The Data Center Frontier Executive Roundtable features insights from industry executives with lengthy experience in the data center industry. Here’s a look at the insights from Amber Caramella of Netrality Data Centers and Infrastructure Masons.
AMBER CARAMELLA,
Infrastructure Masons and Netrality
Amber Caramella is the Chief Revenue Officer at Netrality Data Centers. She is responsible for Netrality’s revenue generation strategy and execution, overseeing sales, marketing, interconnection, network solutions, strategic alliances, and channel partnerships. Amber has more than 20 years’ experience in the telecommunications and technology industries. Prior to joining Netrality, she served as Senior Vice President of Sales at Zayo, where she built the company’s global cloud, software, infrastructure, and data center vertical segment. Amber has held a variety of sales and executive roles at Lumen Communications, XO Communications, and Allegiance Telecom. Amber is on the Board of Directors at Virtual Power Systems, and the Advisory Council of Infrastructure Masons, the Global Executive Sponsor for IM Women, and is part of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee raising awareness and education for underrepresented groups. With her extensive experience in digital infrastructure, Amber’s goal is to increase the visibility and career advancement of women transforming the culture and ideology, leading to the development of a diverse pipeline for future industry talent.
Here’s the full text of Amber Caramella’s insights from our Executive Roundtable:
Data Center Frontier: How is edge computing evolving, and what use cases and applications are gaining the most traction with customers?
Amber Caramella: Edge computing is evolving at a feverish pace. The increase of remote workers, the surge in data, 5G, and the Internet of Things (IoT) play a pivotal role in this evolution.
Gartner predicts by the end of 2022, 31% of workers worldwide will be fully remote or following a hybrid model. The United States will have 53% of its workforce working remotely. This trend has organizations shifting from traditional servers to a hybrid model where they have a combination of cloud computing and colocation for flexibility, security, and a way to enhance their existing cloud infrastructure.
Modern-day innovations are needed to enable a digitally connected world relying on 5G wireless connectivity. The IoT market is growing exponentially, with connected devices predicted to reach 31 billion by year’s end. The Internet of Things connects more and more devices forcing networks to transition – from being on a straight one-lane highway where information is going to and from a central location to something that looks like a web where interconnected devices stream to and from many locations, capturing, storing, processing, and analyzing data near the source where the data was generated instead of the central server or data center.
The digital world continues to evolve, and has made great strides across all industries. Edge computing use cases like augmented reality, virtual reality, telemedicine, biotechnology, robotics, and autonomous vehicles require service provisioning closer to users.
Diving deeper into a few of these use cases, biotechnology is one of the most data-intensive industries. Excessive data is required to develop and trial new specimens, new products, cures, and solutions. 5G power is redefining innovation in biotechnology, enabling labs and devices to process and transmit data quickly, utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to track and analyze billions of molecular interactions, expedite the development of new advancements, shorten the R&D time for new drugs, and gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between genetics and diseases.
Data Center Frontier: Last year’s major service outages at Facebook and Amazon Web Services sharpened the focus on data center reliability. As companies embrace the benefits of cloud and hybrid IT architectures, what are the key strategies for ensuring uptime?
Amber Caramella: The key to uptime begins with a fault-tolerant design that mitigates single points of failure, as the foundation of infrastructure. Companies that work closely with their vendors to collaborate and play a role in the planning, design, and build phase have greater resiliency in their network.
A preventive maintenance strategy — including regularly scheduled maintenance check-ins executed by your data center operations team – ensures power and cooling systems are running at optimal levels and evaluates when systems need to be replaced or upgraded. Monitoring and reporting will notify operators if a system is down. Real-time reporting is essential to address issues before they escalate and cause system outages.
Data Center Frontier: How would you assess the state of the data center supply chain? Are the global supply chain challenges impacting the delivery of data center capacity?
Amber Caramella: The supply chain continues to struggle, considering extensive global shortages of labor, materials, and equipment resulting in longer lead times. Shortages and impact vary across regions and types of equipment.
Broadly, I have seen supply chain shortages and shipping delays affect delivery time frames with new data center builds and bringing new capacity online.
Capacity planning, creating, and executing strategies is critical. Key strategies include ordering equipment ahead of time — not only when needed and storing extra inventory. Expand your supplier list to provide optionality for the availability and delivery of equipment. Establishing a roadmap, capacity planning, relative to your data center needs is paramount.
Inside a Netrality data center facility in Houston. (Image: Netrality)
Data Center Frontier: Several data center observers, including The Uptime Institute, have highlighted nuclear power as an option for data center operators to create a low-carbon energy future. Is turning to nuclear power – either through power purchase agreements or modular reactors – a viable option for the data center industry? Should it be?
Amber Caramella: Nuclear power is a viable option for creating a low-carbon energy future. However, it has pros and cons. When thinking about nuclear power, there are benefits and drawbacks. For example, uranium is technically non-renewable, has high upfront costs, and produces nuclear waste. That said, there are some benefits in that it is carbon-free electricity, has a small land footprint, high power output, produces low-cost energy, and releases zero carbon emissions.
Yes, I view power purchase agreements (PPAs) for renewable electricity and modular reactors as sustainable options when turning to nuclear power because these long-term renewable energy contracts focused on decarbonizing electricity consumption, and modular reactors reduce economic, security, technical, and regulatory barriers for the next generation of nuclear power. Both are a solid start in decreasing our carbon footprint nationally and globally.
The clean energy revolution is expanding into renewable energy sources, including solar, wind, hydropower, and geothermal power. It has and will continue to transform how the world produces energy and what effects it will have on our environment. I am seeing more companies commit to implementing decarbonization strategies to reduce carbon footprint which is promising but believe we need to have more meaningful industry collaboration to drive the right behaviors in the market.