 Live from the JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Hey, everybody. This is a very special edition of our Data Movers podcast. It is part of our greener data series. So we're very special day. I'm your host, James Gada-Kutaya, CEO and founder of JSA, along with my fabulous co-host, top B2B social media influencer, Mr. Evan Cristal. Hey, Evan. Hey, Jamie. How are you? Good, good, good. You know, last podcast, you were like, tell me how you got into this industry. I'm gonna go ahead and flip the merit over to you and say, well, how did you get into this industry and how do you become a social media influencer? Well, the industry is a longer story, but as far as being a social media influencer, it basically requires a completely unhealthy obsession with social media. So, you know, your mom says, put your phone down. This is the opposite of that. It's never putting your phone down. So it's obsession with tech, but also digital, not recommended as a lifestyle choice, I think for most people. But thank you for asking. No, absolutely. It is, I know too, your engineering background, everything sort of shapes who you are digitally as well as you as a person. What about you? How many hours do you spend on social media day? What'd you guess, total? Two hours, maybe. Oh, you're a lightweight. Spend all the hours on social media. All of them. You too can be an influencer. So, but speaking of influencers, we have a IRL, real world influencer on the show today, huh? Absolutely, absolutely. I am so excited about this. We welcome today, Mr. Dean Nelson, Chairman and Founder of iNASINs and CEO of Virtual Power Systems. Dean is also, I should say, a contributing author to our great new book coming out, Earth Day, Greener Data. Hey, Dean. Hey, how's it going? Great, great. You were great. Hey, Dean. Yeah, very excited for this chat, particularly because I, for the first time recently, just learned about infrastructure masons. I thought it had something to do with bricklaying or cinder blocks, but I was wrong. Your tagline as chairman and founder, I understand is sort of uniting the builders of the digital age, one professional at a time. So tell us, this amazing mission, tell us how it began and how it's evolved, helping infrastructure professionals together connect and grow and give back and learn and educate and all that good stuff. Yeah, I've been in the industry for a long time, I guess now, and I, but I love community. And I remember I was at Sun Microsystems. It was 2008 and Jonathan Schwartz got up on stage and you started talking about the job of community. And I was sitting there thinking, what's my community? And I really couldn't put my finger on it. So I thought, well, maybe we need to create one. So I created a thing called Data Center Pulse at that point and brought together people around the world and it grew really quickly. And then I left, I left Sun and went to eBay and got really, really busy and things kind of slowed down on the community side. And when I left and was going to Uber, I realized I want to connect back with my community because I've been so caught up in all the day-to-day activities, I really need to get back out. So I called a number of friends, I called nine of them and I said, I'd like to start something up. Are you interested? And so this is Joe Kava, Google and Christian Bloddy of Microsoft and Eddie Shooter at Switch and Rob Roy at Switch, as well as, just a number of other people that I respect. And they said, great, let's get together. So we started that and I launched it on April 2nd, 2016, but we wanted to make this about the people versus the companies. So we're uniting the builders of the digital age because these people are the ones that actually move things and the companies they work at, those change. So what we didn't want is to have continuity broken in this kind of thing. So it's about the people that come in. So we leave our companies at the door, we connect as individuals and we do things to focus on connecting, growing and giving back. And that is really focused into the strategy and vision that we've got today. So really fulfilling amazing community that we've been able to put together. Yeah, I am a big fan, obviously, also a member. So it's been really just amazing to also see how much you accomplish all the scholarships and just really meaningful, meaningful work that you have been doing, it's really unbelievable. And you did mention your work in our industry and digital infrastructure for so many years. What is it that you see as ways we as an industry can leverage our community and technology to do our part to tackle climate change? Well, in I-Masons, we have four strategic initiatives. And so that's education, diversity, inclusion, sustainability and technology. And so we focus on those things because we believe we can make a difference than when we come together on them. So last, I think right at the beginning of the pandemic, we all focused in on what we could do from a sustainability standpoint. And we had all these different sessions that first were in person, then the pandemic hit, then they were virtual. And then we had things that we launched on Earth Day in 2020, right? And that was the sustainability vision. Every click improves the future. So the reason that those words, small now in words, but the reason they were important is that every click, that means everything we do online, anything we do electronically is gonna be going through digital infrastructure and it needs to improve the future. And when we say improve, that means things need to be carbon negative. That means that it needs to enable communities to be able to have opportunities because of the technology. So it needs to improve the future on many, many facets. And that was great because we had Noel Walsh right from Microsoft. We had Katie, the chief sustainability officer over at Google come in and they were talking about this sustainability vision. But that started uniting people on what we could do together. And that's led to the things that are going on now including what's going on in the greener data book, the chapters that we're writing, right? The activities that were put together, it really comes down to the some needs to be and it is greater than the parts. When you have these companies come together and collaborate, these individuals that lead these initiatives start to put their heart and soul behind it, you can move the needle. And that's what we're seeing, right? And from a sustainability standpoint, that's what's really important to me is that, you know, this isn't about me and this isn't about the organization. It's literally about the sum of the people going after these things to truly change their trajectory when it comes down to climate change. Because we are in a battle right now. And I just, I don't know if anybody really is... Well, I think a lot of people are looking at it, but I don't know if we're actually really united to go back and do what we have to do to change that trajectory right now. So we're gonna do our partisan industry to play a role in that. Amazing. So we're almost at Earth Day this year. It's Jamie's Christmas basically and birthday all in one for Jamie. But yeah, Flashback to Earth Day 2020, I Mason's launched its unified sustainability vision. Every click improves the future. So elaborate a little bit on what that vision was, you know, the driver behind it and you know, what's happened since. You know, there's two actions. You know, we, back in 2019, we had these conversations at our end user summits and those things that, you know, people are really starting to realize we're making commitments, but we're not gonna make it. So that was really what was behind it. And so when we brought these senior leaders together, we had a small group that started it and we said, okay, what is it that we need to actually be focusing on? And so that vision that we just walked through every click improves the future. It means that we believe digital infrastructure should contribute to society and the economy without damaging the planet. In other words, this isn't about being sustainable to be sustainable. It is about balancing ecology and economics. It's about enabling the communities to do things at the same time, making sure that we have ultimately a net zero impact on what we do. And so that was the motivation here is to come together and do that. Now, fast forward two years, we're about to go in on the 22nd we're gonna launch this greener data book. There's a lot of content that's put in there from a number of different members of I Masons about what we can do. And I'm really excited because there's gonna be a post announcement about what we're doing next with I Masons around all these different members kind of the big, the next big jump. And that to me is where it takes all this work that we've done for two to three years of uniting people and now puts it to a fine point, right? All the wood is behind that arrowhead. We're going after this because United we can actually make a difference. And in this divided, we're making incremental and you know, progress together we're gonna make macro progress. Yeah, I 100% agree so well said. And this also makes me think about at the end of I Masons and user forum back in October, 2021, Martin Lynch, the CEO of Pure Data Centers had raised the idea of a carbon label. Really one that I'll label that outlines the carbon for data center buildings, ME and key equipment, IT equipment housed in those data centers. Do you wanna expand on what this means and how it can help us? Yeah, and this ties back into my chapter in the book as well. Cause you know, I look at the industry itself and what we have a problem with is measurement. We don't know how big we are. We don't know what's included. So what is digital infrastructure? Right? And so anyway, we'll talk about that a little bit later but if you double click into it, the whole point is if we can figure out a standard taxonomy to measure the size of the industry, then we can have a starting point and we can move things forward. But assuming that we can get to that point, Martin had brought up this concept about these carbon labels. And I thought it was brilliant because you know, think about nutrition labels that you have on everything you buy at the store. The government went back and yeah, they created the standard way which you can see, okay, I see sodium, I see carbohydrates, I see all the other things in there and I make my choices based on what that label says. Okay, same thing for carbon. Embodied carbon in a data center really breaks down into two things, materials and products. So materials are the concrete, steel, copper, anything else that is made to make that building and the distribution of the electrical within that building. And then you've got the products, air conditioners, generators, transformers, servers, network switches, et cetera. So when you now put them all together, you can have a carbon label of the embodied carbon of that data center, okay? But it has to have the materials and it has to have the product. So what Martin was saying is if we just had the ability to go back and stick on this carbon label, we'd be able to now really be able to measure things. And so we took that one step further. We'll into what? And that's why we thought products are critical but then also data centers because data centers are a sum of materials and products. And if you have all of those, you'll know the full embodied carbon of that actual data center. That's the history of the carbon of all those components in that data center. And so from there, then you have consumption, power consumption, the source of that energy and understanding what those are. So this carbon label allows us to be able to say, I know that unit in that place has this base carbon footprint and this consumption-based carbon footprint. So I should be able to do real-time carbon accounting for that location. And then all those locations that make up digital infrastructure. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's that transparency leading us to measurement. And standards. And action, yeah, yeah. Love it, love it. So clearly you see collaboration as fundamentally important to facing the challenge of slowing down climate change and you have person-to-person collaboration and organizations collaborating, companies, countries collaborating. So what ways can we as an industry collaborate to slow down climate change? So this is why communities like I-Masons are so important because to collaborate, you need to come together on common cause. And the way we do this is to remove the commercial aspects of it. So we're a nonprofit, 501C6 Professional Association. What we care about are the individuals coming in here about the things they're working on. So if we can now start to collaborate together on those things. So for example, we all came in on the ever click improves the future. Well, that's the sum of all the different parts of things that people are doing. So the next thing we're going after is if we're doing carbon labels, we now could all be pushing for it, whether it's the manufacturers of the products, the construction firms that are doing the data centers, to the architecture firms that are speccing what's in those data centers. And then to the actual consumption, we can all focus in on to say, we know our starting point. What's the baseline? Where are we today? Because if we have that, then we can now continue to combine on other things such as other carbon reduction goals. So, but we have to have a starting point. So that collaboration I think for me as an industry, it requires a body of people to come together to create a movement that they're united on. And when they do that, then you start to actually see change because there's a ton of really, really good efforts going on in some amazing companies. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, right? Schneider, Vertif, Eaton, ABB, like all these different companies are going after this individually. But we need to come back together to be able to say collectively, we're going to move that needle in a big way because without it, we can't measure progress. That's why those carbon labels are important. That's why a standard way that we can approach it and that's why bringing people together to make sure that we are actually going after the target and we're going to win the war, right? Not just the battle in it. And the war is climate change. And I frame it and I know this isn't about the war aspects that are going on in our world today. It is really that there is critical things that we must be able to address directly when it comes down to climate change or else we're too late. Yeah, yeah. And that is directly leads us right into your greener data chapter defining the digital infrastructure industry. Can you give our readers, viewers, listeners just some key takeaways from the chapter? Yeah, absolutely. I'm a structure guy. So I love to create, but then I also like to figure out a taxonomy. And so when I was looking at this problem and I pulled in Rob Aldrich who's the head of our sustainability committee, I pulled in a number of other industry leaders to just start having this conversation. Because I said, we don't have a starting point. I don't know what, we can't actually put our foot on it and say now we can see what we're going to do going forward. So we started by defining what digital infrastructure was. And so my chapter is really focused in on what is digital infrastructure? And that's a collection of real estate locations that are basically serving data, right? And so we define in there what the industry is. And then we break it down into the elements of it. And then we break it down into the components that are going to make up the measurement. But it helps us all align on what the actual definition of our industry is and then the measurement that comes from it. So for example, the outcome of this is we believe there's seven million data centers in the world today, seven million. And they are 104 gigawatts of capacity built. All right, 104 gigawatts. They consume 594 terawatt hours of energy annually. That's what's going on in 2021. And that represents 2.4% of the global energy draw is attributed to digital infrastructure. Now think about that for a second. 2.4% of the global energy draw is enabling all of the technology that we see to enable it to work. And the demarcation point here, what's really important is you take this phone. Okay, this is a device that a human is using. And when I actually do something on this phone when it leaves, hits the radio wave, right? Goes over to that cell tower. From that point is the edge of digital infrastructure. The path it traverses to go back and serve whatever is requested. I'm gonna go look at a CAD video in China. What that means is it goes up, hits that tower, goes down into fiber, hits an edge, gets a repeater, goes back into a data center somewhere and is processed in a certain way. Great, everything that traverses in that path is consuming energy. It also has embodied carbon. So this goes back to the labels again. If I know where that goes into this data center, then I will know the embodied carbon. I will know the consumed carbon. I'll know the carbon tax that would be distributed to that packet that's traveling through that data center. It doesn't matter what it's used for. Zoom, YouTube, Instagram, whatever else, there's still just applications that translate into kilowatt hours consumed and carbon that is actually emitted because of it. So if we have that, now we can understand how to measure all the way through and we can do real-time global carbon accounting. So that way we can drive our industry to be the most sustainable in the world. Because today, when you think about it, every click improves the future to enable the economic side, digital infrastructure is enabling that. Without the stuff we've got going on right now, like Zoom and all the other aspects, imagine what it would have been like in the pandemic. The world would have stopped. So there's a positive contribution on that side. How do we measure its impact from a planet perspective? Not just its positive side, but also it's the thing we can improve. Wow, so much food for thought. We need to do a greener data live stream edition on Earth Day. Maybe we can go down a little bit. Yeah, we'll go all day. How's that? I'm in. All right, but let's shift gears now because we like to have some fun here on the show. And we have some rapid-fire questions designed mainly to embarrass you. So let's start with that. And you can reveal all of your innermost secrets and thoughts. So if you were to spend one day or maybe a week or one month changing the world, what would you do? Wow. Kind of do, right? I mean, that's a hard question. Okay, next question. One day, one week, one month is actually a very different thing. But I would say if I had a bulk of time and I could do whatever I needed to, I would try to get the entire world connected because that is the great equalizer on everything. Digital divide. It's still huge. It's amazing in the country. So to me, that would change the world because I think we have a little less than half the population that still is not connected to the Internet. So what are they missing out on? Everything we're talking about. So I don't know, the innovation, creativity, opportunity, economic prosperity, happiness. Like this is just so much stuff that comes with being able to participate in the digital age. That's what I would do. Yeah, yes. Okay, so if you weren't in this industry, and I hope that day never comes, but what would you be doing? Well, a lot of my passions are around music. Design, just creativity. So always been that way. I'd probably be doing something that I'd love to act, love to do. That would be just a blast, but creating things that other people can enjoy, it was probably what I would be doing. Yeah. Awesome. Any tips or tricks for saving energy at home, anything you're doing today or you might be doing in the future that we could learn from? Yeah. Okay, so I am definitely a geek at heart. So my license plate is geekism. Just so you know, I've been a tech guy forever. You stole my license plate out there. Okay, all right. Well, just by the way, geek is chic and nerd is not, just so you know. So there's nerds. I don't associate with nerd, I associate with geek. But that's just a personal preference. But I would say that automation and all this stuff, let technology manage it. They're a lot better at this than we are. So Nest, think about the solar aspects in your house and Tesla's power wall and just take this technology and let it do what it's supposed to do because it's going to optimize and it's never going to forget like we always do. Oh, shoot, I left that on. Oh, I wish I would have changed that. Hmm, let the technology go back and optimize everything for us. Yeah. Thank God my husband has that same mindset because I'm addicted to technology as well and I'm crazy automated and I love it. Nice. And okay, so tell me once you actually leave the house, you get outdoors, what is your favorite outdoor activity in mind? I don't get to do this a lot, but I love to do it and that's just jet skis. So wave runners, I love, I like to work hard and I like to play hard. So when I go out and have fun, I love to do those action type things because the speed is great. But the best part is that when I crash on a jet ski, I don't kill myself. Yeah, it's a softer landing. Right, the water's a little bit more forgiving in that one. But come up to New England in New Hampshire, we have some great lakes for jet skiing this summer, the paradise up here. In the summer, not quite yet. Yeah, a little colder now. But thanks so much for joining us, Dean. I'm serious, we should definitely do a live stream because your insights and analysis and thought leadership is just so amazing to listen to. So thanks for joining us. Yeah, absolutely, thanks for having me on and I'm just blessed to be part of this movement that Jamie is putting on with The Greening Data Book. Again, I'm humbled to be involved in it and thank you very much for that, Jamie. And I can't wait to see what it does. We are so thrilled and excited and together I think we can do anything and I may seem as being a stellar example of that. So thank you, listeners, for being part of our fabulous discussion today and if you enjoyed this podcast, as I hope you did, be sure to check out jsa.net slash podcast for upcoming Data Movers episodes releasing every other Wednesday morning. And be sure to follow us on Twitter at Jay Scotto. She deserved like a million followers, so give her a follow and myself. Not so much, I've been cursed out. Because everyone's already following. And as always, guys, stay safe out there, be kind, think green, hashtag greener data and happy networking.