DATACENTRE.ME. virtual conference and expo

Author: Carly Weller

What do Google, Orange, Huawei, Arup and Interxion all have in common?

They are all sharing their state of the art knowledge with the international data centre community in a new two day conference and expo on 6th and 7th  October 2020.

Born out of COVID-19, the conference and expo is being staged virtually by Caroline Hitchins the well-loved and acclaimed ‘Queen of Networking’ (human networking that is, not ethernet) and founder of DATACENTRE.ME.

Caroline’s legendary London Networking Evenings, popular amongst thousands of data centre professionals, have of course had to cease during the pandemic.

Caroline has worked together with many key-players around the industry, to put together a massive two-day program of cutting-edge knowledge sharing, blue sky predictions and valuable in-depth CPD (continuing professional development) sessions.

Google’s Paul Henry, will be explaining how even players as large as Google need to work with the rest of the industry to define and use modular products with standardised interfaces. Paul will explain how this allows the entire industry to benefit from reusability of individually evolving modules, to create a wide variety of data centre configurations.

Dominique Bodéré from network provider Orange will be ‘unboxing’ the company’s Open Innovation Green Lab and explaining why Orange has chosen a prefabricated modular data centre to power its ‘future networks’ innovation Centre.

Huawei’s Kumar Sainani will be talking about the massive impact of O&M costs making, up as they do, 70% of life-cycle TCO (total cost of ownership). Kumar will explain now Huawei is driving AI from data collected across the DC facility infrastructure to drive, inter-alia, energy optimisation, operation of power & cooling systems – which has now been proven to cut PuE and hence reduce cumulative O&M costs.

Kevin Burke from worldwide hyperscale data centre design and construction company Arup will be putting forward no-holds-barred ‘Blue Sky’ predictions together with other specialists in a panel discussion chaired by Ed Ansell, himself a Blue Sky protagonist and co-founder of the mission-critical engineering consultancy 3i Solutions Group. 

Interxion’s  William Fenick and Steve Hewson will be presenting an in-depth case study on ‘Compute as a service’.  It’s something the industry has talked about for years. Is it a pipedream, or is it now reality? They will be looking at applying computer as a service to the financial services market, the critical issue of latency, and the connection of co-lo public cloud.

These are just a small sample of the high-quality, content rich presentations and CPD sessions throughout the two days of 6th and 7th October 2020.

Early bird discounts are available, and the full two-day programme can be found here.