 Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Hey guys, welcome welcome to our podcast series, Data Movers. I'm your host, Jamie Scado-Cutaya, CEO and founder of JSA. And I'm joined with my amazing co-host, Mr. Evan Kirstel, the top B2B social influencer in our space. Hey Evan, welcome welcome. Hey, thanks so much. Hey everyone, welcome to Data Movers where we sit down with the movers and shakers in today's telco and data center world, supporting all of these crazy new network requirements. Speaking of which, Jamie, let's talk AI because there isn't enough hype and discussion around AI yet out there in the media. But to take it personal, do you use any of the AI tools? Do you use chat GPT or using any of these frameworks or apps that are AI based? Absolutely, we use technology whenever we can to be a foundational research level. We always add our human creativity and touch and we bring our expertise to the industry, all that you can't strip away. But yeah, for me, I have 10 ideas of how I can help support a client. I go to chat GPT and I'm like, all right, what else you got? I have this, what else you got? It's always kind of cool to know that you can use it as an additional tool, not as a total replacement of humanity, I would say though. I totally disagree. I think we're going to replace those humans. How many would you say? I have 50 team members right now. 50 amazing team members at JSA. I have zero. And I'm putting out at least 100x more content than I've ever done before. And GPT4, you talk about creativity and humor and it is way more interesting than I am. It can be way more fun if you're into the prompt engineering and the experimentation. So I feel like I have a team of 50. I'm just loving it. Yeah, I have a team of 200. So we're about even now, but it's not a race, but it is a race to leverage, to harness all of these tools. And guess what's powering all of these applications? It's cloud and data center technology. It's our space. It's our people and that brings us to the incredible person, our incredible guest that we have here today. Let's go ahead and just dig right in and bring in Todd Cushing, president of 1623 Farnham. Hey Todd. Welcome. Appreciate you. Let me be part of the show today. Oh, we love it. And thanks for joining us. You were one of our early guests. So, you know, a couple years later, you've been busy. And, you know, for those who don't know much about 1623 Farnham, let's give them a brief introduction. For me, it's like the old adage in real estate, which I guess applies to data center, location, location, location, right? So who and what is 1623? What do you do for customers? So it is a data center and it's a 76,000 foot data center. In downtown Omaha, it's an ecosystem beyond that. So what it is, is it's got to have good power and it's got state of the art updated lighting, green, you know, things that built into the M&E systems for the facility. But it's really an ecosystem that is about interconnection, networking, peering, you know, really things that make the processing of data happen from east coast to west coast. So that's really what we are is we're an ecosystem. And you know what? You are also a triple threat. I mean, not to like summon JLo or anything here. But when we talk triple threat in our industry, we're talking cloud, co-location and connectivity. You guys certainly have the secret sauce there as a cloud hub and connectivity epicenter. In addition to a robust data center, like you just said, how is your facility set apart from the rest? You know, from a, for us, it's the people, the team we've got customers call white glove. So it's the team, but it's also the facility is what we've built as a brand. It's the people know to come here and they're going to find efficient professional resources relative to the facility, what we deliver to the customers, but the team is what makes it happen. That's true. Fantastic. So you're in Omaha, Nebraska, the heartland. Everything that happens that goes east to west and west to east goes through Omaha. Lots of packets running around. So it's a great place for that. But beyond location, how do you help your customers meet those fundamental needs? You know, we have a term called meet the middle. So we like to meet in the middle of Omaha. We have an annual event we've put on that JSA helps us put on too. But really for us, it's the intersection of the data, the intersection of networks. It's the regeneration point. So what you found is the hyper scale, the enterprises often come here because it is the middle. So they can put, there's hubs that are in our facility for major networks. They'll go north, south, east or west, but it's really that proximity matters. And then as a result of the week, you know, Omaha has other pluses. It's the Midwest. It's not LA cost or east coast, super expensive. It's, it's effective to be here. Good business climate. And in talking about that meeting in the middle connectivity, you also have an onsite internet exchange Omaha IX. We have to mention that it is such a key differentiator for you guys. A big part of what makes your offerings ideal for a world that depends on extensive connectivity, of course. So let's go ahead and dive into peering. Why is this a game changer for your customers? Well, the, the IX is for us, it's a great bold onto the business. So really, if the customers are here and their carriers or customers are here in their enterprise or other folks are these here because of the connectivity capability. They're the distance they're going to find if their networks here and you're peering your P2P, you're going to have a shorter distance. Your latency is going to be better. You're going to have to be more cost effective. So rather than other options that are out there with a client server in the middle and the whole administrator and everything, it's just a good way to go for people that want to share data and laugh about it. So hyperscalers are dumping the data out into the IX and then people peer with that data. And it's just a gamut of the ways that could be used from gaming to video content for all kinds of things that people watch on their TVs if they don't realize he's coming to an IX. But very misunderstood. A lot of people still don't know what an IX is or how to leverage it. So it's pretty common for us to break down with people and explain to them what it is and how it could be used, let alone peering. Yeah, great point. I need an updated education here. It's been a while. So the word on the street is recession. You know, tech is already, I think, in a recession. Every project, every digital transformation is now judged on a pretty stringent cost-benefit analysis. And even mission-critical stuff is still decided fundamentally based on price, even in healthcare, where I'm at the big human health IT show this week. So when it comes to the question of why should I invest in peering, how do you show that ROI that's strong and what's the value-equation benefit of that investment? So a lot of times we have to, if it's a new client, we're going to partner with them and see how they're doing it today. So if they're, again, going back to a client server or some kind of an IP center where they're trying to connect networks, if you're going to simplify it, if you've got a primary and a backup network, if you have to be a financial or, say, an insurance company and you've got that network, what if you had a third network where you could peer? What if you could put that extra capacity out there and lead out with maybe a partner or somebody you're trying to do exchange with? And it's a great way to go that's, really, there's no rule, there's no administrative fee, there's free peering, sharing of data. So somebody's going to work transport out between the two. But beyond that, it's a real cost-effective way of keeping your A and your B network under control, because you're hauling that freight through a shorter connection, it goes fast, and you're already in our facility, typically. It's going to make sense, you've got with somebody that's in the facility. Yeah, absolutely makes sense. And speaking also of value, you and your team over at 1623, of course, have done so much work recently in cultivating that robust cloud offering. So the cloud ecosystem, as you guys say, what would you say is the most pressing cloud-centric demand or demands that you've been seeing from your customers? I think it's more. They want to see more Direct Connect. You've got Google Direct Connect, you've got AWS, you're using network-as-a-service providers to be able to get there and to have a dashboard, you know, run it, they're great, there's no fool that we can get at 16.3 Farnham, but to have even direct, more direct. Some of the largest users of AWS are in Omaha, believe it or not. So they're going, they're hauling freight a long ways, they're pressuring us to be able to get those cloud providers to be direct here. It's going to happen eventually, not too far away, but you'll have a, it's not an announcement by the way, but it's, but you're going to find that that is going to be driven by people wanting more. They really want to connect to cloud. They're moving away from their enterprises. Everybody is, it doesn't matter what country you're in or what data centers, it's what people are doing. They're running mobile cloud products and they want, they want some more speed. Yeah, it's amazing, the Hymn show here this week in Chicago, pretty much the three largest booths, presence at the show were the three big hyperscalers, Amazon, AWS, Google and Microsoft. So they're kind of eating healthcare literally and you know, everything is moving to the cloud and you actually boast some of the lowest possible latencies to Google cloud you know, as you stand at the edge of one of its regional interconnect coals. So cloud looks pretty strategic. I think that's the direction we're all headed, right? So what does that give you as a differentiator? Yeah, microseconds away. It's, it's multiple sites for hyperscalers and you know, my metro surrounding us and, and it's not just search engine and social media and other things. There's a lot in the Midwest, a lot in Omaha and they take us to the next level. They push our infrastructure to the next level. They make us better greener, all kinds of things. So it's just a good relationship that is the scale for a city this side of Omaha, you know, not so much anymore. It's been years people get that there's a lot here, but people are still surprised. It's like what Ashburn would have been the first time somebody saw it. People are very surprised how much it was really going on right up with way of data. And you know what, I would be remiss if I didn't mention to you that we are just about to hit Earth Day weekend here. So we're, we're all about going green, as you know, here collectively. So of course we're talking data centers. We'd be remiss also to say that it's not one of the most in demand aspects of today's digital infrastructure and that's sustainability. So I hear of course 1623 has some amazing efficient systems at your data centers that adds to your green factor. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Sure. There's from our cooling standpoint, so I'll start there. So we have a downtown system that we co-op. So the people downtown want our heat so that they can create steam. So we can stay within a certain delta of what the cold is coming in and what we give it back hot. It's going to use less energy for downtown Omaha for them to take our heat. So from our standpoint, we, nobody else is using cooling 12 months out of a year in downtown Omaha, separate data center, and we are the only one I believe it's on that loop. And we've enhanced the loop, made it more efficient. Also, we do free cooling. It puts, like it's pretty darn cold in the law, about 7,000 hours a year that we can free cool. So we find that we can run a lot of the year on free cool. So we get a lot of hours, it makes our Pee Wee, numbers really good, comes down. It does get hot here, but from the overall average, when you look at number of hours, 7,000 hours is a lot. So it's a good story to tell. Amazing. Yeah, I was just reading about that on your website. Staying in the green, what hyperscalers move, tell us about Nebraska's energy offering. So is that the big picture for your sustainability mission? Yeah, there's a current free energy, there's a rating that people look at it, hyperscalers again, look at it, push people. You look at the zone one for US, the zone central one for Googles, for example, call them out. They have the emoji, if you will, the green logo on there that shows that that's a green, our CO2 low region compared to others. So as you're selecting, if that's important to you, the unspeaking cost, that's a differentiator that we find. So we have that and there's the carbon aware compute that the hyperscalers again, they push us relative to how we unpack things, so what we do with our waste, what we do, how we operate, it's a different mindset. So as they bring in 16 pallets or whatever, what we would do with that is you pay attention to it. So it's not like it just ends up in the same place. So it's a contractual. You know, they're looking for you to make sure that you're being a good steward to the environment. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And still staying on top of campus sustainability and contracts. I've been hearing a little bit about evolving requirements. So not sure what you're seeing on your end, but are there any changes in the discussion you might be having with your customers about what they expect for data center providers, what their must haves are and how are you pivoting? You know, I remember when it was a new term to talk about PUE and now it's an old term, right? I've been around for a little bit, but it's the way you measure it and the level you want to measure. So we in this industry, a lot of times you're a retail client or you're a hyperscale. I would say it bleeds through probably both sides now where people want to know how you're measuring, what you're measuring, they want more detail. They're asking to see your utility providers bill. They want to see the level of detail that people just didn't ask for three years ago. So where you're meeting, how you're metering has really expanded as well where you've got to be able to have the data to back it up. And so then beyond that, there's a goal. So if you're here, okay, so where are you going to be? So gee, we just did a remodel. We thought we were pretty efficient. But the good news is, as you load up a data center, it does get more efficient. So being that we're brand new, we've got some room, some capacity, so we'll get more efficient. Wow. So you've got facility upgrades. You've got big name customers, new partnerships. You have a lot going on. What's next? I mean, it's tough to imagine where you go from here. A lot. There's a big net. So as we throw, we're getting ready to announce the channel program was announced this week. So we've got a new channel program. I will be channel partners. I would be lost if it wasn't for JSA guiding me and helping me through that process. It's new for me personally, professionally. The IX is going to get a new upgrade here shortly. We haven't really made an announcement, but the clients used a lot of 10 gig ports, and then it was 40, then it's 100. Now there's hundreds and 400. So it's capacity. We're going to keep putting money into the IX, make sure it grows, and make sure that people can get their pairing done here at 1623. The Omaha IX, there's just a lot of growth. I think it's really gone crazy relative to a lot of people want to be in that. So that's a good thing. Direct connection. I've talked about it before. There are talks. So people are going to Direct Connect through Omaha. It's going to happen through other big names. So I mean, I could go on and on, but I'm super proud of the facility. I'm born and raised Omaha guys. I knew of the facility for a long time through my IT career before I got here. The team is awesome. The ownership's awesome. It's a great place. Really, really happy with it. I love working in this place. That's what we like. We like to hear it. We like people to say that they like Omaha. They like the atmosphere. They like to do things in our facility. So it's neat. I can testify. Great people, great facility. And great vision too. You guys really always have a plan and your cutting edge, and you keep going. It makes it so much fun. So let's get to the rapid fire section. I love this part. This is where, if you remember Todd, you just throw random questions at you and you tell us the first thing that pops into your mind. So here we go. Favorite food that would surprise people? Meatloaf is not it. It'd actually be Hamloaf. Hamloaf. Probably my mom made it when I was a kid. My wife, the family would begrudgingly eat it from time to time. Hamloaf would be my birthday dinner. I love Hamloaf. I read that chicken fried steak at the local Nebraska dish. It's interesting how you go by region as you go south. You're thinking of chicken fried steak or even a pork tenderloin that will change by region. But no, for me it would be the Hamloaf. Hamloaf. I'm going to google that recipe. Jamie's going to make it for us. You don't want really anything that I make. It's better cold. It makes a great sandwich. It's better cold the next day. I'm hungry. How do people describe you? What's one word you give? I'm sort of geeky. I'm an introvert, but I can be an extrovert. I love to get my hands into things. I'm probably scattered. I'm lucky that I have anchors working around me to pull me back in. I know what I mean. They can interpret where I'm trying to go. But I sincerely I'm an honest person and everybody knows me. I'm trying to do the right thing all the time. My word for you would be heartfelt. What you say is what you do and it's from the heart. Thank you. Apple or Android? I'm sorry? Apple or Android? Apple or Android? I tease people a lot. I've been an Apple person at a Mac. When I first drew data centers I was using the old Mac Plus and these are the different boxes and Mac Draw and all those great software packages. I've been a Mac person forever and I get frustrated when my windows don't work and I have to reboot before I do something. And it takes forever to reboot. So I mean, you know... Good answer. If you look at your home screen on your phone, what's the most used app? Angry Birds, is it? Or something, you know... I can't imagine Angry Birds. You'd be surprised. For me, it's... I like to look at the weather a lot. So we are in the Midwest so we talk about free cooling. So I want to see when it's going to be below 54 degrees it makes a huge difference. So it probably depends on the time of year but I look at the weather a lot just because and it's different apps because nobody can ever get it really right. So I'm looking at barometric pressure as dew points not for a nine-story building but it really is a... Then it's to watch it transition and watch how the facility is all automated. We're just watching the mousetrap but I look at the weather apps a lot. You're rooting for cold weather. That's unusual. I love it. It's just amazingly how much more efficient it is when we can free cool. I totally get you. I love it. That we will torture you with would be favorite holiday to celebrate. You know I like little kids and for me it's all about Halloween. We have traditions the wife and I hang out together and make sure I try to make sure I'm home not traveling during those time frames. We usually make chili, have little kids over we see grandkids who we'll talk to and get pictures we've exchanged but if we have a Yorkshire Terrier they'll get a little costume I think Halloween is like no pressure, no big gifts pretty easy for me. I don't think about too deeply is it evil or whatever it's just kids in candy and costumes I grew up that way. That's right, that's right and honestly my daughter is two and a half and she's obsessed with Halloween every other holiday comes and goes she's still on Halloween my husband and I are like we are raising Wednesday Adams and neighbors and neighbors have young kids and so those times might be the only time all year we see them they come up their wagon and you know you get to go out and say hi I come with serious candy I mean they have a wagon not just a bucket to fill give my daughter some ideas Yes it's like the multi-billion dollar holiday now it's amazing so thanks for joining us Todd really great to see the update and I always learn so much about what's happening out in the heartland it shows us our industry isn't just about DC and New York and LA there's just so much happening in the Midwest what a great country we have all these diverse regions and technologies so good stuff and I have to ask have you seen Warren around town lately he's my all-time hero It has been a year since I crossed paths probably with him the annual events changed from what it used to be and my wife would volunteer and it had like the 5k and different things and you'd get a pair of tennis shoes out of the deal maybe have Warren and Charlie on the back special edition Brooks but she's got but usually a garage steakhouse I would be at lunch and people want to go there because that's where it is and it's not uncommon to see him walk in so it's been about a year since I've seen him on the streets but he's a real guy that's on about the force of nature what a guy and yet another reason to get yourself to Omaha and see 1623 he's on Farnham or on Farnham he's just up the street and we should also say we are announcing today that we are writing volume 2 of greener data and we can say that 1623 Farnham will be part of the next book so super exciting alright guys if you enjoyed today's podcast as much as we did go ahead and check out jsa.net slash podcast for upcoming episodes and of course make sure you go and check out 1623 Farnham yeah follow us on twitter at jscotto follow the hashtags like sustainability hashtag data center hashtag birthday for all the good stuff that is there and as always stay green guys stay safe and happy networking