When the issue of talent shortages in the data center sector was raised at the 7×24 Exchange International conference in 2015, the organization stepped up to help solve the problem under the leadership of long-time Chair Robert Cassiliano.
Cassiliano and his team went on the road to visit universities across the United States, with the aim of inspiring STEM students to consider a career in data centers.
After all, they’re an essential part of business infrastructure that is only growing in its significance as the adoption of cloud computing and AI drives the amount of data storage required.
“I took a trip out to California Polytechnic State University along with the representatives from Google, Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies. We spoke to very brilliant engineering students and their professors, and to be honest, they were not aware of data center careers,” Cassiliano reflects.
“That is not where the focus was. To test that, I went to other colleges in Colorado, New York, Philadelphia, Georgia and Texas.
“All of them revealed the same results. So we challenged our 29 chapters across the United States, Canada and Europe to assess the level of data center awareness in their chapter areas and help come up with a solution.”
Data center awareness
The Carolinas chapter assisted Cleveland Community College in securing a US$23 million government grant to develop a data center curriculum. 7×24 Exchange International then launched International Data Center Day in 2019 to create awareness of the data center industry and inspire the next generation of talent, empowering its member companies and regional chapters to create their own initiatives.
The response was incredible. As an example, the Metro New York chapter ran a challenge with five universities, offering a US$5,000 scholarship to each school, while the Greater Washington, D.C. chapter established its Cloud Run, a community event centered on a 5K run for charity, followed by talks from and activities led by data center experts.
7×24 Exchange International also started its Women in Mission Critical Operations Community, elevating the presence and role of women at the organization’s twice-yearly conferences and also provided opportunities for students and their professors to attend conferences, including the Data Center 101 session.
“The students get to meet with potential employers, technology leaders and business people. They learn how to talk business as well as technology,” Cassiliano explains.
“When I spoke at an event about these initiatives in Brooklyn, New York, to elementary and middle school program directors, they said, ‘Could you conduct the awareness initiatives on the elementary and high school level?’ And so we created the ‘What is a data center?’ presentation.
“What I came away with was the fact that, while we’re focusing on universities, we need to get children and actually their parents to understand what data center careers are at a very early age – because a parent could be directing a child very quickly away from a data center career because they don’t know enough about it.”
Representing the industry
Addressing industry issues on behalf of its 300-plus member companies is at the heart of 7×24 Exchange’s purpose, making it about more than just sharing knowledge and setting best practices for those at the forefront of enterprise IT, although this still remains at its core.
A key vehicle for that is its conferences, alongside a magazine, newsletter and website. Its 2024 Spring Conference in Orlando hosted around 1,500 people, which the company hopes to top when it returns to the JW Marriott Orlando Grande Lakes in June this year. Investor on ABC’s Shark Tank, Chairman of O’Leary Financial Group and bestselling author Kevin O’Leary will be the keynote speaker.
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Growing the talent pool will be a topic again, sitting alongside sustainability, which has become a sore point for the industry, as the development and uptake of AI, for all its benefits, is also seeing energy usage skyrocket.
“Data centers have a bad rap as being an ‘energy hog’. Now, data centers do use a significant amount of energy, but there has been much that has been done,” Cassiliano says.
“As an example, advances in chip design and manufacturing have reduced the energy consumption in servers, lowering the operating temperatures in data centers, which allows for less cooling and reduced energy usage.”
There has been a focus on more efficient ways of cooling data centers, including the use of renewable energy, he adds. Moving data centers to locations in cooler climates has become prevalent, and the use of hydrogen fuel cells and even nuclear power are being considered.
7×24 Exchange International has also collaborated with the Green Grid, the United States Green Building Council, and the National Science Foundation’s Energy Smart Systems project, hosting their speakers at the organization’s conferences and vice versa.
As technologies like AI, blockchain and IoT continue to evolve, Cassiliano is realistic about how they are contributing to the growing energy demands of the data center industry and the challenges that they will present to data center builders and designers. All will be up for discussion at the upcoming conference.
“The mission of the organization, in a nutshell, is to be the leading knowledge exchange for those who design, build, operate and maintain mission-critical enterprise information infrastructures. We also aim to be a good corporate citizen with respect to the environment and to our social responsibility,” Cassiliano concludes.
