 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Lauren Oland at JSA. Joining me today is Erin Chenoy, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at ServerFarm. Erin welcome to JSA TV. Thank you for having me Laura. ServerFarm last joined us on JSA TV during PTC. So much has changed since then in the industry and our world. One big change to note for ServerFarm has been the addition to your Toronto data center which you accomplished during the pandemic to keep customers online. Can you tell us more about that Erin? Sure and the Toronto facility was a data center that we acquired just over a year ago and in very typical kind of server farm fashion we took an enterprise facility put in a significant amount of investment in terms of you know modernizing the infrastructure bringing it up to speed but also creating new capacity for additional customer workloads and as you mentioned you know a lot has changed especially in the last four or five months and you know we've had to deal with two kind of very interesting somewhat sort of you know you know sort of counteracting requirements. One has been increased demand from our customers you know clearly they're driving many more of their applications online and some of the applications they have online are growing in terms of demand so they've had to deal with that at the same time we've had to deal with with creating that capacity for them to be able to grow into under what has been you know some pretty challenging you know the kind of construction circumstances in terms of social distancing you know being able to limit the number of people on site and so we started this particular project early on this year and we've just about managed to complete that you know that construction facility off the off the Neutron to data center releasing an additional 14 megawatts of capacity into the market and interestingly of in record time and so despite the pandemic you know we managed to figure out a number of interesting ways of of changing how we you know how we constructed how we how we manage some of the construction and that's you know not that you know notwithstanding the challenge it's been an incredible incredible achievement by the team absolutely an incredible achievement record time during a pandemic that is remarkable and something else to point out I want to talk about the reuse of the existing Toronto facility basically cut embodied carbon by an estimated 75% and that's also remarkable so could you tell us about the HKS report behind that number and then how it applies to server farms entire business model sure sure and actually let me start with the with the sort of business model and I think our model has for a very long time you know almost 20 years now been that you know what we do for our customers is to remove the pain of managing physical infrastructure and you know and that pain exists in the buildings that they own and operate the IT infrastructure that they own and operate the mechanical electrical equipment that you know that supports all of that infrastructure and we've become very very good at taking all of those pieces together and building for our customers you know a picture that allows them to become more efficient and and we do that by solving real estate problems co-location problems and IT operations problems and about seven or eight months ago we conducted a study specifically on our Chicago facility it was HKS that did that report for us because one thing that we wanted to demonstrate to the to the market is that the way that we create capacity in existing facilities is actually the most green you know the most energy efficient the most environmentally efficient way of creating capacity in the market because one thing it allows us to avoid is the building of a new building and when you look at the numbers when you look at the the amount of carbon that is both embodied in terms of the construction of a facility and the operational carbon and we can through the reuse of existing facilities as in the Chicago instance or more specifically in the Toronto facility reduce that embodied carbon by in this instance 75% and just to kind of put a little bit of a different number around that what that basically means is if that if you're a customer and you have a 1 megawatt IT requirement you're going to save about two years of embodied carbon that means that you're effectively going to be in a facility where for the first two years you have no impact on the carbon footprint compared to if you were going to do the same thing in a brand-new facility and so you know in the current context of demand growing very rapidly but also us being you know good stewards of the environment you know that is that is a tough balancing act in the best of times the fact that we're able to do that under such challenging circumstances I think again is a is an amazing testament to you know the quality and the experience of the team. Erin you mentioned green and green power and certainly the data center industry has been talking about sustainability measures like green power so what do you think is the next frontier for data center sustainability? I'd say a couple of things so one is what we just talked about and there is a lot of capacity sitting in existing data centers and I think as an industry it's our responsibility to make sure that we use the existing capacity in the market as efficiently as possible and a lot of that is when I say that I'm in that capacity that I that I mentioned you know you're sitting in enterprise in enterprise facilities so our ability to take those facilities modernize them create capacity in the market and still deliver such an amazing saving from a sustainability perspective is is it's fantastic it's great that we can do that and and we would love to be joined by you know by lots of other companies that you know that can do the same thing but the other thing that's also important is that the IT load also needs to start to become much more efficient and so I think you know 15 or so years ago you know the world moved towards virtualization it then started to move towards the cloud and all of those things have been on the whole extremely good from a sustainability perspective because they're consolidating workloads they're making as many applications as possible run on as little infrastructure as possible and but we also need to do that for applications that can't either be virtualized or can't be moved to the cloud they still have opportunities for for efficiencies to be gained and those efficiently leads lead to better sustainability and one of the things in that area in particular is most organizations are very very good at using space much more quickly than they are at using power and and that unfortunately ties up resources it ties up infrastructure so if we can help our customers which is really what we do every day of the week if we can help our customers become more efficient by using space and power and network and all of the other resources that make up a data center in as balanced a way as possible we can you know we can we can provide more you know more capabilities in terms of achieving better sustainability for our customers and we are just about out of time but where can our viewers go to learn more about the server farm and all that we've talked about today well a couple of places at the server farm website so server farm LLC.com but also follow us on LinkedIn and on Twitter and you'll find us on LinkedIn obviously a server farm and and and on Twitter as well so yep we'd love to love you to join us in the conversation online there we will find you there for short Erin thank you so much for your time today we appreciate it my pleasure thank you very much and thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcast happy networking