Executive Insights: Marvin Rowell of BASELAYER

MARVIN ROWELL, BASELAYER

Marvin Rowell serves as VP, Global Support and Service at BASELAYER. In this role he is responsible for support and service functions for the BASELAYER Anywhere modular data center product line. Prior to his current role, Rowell was VP of Quality and Test for IO’s modular data center product lines. Marvin also served as the Operations Manager for IO responsible for over 1 million square feet of data center space and 50 megawatts of power infrastructure. Prior to joining IO, Rowell served at Cannon and Wendt Electric managing teams on high profile jobs such as Stadiums, Resorts, Hospitals, and Data Centers. Rowell studied electrical science and has completed the IBEW Apprenticeship Program to obtain a Journeyman Wire License.

Here’s the full text of Marvin Rowell’s insights from our Executive Roundtable:

Data Center Frontier: The data center industry has become disciplined in its construction and deployment of capital. In the past year, we’ve seen growing interest from capital providers eager to invest in the sector, while cloud providers are seeking larger and faster builds. What’s your take on how the industry is managing supply, demand and risk?

Marvin Rowell: The past year saw major activity in terms of new data center builds and M&A. From the finance side, colocation data centers offer investors an asset type with better cash flow and more liquidity. From the webscale side, end users leverage colocation data centers to quickly add capacity to keep pace in the ongoing cloud arms race.

With this intersection of available capital and high demand, efficient market concepts should drive colocation providers to better capacity and resourcing models. Aside from a select few providers, our observation is that this has not yet happened to the industry as a whole; there are still many opportunities to apply analytics, almost in a ‘Moneyball’ fashion, towards optimizing supply, demand and risk.

Also, as edge demand grows, an inability to utilize data to systematically provision resources will only make the inefficiencies more pronounced and costly for data center providers. Those who have the tools to analyze telemetry across infrastructure, IT, and operations will find themselves in front of the pack.

Data Center Frontier:  Advanced data centers were early adopters of the Internet of Things, using sensors to detect and manage temperature and humidity. What’s the current state of instrumentation in most data centers, and how is that influencing the software decisions that end users are making to manage their IT environments?

Marvin Rowell: In many enterprise data centers, we see a larger number of disparate or custom Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems deployed to provide traditional data center metrics (space, power, and cooling). However, just like in the IoT market, I do not envision there will be a “winner take all” platform across all use cases; varying layouts ranging from traditional raised floor to modular will result in different sensor packages for different needs.

As a result, software decisions should focus on selecting tools which combine data from multiple sources seamlessly. These tools should also bring in third-party external feeds to allow operators/users the ability to correlate what is happening inside the four walls of a data center with the macro events outside of it.

A BASELAYER module at the SRP DataStation near Phoenix. (Photo: BASELAYER)

Data Center Frontier:  Everyone is talking about the edge and the potential for a more distributed infrastructure, but there seem to be many definitions of its location. What do you see as the most promising opportunities in edge computing, in terms of location, form factor and timing?

Marvin Rowell: To many, edge computing is defined as entering a new market or expanding operations to a smaller population center. With greater demand for products/services such as IoT, 5G/6G, and high bandwidth content distribution, this way of defining edge computing only scratches the surface. If we segment internet connectivity into Long Haul, Metro Core, Metro Edge, and Local Access we see opportunities at the Metro Edge layer for both rural/urban environments; BASELAYER recently co-presented with Clint Poole of Salt River Project (SRP) on this topic.

If large-scale data centers typical reside in the Long Haul or Metro Core zones, the Metro Edge (potentially at utility substations and/or cell towers site) offers the most opportunity for the expanding edge infrastructure. A distributed modular data center footprint in this zone would fill in the gaps and connect centralized nodes with fiber enabled residential and commercial endpoint locations. We estimate that this will take place in the next two to three years to allow for high availability data center capacity across all layers of the network stack.

Data Center Frontier:  It appears that a dwindling number of users are building new corporate data centers, with most new workloads shifting to cloud or colo environments. What’s your take on this transition, and what will it mean for legacy corporate data centers? Do these facilities have a future as candidates for retrofit or repurposing?

Marvin Rowell: Large corporations often diversify their data center assets across three resource pools (1) on-premise, (2) colocation, and (3) cloud. While many new applications fit nicely to a cloud environment, not all follow suit based requirements (latency, security, regulatory needs, etc.). Therefore, we do see an ongoing need for on-premise data centers, however their usage may change over time.

We’ve seen many companies exploring modular solutions for their new builds to supplement and upgrade their on-premises infrastructure while they transition their legacy data center buildings into office space. Enterprises can then consolidate their staff into one physical location allowing them to eliminate lease and rent costs. The result is significant savings with the added benefit of updated data center capacity.

See the entire Data Center Frontier Executive Roundtable for insights from additional executives and topical stories on the latest data center trends.