I recently had the privilege of attending the 7x24 Exchange Intl.’s 2019 Fall Conference in Phoenix. Throughout the course of the event, there were a lot of topics I heard repeatedly: cybersecurity, speed, 5G, microgrids, renewables, infrastructure, and cloud and edge computing.

There are pros and cons to everything, and colocation is no exception. Though it may be a relatively new concept to the data center world, it definitely wasn’t born yesterday. Other industries have been building their business models around the idea of colocation for quite some time.

I’m sure you noticed a different face on this page, but I still want to take up a few lines here to introduce myself. My name is Amy Al-Katib, and I am the new editor-in-chief for Mission Critical magazine.

The nominations for the 2019 Mission Critical Magazine Facility Manager of the Year are now open at https://bit.ly/2LSdJGq. The nomination period runs until August 31, 2019.

It seems just like yesterday when Steve Carlini of Schneider Electric was telling me about the company’s products for edge data centers, a term I hadn’t heard of until then.

I recently attended Data Center World 2019 at the Phoenix Convention Center. It was a good show with informative sessions. One in particular stood out, namely “Liquid Immersion Cooling: Three Case Studies Show Compelling Data for Power Savings,” presented by Jack W. Kolar, VP, mission critical products, Modular Solutions Laboratory.

The panel discussion featured Carrie Goetz, RCDD, CDCS, CDCP, global director of technology for Paige DataCom Solutions; Enoch Moeller hardware operations site manager for Google; and Kylash Ramesh, management analyst, Division of Facilities Operations & Maintenance for the National Institutes of Health.

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.

It all starts with site selection.

Whirling toward the future.