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 John Hewitt of Vertiv for the first quarter of 2019.
JOHN HEWITT, Vertiv
John Hewitt joined Vertiv in October 2017 as President of the Americas, with responsibility for operations and business development in the United States, Latin America including Mexico, and Canada. Prior to Vertiv, John held leadership roles at technology companies in the US and abroad, including Vice President and Managing Director at Delphi in Detroit, MI, where he reset the company’s go-to-market approach, product line strategy, and inorganic growth strategies; Senior Vice President and General Manager and other executive roles at TE Connectivity in Philadelphia, PA, Shanghai, China, and Frankfurt, Germany, where he generated above market growth and improved profitability; and executive Finance and Supply Chain roles at Motorola in California and Pennsylvania. John earned a Bachelor’s degree in Finance and Accounting from Oklahoma State University, and an MBA in International Business from Thunderbird School of Global Management.
Here’s the full text of John Hewitt’s insights from our Executive Roundtable:
Data Center Frontier: How is the increasingly data-centric nature of business impacting enterprise demand for data center services? What trends are you seeing in enterprise data center and colocation requirements?
John Hewitt: Data volume and demand for services is continuing to grow as more organizations advance digital transformation efforts, and IoT and other data-intensive edge applications build momentum. That has made speed and scalability critical priorities for data center operators, both within the data center and at the edge. They need the ability to add capacity faster than they could in the past and modular, integrated infrastructure solutions are making that possible.
From complete pre-fabricated data centers to fully contained rack and row systems, pre-configured infrastructure systems give operators the agility to add capacity where they need it and when they need it. The modular nature of today’s infrastructure solutions also allows easier and faster scalability. The final piece of the puzzle is improved visibility and control of data center and edge operations. Deploying remote monitoring and management solutions can improve their ability to predict future demand and simplify the management of distributed facilities and edge sites.
Data Center Frontier: We’ve all been hearing a lot lately about 5G wireless technology. What might 5G mean for the data center industry, and when will its impact be felt?
John Hewitt: We are seeing rapid progress in 5G, and this technology will have an impact on the industry sooner than many expect. We see 5G as a primary driver of the continued growth in edge computing.
Last year we embarked on a mission to analyze the data characteristics of emerging and future edge use cases to identify archetypes that could simplify infrastructure deployment. One of the outcomes of that effort was an increased appreciation of how important the high bandwidth and low latency 5G delivers will be to advancing the maturity of many emerging edge use cases. As 5G builds momentum, we’ll see increased need for quickly deployable and repeatable edge infrastructure designs that allow businesses to leverage the full benefits of 5G as the technology becomes available.
The Vertiv kiosk at the Gartner IO conference highlighted the breadth of the company’s ambitions. (Photo: Rich Miller)
Data Center Frontier: There’s a growing focus on automating data center operations, a trend driven by staffing challenges and the need for remote management of “lights out” edge data centers. Do you expect to see more automation? What are the most promising approaches in this area?
John Hewitt: Over the last 12 months we’ve seen a surge in operators deploying remote monitoring and management solutions to support lights out edge data centers. We expect this trend to continue as the number of edge deployments grows.
Remote management and monitoring has always been a smart business decision. Now, it is becoming a necessity due to both labor challenges and the complexity of managing increasingly distributed IT networks using manual processes. New cloud connected service models also are emerging to enable fast, cost-effective services for distributed IT to further enhance the ability of organizations to maintain lights-out facilities while ensuring high availability.
Data Center Frontier: The business community is increasingly focused on climate trends and severe weather events, and how they may impact real estate and IT operations. What considerations does climate change present for the data center sector, and what steps should data center companies be considering to address them?
John Hewitt: Severe weather is just one of the many risks data center operators must address to ensure continuity. Those who take emergency preparedness seriously in terms of system configurations, disciplined maintenance and testing practices and well-defined backup plans have shown the ability to remain operational amidst severe weather events. Also, data centers that use infrastructure monitoring and management tools have been found, on average, to have less downtime than data centers that don’t use these tools.
Thinking beyond weather to changes in climate, we can anticipate corresponding changes in resource availability. Water, for example, is an incredibly valuable resource that is becoming more limited in certain parts of the world. The availability and cost of water absolutely should be a consideration for data center companies, and water-free cooling systems are one example of a technology that can address those challenges.