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 Erich Sanchack of Digital Realty.
ERICH SANCHACK, Digital Realty
Erich Sanchack is EVP of Operations at Digital Realty, responsible for overseeing global portfolio operations, global construction, colocation and interconnection service implementation as well as supply chain operations. Sanchack has extensive experience in operational and business development roles in the technology and telecommunications industries, including building and operating data centers. He previously served as Senior Vice President, IT Solutions and New Market Development at CenturyLink where he was responsible for global commercial managed services and IT service offerings. At CenturyLink, he also held the title of Senior Vice President and General Manager, Federal, where he was responsible for the company’s government sector portfolio encompassing network operations, cybersecurity and security operations, managed hosting with cloud and data management services, and a wide array of communications and IT services. Prior to CenturyLink, Sanchack served as an executive at Lockheed Martin for 12 years, where he held various Vice President roles.
Here’s the full text of Erich Sanchack’s insights from our Executive Roundtable:
Data Center Frontier: The largest hyperscale computing players are now seeking dozens of megawatts of power in wholesale data center deals. Is hyperscale now its own market segment, with different criteria and processes? Or can data center developers and the supply chain adapt to the full breadth of requirements in today’s market?
Erich Sanchack: Meeting Hyperscalers’ data center requirements is real estate, capital and resource-intensive, as they operate at much higher density and at much larger scale than general enterprises. The strength of your credit rating and balance sheet has to be able to support the necessary inventory and capacity, even as their needs continue to grow. They are also looking for strong sustainability capabilities, with about half of our top 20 customers having 100 percent renewable goals and two-thirds of them having significant goals in that regard.
Digital Realty has been in this market for a long time, both prior to and boosted by our acquisition of Dupont Fabros last year. Just to give you an idea of the scope of our involvement, our top 10 cloud provider and top 10 content provider customers consume 518MW of power and occupy 6.76 million square feet of space in our data centers. Is it a stand-alone market? We certainly treat it as one.
Data Center Frontier: Enterprises are deploying more workloads in cloud and hybrid cloud scenarios, but most still maintain legacy on-premises data centers. What challenges does this pose for data center management software (DCIM)? How have the software offerings evolved to meet these challenges?
Erich Sanchack: From a technical perspective, DCIM is DCIM, no matter where it resides. While it can be applied on-premises, in colo facilities or in the cloud, someone is always watching the infrastructure, tuning and tweaking to optimize the environment. What I think you may be asking, though, is, “how does enterprise IT manage the totality of their applications and workloads, given that they may reside in so many different places?”
We are certainly seeing the traditional notions of data center management expanded and even overturned, with the traditional DCIM vendors like Schneider Electric, Emerson and Nlyte being used for the physical infrastructure, and new monitoring and management solutions like Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics, AWS CloudWatch and a whole range of others being used to watch and manage application and cloud resource performance. We think we will continue to see expansion of the solution sets to meet specific needs, alongside the usual market consolidation based on larger vendors acquiring smaller, innovative companies.
Our commitment is to continue to develop the underlying platforms and processes to enable our customers and partners to use whatever combination of technologies they need to meet their needs, wherever their infrastructure and applications may reside.
A data center at the Digital Realty data center campus in Richardson, Texas. (Photo: Digital Realty)
Data Center Frontier: There’s growing interest in the use of lithium-ion batteries in data center UPS systems. Are lithium-ion batteries likely to find traction in the data center market? If so, what are the key factors in the rate of adoption?
Erich Sanchack: We believe that lithium-ion batteries will eventually dominate the market based on long-term cost savings and rapid ROI, and we have already made them a standard in our new designs. They are smaller, lighter weight, and lower-maintenance, creating clear cost-efficiencies that can be passed on to our customers.
While there is a lot of investigation into fire suppression issues surrounding their deployment, in the final analysis, there’s really nothing but upside to their ascendance.
Data Center Frontier: Microsoft is deploying underwater data centers. Is this brilliant or crazy? Also, are there other examples of “outside the box” data center innovation that bear watching?
Erich Sanchack: Microsoft is an extremely innovative company moving the data center market’s knowledge forward rapidly with prototypes like this. While we do see that there are risks associated with underwater data centers from a widespread, commercially-scalable perspective, we do believe there will be more shaping of the definition of the operating requirements as new cooling options are presented to the market.
In terms of what they are able to learn, and share, regarding advanced power, cooling, structural considerations and other key data center issues, it’s a very bold and laudable endeavor and something we are eager to learn more about as it progresses.
We do think that it puts a spotlight on one of the most critical issues we face as an industry, with regards to how to cool increasingly dense racks. We anticipate that, over time, air-cooled systems will be phased out and there will be a return to water. We are actively transitioning air cooling to water across our portfolio, at both the storage and chip levels, and using them to cool individual racks of up to 90kWh. From a sustainability standpoint, taking maximum advantage of reclaimed water used in closed systems allows us to advance these initiatives with minimal impact to the environment.