Jason Lopez: Part of the conversation isn’t just about CO2. It’s about water which is used to cool data centers. Lots of water. This is a big deal, especially in the western United States which has experienced below-average precipitation since the late 1990s. And despite some intervals of rainy seasons, climate scientists warn not to count it. As innovative as the computer industry has been at developing networking, IoT, AI and the cloud, Harmailsays they need to get more efficient in how they cool operations.
Harmail Singh Chatha: They can't be using very traditional old-school mechanical. They should be trying to go into environments where they can use outside air to cool hence leading to better sustainability.
Jason Lopez: Or move to where the water is.
Harmail Singh Chatha: People just need to give up the notion that I need to touch my gear. You don't need to touch your gear.
Jason Lopez: And another factor is locating data centers is putting them in the wrong place...literally in the same building, the company is in.
Harmail Singh Chatha: Your cost to operate within an office building versus a true and traditional data center is just so much higher.
Jason Lopez: He cites other factors in a location such as the General Data Protection Regulation, which has sparked more localization in the countries where it’s required.
Harmail Singh Chatha: And then what you do have is least, you know, multi databases or multi-data center strategy, whether it's two data centers, three data centers for high availability, that distribution of compute networking and storage. Whether that happens in that traditional three-tier sense of big SANs versus the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure. That's kind of the trend.
Jason Lopez: Sustainability in data centers is about using less power, less water, and producing less CO2.This, in the face of more. More apps, more storage, more demand. One of the industry’s recent challenges was a moment of learning. That was during COVID. There was a lot of stress put on Internet providers, especially services like Zoom.
Harmail Singh Chatha: As soon as the pandemic hit, their demand increased so much by everybody working from home that they couldn't even predict that. So as much as we wanted to talk about sustainability and how we can be efficient and the impact of data centers, I think it's greater now than it was pre-pandemic. So what's going to continue to happen is data centers obviously with smart cars and smart streets and smart cities and everything else, like smart homes for example, your home network in itself is becoming a data center. So the demand on data centers, it's going to continue to grow. There's a lot of edge connectivity going on, like edge data centers as the car is driving it needs constant connectivity to offload data, and pull data back X, Y, Z. The entire world already relies on data centers quite a bit. The reliance is going to continue to grow. As everything gets more connected, I think providers are going to have to change their mindset. They've been talking about it for a number of years of how we're sustainable. We're doing this, we're doing that, but that's a small set of data center providers doing it right now versus the broader set isn't focused on that and they're still operating inefficiently. So the industry as a whole has to start changing and combat climate change. Customers like us, we are getting asked by our customers about what's our carbon intensity, what's our carbon footprint, and what are we doing about sustainability? And ultimately we're going to be starting to focus or we have been focused on and we'll continue to focus on only partnering with data center providers that have the same mindset about sustainability. If providers aren't focused on that, they're ultimately going to get weaved out of it.
Jason Lopez: In the post-pandemic world there’s one major change in how we live our lives...which is due to data centers. As much as some are trying to put the genie back in the bottle, working from home has been established not as a perk, but as a real way of operating. Harmail says a similar wake-up call is happening around sustainability.
Harmail Singh Chatha: I think there just needs to be a lot more knowledge within the data center industry and folks that are getting into becoming data center operators like myself. If I can go back in 15 years and tell myself, “How do you operate this efficiently?”Go out and really do the homework on it, understand what your business initiatives are, understand what your business goals are and really customize a data center footprint that encompasses, you know, cost efficiencies, high availability ultimately gets you to your sustainability goals and partner with data centers that meet your requirements. This kind of demand for sustainable data center services is just starting to be baked into the industry.
Jason Lopez: It’s become a part of the conversation that he says he has with customers all the time.
Harmail Singh Chatha: We're trying to be as efficient, utilize the power in the most effective way, not have any waste, reduce our carbon intensity and where we can go as much renewable energy as we can and partner with data center providers that utilize the renewable energy. We're going to continue to get a lot more efficient just because CEOs and customers are asking providers like us or customers as well to be more sustainability efficient.
Jason Lopez: Harmail Chatha is the Director of Global Data Center Operations for Nutanix. This is the Tech Barometer podcast, I’m Jason Lopez. This is one of three stories in a series on Harmail and the data centers he oversees for Nutanix. Check back at www.theforecastbynutanix.com for the other reports we have as we talk more with him about his journey as a data center engineer and the challenges of building a data center when the supply chain dried up.
