Richard Zbin, facilities director at the Kaiser Permanente Silver Spring Data Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, was named Mission Critical’s 2019 Facility Manager of the Year, and three honorable mentions were recognized for their award-winning qualities. 

Six years ago, Richard Zbin was asked to “fill in” as facility manager while his company searched for a permanent replacement. Today, he is the proud winner of the 2019 Facility Manager of the Year contest. So how did he get from point A to point B?

For the latest installment of the State of the Mission Critical Industry series, we sat down with Chris Crosby, CEO of Compass Datacenters.

Within a short time frame, hyperscale data centers have gone from being designed with a typical wholesale data center layout to industrial-level design.

ASHRAE, a global nonprofit membership organization with more than 57,000 members in more than 130 countries worldwide, has been leading the engineering and development of facility standards and guidelines for 120-plus years.

The seamless interconnect of data center facilities is needed to deliver lightning-fast speeds, and yet internet content providers (ICPs) have grown at such a rate there has barely been enough time to create the rigorous testing regiment necessary.

Fire up the Wayback Machine, and let’s travel back to the year 1996 — the time when the Telecommunications Act paved a competitive pathway for traditional phone companies and internet businesses.

The data center industry is experiencing unprecedented growth. There is currently 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day, and this pace is accelerating with the emergence of the IoT. By the year 2020, the IoT will comprise more than 30 billion connected devices. 

Over the last year or so, there has been a lot of publicity around cloud computing — both public and private. Most of the publicity seems to be centered around how businesses need to move away from their physical on-premises systems to a purely cloud-based architecture.