Not Your Father’s Data Center

The increasing power consumption of data centers and the subsequent challenges of powering and cooling them have emerged as significant concerns for industry professionals. The quest for sustainability in the field is increasingly urgent, given that data centers are estimated to consume about 50 times more power than traditional offices, and the reliance on fossil fuels and hydrocarbons is unsusta...

The 7×24 Exchange International is known for its conferences and helping companies and organizations from several industries, such as manufacturing and technology, collaborate and share information to improve. It’s a premier group which data center professionals can benefit from quite a bit of information.  What are the advantages of the 7x24 Conference, and what does planning it entail?  For an e...

Burnout is a familiar concept in the tech field, with 40 percent of workers saying they want to quit due to stress, fatigue, and poor work-life balance. This can be especially true for startup companies, which face challenges and uncertainties that can place added stress on employees. But one company, Yerbo, is seeking to change that.   On today’s episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center by Compas...

The phrase “energy crisis” has been tossed around frequently the past few years, and not without reason: as demand for fossil fuels skyrockets, climate change speeds up too. So while the U.S. puts legislation into place to help mitigate the climate crisis, there’s another problem in the process - our energy grid might not be able to keep up with these environmentally friendly power alternatives. W...

In 2022, nearly 21% of persons with a disability were employed , but were much less likely to be employed than a person with no disability. For one company, however, people with disabilities are an untapped talent pool with lots of potential. Growing their data labeling and AI business, Enabled Intelligence looks to build an inclusive environment for those with neurodivergence, as they see what ot...

By providing the infrastructure required to store, process, and transport enormous amounts of data, supporting a wide range of applications and services, data centers in general play a crucial role in the digital economy. The "Data Center Capital of the World" title sometimes makes reference to Loudoun County in Virginia, which is a popular location for data centers. The county has become a desira...

Jonathan Friedmann knew the semiconductor business would find its way into his life someday. Friedmann, CEO & Founder of Speedata, spoke to Raymond Hawkins about his career and his latest venture, Speedata, which provides a state-of-the-art Analytics Processing Unit to optimize big data and analytics workloads. While data growth is expanding at an exponential rate, processing speeds are laggin...

Born, raised, and educated in Germany, Carsten Baumann, Solution Architect and Director of Strategic Initiatives at Schneider Electric, calls the United States his home these days. Baumann’s travels took many different routes, from a town outside of Frankfurt to the glitz of Los Angeles and now a quiet, more rural ZIP code in Colorado. But one constant remained: engineering. Baumann spoke with Ray...

The world is in an energy crisis caused by many events affecting billions. Yet, while others are focusing on how this might affect oil & gas prices, the critical piece missing from the news is how this will involve a business that helps lift the entire market: data centers. So, what impact will the crisis have on data centers, and what is the forecast for the industry heading into 2023?   On t...

Like most people involved with Data Centers, Andy Lawrence, Executive Director of Research at Uptime Institute, didn’t start his career that way; Lawrence’s beginning was IT. As a journalist covering all things IT, Lawrence gravitated to the economic and ecological impacts, which led to his interest in data centers. He joined ‘the Hawk’, Raymond Hawkins, to talk about his career and discuss some o...

Who doesn’t love a sequel? Raymond Hawkins sure does, and back by popular demand for another episode of fantastic industry insights, Fred Thiel, CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings, joined the Hawk to talk about all sorts of things. Top of mind was how current events are shaping the crypto community and how crypto could impact the events unfolding in Europe.     The current state of affairs could pro...

The summer of 2021 brought news of Texas and Oklahoma leaving the Big 12 for the SEC. This summer USC and UCLA rocked the landscape of college conferences once again. The schools announced they would leave the Pac-12 to join the Big Ten. The deserted conferences are shifting the narrative to expansion for survival.   After the summer 21 news from Texas and Oklahoma, it’s become clear that two conf...

The Hawk’s talk went nuclear again. Raymond Hawkins brought on Dr. Everett Redmond. A Senior Technical Advisor of New Reactors and Advanced Technology at the Nuclear Energy Institute, Dr. Redmond joined the show for a fascinating talk on nuclear energy and energy in general for the data center industry. Dr. Redmond studied nuclear engineering at MIT, and along with scuba diving, his passion is nuc...

The hats he wears are many: Chairman & Founder of Infrastructure Masons (iMason,) CEO of Virtual Power Systems, Co-Host of The Next Wave Podcast, and Founder & CEO of a strategic advisory and consulting service for Startups, Fortune 500 companies, and Investment firms. One might call him a living legend in the data storage space. Back by popular demand, Dean Nelson joined Not Your Father’s...

How did a Texas boy, who swore up and down he’d never leave Texas for Oklahoma, wind up involved with the data storage industry in Oklahoma? Chris Brown, CTO at Uptime Institute, isn’t 100% sure himself, but spending the past 25 years in the Sooner state means something went right. And Brown said the data center life treated him well so far.   “I was fortunate enough to get into some different com...

Rick Ward, CTO, and Founder of Orbits Edge, described how space is becoming increasingly accessible to laypeople. “We’re getting more and more to the place where I can see myself there. And that is a big deal. You don’t have a space-bearing civilization when the only people who go up there are less numerous than Olympic gold medalists.”  Ward and Raymond Hawkins, Chief Revenue Officer of Compass D...

Rick Ward, CTO, and Founder of Orbits Edge, described how space is becoming increasingly accessible to laypeople. “We’re getting more and more to the place where I can see myself there. And that is a big deal. You don’t have a space-bearing civilization when the only people who go up there are less numerous than Olympic gold medalists.”  Ward and Raymond Hawkins, Chief Revenue Officer of Compass D...

International trade law expert reveals the difficult yet satisfying work that the CCIA performs to keep tech at consumers’ fingertips. 

Host Raymond Hawkins switches up the usual topic of data to bring listeners a lively discussion of March Madness picks. 

The data center industry is probably not the first industry one would think of when it comes to changes from the pandemic since data is stored virtually. Tim Huffman, Vice President of CBRE, joined Host Raymond Hawkins, Chief Revenue Officer of Compass Datacenters, to discuss the surprising number of shifts that actually occurred in the industry.

Data has moved from the building filling mainframes of the 60's technology to satellite gathering machine learning and AI processing at the speed of light. Megabytes have turned into Petabytes, leaving businesses to absorb the paradigm shift of data collection. In this episode of Not Your Father's Data Center, host Raymond Hawkins and Doug Mohney, Editor-in-Chief of Space IT Bridge, look at the ex...

Host Raymond Hawkins discovered that despite lacking formal leadership training, Cy Wakeman, President & Founder of Reality Based Leadership, has written a plethora of books in the leadership genre. As a former counselor in human psychology, Wakeman revamped traditional leadership views. She explained, “I saw the world from a viewpoint of shared accountability at the time that most people were...

Fred Thiel, CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings, one of the largest bitcoin mining operations in North America, joined host Raymond Hawkins to discuss cryptocurrency. From blockchain to bitcoin, Thiel covered it all, including all the nooks and crannies in between. “The blockchain is essentially a chain of linked blocks that each block consists of a certain number of transactions,” Thiel said. “If yo...