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 Ted Behrens of Chatsworth Products.
TED BEHRENS
Chatsworth Products
Ted Behrens is Executive Vice President of Global Engineering, Product Management & Marketing. Ted is responsible for strategy, product management, engineering development and marketing efforts for all CPI global product platforms. Ted leads the teams responsible for bringing innovative solutions to CPI’s customers. These teams include Product Management, Marketing, Engineering and Operations. In addition to his extensive data center and product development experience, Ted provides comprehensive product sales assistance and leads new market identification projects and product positioning. Ted carries this experience over to also serve as one of CPI’s expert speakers, presenting at various events to educate attendees about power and infrastructure management solutions.
Here’s the full text of Ted Behrens’ insights from our Executive Roundtable:
Data Center Frontier: Over the past year, some of the industry’s largest companies have developed new designs for their data centers. In a number of cases, these redesigns have featured changes in cooling systems. What do you see as the important trends driving how data center operators are approaching cooling?
Ted Behrens: Certainly air-side economization or “free air” cooling has been a method that is proving out as a key trend across so many geographies. This has only become pervasive as the industry has challenged the “legacy standards” such as server inlet temperatures and air particulates.
I believe advancements in semiconductor technologies coupled with adoption of GPUs (graphics processing units), the industry will continue to create more headroom for existing cooling methods, whereas maybe five years ago many predicted liquid cooling would become a pervasive technology.
Data Center Frontier: Edge computing and the Internet of Things are currently two of the hottest topics in the data center industry. How might these trends impact how we build and deploy data center capacity?
Ted Behrens: The industry as a whole has gone through many iterations on how we view a “unit of scale” when deploying infrastructure over the last couple of decades. There has been a significant focus in recent years to drive centralized infrastructure in order to achieve standardization and ease system management challenges. The growth in demand for content has outpaced the capacity of a centralized infrastructure model, particularly when you look out along the near-term growth curve. The recent trend in edge build-out really is a course correction to match up with this new curve and once again redefines the appropriate “unit of scale.”
Data Center Frontier: The cloud computing sector appears to be entering a phase of more concentrated growth. How do you see the cloud evolving as a business, and how might this impact data center service providers and vendors?
Ted Behrens: The cloud is revolutionizing the distribution of software while enabling compute and storage as a demand based utility model. While this has led to massive growth within a subset of cloud service providers, the industry-wide tidal shift is fueling growth across most providers servicing this sector. In coming years I would expect many vendors and service providers to pivot into specialized segments or niches that will both leverage the large scale cloud providers infrastructure but also layer services in order to meet the end-user’s business objectives.
Data Center Frontier: Recent cloud growth has increased the focus on “speed to market” – the ability to deploy data center capacity rapidly and efficiently. How would you evaluate the industry’s progress on provisioning timelines, and where do you see opportunities to improve it?
Ted Behrens: The growth of the hyper-scale market and subsequent slowing of Enterprise data center build-outs has put extraordinary pressure on the supply chain component of infrastructure deployment. With Enterprise scale build out projects are spread over a broad spectrum of customers and timelines as opposed to the concentration driven by the hyper-scale customer. This will support innovation in developing a robust, regional, yet flexible delivery model as a key differentiator amongst suppliers.
The challenge will be to find that appropriate balance point between price, availability and ability to customize infrastructure in order to serve the rapid evolution of the business needs.