Mastering the Cloud: How to Choose the Right Infrastructure for Your Business with Peter Blunt

https://youtu.be/VG4lAOftLzQ

In episode 35 of REDD’s Business and Technology Podcast, get ready for this informative discussion with our hosts, Jackson Barnes, and Nigel Heyn with their guest, Peter Blunt, the Chief Commercial Officer of Polaris Data Centre. Peter unveils the secrets behind choosing the perfect cloud infrastructure for your business: private cloud, public cloud, or on-premise.

Polaris Data Centre offers a plethora of options to suit your needs. They’ve got everything from bare metal servers to private cloud deployments and managed services. But the key lies in aligning your choice with your workload and business requirements. Don’t get swept away by the allure of infinite scalability if you don’t need it!

Peter drops some serious knowledge on power consumption and environmental impact. Consider the total cost of ownership and those hidden expenses lurking in your on-site infrastructure. Power usage, cooling, and security concerns can be daunting. But fear not, data centres like Polaris have your back with higher power efficiency, top-notch security, and uninterrupted power supply – perfect for those 24/7 operations.

But wait, there’s more! Cybersecurity takes centre stage, and Peter emphasises the importance of locking down your data fortress. Collaboration is the name of the game. Work closely with your data centre provider to craft bespoke solutions tailored to your needs. Efficiency and cost-effectiveness await!

And what’s the scoop on the data centre industry? It’s soaring! Public cloud adoption is driving the growth, while colocation and private clouds continue to shine.

Join us in this captivating journey through the clouds, where business tech decisions are made with savvy and precision. Tune in now to uncover the secrets behind cloud success!

#CloudInfrastructure #DataCentreSolutions #PrivateCloud #PublicCloud #OnPremiseInfrastructure #BusinessTechDecisions

00:00 – Opener
00:26 – Peter introduction
00:47 – Peter career history background
02:53 – What is a Data Centre?
04:17 – How did Polaris start?
04:59 – “To make a community, you need to create jobs”
07:45 – Evolution of Data Centres
09:37 – How did the current technology affected the industry of Data Centres?
11:17 – Why choose Polaris as a service instead of going to a public cloud?
14:52 – The future of Data Centres in regards to AI and technology
15:45 – ChatGPT vs Google query
17:06 – Growth of Data Centres
19:35 – Myth or facts about Data Centres
23:26 – Building security vs Data Centres for businesses
24:54 – Cybersecurity for Data Centres
26:47 – Difference of a good data centre to a bad one
28:34 – Advice for those who are considering getting a Data Centre provider
32:25 – Data Centre industry in the present
34:08 – What’s next for Peter and Polaris?
35:39 – Outro

If you would like to discuss any of the topics discussed in this episode further with a REDD expert or if you would like to be a guest on the show, please get in touch either via our website, [email protected] or through any of the links below.

• https://www.linkedin.com/company/redd-digital/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacksonpbarnes/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/nheyn/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-blunt-095b3546/
• https://www.polarisdatacentre.com.au/

Show Transcript

(00:20):

Hello and welcome to REDD’s Business Technology podcast. I’m your host, Jackson Barnes

(00:24):

And I’m your co-host Nigel Heyn.

(00:24):

Today we’re sitting down with Peter Blunt, who’s a Chief Commercial Officer from Polaris Data Centre and expert in everything data centres. This one will give you an overview of what a data centre is and talk a little bit about what’s happening that industry, AI, ChatGPT, cyber security, and a whole bunch of things. Pete, thanks for coming in.

(00:40):

Great to be here with you guys.

(00:42):

No worries mate. Let’s start just with your background, just the short version.

(00:47):

Well, I don’t know if there is a short version, but I’ve been in the data centre industry for about 18, 19 years now and what led me into the data centre industry was I was working at a lawyer in a firm in the city and I think I was one of the younger lawyers there. So it was assumed that I must know something about technology. And where this actually came from was I was working late one night, as you know, always do there and I walked into, walked past a partner’s office and he was trying to turn his head upside down to read a PDF that was on his screen. And I walk in there and I say, what’s going on? And he’s there swearing at the fact that his PA’s not there because he needs someone to print this to turn it the right way up.

(01:28):

And I’ve walked and gone, oh, he just click here and it turns around. And he was just like astounded. Anyway, went back to swearing about the case that he had the next day and a couple of days later he calls me into a client meeting and says, look, I’ve got our expert here in it, Peter, and he can help you with your software licensing. And I’m just like, what the hell is going on here? And that’s sort of what got me into it and I thought, well actually this is a great area to be in generally is obviously a growth industry and that’s what you want to align yourself with. So that’s sort of what got me into the IT space working as a lawyer and I did a lot of transactions around business purchases, leasing, all the things you need to do to establish data centres. And from there I suppose I gravitated towards clients that I saw that were being really successful and seeing really strong growth and ultimately ended up working for one of my clients who at the time was expanding really rapidly building data centres and haven’t looked back really. And now I sort of do very little in direct legal work. Most of what I do now is around building and operating leading data centres around Australia.

(02:37):

Awesome. Looking forward to getting some insights out of you. That’s a long time in that industry, 18, 19 years. So surely you’ve got a lot of insights today. What I might do to ask you to set the scene for people listening, I’m conscious that we’ve got some people in the IT industry, some people that are completely nodding the IT industry. Let’s start with what is a data centre in your words?

(02:55):

So really a data centre is about providing power, cooling and security for IT equipment. So everything that you do today that’s done online, done on your phone, whether it be on a website through some sort of portal, your internet banking, all those things all gets done on a physical computer that exists somewhere. And that’s that, that’s in a data centre, even

(03:19):

This podcast even from stream from a data centre.

(03:22):

Absolutely. And we talk about everything being in the cloud these days. Well that’s still a physical location and that’s a data centre. Any other, so the key things that a data centre provider is giving to their customers is the physical security of those premises so that their equipment can’t be physically accessed, ensuring that it’s got power and cooling and correct humidity, et cetera, available 24 7 and there’s no such thing as downtime or outages. Everything we do is a hundred percent compliant a hundred percent of the time.

(03:59):

Cool. I’m going to ask you a couple of follow questions on that, but maybe nice, did you want to start with what you want speak about first?

(04:04):

Yeah, so Peter, look, I don’t think people understand the story of what Polaris is and maybe broader Springfield. Can you spend a couple of minutes just sharing to our listeners the great story that is Springfield and how Polaris came to be?

(04:16):

Yeah, absolutely. Look, while most of this was before my time, the folklore is there that Springfield was established 31 years ago. Maha Sin Ambian, Bob Sharpless had a vision for the 2,800 hectares of land that is now Springfield and all the surrounding suburbs. That was a disused forestry operation with one person living on it and with their vision and their just dogg of determination to make it work. We’re now at like 53,000 residents in Springfield with a target of 150,000 residents in Springfield. And the reason why that’s been successful is I think they identified really early on that to make a community you need to create jobs. And so a lot of what is being done at Springfield is about creating commercial hubs that will generate jobs. And once you’ve got that, well then of course people want to live there and you know can then build a great lifestyle and at all of those things and amenity that people expect. So Polaris was one of those things that they saw an opportunity in the Queensland market back in the early two thousands that there was a need for, yeah,

(05:43):

So Polaris identified the market.

(05:45):

Yeah, so Bob and Maha identified that there was a real need in the Queensland market for bespoke data centre capacity. We had corporate customers that were screaming out for it and it just wasn’t available. And at that time I was working in the industry myself and I knew that we had customers lined up as soon as we could build data centre capacity. It was taken and two really important customers in Queensland being Queensland government and Suncorp Bank had very specific requirements for very large amounts of data centre capacity with the highest possible standards. And so a joint venture was struck with Suncorp and Springfield in order to construct this with the two anchor tenants there being Suncorp Bank and Queensland government. So Pete,

(06:32):

What was that? What was their need for starting? Was it just their server rooms were getting too big at Suncorp and Queensland government, they wanted to put it somewhere else? Was that their main need?

(06:40):

So prior to that, most organizations built and operated their own server rooms or small data centres. And a lot of organizations were realizing that one, this is really expensive and really hard to do well and it’s not core business for them. So they knew that they needed experts in this field and acknowledging how critical IT infrastructure is to any business mean these days none of us would have a business without our IT infrastructure. That simple, you might as well close the doors and go home. So that was becoming a realization and that’s why it was identified that you really should leave this to the specialists who know how to build and operate these facilities so that you can get on with your business of running a bank or running a government or whatever it is that you are doing. So yeah, that’s what created that need. And in 2009, Polaris data Centre was constructed. It’s a 14,000 square meter building, so it’s very, very significant facility and has operated very successfully ever since. Is it

(07:43):

Still the largest data centre in Queensland

(07:46):

By Square Meter Ridge? It is the largest facility. There are some new builds coming up now, which will possibly be larger, but in terms of a single facility, I believe it is still currently the largest.

(07:59):

Do you want to talk to maybe the evolution of data centres because kind of where you’re at now and why we started, but obviously data centres 20 years ago probably look a little bit different to today.

(08:08):

Yeah, they they certainly did and in Queensland at least, and probably Australia, there were very few experts in the field of data centre construction and the industry was quite limited 20 or 30 years ago. And so over the years it’s sort of been various people with HVAC experience and electrical experience and some IT experience all sort of coming together and working together to create a facility. But that’s become a lot more refined over the last 20 years. And certainly there was obviously a lot of learnings taking from overseas and at the time that Polaris was built, they traveled all around the world and went and visited countless facilities to take the learnings from all of those facilities and bring them back and build something that was world standard for the time and still is, we’re 14 years on in operation and Polaris still stacks up against the best of the modern data centres. So

(09:06):

14 years ago was there Microsoft Azure and a u s data centres would’ve been over the new us but none locally in Australia 14 years ago, is that

(09:14):

Right? Not as far as I’m aware. No. And it is a very different environment, you know, take for instance, Microsoft had their own data centre facilities, but that was for their own equipment. We didn’t have public cloud like we do today.

(09:28):

How did that public cloud being a u s and Google and Microsoft Azure have changed what you do because they’re essentially taking your market share I imagine, but obviously the market share for data centres and just data and server is probably gone grown like crazy. They have as well SO’S probably enough to go round, but how did that change what your plan was 14 years ago when they came to Australia?

(09:53):

So you right, the industry itself has grown so much that there is enough to go round. So we don’t really see it as eating into our market share. We see it’s a massive industry that has grown so strongly, there’s still plenty to go around. What it has brought about is a lot more investment in technology and thinking about how we design and build and operate these facilities more efficiently. And that’s something that’s been really great for the industry and it’s great to see all of those organizations investing a lot in trialing radical, totally different technologies of how can we operate these facilities more efficiently, efficiently seeking greater densities. We’ve seen a huge change in the densities of what a customer would put in a single rack from in the early days you might see two kilowatt racks. And then we started to talk about five and 10 kilowatt racks. Now we have customers that are talking about 30 kilowatt racks and I can see deployments that are going to probably hit 70, 80, 90 kilowatts in a single rack. And all those sorts of things happen because of organizations investing in trialing different ideas and trialing different technologies.

(11:10):

So I want to ask you, so let’s say you’re a C I O or a IT manager and they have infrastructure on their site for example, and they’re considering, do we go put our infrastructure when it’s due renewal or whatever into your data centre and run their own kind of private cloud? Or do they go into the public cloud at US Azure for example? Why would you choose to leverage Polaris and buy your own servers and chuck ’em in Polaris instead of going to the public cloud?

(11:39):

Well, I suppose that there’s a couple of different options there. So depending on the client’s level of engagement with their IT infrastructure, they can yes, just take a bare metal approach and buy their own servers and put them in our facility. They may choose to build their own private cloud and operate that. They may choose to use one of the private cloud operators or managed service providers who’ve got capacity in Polaris and build it on that. And then your other option of course is to go to a public cloud solution. And look, it really just depends on what the client is doing with that and what they need. The big public cloud operators talk about the fact that they’ve essentially got infinite scalability. They can turn the services up and down overnight at extraordinary multiples. And as cool as that is, not every customer needs that.

(12:29):

The reality is often if you’re managing your IT well, you actually should have a pretty good idea of what the demands are going to be and it’s perfectly normal to have normal day-to-day spikes in those things. But if there is going to be a really significant demand increase, you probably already knew about it in advance and you’ve planned for that with your systems. So I just think it comes down to horses for courses that each client would really needs to be well-advised to look what best suits what they’re doing because each of those solutions at all of them can become really expensive if they’re not the right fit for you. And so that’s where getting the right advice I think about is what suits your workload and your business and then that’s going to lead to the best outcome technically. And then also how do you deliver that, achieve that in the most cost effective way,

(13:27):

Sorry, as it used to be 10 years ago, elastic workloads, you chuck in the public cloud, right? Because you can scale up and down and that kind of thing and if it’s a predictable workload, you want it on premise or hosted in a private cloud somewhere because then it’s a continual cost. What’s what? What’s going to happen? Is that still the case or has that changed now compared to 10 years ago?

(13:47):

We still see a lot of that mindset, but I would suggest we don’t see as much need for super elastic workloads as and as probably what people had thought. And look, having said that, we do have some clients where we actually have pricing models built for elastic compute. And so we’ve got clients running very large H P C, high performance compute deployments and we’ve struck arrangements with them where we only charge them when the unit is running and for as much as it is running. So they have a completely scalable model, an elastic model with us as well as you know what they’re obviously providing to their customers at the end. So that goes against the concept of if you want it to be super elastic, you have to put it into a public cloud scenario. Now, in fact it can be done in private cloud or even in a bare metal type approach. And I would suggest probably more cost effectively Peter,

(14:51):

With the challenges of elasticity and I guess more and more people adopting private cloud, public cloud, just technology does everything that we live, AI is consuming more and more resources. I guess power is one of the biggest expenses you see as a data centre operator. Can you talk through where the future is going with all of these conversion together on driving more and more compute effectively?

(15:14):

Yeah, well look that that’s actually a really curly one and that comes back to what we even get into some of the fundamentals that I think we all need to think about how we use compute because we are living in this age where we have endless compute available to us through our smartphones on our desktop, everything where any of us can access these incredible AI tools, for instance, for free at the drop of a hat. But you actually have to think about what’s the infrastructure that’s sitting behind that’s running these and how much power is being used now all and all for the great technology, but are we just using it for the sake of using it, in which case we’re just burning power for the sake of burning power. You know, look at doing a chatGPT query probably uses sort of five to 10 times the amount of compute power of what a simple Google query would’ve used.

(16:12):

So if you are sitting there thinking, oh, I would normally ask Google, I would normally check this on Google, but hey, let’s have a go and chatGPT, you have to think about the fact that firstly there’s a whole server farm sitting out there somewhere which is just burning power even at idle. But then you are using that to do your query and using 10 times the amount of energy that you would’ve used if you’d just used Google. Well, it might even go about you could have actually just gone and picked a book up and not used any energy, but that’s a separate thing. I think we’re at a really interesting point in time where we need to think about, we’ve sort of got this consumerism type thing happening right now in the IT world and it’s really been brought to the forefront with AI where we can all just so easily be consuming energy and not even be thinking about it.

(17:10):

Is there growth in the data centre space because of ai? I imagine it’d be mostly US based, right? I mean locally in Australia the data centres wouldn’t have a huge or down from chatGPT and other AI services that are popping up everywhere recently.

(17:23):

Oh no, look, a lot of it is serviced locally. There’s been huge amount of growth in the Sydney and Melbourne markets, particularly not so much in Queensland, but no, look, a lot of it is served a lot and look, the public cloud market, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne is growing really significantly has done for the past five years.

(17:44):

Cool. And renewable energies, Peter, how does that play with what you guys are doing? So power and things like that, just keep the energy vein is something I’m passionate about. Can you share more where you see things happen there from data centre point of view? Yeah,

(17:55):

So at a building level we can source renewable energy through our own solar deployments and those types of things, but the sheer volume of energy that a data centre uses, you’ve really got to look externally to looking at purchasing agreements to purchase solar, wind, hydro, other forms of energy. And that that’s something that we’re all starting to find our feet now in the sourcing and use of renewable energy. And look, I think we’ll start to see more and more providers differentiate themselves on firstly the quantity of renewable energy they’re using but accessing it in cost-effective ways that that’s really important. But it comes back to my earlier comment of renewables is one thing, but let’s actually think about do we necessarily need to consume this power in the first place? So I think that’s a fundamental question that needs to be considered

(18:53):

It’s behavior. And I guess it’s interesting to understand are customers demanding that? Are they asking for the green? Is that something or we still quite in the infancy phase here in Australia,

(19:04):

We are seeing it, but it’s become part of a much more sophisticated discussion around E E S G generally. I would say five years ago it was the first and often the only question around sustainability was just simply it was simply around energy. But now that’s become a far broader and more educated approach and they’re looking at the whole of provision of services and all of those environmental and social responsibilities.

(19:33):

Pete, I wanted to pivot back to, I guess maybe it’s a myth, maybe it’s fact, I’m not sure a question that or maybe I objection. We get from a lot of internal IT teams right around the buying new servers in their office versus using a data centre to host their infrastructure. The standard conception is that it’s too expensive, why would I do that? It’s so much cheaper just buying a server and putting it in my server room and getting my own cooling and locking it in a cabinet and that kind of thing. What do you say back to that?

(20:04):

The main issue there is that there’s a whole lot of costs which that person isn’t seeing when they do it internally. So if you’ve got an office and you go and put a whole lot of servers in the server closet, it just goes on the power bill along with everything else in the office. So the person who’s put them there doesn’t actually see that their power bill has gone up by three grand a month.

(20:26):

Doesn’t come out of it budget.

(20:27):

No, exactly. It doesn’t come out of IT budget. And look, I, I’ve actually had lots of discussions with clients where they’ve said to me that it’s a real problem for them to build a business case to put their equipment into a data centre because they can’t actually quantify the amount of power that they’re using where they are and if they stay where they are, the power they’re using goes on someone else’s budget, not theirs. And so for them to actually be paying for it is a concern and the power that they’re using, let’s think about it. If you’ve just taken the server closet in your office and you’ve put a couple of split system air conditioners in there to try and cool all this stuff, it’s probably really inefficient. So what we do as data centre operators is work to try and deliver that cooling in the most efficient way it can possibly be done.

(21:18):

And if you look at the, there’s a metric power usage effectiveness or P U e you often hear talked about in the data centre industry. Now when I came into this industry having a p u E of two was considered good, which basically means for every one unit of compute capacity you use the equivalent amount of energy to cool it and to run the facility. Now in that very quickly got brought back once it sort of came into focus, p u E sort of came down to be sort of 1.5, 1.4, one three and that’s sort of about where the industry’s sitting now for most facilities and that sort of dependent on what climate they operate in and a few other things. But there is no way that your server closet with a couple of split system air conditioners is running at a P U E of 1.3.

(22:06):

So all of those sort of things, which unfortunately to the IT guy are probably not quantifiable, but they need to be considered. And that’s not even going into the fact of, again, think about how important your IT equipment is, should you really be trusting it to the building infrastructure which could randomly be turned off by the building manager. Look, it’s not uncommon in an office building for them to decide on the weekend, hey, we’re going to turn the power off all weekend while we do an upgrade on a switchboard or they turn the cooling off because they need to do some work on a chiller or something like that. You can’t have that happen to your IT equipment. So they’re the things that aren’t necessarily seen on a p and l or on a business case. But in this day and age with we’re all running 24 7 businesses, uptime is just not negotiable.

(23:02):

Really good points actually. And probably the other thing you mentioned was around the security side, right? Because like physical security, because witnessed a lot of server racks, you walk into businesses and key sitting in on the rack, they’re ready to go or just completely open or it’s closed, but the back of it is completely exposed and all it takes these days is someone to go in there and grab a Naz or a drive or plug something in

(23:26):

Or even the social engineering. We had a case several years ago where a person walked in with wearing a Telstra vest too. The office gave full access to the servers and can do anything. Whereas in a data centre you’d be shot before. You can do that, right?

(23:40):

Yeah,

(23:40):

Yeah, that’s right. Well we usually ask questions before we shoot Nigel, but look, you’re right. Again, this is about sticking to what you do best. So in an office you’ve got a whole lot of people who need to come and go and security isn’t, physical security probably isn’t the number one priority, whereas in a data centre that’s what we do all day every day and every single person that walks in that front door has been checked, we know why they’re there. They’re being supervised the whole time. They’re only allowed to go into the areas they’re specifically authorized to go into. Everything is under access control every step of the way there is security and then there’s checks on security and double checks on security all the way through. And it’s something that’s become more and more important now with both the state government and the federal government now setting up their own certification frameworks around security for data centre providers. So a select group of providers have been through and met those requirements for the state government and the federal government. And that’s really good to see that our governments are now recognizing how important physical security is to their operations.

(25:00):

That’s awesome. A follow up question from that Cybersecurity’s, a massive topic we probably had on here, but it’s in the news and there’s been a massive amount of breaches recently. Are you getting a lot of questions from your clients around cybersecurity? Apart from the physical access side, what kind questions are you getting?

(25:17):

So for us, the questions are generally limited to our own cybersecurity of our operating environment. So very critical for us is the cybersecurity of our generators, uninterruptible power supplies, our cooling systems, all those of those sorts of things. And the simple answer there is we deal with that by keeping all of our operational technology systems islanded, islanded from the outside world. So that’s the you protection first and foremost. We don’t get into the cybersecurity of the client’s equipment. That remains their responsibility quite thankfully because that is, as we all know is the hottest topic at the moment and by far the biggest risk to any organization. And look, I’m clearly the view that at the moment we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. There is so much going on at a cyber level, so much information being harvested, stored and kept for when there’s a right time to use it that I think we really need to think about this that we haven’t seen anything yet.

(26:31):

I think so your strategy essentially to keep your systems completely isolated and then you really own and probably market leader in that space around the physical security, which is to be honest part cybersecurity, right? Because like I said before, if you’ve got a server in your office that’s unlocked and backups sitting on tapes or hard drives or whatever, it’s so easy to take that and then that can be sold and whatever else. Or there can be old logins and that kind of stuff. So that’s definitely a good point form from that. It’s something that people may have asked you in the past. What is the difference between a good data centre and a bad one?

(27:07):

Look, I think the key thing now about good and bad data centres is really about how they’re operated. It comes down to the people, the systems that those people employ to operate the facility we’ve moved on from it’s look, certainly if you’d asked me this question 15 years ago, there was a massive difference in how data centres were designed. There was some facilities out there that were really well designed and others that were quite frankly pretty terrible. And you only find out that a facility’s badly designed when the lights go out and then somebody goes, hang on. We didn’t really think about that. But I would be confident to say now that all of your current data centres have been designed and built and operated in an environment where people really were well educated in how to build these systems well things still go wrong and I dunno the statistic off the top of my head, but most outages are caused by human error. So that’s really the difference I think now in a good and bad facility is how well that facility’s operated because it only takes the procedures to be lax in one area and have one person make a bad call and that can impact the entire facility. So yeah, look, it’s the people on the ground that really make the difference and the experience of those guys.

(28:35):

Some advice I would have is definitely to go physically and look at the data centre if you blink, putting a fair amount of stuff there. If it’s just one little thing, wouldn’t know so much. But if you’ve got a lot of infrastructure, I would recommend highly going to probably two data centres, doing a walk around, meet the people, that kind of thing. What other advice would you have for people who are considering a data centre provider of questions you should ask?

(28:54):

So look back to your point before I think it look, definitely go and actually physically see the facilities and talk to the people, walk through them, get an understanding of how they work, what their approach to security is, what their approach to procedural procedures you that that’ll just tell you a lot about the type of the way in which they operate their facility and that that’s so important. Then it really comes down to finding a data centre that’s prepared to work with your needs. We’re seeing a big shift now in customers seeking bespoke requirements and bespoke engagements with their facilities. So no longer is it here is our offering and you just have to take it actually come and sit down with a data centre provider and say this is the type of workload we’ve got, this is how we’re thinking of doing it, how can you provide this to me in the best way, in the most cost effective way?

(29:51):

So that might be like I was talking about before where we’ve got H P C clients and they want an elastic model where they can scale up, scale down because the power consumption of their equipment is the biggest cost. So let’s work so that we can actually share and those costs and come up with a commercial model that works. Other customers are looking at really high density deployments, but you need to actually have a talk with your provider and find out whether that works well for the provider. Some facilities just by nature of their design, are actually better set up to have a deployment spread out over a larger area and have lower density racks. Other facilities are really well suited to having really high density racks compressed into a really small footprint and you need to have that discussion with the providers. So the most competitive offer with one provider could actually be a totally different design to the most competitive off offer from another provider.

(30:53):

One of the areas that’s a hot topic at the moment of course, is moving into direct to chip cooling and immersion cooling and these other technologies which allow really high density deployments and they’re pretty polarizing from a data centre operator’s point of view as to which of those technologies work well in their facility. And myself, when I look at it for our facility, we are really well set up to take direct to chip cooling. Those sorts of deployments will allow us to really easily do probably heading towards a hundred kilowatt racks without too much trouble, very easily integrated and very reliably integrated into our systems. When I look so instead at say an immersion cooling type option, there’s a lot of challenges with immersion cooling and its compatibility with other equipment on the floor and operating procedures and all of those things. And while look, there’s nothing wrong with that technology when I look at it, I think in terms of getting the best value for a customer, they will probably get better value if they came to us with a direct to chip cooling deployment than what they would with an immersion deployment.

(32:08):

So your advice is to go essentially to a data centre or multiple data centres with current state and problems and then see what the data centre can come up with?

(32:17):

Yeah, a hundred percent. And it’s probably like it’s any business relationship, isn’t it? Sit down together and actually understand each other’s pain points and each other’s strengths and come up with a collaborative solution. We need to do that in any business. Data centres are no different

(32:35):

Data centre. The industry itself, Peter in Australia, is it in a growth consolidation stagnation? Where is it at right now? So

(32:44):

Overall definitely in a massive growth phase. However though that is driven primarily by the growth in public cloud. All the statistics point to co-location either being static or some amount of growth. But the really strong growth we’re seeing is all in the public cloud space at the moment. But as I say to you, the industry as a whole just continues year on year two to hit the mark and really significant growth,

(33:14):

Well that mirrors what we’re experiencing. Probably 80, 20, 80% people want to be in the Azure and the public and then 20 still want to have the private tangible the colay got with you guys as well. So yeah, that makes complete sense

(33:26):

And you need to be careful. I think a lot of clients here that everything has to be in the cloud and the clients don’t necessarily understand what the different options are in terms of being in the cloud. And there’s certainly lots in the media about being in Azure and that sort of stuff. And that’s a discussion that I think has to be had with clients about helping them understand what’s actually best for their business. And then as I said earlier, it’s horses for courses, private cloud and public cloud are both great solutions and it’s just really a matter of what’s best for you.

(34:06):

Yeah, great advice. Thank you.

(34:07):

Think there needs to be a bit more education in that space. I feel like you are right that a lot of people these days go, we’re on premise, we need to go to the cloud and there’s all discussion just because the cloud, right, which maybe there is more education in that area needs to happen. So what’s next for Peter Blunt and Polaris Data centre?

(34:26):

Well, so look, we’re a really well established facility with a good long-term client base. So for us it’s very much about business as usual and continuing to operate the facility to the higher standards. We always continue to strive for improvements around energy efficiency. I think that will continue to be a focus for us. As I said, that now is part of a broader overall strategy in the E S G space, which is certainly where we’re getting a lot of discussion with clients and we need to, I think, look at how we work really closely with our clients in that energy space to minimize the energy usage overall. We can do a certain amount as the data centre operator, but when a client chooses to put 10 racks of equipment in there and chooses to have them running, that’s up to them. And unfortunately for a data centre operator, we are remunerated by hosting as much equipment for you as possible. So our goals are not necessarily aligned from an energy perspective. Now the question now is for us that how do we work with clients to help them be as energy efficient in their operations so that they can get the best overall energy outcome for everybody.

(35:47):

Peter, cool. Peter, thanks for coming in, sharing insights. Really, really appreciate your time and thanks both sitting.

(35:51):

Thanks Peter, really appreciate it. Okay, thanks guys.