate and they want the security of a dedicated data center floor, not multi-tenanted. Prime will actually enter into a joint venture with that company where they're paying themselves rent and they're participating in the real estate upside, the appreciation of the asset. We also are very active in sale leasebacks. So a company that may not be in the facilities world, maybe they want to focus on their core competency, we'll buy that asset, we'll manage that asset, we'll improve it if needed, and they can get out of the facilities world and hand it over to us. That's just a couple of small examples. We're also making some announcements in the next couple of weeks where we're for instance, building powered shells and built to suit facilities inside the San Francisco Bay Area. You know, I think we're going to talk about Santa Clara in a little bit, but that's a perfect example where a tenant will come to us, we have the land, we're going to build them a perfectly suited, customized data center to their every need. We can do all of that because again, we are private, we don't have the same restrictions as a typical REIT would have as an example. So we call it partnership as a service. Come to us with what you're looking for. We're most likely we can make it work, whether that's ground up development, sale lease back, powered shell, you name it. All right, so we have a lot of global experience in that realm as well. Yeah, and another great example of this is a recent headline I was reading from Prime. You did a built to suit lease, there we go. And this was a publicly traded global enterprise up in Sacramento at your McClellan Park campus. Could you tell us more there? Yeah, absolutely. McClellan Park is a former Air Force base and Prime built a, at the time, designed and built a six megawatt data center, just white space. We recently leased that entire facility, but in addition to the six megawatt, the tenant had us add another two megawatt. So with that particular facility, we own our own substation. We have a 50 megawatt substation on site and we had all of the permitting in place. So we could expand that from a six megawatt facility to an eight megawatt facility in record time. It is a single tenant. It is a private enterprise, although they're publicly traded. This is not a co-location provider. This is a household name. It's a perfect example of where hybrid is going. This particular tenant still has a vast majority of their compute and storage infrastructure under their own control. They of course have some workloads that go to the cloud, but again, not all workloads are appropriate. This customer doesn't want to risk it. So yeah, it's been a great project. We have three more buildings planned on that same campus. Again, we own our own substation, so we can raise the building and we can power it and all the permitting is in place. So it's a great project. Critical for California, right? Absolutely. Yeah, it is a, you know, this is the digital infrastructure that drives the economy. And this particular tenant is a very important part of that digital infrastructure, right? Sacramento into itself is an excellent location for not only primary compute and storage, but backup and disaster recovery. We could talk about that a little bit later, but essentially we're very close to the San Francisco Bay Area from a telecommunications perspective, approximately 90 miles, 100 miles. So there's not a lot of latency with your workloads, but we don't shake when there's an earthquake. We're not on a fault line. We're on a completely separate plate. We don't have earthquakes. We don't have floods where our location is. We're not on the coastline. So many enterprises actually replicate a tremendous amount of data to Sacramento. It's very safe. It's very quick, massive infrastructure. So it's a great campus, McClellan Park campus. You should check it out. It's a good spot. Yeah, I was actually checking it out online as you're speaking. And by the way, beautiful architecture, beautiful design of your buildings, just as I had to beyond what's inside the building. Really well done. So looking at the enterprise today, we see this tremendous push to the edge, involving all assets of IT and telecom. But how does an enterprise sort of balance that need for centralized management, being close to the edge for user experience, at the same time, providing for quality of service and optimization? How do you manage that central versus decentralized challenge? Yeah, Evan, if I could answer that easily, I'd be living on my own island in Hawaii right now. Like Larry, Larry. Like my bud Larry. Yes, great company. I used to work for Oracle. Yeah, it's a great question. The answer is it's not easy. It's fluid and every enterprise is different and every workload is different. So you mentioned edge computing as an example or moving content closer to the edge. That's very important for user experience for pushing rich media, videos, pictures, what have you, beautiful podcasts like this one. Do you want that closer to the edge for multiple reasons? There are other workloads such as relational databases, since we're talking about Larry, that need to be more centralized. They don't do well with latency, right? So the customer, the tenants, the enterprise, whatever you wish to call them, they need to truly, first and foremost, understand the nature of their data, okay? Am I latency sensitive? Is my content sensitive? Do I have intellectual property risk? Do I want to put this in a multi-tenant environment? Do I want to put this on an AWS or an Azure or a Google cloud? Can my workloads handle that latency that's inherent with multi-tenant environments, right? So that's an incredibly complex question. Every enterprise struggles with it. That's kind of what led to our theme of partnership as a service. There is not one size fits all. In fact, in a large company, even a medium-sized company, you're going to have all of those examples in the enterprise. You will have file systems and you will have rich media and you will have relational databases and they all need to be treated differently, right? So it's a tough one. I wish I had an easy answer for you, Evan, but it's not so easy. It's not easy. And for sure, getting to the edge, knowing the right balance between what we should put in the cloud, but also top of mind these days in our virtual roundtable yesterday, this was also a topic, disaster recovery and business continuity. It's now summer. It's that time where nature gets tough. But also we talked about California and it's earthquakes and even power grids. So tell me, what are some of the pitfalls that you've seen over the years in terms of disaster recovery and business continuity strategies? What's prime strategy there and how does it align with your DR plans, your locations across California, for example? Yeah, great question there. That's a deep topic and we touched on it just a little bit. First and foremost, to the IT group, understand your workload. What is the data that you need to replicate? Understand the interdependencies of that data. So for instance, you can protect your accounting data. That's great. But if you don't protect the way in which you report to the street as an example, the accounting data does you no good. So you have to understand the interdependencies between your data. Location and proximity is critical. Having a data center that's 50 miles from your primary data center as a backup and a target, that's a great strategy unless it's on the same coastline or on the same fault line. So think about what direction your data is going. Think about things like, can my employees get to that site if they need to? The critical employees. Is there airport infrastructure? If airports are closed down, is there road and rail infrastructure? So all of those considerations enter into where prime chooses to invest. That was a no pun intended of primary driver to choosing McClellan as an example in Sacramento. When you replicate data, many times you're worried about the latency related to the speed of light going through that fiber. So the closer the better, but be far enough a way to protect yourself. Sacramento has massive infrastructure, employees, roads, rail. So even if the airports are shut down, if you're a San Francisco Bay Area client or company, you wanna get your data to a safe location, Sacramento is absolutely perfect. You can be there in a couple of hours, okay? You're not relying on other infrastructure. So prime looks at that very closely. For instance, we will be connecting our Sacramento location to our Santa Clara locations. And I say that plural intentionally. So one is public and one is not yet. That'll be coming out soon. So yeah, it's proximity to your core data. It's the stability of that environment, the availability of power obviously and the availability of connectivity. Those are the primary drivers and understand your data. And then because this is a topic near and dear to my heart, I'm gonna keep talking first and foremost, if you have a disaster recovery plan, you have to test it. Don't just leave it on the desk and collecting dust. Test it quarterly, test it monthly, partial failovers, full failovers. You need to exercise that machine. That would be my top piece of advice. Great advice that is. I'm actually looking at your LinkedIn profile, Jeff Barber and give some amazing pictures of projects underway. Anyone who's interested in critical power engineering and civil engineering construction should check them out. They're really impressive. And you recently announced a development of a nine megawatt facility in Santa Clara. So tell us about that project. Yeah, so San Francisco Bay Area, obviously the tech hub of the world. What it is though is also very short on power. So this facility is locked down. We're starting construction within the next two weeks. You can check out our website, primedatacenters.com. That set 111 Comstock is the address. So, but that facility is now fully leased. I can't give you the tenant name yet, but we did pre-release the entire building. It's an extremely large world-class leader in the co-location space. That'll be public in about a week or two. We'll do a couple of joint press releases. And I'll be sure to get you an immediate copy of that. So yeah, we're very excited about that. And we're working on a couple of other properties in San Francisco Bay Area that also have power rights already locked down. That's a critical consideration. You can own the dirt, but if you can't get power, that's a tough one. Oh my goodness, I want to bet. I think I know, but okay. I'll do it, I'll do it is. I think I can do it is. You know what we could do, Jamie? We're going to bet Evan's cryptocurrency. Oh no. I will bet you a billion Evan points. And I will match it, which is that'll be worth about $27. So yeah, that's fine. Oh, we're talking now. We're talking heavy money here. I'm getting intense. I'm getting nervous. Well, you know, this is Colo facilities, data centers, hyperscalers. It's an amazing, amazing world ever expanding. There's no shortage of data for sure and consumption of that. So what are some contributing factors to hyperscalers growth? And how does that enable Prime to help those hyperscalers from say like an equity and tax advantage standpoint? Oh, great, great question. I hate to say the answer is it depends, but the answer is it depends. We actually have the world's, one of the world's largest hyperscalers as a tenant in one of our Bay Area facilities. So obviously the growth of data is exponential, continues to be exponential. The advent of 5G networks and getting your content, if you mentioned earlier, closer to the edge. In fact, I personally believe it will be edge everywhere. You're gonna see many, many, many 10 or 15 megawatt edge locations, which, you know, 10 years ago that would have been a massive data center. Now it's just run of the mill, you know, somewhat small. Yeah, yeah, Prime does work with the hyperscalers. As a very specific example, we have a powered shell where we stand up the building, we get utilities to the building, that hyperscaler comes in and does their standard power and cooling inside the building, the distribution units and generators and things like that. That's a great business model for us. We have it down to a science, we have great developers. So those tenants tend to be very locked down into standardization. They have a design, it's very efficient for them. If you look at a Facebook or you look at a Twitter or even like an AWS, if we're talking, you know, cloud providers, they're very specific in how they want the interior of their buildings to work and function and cool and power. So yeah, it's front of our mind. Obviously those are the largest tenants in the world. There are places in the world where Prime is right now securing rights to build, specifically in Europe, some of the most, I would say, hungry locations for data centers. Prime has already secured a couple of those. So you'll be hearing more about that in the next, I would say three to six months, we'll do some announcements there as well. Same. Yeah. So let's shift gears to who is Jeff Barber, just looking at your LinkedIn profile. Uh-oh. You started off at a company as a deck vac system admin. So you're basically as old as time. Yes. And... Yes. Is that really on there of it? I mean, it must be on there because it's true, but that is, I need to go edit that. I need to make myself look less than 100 somehow. And you were supporting 14,000 lottery terminal devices. So what could go wrong? Right? What could go wrong? Plenty. Yes. It's fine. And then you rose through the ranks of tech companies like HP and Dell EMC and Oracle and others. So really fascinating career. You know, what are some of the takeaways from your career that help you turn prime into one of the fastest growing turnkey data center, you know, development companies out there? Yeah, you know, yeah, great question. And I'm definitely making a note to go update LinkedIn or start telling different lies. You know, it's interesting, Evan. I reflect back on that particular job you brought up. I was what they would call a tape monkey for the California State Lottery. So yeah, working on deckback systems and concurrent mainframes and tandem mainframes, if there's anyone old enough out there to remember that stuff. It taught me a tremendous amount about how to manage a technical environment, the importance of a data center. We're going back here, as you can see, a very, very long time we're talking about. I did, you know, from there, from the California Lottery, I went to the tech side. Like you said, Hewlett Packard, you know, very long time ago. The bulk of my career was spent at EMC, managing global accounts for them. It was interesting. When I began talking to prime, I was speaking with them from a strictly consultative perspective. They had hired me as a consultant to help them stand up a sales organization, help them stand up, sales force automation, bring a little marketing bend to the company. These are all real estate professionals, the other folks at Prime. As we work together though, our CEO, Nicholas Log, I think you saw very quickly that the buyers have shifted. The tenants are no longer just the real estate folks within the enterprise. They're typically the chief investment or the chief information officer or the CISO, the security officer. So they brought me on board as a partner and as an employee, because I speak that language. I actually don't speak real estate, but we have people, our other leadership is all real estate. So it's a great, great team. There's been a massive shift. Like the people I deal with every day from a tenant perspective, they're not real estate folks. They work in IT. They're storage and server professionals and network professionals. So that's probably the greatest takeaway is that there's a buyer shift here. And Prime has addressed that. Not only with myself, but with some new hires coming on board. These are tech professionals, not just real estate folks. Now, I love when you say there is a buyer shift. It's so true. It's also been perhaps, and you were alluding to this earlier, a shift in one of the top data center markets. Locations shifted, obviously came to the edge. A big push for that. So what are some of the top data center markets that Prime is now looking at? Can I go back to that? Yeah, yeah, good question. You know, you're right. The expansion of the edge is unavoidable and very exciting, but there are still some core locations, right? Virginia, Oregon, Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area. That tends to follow the connectivity. So if you look at the concentration of the connectivity, either across the Atlantic or Pacific or internal to the US, that's where we're looking. Now, that's a little too broad to answer your question. Specifically, we are securing properties, let's say in the Chicago area, as an example. We're very much looking at some properties in Texas very closely, I should say. Also, traditional markets such as Southern California. So the world is not becoming less connected. Let's put it that way. It's becoming more connected, right? And again, we're seeing tremendous growth in our particular real estate vertical, but there are a couple limiting factors there, such as power, such as securing permits, such as connectivity. Lots of people say, well, why don't you just go build a data center wherever the land and the power are the cheapest? That's great, but I can't fill a room full of servers and not have any way to speak to the world because I don't have connectivity. You have to get it out there, right? So it's symbiotic, it needs to follow each other. And that's where we're looking. I mentioned Europe, Germany, be specific, is a growing market. You'll see more there very soon. And yeah, you'll see quite a few announcements coming out from us in the next six months, I would say. I bet. Well, let's switch gears to our rapid fire sections where we have a few rapid fire questions and we try to embarrass you. So... Just don't ask me about deckback systems, please. Don't ask me about mainframe and things like decknet. We have much better questions in mind. So we'll start off, we'll treat you gently to start. So we're all getting back to the road in many ways and traveling again. What's your favorite place to travel to globally? Globally, wow. Yeah, when I was with EMC, I spent a lot of time in the air. My favorite, that's a great question. I'm gonna give you the first one that comes to mind and it's gonna be Dublin, Ireland. I love it, I love the people. They love to argue like I do, but they could still split a beer and not be too angry. They love to debate and talk politics and not get violent. And they're just a great, great people. It's a beautiful city. I agree. I once spent 11 hours in a pub in Dublin, not even drunk, just, it was amazing. I was just, I love that place. That's disappointing, not even drunk. Yeah, yeah, I spent a week there one night. Yeah, I like to say that. You gotta make sure that there's enough blood in your alcohol system, so it's definitely, I love Ireland, absolutely. All right, what's next? That's an easy one. I know, well, mine's more industry, you know, my data center geek sound. What's your number one piece of industry advice for us? Number one piece of industry advice. Well, if we're gonna stick with the data center theme right now, we kind of touched on it. Understand your buyer, it's kind of sales 101. You know, who are you selling to and what's driving their wants and needs and security and all of the above. Understand the IT buyer. Like I said, I can't overemphasize how that shift has taken place very quickly where we're not dealing with brokers. You know, we're willing to. We love brokers, but these enterprises, typically the chief information officer is making the decision, you know. Yep. So people talk about leaving California, moving their company out of California, which I think is nuts because California is like the most beautiful place in the world from the North to the South. What's your favorite, as a native, what's your favorite beach in California and why? Yeah, it's a great, California is a great state and it's a very large state. So I'm actually ours from the beach. So everyone thinks that I surf, but I live in Sacramento, California. So I surf on a couple of lakes. I do. My favorite beach is definitely La Jolla down in San Diego. La Jolla is a beautiful town, beautiful people, just absolutely idyllic, it's gorgeous. So that's another easy one. You guys are going easy on me. I like it. Yeah, I'm looking at right now at Laguna Beach and I gotta say this one, it sounds pretty good too. Ah, Laguna Beach, yeah, that's, yeah. Yeah, I spent a lot of time down there by Balboa Island, so not too far from you there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it, yep. Okay, favorite place to dine. Favorite place to dine? Well, my favorite place to dine actually is not in California, but almost. It's, we're blessed with this location. I'm about 70 minutes from Lake Tahoe where I live. So I would say the Lone Eagle Grill in Incline Village, Lake Tahoe. You're overlooking the lake. You've got snow-capped mountains. You've got great food, and there's a casino next door. So I have all my favorite things in one little location. Yes, that's it. Let's go. That's making my heart ache that description. So I see as well, you're a volunteer. One at Sacramento Children's Home and another Project Linus that makes blankets for needy children. That sounds wonderful. Like what are those two activities about? Yeah, well, yeah, Project Linus is a great one where children who and sometimes very, very small children, these receiving homes need blankets and it's something you could do with your kids. Essentially, you get the material and there's a way you can cut the edge and not each of the edges. So you create a beautiful little blanket for those folks. My children and I have done that several times. And yeah, unfortunately, there are a lot of kids who need good homes and some of those kids are very, very small. So whenever possible, we like to volunteer at the Sacramento Children's Home and receiving home and do what we can. It pulls at your heart. It takes a special kind of person who can do that. It has a huge impact on me. I'd like to say it was all positive but sometimes it makes me a little bit sad but yeah, they always need volunteers. So please look them up and see what you can do. Wonderful. Well, I'm gonna say, I mean, should we end there? Cause I feel like my next question just isn't. Yeah, probably. Well, what is it? Is it about cryptocurrency or are we? It was pretty meaningless after that comment. We can edit that out. We'll let it out the sad parts. No, we'll just add a background violin playing, Jeff. So we'll have that. But in all seriousness, thank you for joining us, Jeff. It was really eye-opening discussion. I learned a lot about the new world of the data center business that's just radically different from the data center world even two, three, five years ago. So we'll be looking to you for news updates and insights. Yeah, absolutely. I'd be thrilled to do this again. And I think next time we'll talk about some of the trends towards green energy, right? I mean, data centers are tremendous consumers of power. And it matters where that power's coming from. So I think that'd be a good follow-up topic. Let's do it. Absolutely. We're gonna book it. So guys, put that in your calendar. Next one coming up when we talk with Jeff will be on green energy. I like it. Thank you, Jeff, so much. We so appreciate your insights. You're really changing our industry and we appreciate all you do in your prime team. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Jamie. Thank you, Evan. Please check us out at JSA.net slash podcast for more upcoming data movers episodes. We release every other week on Wednesday mornings. And there's other JSA podcast series there as well. And be sure to follow us on Twitter at Jay Scott, Evan Kerstel, and Clubhouse. We got to join the Clubhouse party, Jamie. So. That's another thing on our plate, so that I do that. Someone sent me an invite. We will. Someone's invited me. I feel left out. Consider it done. Consider it done. I'm in. Invite. Clubhouse. Writing it down on my desk here. I have friends. I have friends, yes. And always, guys, out there. Stay safe and happy networking.