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.

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.

The number of locations enterprise IT teams are responsible for managing is exploding across sectors, and the number of applications and devices that teams are leveraging to connect their workers is on a similarly epic growth trajectory.