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 Robert McClary of FORTRUST.
Robert McClary, FORTRUST
Robert McClary is Chief Operating Officer of FORTRUST. Since joining FORTRUST in 2001, Robert has held the critical role of building the company into the premier data center services provider and colocation facility that it is today. Robert is responsible for the overall supervision of business operations, high-profile construction and strategic technical direction. He developed and implemented the process controls and procedures that support the continuous uptime and reliability that FORTRUST Denver has delivered for more than 13 years. He is considered one of the leading experts on Management and Operations in the data center industry, and was selected as a finalist by AFCOM for Data Center Manager of the Year. In 2010, Robert received designation as an Accredited Tier Specialist (ATS) by the Uptime Institute. Robert developed and honed his skills during his 16-year tenure in the United States Navy, serving in both enlisted and officer roles. He is a graduate of Southern Illinois University. Speaking on topics such as data center design, construction, management and operations Robert has presented and participated on many panels at industry events such as 451’s Uptime Symposium, Data Center Dynamics, 451’s Hosting Cloud Transformation Summit, and IT Summit Denver.
Here’s the full text of Rob McClary’s insights from our Executive Roundtable:
Data Center Frontier: What will be the key trends that will shape the data center industry in 2017?
Robert McClary: One of the first trends will continue to be rack densities increasing as IT environments become more optimized and hardware is refreshed. You’ll see per rack kW increase, as we’ve seen over the past several years.
Second, I think edge computing is going to start pushing the modular approach to data centers. Long story short, we’re going to have a higher volume of data centers, but smaller data centers that are going to be in a distributed model to be able to handle application latency and basically access to the consumer market. Edge computing is an unfortunate reaction to poor bandwidth infrastructure to the consumer in the US, so we’re going to have to be able to deploy greater numbers of data centers in dispersed locations, which I think is going to accelerate the growth of modular approaches to design and construction of data centers.
Another continuing trend is the data center end user’s increasing demand for customer-facing DCIM tools to be able to validate SLA achievements and forecast future demands on their IT environment.
A fourth trend that I see is for the last several years we’ve been looking at how to get a data center more efficient with respect to PUE or cooling efficiency. I think you’ll also see a push towards better infrastructure components than the traditional static UPS systems, batteries, and switchgear. I think you’re going to see approaches that will conserve real estate or data center footprints, and one of those approaches would be modular, but also to different types of energy storage and kinetic energy approaches when it comes to UPSs and electrical distribution infrastructure. We’ve been focused probably for the past five to eight years on the mechanical side of the data center. I think you’re going to see an increased focus on efficiencies in the electrical distribution side.
Data Center Frontier: There are signs that cloud technologies are gaining traction in the enterprise sector. How is this affecting the balance of the deployment of enterprise workloads between on-premises facilities, service provider data centers, and public cloud platforms? What will this look like in 2017?
Robert McClary: I think with the fact that a lot of enterprises are looking to incorporate cloud technology in their IT environments, with respect to whether it’s infrastructure-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service, this is going to accelerate the growth of service provider data centers because a lot of those choices in cloud offerings are going to need a marketplace type environment. And what better than a multi-tenant data center or colocation provider to be able to establish that for the end user? The enterprise IT consumer really wants choice and convenience. They don’t want to be tied to one individual cloud offering, whether public, private or hybrid. They want to be able to choose among several types of cloud offerings and providers. The colocation data center then sets up well to be able to provide that to the enterprise user.[clickToTweet tweet=”Rob McClary: Security usually defines whether you choose private or public cloud. Those lines are becoming blurrier. ” quote=”Rob McClary: Security usually defines whether you choose private or public. Those lines are becoming blurrier. “]
You can have a business unit in one cloud and another business unit in a separate cloud. Or different areas of transactional functions. Hybrid cloud was a mix of private and public cloud. Everything’s hybrid now. There’s some things you want to put in public clouds and some things you don’t. Security usually defines whether you choose private or public. Those lines are becoming a lot blurrier. A lot of it is just people becoming better educated on what cloud platforms actually have in place when it comes to security and what they don’t. When you’re looking at your IT workloads, you’re going to have to make decisions on which ones you want in private cloud, which ones are okay to be in public cloud, and which ones you’re going to want to have on your own hardware to be able to control.
A glimpse inside a FORTRUST data center. (Image: FORTRUST)
Data Center Frontier: How is the pricing and availability of renewable energy impacting your data center business? Are customers being more specific about what types of green power solutions they are seeking?
Robert McClary: Renewable energy is more of a touchpoint with enterprise users in data centers. I think it’s less of a requirement when it comes to colocation. With colocation, they’re still looking for the best price and the highest availability and reliability. Some colocation data centers have access to renewable energy sources from their utility providers and some don’t. A lot depends on where you are geographically. We happen to be in a regulated utility, so our utility provider does do a significant percentage of their electrical generation through alternative energy sources. However, I think it’s becoming less of a checkpoint for a prospective colocation client.
I think also you’re going to see people looking at alternate means of uninterruptible power supplies in the form of kinetic energy versus traditional lead acid battery storage. The recycling, the nature of lead acid batteries, whether they’re wet-cell or they’re valve regulated and sealed, is -from a recycling standpoint- an environmental issue that we need to look at.
Data Center Frontier: What’s the state of modular data center solutions in 2017? What do you see ahead for these solutions?
Robert McClary: Over the past four or five years I’ve seen the numbers of actual modular solutions grow in volume, so there are more choices when it comes to modular approaches to data center design and construction. I see those continuing to grow. I think what’s made the adoption of these types of solutions slower over the past few years than it should have been is just general contractors and engineering firms becoming familiar with the technologies and being able to consult to an owner/operator on the advantages and significant cost savings of some of these solutions.
To get a little edgy with this, quite frankly, the reason for that is that they lose money. When you have an approach that may cost you margin, you’re not motivated to provide that to an owner. When you can keep doing the same thing that you’ve been doing, it’s easier. Long story short: when people have to take a financial haircut, they don’t necessarily run to the barbershop. I think the adoption rate has been slowed because of that.
What do I see ahead? They will continue to become more plentiful as owners become more educated and demand capital efficiencies in data center design and construction. I think it’s just an evolution in the data center industry, but because it has a monetary loss to contractors and a cost savings to owners associated with it, sadly it’s going to be slow to evolve.
The other thing we want to talk about with this is the containment of the IT environment. Why we’ve been fighting with all kinds of different solutions over the years about how to contain the hot aisle and the cold aisle, and how to separate the two in a raised floor environment. We’re basically putting a band aid on a bad approach, instead of fixing the root cause of why containment is so lousy in a raised floor environment. We need to figure out different ways to deliver the IT environment in a data center. Why not encapsulate the IT environment and have the containment built in as part of the infrastructure instead of building out infrastructure that’s basically open white space and then trying to contain the hot aisle and the cold aisle after the fact? Build it into the design. Start designing the data center from the IT environment back through the MEP instead of the reverse.