Data Centre LIVE: Round-up

Hosted on event streaming application Brella, our virtual audiences had an immersive and collaborative event experience at their fingertips, wherever they were in the world, as well as the opportunity to network with other attendees in real time.

Speakers, panellists and fireside hosts - including VMware’s Vittorio Viarengo, NTT’s Marientina Laina and Schneider Electric’s Steven Brown - had a constant stream of interaction from our engaged virtual audience, amplifying the conversations on data, cloud and 5G.

“One of the most engaging and interactive virtual events the sector’s seen”

Missed out on the action? Or want to watch Data Centre LIVE back? On-demand sessions are available via the Data Centre Magazine YouTube channel, which you can watch and subscribe to here.

Data Centre LIVE’s hot topics

DE&I

Led by BizClik managing editor and host Neil Perry, Schneider Electric’s Marc Garner, Sophia Flucker of MiCiM Ltd and Marientina Laina of NTT kicked off Data Centre LIVE with an insightful panel of DE&I in the data centre industry. “Are we doing enough at the moment” was the key theme highlighted by the speakers, with Laina saying “no, we can always do better.”

“It’s important to know that women in tech make up approximately 25% of the workforce, which is quite telling,” Laina added. “When I made the decision to join the tech centre, friends and colleagues asked ‘are you really sure, because it’s a very male-donminated industry?’ For us, increasing these kinds of figures is a commitment and a meaningful priority for diversity, equity and inclusion. Since FY21, we have managed to increase women’s representation from 11 to 28% in executive leadership. We are committed to do better and do more.”

Sustainability

The Sustainable Data Centre Forum, with contributions from Uptime Institute’s Ali Moinuddin, Steven Brown of Schneider Electric, Virtus’ David Watkins and Susanna Kass of Infraprime, saw the engaging panel dive into the capabilities of legacy technologies and how they are key to making the transition to more climate-friendly offerings. With data centre operators having a duty to reduce their environmental impacts, the vast topic was tackled head-on. Design and build is “critical” to data centres’ sustainability, said Watkins. “We need to look further than efficiency now and really need to get into stuff like embodied carbon. All of us operate and build efficient data centres, but now it’s more about the entire life cycle.”

Sourcing locally was also highlighted by Watkins, and echoed by Brown who added: “Design and build has become critical to how sustainable our data centres are. We have done very well as an industry in procuring green energy - so unless you’re a very legacy data centre running very inefficiently, you’re going to find that most of your embodied carbon lifecycle is in that design and build phase which is a challenge.

“What I’m optimistic on is that there’s also a business incentive to deploy that kind of technology and design and build.”

Multi-Cloud

Leading the conversation on al things multi-cloud, Vittorio Viarengo, Vice President Cross-Cloud Services at VMware, hosted his own keynote and joined panellists Mike Milner from Trend Micro, Akamai’s Blair Lyon and Samta Bansal of Hitachi Vantara for a multi-cloud forum. During his keynote speech, Viarengo, explored the advantages of the mutli-cloud; the role that cross-cloud services plays in achieving the promises multi-cloud offers; and provided insights on how organisations can use cross-cloud services to achieve their business goals. 

He also delved into the challenges of having a multi-cloud environment and how cross-cloud services can help to mitigate these challenges. 

Attendees were empowered with the knowledge of how to ensure that whatever you build in the cloud stays secure, and how to design for reliability, cost and performance.

More virtual events from BizClik

With attendee feedback citing Data Centre LIVE as “one of the most engaging and interactive virtual events the sector’s seen” we look forward to hosting our next forum in the form of Tech LIVE on 8 June for an exclusive one-day virtual event is an essential deep dive into technology, AI and cyber.

Register for your free tickets now.