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 Brad Alexander of DartPoints.
BRAD ALEXANDER,
DartPoints
As Vice President and CTO, Brad is responsible for guiding the company’s technology strategy and execution, ensuring maximum uptime and performance, and driving ongoing product development. Working with organizations of all sizes and across all industries, Brad is a trusted advisor in helping clients determine the right solution for their IT infrastructure. Brad earned his Computer Information Systems degree from Clemson University.
Here’s the full text of Brad Alexander’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?
Brad Alexander: Edge computing is really starting to become about the supporting features and functions of whichever platform people are using. Bare metal at the Edge has been and will continue to be popular, but edge computing platforms that can make networking, PaaS, or containerization more scalable and easier to use are growing in popularity. Content providers are pushing to make compute at the edge easier to consume, and billions of dollars are being put into smaller tier two and tier three markets. These are the markets where DartPoints deploys digital infrastructure and cloud.
Something that has really gained traction with our customers is data thinning, which is where data is processed at the edge and then sent back to a centralized storage repository. Artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge is also booming right now. One of the fastest-growing use cases we’re seeing is in the retail industry. Companies are using AI to intelligently process data and consumer interaction in real time to identify target audiences, and build focused advertising campaigns in real-time, and at scale.
AI and IoT have transformed the retail industry for businesses by providing intelligent, real-time analytics on specifics such as customer preferences, inventory requirements and pricing trends. In addition, these advancements improve the customer experience by ensuring stores have the items they want, when they want them, at the price they want to pay. AI really is a game changer in the retail space.
“AI and IoT have transformed the retail industry for businesses by providing intelligent, real-time analytics … AI really is a game changer in the retail space.”
Brad Alexander, DartPoints
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?
Brad Alexander: Horizontal scalability not only reduces the risk of lost data, but it also ensures that there is no single point of failure – this is a huge safety net. This same principle is also what makes a multi-cloud, multi-provider solution so attractive to companies that are focused on reliability. A multi-cloud platform adds an extra layer of protection. If one provider experiences an infrastructure breakdown or is victim to a cyber-attack, companies with more than one provider can quickly switch to the other provider or back everything up to a private cloud to secure important data.
Geographic and safety awareness are also important contributing factors to uptime and data security. Some locations are at lower risk for natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes minimize geographic risks and make it an attractive location for colocation tenants. Data center locations should be carefully evaluated based on climate as well as environmental conditions and the probability of a natural disaster.
Network visibility and control helps avoid issues before they occur, which is why application intelligence is a key component of reliability for service providers. It gives them the power to collect reliable, actionable application data for more effective monitoring and security. Intelligent applications also understand the proper flow of data and can detect traffic that might indicate a threat. This protects confidential information from application security attacks.
When it comes to uptime and business continuity, the number one and number two threats are human error and security and procedure flaws. The end user is typically the most overlooked threat to a business, and is a common entry point for ransomware, malware, phishing participants, and the source of data leaks from social engineering attacks. Companies shouldn’t assume that network hardware and security software will protect against end user mistakes. My best advice is to train, reinforce, test, review, and train some more.
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?
Brad Alexander: The data center supply chain is extremely strained currently. Transportation bottlenecks, massive labor and material shortages, and the increasing cost of critical components are causing roadblocks in both new construction and expansion. For example, we are currently going through an expansion project in one of our markets. The project is 14 percent over budget due to increased labor and components costs and is five months delayed because of generator shortages. Smaller components such as servers and storage are being delayed an additional eight weeks, and we have seen delays as long as seven months for various pieces of core networking equipment. Nearly every hardware vendor has increased costs by 7-12 percent since the beginning of 2022.
I feel the industry has built considerable capacity in the cloud and major data center markets over the last three years, and a critical capacity constraint has not yet fully been felt. However, customers may soon have to rely on more regions or multiple providers to meet capacity requirements. Smaller markets where the peak capacity was only a fraction of the larger markets are feeling the delays in expansion as these edge markets are gaining more and more traction.
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?
Brad Alexander: I feel strongly that nuclear power could be an alternative power option for many dense data center markets. Power purchase agreements for densely populated data center areas could be a very attractive option that would provide ongoing sustainable nuclear power to many providers in metro regions.
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are still a long way out, in my opinion. In the next 30 years, however, I can envision SMRs gaining traction – again in dense areas – where a single data center provider could power its entire metro campus by deploying and maintaining its own plant.