In June of this year, I attended the 2017 7x24 Exchange Spring Conference, titled “The Challenge of Change, End-To-End Reliability: Mission Critical Facilities.” There were a lot of great presentations and Mission Critical posted a couple of videos on our Facebook page and website from the conference. Check them out.

I had the opportunity to interview Mehdi Paryavi, chairman of the International Data Center Authority, after the IDCA’s presentation titled, “The Infinity Paradigm®, The Paradigm Shift for the Data Center.”

The data center industry is evolving at a very fast pace in the areas of IT, cloud computing, IoT, Big Data Analytics, cyber security, and more.  “Everything we do today is shaped by the data center industry,” Paryavi said. To meet the needs of the ever evolving data center industry, IDCA formed in May 2011 “to aid in standardizing the approach, selection, design, feasibility, operation, and various processes and methodologies for the word of Data Centers, Cloud, IoT, and Information Technology.”

Paryavi said there is an abundance of data center confusion and standards are needed. “No one is speaking a common language,” Paryavi explained, pointing to the gap between IT and facilities in how data is managed as one example of confusion in the data center. “We must bridge the gap between IT and facilities. The king is data and it is being missed in this industry,” says Paryavi. “Billions of dollars are being spent on data center security because everyone ignores data.”

Another example of data center confusion is capacity. “Capacity is more than power,” said Paryavi. “People have to know how to drive their infrastructure. We have to empower innovation, driven by endusers. Vendors are not innovators.”

The key to correcting these problems is education. IDCA conducts public, private in-house, and online training for data center professionals. “The benefits are different for each company,” Paryavi says, and training is tailored to each organization’s needs.  “As fast as technology is moving, our people need to move, too,” he said. “We want to train and certify employees, both corporate and in government, by standardizing methods and create the data center industry as the greatest industry in the world.”