DCD Zero Downtime: The Bi-Weekly Data Center Show

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 hyper...

Hunter Newby doesn't claim to have invented the Meet-Me Room, but he created one of the first, in the iconic and historical Manhattan facility, 60 Hudson Street, in about 1998 At the time data centers had separate connections from multiple carriers, and linking between those carriers meant running a link between their connection points - and paying them heavily. Hunter set up a room where the netw...

Join us for an extended discussion with CTO and founder of North American Access Technologies Julius Neudorfer about the history of liquid cooling, and where he sees the market developing in the future.

Formed by DigitalBridge and Liberty Global, AtlasEdge has quickly become one of the Edge industry's largest players. We chat to COO Zahl Limbuwala about how it defines the Edge and where it places its servers.

For years, operators have been trying to make their data centers more efficient by optimizing the cooling and power distribution in the facility - and have more or less ignored the IT equipment in the racks. PUE - the most popular data center metric - simply optimized the ancillary equipment, trying to approach a "perfect" figure of 1.0, where all the power goes into the rack. But what if you...

In this episode, we talk to Cloudflare's CTO John Graham-Cumming about how to respond to an outage at your company. We also discuss why the company bans the use of the word "Edge," and talk about the company's 'Supercloud.'

Can light be used to compute? We talk to Nick Harris, CEO of chip startup Lightmatter, about how the company hopes to harness photons for AI computing and as a data center interconnect.

What does a technologist do at a real estate company? We talk to Digital Realty's CTO Chris Sharp about the importance of understanding both bits and bricks, discuss the company's interconnection efforts, and do a quickfire round on which future technologies will transform the data center.

Most people think the Internet of Things is a recent idea, maybe dating to around the year 2000.  In fact, the idea is some 15 years older than that. In 1985, the Internet was officially two years old. It linked up some 2000 hosts, and a handful of people used email. In that year, cellular phones were the size of bricks, and almost no one had one. And yet, in 1985, Peter T Lewis pre...

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...

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 w...

As grids around the world struggle to meet demand amid heatwaves and wars, data center power and water usage is increasingly coming under scrutiny. We talk to the researcher who has spent years trying to track the sector's consumption, so that regulators and companies alike can access accurate figures on a secretive sector.

What's it like building facilities for Google, in the epicenter of data center construction - Northern Virginia?  Sarah Godbehere has spent the last three years managing construction on a Google campus in Northern Virginia. She tells us what it's like to be a young woman in an industry full of older men, and shares how she turns potential conflicts by asking the right questions.

When a data center firm claims to be 100 percent carbon neutral, can we believe them?  Does every electron used in that data come from a solar panel or a wind farm?   Until we have reliable carbon accounting, we won't know for sure, and operators will continue to rely on renewable energy certificates (RECs) which match energy consumption over a year, instead of hour by hour. Simone...

As sustainability continues to become an increasingly important issue for data center owners and operators, many are tying their financing into ESG-related goals. The likes of Green Bonds see proceeds going towards specific green projects, while Sustainability-Linked Loans see interest payments tied to specific targets such as PUE or water use. Such financing options have been adopted by cloud and...

Cryptocurrency valuations are in freefall, causing mining to halve. But Bitcoin still consumes as much power as entire nations, amid a climate emergency. We talk to Digiconomist's Alex de Vries about the history of crypto, the crash, and learn just how much power the sector uses - and what it means for the planet.

Working from home expanded massively during the pandemic - but were we ready for such a massive change? The proportion of remote workers grew from 17% of all employees worldwide in 2019 to 32% but the companies weren't fully ready for the change and collaboration tools were often pushed beyond what they were designed for.  Alex Cruz Farmer of Cisco ThousandEyes has the tools to...

The world needs hydrogen as part of the replacement for fossil fuels - and data centers could be the catalyst for that.   Mark Monroe, Principal Engineer at Microsoft, explains how the hydrogen economy works. He shows us that hydrogen is not just a proven alternative to diesel for backup, but brings other benefits with it.  If data centers switch this small part of their e...

In this episode of the Zero Downtime podcast, we speak to Leaseweb general counsel Jacqueline van de Werken about how to encourage more women in the data center and cloud industry, and how to retain those that do join.

It's easy to think that sustainable data centers are all about reducing carbon. In fact the earth faces a biodiversity crisis as big as the climate crisis. Data centers can have a role in fighting to prevent extinctions, and produce a lot of other benefits in the process. When you build a data center, you have to see the unintended consequences, says Michelle Wallace of data center promotion group...

Data center operators who want to be sustainable tend to focus in on carbon - but there are a lot more elements in the Periodic Table, And as we progress towards sustainability, we are going to have to consider all of them. In this podcast, Astrid Wynne Rogers , sustainability lead at TechBuyer tells us why we should pay close attention to the lifecycle of our physical servers and the other equipm...

CTOs have traditionally been key positions for research-driven software and technology companies. As colocation companies increasingly move beyond merely serving space and power, the role of the CTO becomes more important.   Holland Barry, Field CTO for Cyxtera, discusses the role of the CTO and Field CTO at the company, the key skills required, and some of the interesting projects the compan...

DCD's Sebastian Moss talks to Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at Kentik, about the developing situation in Ukraine and Russia. We discuss telco disruptions, misinformation, false BGP hijacks, Cogent and Lumen's disconnection claims, whether Russia could drop off from the Internet, and more.

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 tha...

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...