The mission critical industry has been growing rapidly the last few years and is expected to continue strong for the foreseeable future. To what do you attribute that growth and how long might it continue?

Across a wide range of industries and applications, the world’s data needs continue to expand at an unprecedented rate. From finance to oil and gas to health care to agriculture, data has become a vital component of day-to-day operations across all industries; as data needs increase, so too does the pressure on mission critical systems to support data storage and processing.

You may have noticed that liquid cooling has had a lot more activity and press coverage this past year.

This past October I was fortunate to attend two conferences, the 2018 Critical Facilities Summit in Nashville on October 14-16, and the 2018 Fall 7x24 Conference in Phoenix, held October 21-24. Both conferences were filled with great presentations that were thought provoking and worthy of further study.

To understand the sensitivity of different parameters — such as capital cost, power cost, water cost, and weather — consider the model of a typical 1,200-ton plant for a data center application operating 24/7 in four cities, representing different weather profiles:

Energy efficient, renewable, sustainable, carbon neutral, and of course the catch-all, going green — all make for great sound bites, but how do we really quantify how well we are doing in the age of gigawatt scale data centers?

Edward Dirnberger, IT facilities manager for a global automotive manufacturer, was named Mission Critical Magazine’s 2018 Facility Manager of the Year.