DCD Zero Downtime: The Bi-Weekly Data Center Show
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DCD Zero Downtime is DCD's editorially-led podcast. In each episode, our editorial team will be talking with leading members of the data center and digital infrastructure community, delving deeper into the future of the industry and its major challenges.
100 Episodes
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As land and power in Virginia's Loudoun County become increasingly scarce, data center developers are seeking fresh ground on which build. While many are moving south within Virginia to the likes of Prince William County, Quantum Loophole is hoping to lure companies north into Maryland.
A former aluminum smelting works, the company's maiden campus is reportedly luring cloud companies and the hyperscale developers serving them on a huge scale.
CEO Josh Snowhorn talks us through the company's history and its 2,000+acre gigawatt project located just north from Loudoun across the Potomac river.
Oxide Computer has been rebuilding the rack. In this podcast, CTO Bryan Cantrill tells us why.
The data center industry has been building its own infrastructure for years, with the wrong components.
Servers weren't designed to be operated in data centers, and the 1U rack unit is the wrong size, because of simple science. Part of the success of the cloud is that it takes that integration away, and gives users an easily consumed set of virtual servers and elastic infrastructure. But it costs, and it has pushed users to renting something they would be better off owning. That's why we heard of the "cloud diaspora" - organizations people bringing their IT back from the cloud.
But what people need, Cantrill says, is an elastic infrastructure for the on-premise facility. In this podcast, you can hear him explaining why his team found they had to rebuild almost everything to deliver it.
After a hiatus of several years, climate change policy is taking off in the US, with the Biden-Harris Administration using the Inflation Reduction Act and the Energy Earthshot to accelerate the clean energy economy.
But data center energy policy goes back a lot further than that. Stephen Harper, Intel's Global Director, Environment and Energy Policy, was there 20 years ago when data centers first came onto the climate change radar, and he's been tracking progress since then.
As well as their own emissions "footprint", data centers have a positive impact on emissions elsewhere, known as the environmental "handprint"
But how do we measure that handprint, and set it against the negative impact of infrastructure.
And coming after this backstory, just what impact of these Biden-Harris initiatives have?
DCD speaks to Stephen about the likely impact of historic climate legislation for the digital infrastructure sector.
Efforts to reduce the environmental impact of our digital world tend to start with the cooling systems at data centers, and rarely get any further.
The tech industry created PUE as a simple metric which could express how efficiently power is delivered to the racks, but did not consider what happens to that power when it gets there.
That’s not good enough, because poorly written software could be wasting that power in unnecessary loops and fruitless calculations.
The Green Software Foundation has emerged to propose a measure of Software Carbon Intensity that will tell developers if their software is a good planetary citizen.
But this is an issue that gets more complex, the more you look at it. Software that completes quickly must save energy, but what if the software is running on multiple hardware platforms? What about the embodied energy of the hardware you choose for it?
David Mytton is Co-founder & CEO of Console, a company that makes tools for developers. He’s also looked at the energy used in technology, bothy at Imperial College and at the Uptime Institute.
He’s now working on a PhD in sustainable computing at the University of Oxford.
He talks to us about the prospects for Green Software finding its way from academic research, through sponsorship by large vendors, into the hands of developers and consumers.
Data center automation is one thing, but what about automatons walking in the data halls? Robots in the data center are often discussed but rarely make it beyond the pilot project stage. Those that are deployed are often closer to Short Circuit’s Johnny 5 than Neill Blomkamp's CHAPPiE.
Utah-based Novva data centers has deployed Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dog – possibly the most advanced robot that is currently commercially available – at its flagship data center and is looking to create a replicable and scalable model for deploying robots in its other current and future facilities. DCD discusses the pains of deploying a robot that is still a way off enterprise-ready plug-and-play with CEO Wes Swenson along with the lack of a wider support ecosystem for robotic deployments, and the future role of humans in the data center.
Figures quoted in 2021 suggested that data centers and communications technology could use eight percent or even 20 percent of the world's electricity by 2030. That seemed too high to us, so we tracked down the original source of the quotes, only to find he feels the same way. Anders Andrae is an academic, currently working at Huawei's Swedish R&D center. Since his original 2015 paper he has revised his predictions down, but the old figures still often show up out of context. More importantly, he thinks we should be looking at the benefits of IT as well as the energy cost. He talks of a "handprint" that counter-balances the environmental "footprint". Andrae says the Internet saves far more emissions, through offering a digital alternative to physical services, than it consumes.
You can find Andrae's research here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anders-Andrae
Data centers are about as efficient as they ever can be, in terms of delivering power to servers and keeping them cool, so what's the next step to sustainable digital infrastructure? There is a lot of talk about reusing the wasted heat that facilities produce, but this seems like a hard job when all too often they can't give it away for free.
Max Schulze is the founder of the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA), a group of stakeholders aiming to achieve a sustainable digital infrastructure by 2030. He thinks the answer to heat reuse is economics, not engineering.
And when we've sorted that out, he foresees that the big cloud providers will be disaggregated, and the cloud will become the same kind of market as the electricity grid.
In the first episode of the Zero Downtime podcast, we sit down with Lex Coors, winner of DCD's 2021 Outstanding Contribution to the Industry award and Chief Data Center Technology & Engineering Officer for Interxion.
We spoke to Lex about his two decades at the company, from the early days, to the rise of cloud, and the recent Digital Realty acquisition. We also discussed sustainability efforts, the European energy crisis, and how to ensure that local communities don't turn against data centers.
DCD sits down with Alex Goodall, CEO of Xela Energy, to discuss the company’s rebrand from Clean Energy Capital, and how it aims to deliver behind-the-meter renewable power to the UK’s data center market.
In this episode, DCD catches up with Bill Long, CPO at Zayo Group, to discuss the company’s long-haul fiber build across the US to support the growing demands of AI workloads. Long also discusses Zayo’s acquisition of Crown Castle’s fiber assets and why the Macro Edge provides a worthwhile opportunity.
Earlier this year, Zendo Energy emerged from stealth and launched an "Energy OS" to enhance energy procurement for the data center industry.DCD speaks to Drew Barrett, COO at Zendo, about the launch and the broader energy market.
In this episode, DCD chats with Jason Eichenholz, CEO of Relativity Networks, about hollow core fiber (HCF). Eichenholz details the latest developments of the technology, plus its potential to support the AI data center boom, and whether HCF can have an impact on the telecoms sector.
In this episode, we chat to Ben King, associate director with Rhodium Group's Energy & Climate practice, who provides an in-depth look into the US geothermal sector. We explore the exciting world of enhanced geothermal power and how, if scaled, it could provide enough energy to meet skyrocketing data center demand across the US.
AI is changing how data centers operate, and particularly in the case of retrofit facilities, it is more important than ever that operators have all the data they need to ensure uptime. We talk to Jad Jebara, CEO and president of Hyperview - an AI-powered DCIM provider - about some of the pitfalls data center operators are falling into as they handle more demanding workloads, and how a surprising number of operators are still actually using Excel for capacity planning.
What does it take to run a cloud provider in 2025? We chat to David Driggers about Cirrascale, a company older than the neoclouds, but without the deep pockets of the hyperscalers, about how the company is carving its own path in an increasingly crowded market.Plus, we hear about the current AI inference market, and where growth opportunities lie.
In this podcast episode, we speak to Harry Keeling, head of business development - new markets at Rolls Royce. Listen in to hear more about the rise of small modular reactors, Rolls Royce SMR’s business model, and the potential of SMRs in powering the data center sector.
With global political uncertainty, data sovereignty has become a key conversation for governments, enterprises, and cloud providers alike. In this episode, we talk to Civo’s Mark Boost about the importance of data sovereignty - as well as establishing a definition - and how this links to the ongoing issue of increasing competition in the cloud market beyond the US hyperscalers. We also touch on how the UK’s CMA investigation, and whether such anticompetitive investigations really go far enough.
In this episode, we talk to Core Scientific COO Matt Brown about the company’s pivot away from housing cryptomining rigs to hosting GPUs for the likes of AI cloud firm CoreWeave.We talk about the wider crypto market and why the move to AI hosting is becoming so common, the rise of the neoclouds and why they’re willing to work with companies that might not be used to working to Tier III-quality uptime requirements, and Matt’s own experience coming to the crypto space from world of traditional colo.
In this episode, we talk to Sainesh Vallabh, group chief commercial officer, Helios Towers, about the company’s strategic focus to drive tenants to its mobile tower infrastructure. Sainesh explains the company’s plans for the year, opportunities to look at new markets, and the challenges that Africa and the Middle East present for Helios.
In this episode, we are staying in the editorial team’s home county - the UK. Pulsant is a regional Edge provider focusing on the UK market, and has recently launched a new Sovereign Cloud offering. We talk with Pulsant’s CTO Mike Hoy about the data center industry in the UK in the context of the Labour government, how enterprise strategies are changing in relation to cloud deployments, and discuss the ongoing CMA investigation into the cloud services market.
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