 Lie from Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering I.O. Brought to you by I.O. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Hello, everyone. Welcome to this special CUBE presentation, live at the Rosewood in Menlo Park and here in California in Silicon, heart of Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. This is theCUBE, Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the Silicon Noise. We're part of the I.O. Data Centers. I.O. Conversations, Thought Leadership event here in Silicon Valley. Talking about Data Center as a platform. Our next guest is Suzanne Kass from Base Layer, Peter Groves from Bloom Energy. Welcome to the program. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you. So Data Center is a platform, is all about the cloud. And the cloud is just a data center that no one knows the address of. So we still have to do all the innovations. Suzanne, what's the main innovation happening? Because facilities are still going to be needed. But yet the energy piece of it, the costs are still gonna be there. What are the current innovations that you see? Well, the newest innovation, and I'm actually passionate about John, is actually focusing more on energy savings and growing sustainably. I fundamentally believe the cleanest unit of energy is the one that you actually don't waste while you actually still have to do cloud computing at the growing astounding speed sustainably. Is there any new trends that you see happening that are indicative of the cloud movement where people are actually looking at data centers differently? I mean, it used to be a sprawl kind of mentality. Now you're seeing engineering, specifically going into it. What are you seeing, big trend? One of the key big trends I've asked you to observe is actually the growth of the edge computing. So the mega data center will continue to grow as I actually worked at eBay for a long time ago, citing many of them around the world. But the growth is actually because of the driven of the devices in a smart city. So it's gonna be at the edge. Peter, how about you? You're seeing trends also in the energy side as well. What are you seeing? What are your thoughts? As most of you know, the data center industry is very risk-averse. For the longest time, innovation was coming slowly until about five, six years ago with the advent of hyperscale data centers. Different reliability expectations, different conditions enable these companies, whether it's Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft to bring some very interesting new concepts, new technologies that had an enormous impact, not only in terms of energy efficiency, but also energy utilization and other elements that are part of the whole sustainability picture. Since then, other companies, enterprises and co-location companies have embraced some of these technologies. And now we're seeing some real transformation, not only in terms of power, but also cooling, security, physical logistics associated with data centers. It's a brave new world and the energy components, power components plays a major role here because it's such an important, expensive and the major component of the physical reliability of the data center. Now historically, when we think about a data center, we think about raised floor, we think about large, dedicated space, servers over here, storage over there, a bunch of network stuff, it's all being hyper-converged into a series of racks, but I want to come back to the point that you made just now about the edge, that what we're, because of physics, while we will continue to see these very large data centers, we will increasingly see what we're starting to call edge centers, the ability to put significant amounts of processing power close to where the sensors are, where the controls are, because the speed of light will not allow for round trips of more than a few milliseconds. So that's where energy and the things that you do will really become crucial to the design question. So can we talk about what it means or how you envision folks starting to design these edge centers, especially in the context of energy consumption? Precisely. Actually, I love the way that how you designed it because you speak like a data center designer, as a PhD. Indeed, actually, very well stated and you keep it very simple. The only one thing I would actually build on your idea is actually make it smart. So the smartness of it, to go by some of the technology that Bacelay have done, it's actually the inventing of that is we don't need a building. We provide dual source, so you can actually toggle between the grid power and also additional capacities, such as Peter's company bloom and others such as the energy storage system. And space is absolutely very important. That's underlined about the way that actually how you describe it. So one of the unique things that actually I'm personally involved with is actually welcoming many utilities attending our conference today. They're all attending from the California utility and also some of them come as far as the East Coast and New York ISO. Specifically, it's actually placing a module instead of a building, a building, have dual feet, be able to consume separate feeder and power right on the transmission substation. We have many clients around the world, including some of them actually attending today, like Goldman Sachs, take full advantage of that. And they have never have any downtime. It's actually improved the reliability compared to the race floor and saving hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. And one of the unique innovation actually I'm leading on that part, coming out from the renewable background, is actually have that right on the generation of clean power. Now, Peter, Bloom Energy came out with a significant fanfare about eight, nine years ago, as I recall. Fuel cell-based but very, very large capacity. How is Bloom Energy fitting into this vision of dual capacity, dual connection, as a way of driving energy or energy management needs? The concept of destroy generation, onsite generation, is gaining ground rapidly. And for a, it's a whole slew of reasons of which the reliability of the grid is a significant factor. Just in terms of numbers, the number of utility events, failures have grown at the rate of about 10% a year for the last 10 years or so. Just last year, there were over 3,600 events averaging about 44 minutes of downtime. So there is a significant concern in the entire community about power resiliency. And the focus is on many enterprises to have some control over one's power destiny. So then if you take into account the fact that when it comes to data center and any kind of mission critical facility, there is no real sustainable onsite generation solution. When you talk about sustainable green power, you primarily think of either wind or solar. Geothermal might be a factor. But they don't satisfy the basic requirements of continuous availability, which is essential in the operation of a data center, right? And that's where Bloom comes into the picture, the ability to deliver much cleaner power with a much lower carbon content. But a solution that is uninterruptible, continuous, a solution that could very well replace the traditional components of a data center, UPSs, batteries, generators, transfer switches, a lot of auxiliary components, simplifying the architecture, reducing cost, improving the reliability, and finally having this green sustainability element has dramatically changed the whole green power solution for data centers. Interesting topic. And Peter certainly put us on our agenda for our Cube Friday podcast that we're going to do Friday, because this really is such a cutting-edge trend. But it's got implications and impact to the industry. And I want to get both thoughts on this, Suzanne and Peter, on the cultural impact of two industries colliding. Because you mentioned some of these cutting-edge power, the utilities, the smart grid's been around. I mean, it's been trying for years, decades to get that smart grid going. But now the IT culture, the raised floor, meets these two industries. Can you share some insight into what is the culture clash, if any? What's the good, bad, and ugly around that integration? Because you have two sets coming together. And certainly IoT, Internet of Things, is right around the corner. So that's happening at the meet. So what does the culture clash look like? Is it good? Is it going well? Can you share any insight? Sure. As I mentioned before, data centers operators had a difficult time accepting all this new technology. But things have changed. And probably I would certainly not underestimate the importance of OCP, Open Compute Project, will fundamentally, in my opinion, change this industry. It's all about this whole industry. It got to the point where it's really mature enough to talk about becoming a commodity. And I'm not trying to minimize the significance of these new elements. Since it's all about industrializing, standardizing this whole business, where the drive cost and cloud has a lot to do with it, Internet of Things has a lot to do with that. And the concept of OCP is exactly its focus prime. And the main focus is cost reduction, energy, energy efficiency improvement. And it's going to tremendously transform the way we built and operate the data centers. And it started with Facebook. Now Google joined a lot of the software involved in that. That's a great initiative. Everybody's there. B.O.A. made an announcement about embracing this. So it's happening in your mind. It's happening. And it's going to change this industry. And the power and energy element having to do with that, it's fundamental. That's probably one of the single most critical elements of this new concept. Yeah, energy is data centers are driving a lot of the net energy consumption. It's a big issue. All right. Thanks so much for sharing your insights here on theCUBE. Appreciate it. I know you got to go to your panel. We're here live at the Rosewood and the heart of Silicon Valley right down the street from all the venture capitals here on Sand Hill Road. This is theCUBE. We're having more live coverage from IO Conversations, the IO platform, data centers and platform event here. And the Rose will be right back.