Data Center Director with Sustainability Mindset

Explore the joys and challenges of leading data center operations with a sustainability mindset. In part two of a three-part podcast series, Harmail Singh Chatha explains what it’s like being director of Global Data Center Operations at Nutanix as the company embraces IT sustainability best practices. “The mindset is changing,” he said. “Everything is becoming more efficient. Compute is becoming more efficient. Data center providers are becoming more efficient. Everything is going to a software-defined network. The conversation started 10 years ago, but it’s finally starting to come to fruition where networking is deployed as code servers are provisioned, as code instances are spun up as code. That’s the mindset that everybody has to go into as they’re going into this industry.”

Related:
Architecting Sustainable Data Centers
Building Scalable, Sustainable Data Centers
IT Sustainability Becomes Business Imperative
Attention Turns to IT Sustainability and ESG
Green Data Centers: Designing an Eco-Smart Future
Inside a Hyper-Dense Data Center
2023 Enterprise Cloud Index

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Transcript:
Harmail Singh Chatha
I call one of our data centers, my baby. We’ve heard about building data centers submerged in the ocean. You know, data centers traditionally are super boring. Let’s just have an honest conversation.

Jason Lopez
If you’re following along in our series of three podcasts with Harmail Chatha, Director of Global Data Center Operations for Nutanix, you know his vision is of a software defined world. A world where efficiency is a key factor in how people are thinking about data centers these days. This is the Tech Barometer podcast, I’m Jason Lopez. As the work goes into data centers to make them more sustainable, they also have to do more. Just about everything we do compute wise from surfing the Internet to the cloud to AI comes from a data center.

Harmail Singh Chatha
Back in the data center. In the 2000 fives or earlier, it was that cookie cutter approach of, you know, just give me a 42 rack. People used to push three four kilowatts per rack. They didn’t really challenge the process. They just wanted a fail safe environment to go into.

Jason Lopez
If you’ve ever been in a data center unless you’re an IT engineer there’s really not a lot to see.

Harmail Singh Chatha
You walk in, there’s just rows and rows of servers and lots of cables and you know, back in the day, cable management wasn’t a thing. You just connected it, get it online, and the servers are gray, the racks are black and you have white light in the data center.

Jason Lopez
Harmail said the bland look of data centers inspired his team to build the Nutanix data center with a bit of flair.

Harmail Singh Chatha
When you walk into our data center, you’re going to see a lot of LED lights. You’re going to see hologens of the Nutanix logo, you’re going to see blue and green inside the hot out containment. It’s rows and rows of Nutanix gear. But we have a cool LED wall on one side just to brighten up the space and a little bit more engagement and not have it so boring.

Jason Lopez
But there are data centers out there Which have a fantasy golf course feel if you will, not so much because of what they look like on the inside but rather the environments they’re in.

Harmail Singh Chatha
There’s a cool one in the Nordic track up north. It’s built inside of a hill. It’s very small, but it’s very exotic. Haven’t been to that one yet, but it’s definitely on the list. That one is pretty cool.

Jason Lopez
And what sounds like out of a James Bond movie, you can even find data centers that are underwater or on boats.

Harmail Singh Chatha
Can that really scale out? Like look at the total megawatts of data center power being consumed or built total square footage worldwide of data centers. You know, the folks that are hosting on barges, I would think are just like a small mini subset of services that live there that are highly critical in the grand scheme of things. I...