Data Center Frontier Show podcast discusses microreactor and SMR nuclear power generation for data centers. Guests James Walker and Jay Jiang Yu explore the advantages of microreactors, their potential impact on the industry, and safety concerns. They also talk about deploying functional systems in data centers, working with Idaho National Labs, and the prospects of nuclear power for remote locations.

Brian Kennedy, Director of Business Development and Marketing at Natron Energy, discusses the benefits of sodium-ion battery technology for data centers. They explore the unique chemistry of Natron Energy's batteries, its safety features, high power density, and fast recharge capabilities. The podcast also covers technology comparison, battery longevity, applications in critical power and peak load shaving, sustainability advantages, and major industry partnerships.

Steven Carlini, VP of Innovation at Schneider Electric, joins the show to discuss challenges of AI in data centers. Topics include power demands of AI workloads, innovative cooling solutions, managing extreme rack power densities, liquid cooling for AI, and updates to environmental sustainability metrics.

Data center operations leader Brian discusses implementing renewable power strategies in data centers, including a year-long project measuring the viability of 24/7 carbon-free energy. They also address the importance of addressing noise disturbances, enhancing community relations, and increasing efficiency in data centers. EdgeConnex aims to achieve low power utilization efficiency and 100% renewable energy by 2030 while considering the environmental impact on surrounding communities.

For this special episode of the DCF Show podcast, Data Center Frontier's founder and present Editor at Large, Rich Miller, returns for a visit. Tune in to hear Rich engage with the site's daily editors, Matt Vincent and David Chernicoff, in a discussion covering a range of current data center industry news and views. Topics include: Dominion Energy's transmission line expansion in Virginia; Aligned Data Centers' market exit in Maryland over a rejected plan for backup diesel generators; an update on issues surrounding Virginia's proposed Prince William Digital Gateway project; Rich's take on the recent Flexential/Cloudflare outages in Hillsboro, Oregon; and more. Here's a timeline of key points discussed on the podcast: :10 - For those concerned that the inmates might be running the asylum, the doctor is now in: Rich discusses his latest beat as DCF Editor at Large. 1:30 -  We look at the power situation in No. Virginia as explained by one of Rich's latest articles, vis a vis what's going to be required to support growth already in the pipeline, in the form of contracts that Dominion Energy has for power. "Of course, the big issue there is transmission lines," adds Miller. "That's the real constraint on data center power delivery right now. You can build local lines and even substations much more quickly than you can transmission at the regional level. That's really where the bottlenecks are right now." 3:00 - Senior Editor David Chernicoff asks for Rich's take on Aligned Data Centers' recent market exit in Maryland, related to its rejected plan for backup diesel generators. "Is this really going to be the future of how large-scale data center projects are going to have to be approached, with more focus put on dealing with permission to build?" wonders Chernicoff, adding, "And are we going to see a more structured data center lobbying effort on the local level beyond what, say, the DCC [Data Center Coalition] currently does?" 5:19 - In the course of his reponse, Rich says he thinks we'll see just about every data center company realizing the importance of doing their research on the full range of permissions required to build these megascale campuses, which are only getting bigger. 6:12 - Rich adds that he thinks the situation in Maryland illustrates how it's important for data center developers to step back for a strategic discussion regarding depth of planning. "The first thing to know," he points out, "is that Maryand was eager to have the data center industry. They specifically passed incentives that would make them more competitive with Virginia. They saw that Northern Virginia was getting super crowded...and they thought, we've got lots of resources up here in Frederick County, let's see if we can bring some of these folks across the river. And based on that, the Quantum Loophole team found this site." 8:20 - Rich goes on to note how "the key element for a lot of data centers is fiber, and a key component, both strategically and from an investment perspective [in Maryland] is that Quantum Loophole needed to have a connection to the Northern Virginia data center cluster in Ashburn, in Data Center Alley - which is not that far as the crow flies, but to get fiber there, they wound up boring a tunnel underneath the Potomac River, an expensive and time-consuming project that they're in the late stages of now. That's a big investment, and all that was done with the expectation that Maryland wanted data centers." 10:26 - Rich summarizes how the final ruling for Aligned in Maryland "was, effectively, that you can have up to 70 MW but beyond that, you have to follow this other process [where] you're more like a power plant than a data center with backup energy." He adds, "I think one of the issues was [in determining], will all of this capacity ever be turned on all at once? Obviously with diesel generators, that's a lot of emissions. So the air quality boards are wrestling with, on the one hand, having a large company that wants to bring in a lot of investment, a lot of jobs; the flip side is, it's a lot of diesel at a time when we're starting to see the growing effects of climate change, and everybody's trying to think about how we deal with fossil fuel generation. The bottom line is, Aligned pulled out and said, this is just not working. The Governor of Maryland, understanding the issues at stake and the amount of investment that has already been brought there, says that he is working with the legislature to try to 'create some regulatory predictability' for the data center industry. Because it used to be that 70 MW was a lot of capacity, but with the way the industry is going right now, that's not so much." 12:06 - In response to David's reiterated question as to whether the data center industry will now increasingly have to rethink it's whole approach to permitting prior to starting construction, Rich notes, "There's a lot of factors that go into site selection, you're looking at land, fiber, power. The regulatory environment around it, whether there's going to be local resistance, has also become part of the conversation, and rightfully so. One of the things that's definitely going to happen is that data centers have to think hard about their impact on the communities where they're locating, and try to develop sensible policies about how they, for lack of a better term, can be good neighbors, and fit into the communities where they're operating." 14:20 - Taking the discussion back across state lines, Editor in Chief Matt Vincent asks for an update on Rich's thoughts surrounding contentious plans by QTS and Compass Datacenters for a proposed new campus development, dubbed the Prince William Digital Gateway, near a Civil War historic site in Prince William County, Virginia. "This is one of the most unique proposals in the history of the data center industry," explains Miller. "It would be the largest data center project ever proposed. And of course, it's become an enormous political hot potato. It's the first time where we've really seen data centers on the ballot in local elections." 20:41 - After hearing some analysis of the business and political angles in Prince William County, Vincent asks whether Miller thinks the PW Digital Gateway project's future is in doubt, or if it's just that we don't know what's going to happen? 22:50 - Vincent asks Miller for his take on the recent data center outage affecting Flexential and Cloudflare, as written up for DCF by Chernicoff, particularly in the area of incident reports and their usefulness. In the course of responding to a follow-on point by David, Rich says, "I think the question for both levels of providers is, are you delivering on your promises, and what do you need to do to ensure that you can? Let's face it, stuff breaks, stuff happens. The data center industry, I think, is fascinating because people really think about failure modes and what happens, and customers need to do the same." 32:14 - To conclude, Vincent asks for Miller's thoughts on the AI implications of Microsoft's cloud-based supercomputer, running Nvidia H100 GPUs, ranking third on the world's top 500 supercomputers list, as highlighed at the recently ongoing SC23 show in Denver. Here are links to some related DCF articles: -- Dominion: Virginia’s Data Center Cluster Could Double in Size -- Dominion Resumes New Connections, But Loudoun Faces Lengthy Power Constraints -- DCF Show: Data Center Diesel Backup Generators In the News -- Cloudflare Outage: There’s Plenty Of Blame To Go Around -- Microsoft Unveils Custom-Designed Data Center AI Chips, Racks and Liquid Cooling

Exploring the impact of AI on data centers, this podcast discusses sustainability concerns, adaptive reuse, and the concept of 'creative destruction'. It also covers AI-driven innovations in site selection, cooling, and sustainability, as well as strategies for deploying AI-specific solutions in enterprise data centers.

The Legend Energy Advisors (Legend EA) vision of energy usage is one in which all companies have real-time visibility into related processes and factors such as equipment efficiency, labor intensity, and consumption of power and other energy resources across their operations. During this episode of the Data Center Frontier Show podcast, the company's CEO and founder, Dan Crosby, and his associate, Ralph Rodriguez, RCDD, discussed the Legend Analytics platform, which offers commodity risk assessment infrastructure services, and real-time metering for energy usage and efficiency. The firm contends that only through such "total transparency" will their clients be able to "radically impact" energy and resource consumption intensity at every stage of their businesses. "My background was in construction and energy brokerage for a number of years before founding Legend," said Crosby. "The basis of it was helping customers understand how they're using energy, and how to use it better so that they can actually interact with markets more proactively and intelligently." "That helps reduce your carbon footprint in the process," he added. "Our mantra is: it doesn't matter whether you're trying to save money or save the environment, you're going to do both of those things through efficiency -- which will also let you navigate markets more efficiently." Legend EA's technology empowers the firm's clients to integrate all interrelated energy components of their businesses, while enabling clear, coherent communication across them. This process drives transparency and accountability on “both sides of the meter,” as reckoned by the company, the better to eliminate physical and financial waste. As stated on the firm's website, "This transparency drives change from the bottom up, enabling legitimate and demonstrable changes in enterprises’ environmental and financial sustainability." Legend Analytics is offered as a software as a service (SaaS) platform, with consulting services tailored to the needs of individual customers, who include industrial firms and data center operators, in navigating the power market. Additionally, the Ledge device, a network interface card (NIC), was recently introduced by Legend EA as a way to securely gather energy consumption data from any system in an organization and bring it to the cloud in real-time. Here's a timeline of key points discussed on the podcast: 1:15 - Crosby details the three interconnected parts of his firm's service: commodity risk assessment, infrastructure services, and the Legend Analytics platform for understanding energy usage and efficiency. 2:39 - Crosby explains how the Legend Analytics platform works in the case of data center customers, by providing capabilities such as real-time metering at various levels of a facility, as well as automated carbon reporting. 4:46 - The discussion unpacks how the platform is offered as a SaaS, and includes consulting services tailored to each customer's needs. 7:49 - Notes on how the Legend Analytics platform can gather data from disparate systems and consolidate it into one dashboard, allowing for AI analysis and identification of previously unknown issues. 10:25 - Crosby reviews the importance of accurate and real-time emissions tracking for ESG reporting, and provides examples of how the Legend Analytics platform has helped identify errors and save costs for clients. 12:23 - Crosby explains how the company's new, proprietary NIC device, dubbed the Ledge, can securely gather data from any system and bring it to their cloud in real time, lowering costs and improving efficiency. 23:54 - Crosby touches on issues including challenges with power availability; trends in building fiber to power; utilizing power capacity from industrial plants; and on-site generation for enabling stable voltage. Keep pace with the fast-moving world of data centers and cloud computing by connecting with Data Center Frontier on LinkedIn, following us on X/Twitter and Facebook, and signing up for our weekly newsletters.

For this episode of the Data Center Frontier Show Podcast, we sat down for a chat with Andy Pernsteiner, Field CTO of VAST Data. The VAST Data Platform embodies a revolutionary approach to data-intensive AI computing which the company says serves as "the comprehensive software infrastructure required to capture, catalog, refine, enrich, and preserve data" through real-time deep data analysis and deep learning. In September, VAST Data announced a strategic partnership with CoreWeave, whereby CoreWeave will employ the VAST Data Platform to build a global, NVIDIA-powered accelerated computing cloud for deploying, managing and securing hundreds of petabytes of data for generative AI, high performance computing (HPC) and visual effects (VFX) workloads. That announcement followed news in August that Core42 (formerly G42 Cloud), a leading cloud provider in the UAE and VAST Data had joined forces in an ambitious strategic partnership to build a central data foundation for a global network of AI supercomputers that will store and learn from hundreds of petabytes of data. This week, VAST Data has announced another strategic partnership with Lambda, a, Infrastructure-as-a-Service and compute provider for public and private NVIDIA GPU infrastructure, that will enable a hybrid cloud dedicated to AI and deep learning workloads. The partners will build an NVIDIA GPU-powered accelerated computing platform for Generative AI across both public and private clouds. Lambda selected the VAST Data Platform to power its On-Demand GPU Cloud, providing customer GPU deployments for LLM training and inference workloads. The Lambda, CoreWeave and Core42 announcements represent three burgeoning AI cloud providers within the short space of three months who've chosen to standardize with VAST Data as the scalable data platform behind their respective clouds. Such key partnerships position VAST Data to innovate through a new category of data infrastructure that will build the next-generation public cloud, the company contends As Field CTO at VAST Data, Andy Pernsteiner is helping the company's customers to build, deploy, and scale some of the world’s largest and most demanding computing environments. Andy spent the past 15 years focused on supporting and building large scale, high performance data platform solutions. As recounted by his biographical statement, from his humble beginnings as an escalations engineer at pre-IPO Isilon, to leading a team of technical ninjas at MapR, Andy has consistently been on the frontlines of solving some of the toughest challenges that customers face when implementing big data analytics and new-generation AI technologies. Here's a timeline of key points discussed on the podcast: 0:00 - 4:12 - Introducing the VAST Data Platform; recapping VAST Data's latest news announcements; and introducing VAST Data's Field CTO, Andy Pernsteiner. 4:45 - History of the VAST Data Platform. Observations on the growing "stratification" of AI computing practices. 5:34 - Notes on implementing the evolving VAST Data managed platform, both now and in the future. 6:32 - Andy Pernsteiner: "It won't be for everybody...but we're trying to build something that the vast majority of customers and enterprises can use for AI/ML and deep learning." 07:13 - Reading the room, when very few inside that have heard of "a GPU..." or know what its purpose and role is inside AI/ML infrastructure. 07:56 - Andy Pernsteiner: "The fact that CoreWeave exists at all is proof that the market doesn't yet have a way of solving for this big gap between where we are right now, and where we need to get tom in terms of generative AI and in terms of deep learning." 08:17 - How VAST started as a data storage platform, and was extended to include an ambitious database geared for large-scale AI training and inference. 09:02 - How another aspect of VAST is consolidation, "considering what you'd have to do to stitch together a generative AI practice in the cloud." 09:57 - On how the biggest customer bottleneck now is partly the necessary infrastructure, but also partly the necessary expertise. 10:25 - "We think that AI shouldn't just be for hyperscalers to deploy" - and how CoreWeave fits that model. 11:15 - Additional classifications of VAST Data customers are reviewed. 12:02 - Andy Pernsteiner: "One of the unique things that CoreWeave does is they make it easy to get started with GPUs, but also have the breadth and scale to achieve a production state - versus deploying at scale in the public cloud." 13:15 - VAST Data sees themselves bridging the gap between on-prem and in the cloud. 13:35 - Can we talk about NVIDIA for a minute? 14:13 - Notes on NVIDIA's GPU Direct Storage, which VAST Data is one of only a few vendors to enable. 15:10 - More on VAST Data's "strong, fruitful" years-long partnership with NVIDIA. 15:38 - DCF asks about the implications of recent reports that NVIDIA has asked about leasing data center space for its DGX Cloud service. 16:39 - Bottom line: NVIDIA wants to give customers an easy way to use their GPUs. 18:13 - Is VAST Data being positioned as a universally adopted AI computing platform? 19:22 - Andy Pernsteiner: "The goal was always to evolve into a company and into a product line that would allow the customer to do more than just store the data." 20:24 - Andy Pernsteiner: "I think that in the space that we're putting much of our energy into, there isn't really a competitor." 21:12 - How VAST Data is unique in its support of both structured and unstructured data. 22:08 - Andy Pernsteiner: "In many ways, what sets companies like CoreWeave apart from some of the public cloud providers is they focused on saying, we need something extremely high performance for AI and deep learning. The public cloud was never optimized for that - they were optimized for general purpose. We're optimized for AI and deep learning, because we started from a place where performance, cost and efficiency were the most important things." 23:03 - Andy Pernsteiner: "We're unique in this aspect: we've developed a platform from scratch that's optimized for massive scale, performance and efficiency, and it marries very well with the deep learning concept." 24:20 - DCF revisits the question of bridging the perceptible gap in industry knowledge surrounding AI infrastructure readiness. 25:01 - Comments on the necessity of VAST partnering with organizations to build out infrastructure. 26:12 - Andy Pernsteiner: "It's very fortunate that Nvidia acquired Mellanox in many ways, because it gives them the ability to be authoritative on the networking space as well. Because something that's often overlooked when building out AI and deep learning architectures is that you have GPUs and you have storage, but in order to feed it, you need a network that's very high speed and very robust, and that hasn't been the design for most data centers in the past." 27:43 - Andy Pernsteiner: "One of the unique things that we do, is we can bridge the gap between the high performance networks and the enterprise networks." 28:07 - Andy Pernsteiner: "No longer do people have to have separate silos for high performance and AI and for enterprise workloads. They can have it in one place, even if they keep the segmentation for their applications, for security and other purposes. We're the only vendor that I'm aware of that can bridge the gaps between those two worlds, and do so in a way that lets customers get the full value out of all their data." 28:58 - DCF asks: Armed with VAST Data, is a company like CoreWeave ready to go toe-to-toe with the big hyperscale clouds -  or is that not what it's about? 30:38 - Andy Pernsteiner: "We have an engineering organization that's extremely large now that is dedicated to building lots of new applications and services. And our focus on enabling these GPU cloud providers is one of the top priorities for the company right now." 32:26 - DCF asks: Does a platform like VAST Data's address the power availability dilemma that's going to be involved with data centers' widespread uptake of AI computing? Here are some links to some recent related DCF articles: Nvidia is Seeking to Redefine Data Center Acceleration Summer of AI: Hyperscale, Colocation Data Center Infrastructure Focus Tilts Slightly Away From Cloud AI and HPC Drive Demand for Higher Density Data Centers, New As-a-Service Offerings How Intel, AMD and Nvidia are Approaching the AI Arms Race Nvidia is All-In on Generative AI

For the latest episode of the Data Center Frontier Show Podcast, editors Matt Vincent and David Chernicoff sat down with Mike Jackson, Global Director of Product, Data Center and Distributed IT Software for Eaton. The purpose of the talk was to learn about the company's newly launched BrightLayer Data Centers suite, and how it covers the traditional DCIM use case - and a lot more. According to Eaton, the BrightLayer Data Centers suite's digital toolset enables facilities to efficiently manage an increasingly complex ecosystem of IT and OT assets, while providing full system visibility into data center white space, grey space and/or distributed infrastructure environments. "We're looking at a holistic view of the data center and understanding the concepts of space, power, cooling, network fiber," said Jackson. "It starts with the assets and capacity, and understanding: what do you have, and how is it used?" Here's a timeline of points discussed on the podcast: 0:39 - Inquiring about the BrightLayer platform and its relevance to facets of energy, sustainability, and design in data centers. 7:57 - Explaining the platform's "three legs of the stool":  Data center performance management, electrical power monitoring, and distributed IT performance management. Jackson describes how all three elements are part of one code base. 10:42 - Jackson recounts the BrightLayer Data Center suite's beta launch in June and the product's official, commercial launch in September; whereby, out of the gate, over 30 customers are already actively using the platform across different use cases. 13:02 - Jackson explains how the BrightLayer Data Center suite's focus on performance management and sustainability is meant to differentiate the platform from other DCIM systems, in attracting both existing and new Eaton customers. 17:16 - Jackson observes that many customers are being regulated or pushed into sustainability goals, and how the first step for facilities in this situation is measuring and tracking data center consumption. He further contends that the BrightLayer tools can help reduce data center cooling challenges while optimizing workload placement for sustainability, and cost savings. 20:11 - Jackson talks about the importance of integration with other software and data center processes, and the finer points of open API layers and out-of-the-box integrations. 22:26 - In terms of associated hardware, Jackson reviews the Eaton EnergyAware UPS series' ability to proactively manage a data center's power drop via handling utility and battery sources at the same time. He further notes that many customers are now expressing interest in microgrid technology and use of alternative energy sources. 27:21 - Jackson discusses the potential for multitenant data centers to use smart hardware and software to offset costs and improve efficiency, while offering new services to customers and managed service providers. Keep pace with the fast-moving world of data centers and cloud computing by connecting with Data Center Frontier on LinkedIn.

Equinix's VP of Colocation, Tiffany Osias, discusses data center innovations for AI, liquid cooling, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and sustainability. They aim for 100% renewable energy by 2030 and offer advanced cooling solutions for high-density racks. Osias emphasizes Equinix's role in optimizing AI workloads and cloud architectures for customers.