 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the leading newsroom for telecoms and data center professionals. I'm Joe Maxleam and joining me today is Jack Pedalpiece, CEO and co-founder of 40 Datacenters. Jack, thank you so much for coming on the show and how has the last year treated you? I haven't seen you since I think zero since February last year. It's been good. It's been interesting as it has been for everybody. We've just made our way through the pandemic and I think like a lot of companies, we're just glad to be seeing the restrictions slowly being lifted and we're just glad that for us and a lot of our clients, we've been able to get through it in one piece. Most people who I know, thank goodness, have been okay health wise. So like I said, I'm just glad to be coming at the other side at the moment. Well, there's finally a light at the end of the tunnel. So let's hope that the next two, three months at least for the UK, things get better. But talking about the UK, you're a UK based operator, co-location operator, network services provider as well. You actually do see that side of London and I would like to talk about that as well. But let's talk about the UK market first. There's a lot that has happened almost on the weekly basis now in terms of Downing Street. But we've got Brexit. We are on the 1st of July now, which means regulations towards European citizens are different. We've got COVID, we've got new legislation coming through. Give us a sense of the state of the market in the UK in terms of data center businesses. And what's the investment feeling like as well? Well, don't forget about the data adequacy ruling that came through just a couple of days ago as well, which was pretty good news for a lot of the data center and cloud operators here in the UK. Obviously, getting data adequacy formalized is going to be quite an important step towards maintaining that levels of uncertainty that we've been seeing over the last 12 months. Not only with the pandemic, but obviously, as you've just said, with Brexit as well. The UK market's been really challenging for the last 15 months. I think like a lot of businesses, we've all had to adapt to a new way of working. But I think that the data center sector certainly in the UK has probably done a better job than most and certainly from a collaboration point of view. When the pandemic hit, we were really lucky to be part of a community where major data center operators in the UK that we came together and we actually discussed and we troubleshot a lot of the challenges that we're facing. Some of the bigger providers who not only have got data centers here in the UK, but have also got international presence, so places like Milan and also Wuhan in China, where they were seeing the pandemic occurring two or three months ahead of us. They were able to share some really useful insights. So from a collaboration point of view, I think we've come together and we've actually come out the other side stronger than ever. We've also had some good collaboration with the UK government over the course of the last year, partially in relation to the pandemic response and the way that they were able to get data infrastructure added to the key worker status. So that was great. And I think as far as tech business in the UK is concerned, like all technical businesses around the world, as people are starting to work from home and adapt new ways of working, we are net beneficiaries of that transition. So yes, I think Brexit has had an impact on the UK market. I think it's going to be a little bit difficult to disentangle what's happening with the pandemic versus some of the supply chain challenges and human resource challenges we're seeing with Brexit. But for the most part, we seem to be still going strong. The UK market seems to be very buoyant. I mean, I love the point about collaboration as well and how others were three months ahead and they share the information. I think that's very important. And I mean, I keep saying it, the industry has an amazing well over the pandemic. And we still got a while to go, but I think we will be fine globally. But an interesting thing that we're also seeing in UK is the rise of the data center outside of London. I mean, this is not completely new, but now this seems to be an acceleration, even with American operators coming into the UK, acquiring some of the data centers outside of London, especially in Wales. Give us a sense of what's happening outside of London and what are the benefits of having your infrastructure located outside of the capital? So I feel like we're a bit of a head of the curve on this one. Yeah, you've been there for a while now. We've been there for a while. I mean, we're I think probably what a class is a regional data center for a very short period of time when the phrase was still trendy. I think we may have even described ourselves as an edge data center, although I think that might be stretching the truth a little bit. Everything is edge nowadays. Everything is edge nowadays. So the fact that we're not in central London, I think we're proud to take that take that time on a go. I think there are lots of factors that are driving investments outside of central London. I mean, one of the reasons that we originally set up our data center just inside the M25, but outside of central London, is because we saw that there was a market for a retail co-location provider, not in central London, providing services for small and medium-sized businesses in some of the southern counties just south of London. And that business model has worked really well for us. In fact, it worked so well that we set up another site very fairly close to Gatwick Airport. And a lot of that is to do with the fact that geography does make a difference. Despite what a lot of people say, certainly when it comes to co-location, people want to be able to drive to their data center in order to upgrade or fix their servers or just inspect them and make sure that they're okay. So physically, being within an hour's drive of a data center is really important. And obviously, if you're not working inside central London or inside one of the central metro areas, then that's not going to be an option for some businesses. So convenience is one thing. There's also the question about latency. And obviously, again, as companies are starting to grapple with hybrid working, or I think it's now referred to not WFO working from home, or working from the office WFH, which works at home, but it's WFA working from anywhere. I think companies are really grappling with the idea of being able to have their workers work from any location. Latency and the ability to connect to their servers quickly is becoming an important factor. So again, geographically, making sure that you are physically as close to your servers is becoming a factor. And I think, yeah, it's one of those trends which I think might have to pause. I'm sorry, I might have messed it up a little bit. Sorry. I was on a roll and then my head went off in a different direction. What would you like to pick it up from? I think from where you said the working from home trends and working from anywhere. I think it was after you made that point that you kind of stopped. Yeah, sorry. Up to that point, it was all good. Okay. So yes, there is a widespread adoption of remote working from home. And I think that for certain roles, I think that it is possible for people to be able to look after their IT infrastructure and not be geographically close. But there are certainly roles within the data center sector, such as facilities engineers, support engineers, where we still physically need feet on the ground. So I think drug feed is still an important factor. Well, that's interesting because location being close to the user, and I guess to working from anywhere, it's quite interesting because one thing I've seen a lot and some people have reached out as well, it's the rise of the digital nomad. So your data sense and data sense outside of the main city, especially the flap market plus doubling, so flap plus D. They seem to really be rising now on the back of this digital nomad trend that we've seen from the pandemic, which we're probably going to see in the next 10, 20 years. This has just accelerated one or two decades in the space of 12 months. But you've already touched a little bit on 4D and reasons why being outside of London or at least central London. Tell us more about the company. How did it start? Who are your clients? A snapshot of your client space? Just talk us through the business and also please talk about sustainability and how you address climate change because that's one of the most important things at the moment. So as I mentioned, we are a regional data center, so we're outside of the major metro area of central London, but we still serve London customers. Originally, we were finding a lot of our customers were actually London-based and they were using us for DR, but they started to use us for their production. When we built a second data center in Gatwick, they started splitting their workloads, their production and backup between our bi-fleet data center, which is close to Heathrow and our Gatwick site. So that's our main business. We're a retail co-location provider. Most of our clients are small and medium-sized businesses. We do have some larger clients as well, and we do look after organizations like the NHS. But over the years, we've expanded our service offering and we've gone into things like broadband for businesses. So we're effectively a V2B ISP. We also offer cloud solutions, so we've got our initial public cloud setup. And more recently, and very popular as well, our private cloud solutions as well. And I think that combined with the connectivity and the COLO is where we're now finding ourselves as more of a solution provider. And the word hybrid cloud and hybrid co-location gets bounded around a lot. Not sure if many people necessarily know what it is, but it is actually the direction I think a lot of companies are going in because rather than one IT infrastructure being a fit for everything and every one, I think companies are starting to recognize that certain demands are better held on a dedicated server, perhaps in a data center, whereas other certain services are perhaps better suited for, say, a hyperscale cloud provider. So that's kind of the market that we look after. You mentioned climate change. This is something which is really important to me as a business owner. And I think for the sector as a whole, and I think ESG is an area which is becoming a lot more, it's getting a lot more focused. Certainly, if you've seen in the press recently, there are some organizations like Engine Number One, which have been able to get a couple of their members onto the board of some major oil companies. And I think that data centers have got a really big part to play in talking about how we are either affecting climate change and how we're actually working towards mitigating some of the worst parts of climate change. I think one of the important things to remember is that data centers are motivated to be as efficient as possible. We do things on a very different scale to a lot of businesses, especially for businesses trying to build a data center within its building or trying to build a comms room or something like that. Typically, those are quite inefficient. Data centers like ours, we build things on a much bigger scale and we look at the best type of technology that's going to bring the greatest efficiency. And we've seen some huge efficiency gains in things like cooling technology over the last 10 years. And again, just as we were innovative and leaders as far as becoming a regional data center was concerned, we actually started to build our first evaporative cooling system in our bi-fleet data center nearly 10 years ago. We won a whole load of green awards for that when we did it. And lots of other companies and data centers are following that trend at the moment. But from a climate perspective, I think data centers are on average far better, more efficient solution for companies that will need to run their IT systems. If they're looking at the amount of power that they'll be using by running those systems in the office versus putting them into a data center, I think data centers will win every single day of the week. Okay. I think you picked up on a lot of different good things in there, especially the bespoke canization of services, especially as a co-location operator. And then of course, in the climate change, I mean, what you said about evaporating cooling they've been using for more than a decade, that's often the truth. The truth is that a lot of these technologies and experiments, they start with the boutique players, and then it goes on to the bigger players. So you guys are always ahead of probably the bigger ones because they can't risk as much. And I'm glad they've paid off. And I'm sure you're going to be getting into solar power at some stage as well. Actually, mentioning power, that that is, I think, the next big step for companies like ours and a lot of other data centers, localized power generation from renewable sources. This is something that we're slowly starting to talk about. And I think that there are going to be some big opportunities. The technology isn't quite there at the moment. I think the economic incentives aren't quite there as well. But I think watch this space over the next five to 10 years, data centers will be leading the charge in creating localized energy generation sources from renewable energies. And that can be from either solar power, which obviously has certain challenges in this country where it seems to be gray half the time in the skies. But also there are some other interesting solutions like green gas solutions. I think America is leading the charge in terms of green hydro concerns. And so these are things that we're starting to look at right now as well. Yeah, well, that'll be definitely interesting to see it happening over the next five years. But talking about the next five years as well and not just on power, what are the plans for 4D over the next 12 to 18 months, especially in terms of expansion? I mean, what other markets are you going to be building in other markets, even just regional land markets in the UK? But what's the plan? Where are you going? So we want to carry on doing the same. We want to carry on growing. I'm hoping that somewhere in our next two or three year plan, there's going to be a third data center in the works. But whereabouts? I couldn't possibly say, well, probably somewhere in the southeast. Personally, I don't want to have to commute too far. So from a selfish point of view, I suspect it's going to be well within a driving distance of where I live. And again, another tick for the people who want to have their data centers close to where they live. Sorry. I was going to say, we've got to find where you live and then just do an hour radio. Yeah, but I live fairly close to the M25. So you've got the whole of London, unfortunately. So yes, expansion, hopefully a third data center. In the slightly shorter to medium term, we've been really fortunate with our foresight when it came to our cooling and our gamut data sensor that we have the capacity and ability to build out high density cooling solutions. So over the last year, we've started to build things like rear door calling. And we've also very recently built up an immersion cooling system for our clients. And these are some really cool. We get excited about them in the data center world, at least cooling solutions that are allowing some of our customers to do some very, very power intense CPU GPU intensive operations. So I think the HPC route is certainly an area that we're going to continue to expand into and it's very exciting for me and my team. Does that include them cryptocurrency as well or just HPC, just normal HPC? It's mostly normal HPC. We've actually seen two trends of crypto miners over the last three years, the first time when Bitcoin went through the roof. And actually in the last two or three months, we've had quite a few inquiries. The honest answer is a data center like ours, a tier three data center, we're never going to be the best place for running cryptocurrency miners. We provide 24-hour support and we've got all these generators and aircon units, all with M plus one built into them. You're paying for something that really you don't need when it comes to cryptocurrency mining. You're not looking for uptime and reliability. You're looking for somewhere where you can run ASIC crypto miner rigs for as cheap as possible. And there are data centers out there, tier two data centers, for example, that don't offer quite as many services that we do that are going to be cheaper. And there are other places where electricity is a lot cheaper. And I would certainly recommend if you are getting into crypto mining, do have a think about where you're actually going to be running it. I've had a couple of very concerned partners where their husbands perhaps have bought a crypto miner is creating a lot of noise in their home and they want to move it out and they haven't quite realized how expensive it will be to put it into a tier three data center. So yeah, it's mostly HBC stuff at the moment. Well, let's just move to Finland. Move to Iceland or Finland or Russia. There are loads of China is very popular here as far as crypto. There's a lot of cheap electricity out there. Just going to get that visa sorted. Exactly. But look, Jack, so if people want to get to know more about 4D and how to get in touch, where could they go and find more information? Our website is a great place to start 4D-DC.com. So that's where you can find most of our information. But we are also on LinkedIn and on Twitter. And we try and post as regularly as we can our thoughts on things like HPC, data adequacy, which is a personal interest of mine, and all things UK data center related. So yes, our website, LinkedIn and Twitter are the best places to find us. You do have a very good blog as well. And you're also part of I think Tech UK. So there's a lot of things coming out of you sometimes that are really interesting to read. But Jack, thank you so much for joining us. And I hope you enjoyed your time here. And thank you our viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcast. And don't forget to check out our social media channels for more content. Until next time, happy networking. Thanks for having me.