In this episode of Over the Edge, Ali Fenn, a data center infrastructure and sustainability leader, formerly the President of ITRenew, breaks down the journey of technology from pre-use to post-use, and analyzes the amount of carbon emission produced throughout its lifecycle. She also talks about creating a circular IT infrastructure, demystifying hyperscale hardware, and causes of the ‘lion’s share’ of carbon emissions. She ends the episode talking about a need for the world’s collective effort in solving unsustainable IT infrastructure.
This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Ali Fenn, a data center infrastructure and sustainability leader. She is the former CEO of IT Renew, which was recently acquired by Iron Mountain. Ali is an expert in green computing, sustainability and is a dynamic and innovative executive with a track record of success in business development, sales and product management. She is currently a board member of Cato, and strategic advisor for Energy Internet Corporation as well as Pentatonic.
In this episode Ali Fenn breaks down the journey of technology from pre-use to post-use, and analyzes the amount of carbon emission produced throughout its lifecycle. She also talks about creating a circular IT infrastructure, demystifying hyperscale hardware, and causes of the ‘lion’s share’ of carbon emissions. She ends the episode talking about a need for the world’s collective effort in solving unsustainable IT infrastructure.
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“They've [most companies] done a really good job at being efficient in the use phase, but supply chain is the next big place we all have to look at. It's the lion's share of carbon emissions. It's not just equipment, it's cement and construction and everything else that goes into the physical infrastructure.”
“I do believe that it's this topic of sustainability and in the context of IT infrastructure: It's our global collective imperative to solve it. And, at the same time, it's a huge opportunity, right? Data center infrastructure is going to fuel the transition economy. It's a trillion dollar opportunity. This is not just sustainability, it is not a tax. It's an opportunity if we do it right.”
“The idea here is to demystify hyperscale hardware and demystify open hardware. It doesn't have to be harder, but there is some work that goes into making it accessible to the broader markets. And that's the stuff that we do. We ultimately deliver it in a way that the enterprises can run super fast. And, that time-to-value is a big one, especially right now in the supply chain that we're in. You asked about the value proposition of this stuff, well, it's available. We're not manufacturing this stuff, right. So that's a huge advantage right now.”
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(02:30) Early on in Ali’s career
(03:25) First Company Ali Joined
(04:00) Transfer to Infrastructure and Hardware
(05:50) What does ITrenew do?
(07:53) Data Center Sustainability and the ‘3 scope’ terminology associated with carbon emissions
(09:40) PUE - Power Usage Effectiveness
(11:42) Hardware Footprints - Sustainability and Circularity
(15:45) Hyperscale data centers
(20:30) ITrenew and recycling vs. refurbishing
(25:01) What is Sesame?
(25:40) Data Security
(29:38) Edge is Everywhere - computing impacting sustainability and equipment
(33:21) Ecosystem Wide Collaboration and Data Center Sustainability
(35:56) Supply chain data publication
(36:45) TCO Levels
(39:00) Rack Density
(40:00) Business Model Innovation and Circular IT Infrastructure
(42:30) Edge Computing Effects
(45:15) Solving IT infrastructure
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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting DellTechnologies.com/SimplifyYourEdge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
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[00:00:00] Matt Trifiro: Hi, this is Matt host of over the edge. The only podcast focused on teaching you about edge computing, the grid and the future of the internet. On this show, I interview experts and practitioners with deep knowledge and expertise in digital infrastructure and the software and technologies that support it.
[00:00:14] Matt Trifiro: We'll even throw in a little metaverse web three and cryptocurrency to keep it on. Join us each episode from mind, expanding romp through the vast technological and business landscape that is quickly defining our new digital world.
[00:00:29] Narrator 1: Hello and welcome to over the edge. Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Ali Fenn.
Ali is the former CEO of IT Renew, which was recently acquired by Iron Mountain. She is an expert in green computing, sustainability and is a dynamic and innovative executive with a track record of success in business development, sales and product management. She is currently a board member of Cato, and strategic advisor for Energy Internet Corporation as well as Pentatonic.
This episode was recorded when Ali was still at IT Renew. In this episode, Ali breaks down the journey of technology from pre-use to post-use, and analyzes the amount of carbon emission produced throughout its lifecycle. She also talks about creating a circular IT infrastructure, demystifying hyperscale hardware, and causes of the ‘lion’s share’ of carbon emissions. She ends the episode talking about a need for the world’s collective effort in solving unsustainable IT infrastructure.
But before we get into it, here’s a brief word from our sponsors
[00:01:24] Narrator 2: Over the edge is brought to you by Dell technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions, from hardware and software, to data and operations across your entire multicloud environment.
[00:01:36] Narrator 2: We're here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
[00:01:45] Narrator 1: And now please enjoy this interview between Ali Fenn and your host Matt Trifiro.
[00:01:54] Matt Trifiro: I, this is matcha Fierro, CMO of edge infrastructure company, vapor IO. Today I'm [00:02:00] here with Allie Fen, president of it renew. We're going to talk about Allie's background in technology, her journey at it renew and how it renews unique approach is helping enterprises scale sustainably and securely decreasing.
[00:02:14] Matt Trifiro: They're critical infrastructure. Hi, Allie. How are you today?
[00:02:18] Ali Fenn: I'm excellent. Thank you. Thanks for having
[00:02:19] Matt Trifiro: me. Oh yeah, you bet. So one of the things I always like to ask my guests is like, how did she even get involved in. I
[00:02:26] Ali Fenn: actually started my career as a, as an investment banker doing technology finance work, and very quickly realized that, well, at first I had the good fortune of doing that out in San Francisco, not on wall street, which led me to be exposed to all of the first-generation internet companies.com companies and so forth.
[00:02:46] Ali Fenn: And I got, I did my typical two year. Late nineties. Yeah, I started in 96. So I guess that tells you about how old I am.
[00:02:57] Ali Fenn: Exactly. So I very quickly [00:03:00] realized that I, I was a player and not a coach and wanted to be actually in the game, building things and not, not as an advisor on the finance side. So did my two years as an analyst and then jumped into, uh, an internet company and never looked back.
[00:03:13] Matt Trifiro: So what was the first company you, you was the first company you
[00:03:16] Ali Fenn: joined?
[00:03:16] Ali Fenn: This company was called. Okay. This'll date me even more, but we were doing something truly groundbreaking and revolutionary at the time, which was electronic delivery of enterprise software. So no more gold CD, good download and update your major, huge enterprise software applications like PeopleSoft and SAP and these kinds of things, and then support them and update them and upgrade them.
[00:03:41] Ali Fenn: And it was a brand new world. Right. We took the company public and had a very great rise of. Grateful like everybody else.
[00:03:48] Matt Trifiro: And how did you transition to a world of infrastructure?
[00:03:53] Ali Fenn: Throughout my career there's been the through line has been infrastructure. [00:04:00] So all kind of enterprise originally enterprise infrastructure, right?
[00:04:03] Ali Fenn: So I spent some time at VA systems doing application server stuff, and then actually transitioned randomly into the hardware space as part of a buyout of wise technology that was intended to turn that old green screen terminal company into. Well, we were calling thin client at the time. It was actually early cloud, right?
[00:04:22] Ali Fenn: It was, it was absolutely cloud computing. And we were trying to do application streaming and operating system streaming and turn it really into a software platform, additionally, to the hardware. And that led me back into a, it gave me an exposure to hardware, but it's all been, and I spent some time at Seagate doing a mix of hardware and software as well.
[00:04:41] Ali Fenn: I've been in and around enterprise and then cloud infrastructure throughout the majority of my career and an open source as well. Right. So when I was a BA I launched the whole Linux program at that time up until that point, everything was sparked Solera. And we did everything. Open-source enabled Java on Intel, all that sort of [00:05:00] stuff.
[00:05:00] Ali Fenn: And then starting at Seagate really got involved in the open compute project from the open hardware side, thinking about how do we change storage interfaces? How do we think about ethernet attached storage devices, those kinds of things. And let's contribute those to the open communities instead of the traditional standards organizations with the objective of going faster.
[00:05:18] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. That's, that's really interesting. And how long have you been at ITP?
[00:05:23] Ali Fenn: I have been at it renewed for about three and a half years. Pretty much. Exactly.
[00:05:28] Matt Trifiro: And what does it renew do? We
[00:05:31] Ali Fenn: are in the business of sustainable data center services and solutions. And what that means from a, in a plain English way is.
[00:05:38] Ali Fenn: We are orchestrating a global circular economic model for the it hardware industry, which means we work with on the one hand, the largest global hyper-scale cloud service providers. We help them with their lifecycle strategies. We securely decommissioned their assets. These are companies that are running fleets of millions and millions and millions of servers, and they necessarily refresh that [00:06:00] equipment very quickly before the end of its life.
[00:06:03] Ali Fenn: And then we transformed that equipment and kind of cascaded into secondary lives to maximize the lifetime value of the equipment in the, in the aggregate, and also maximize the sustainability of that equipment. And the sustainability piece comes from the fact that when you think about it, When you do a lifecycle analysis of it, equipment, a ton of the carbon impact, a significant majority in many deployment models comes from manufacturing.
[00:06:29] Ali Fenn: And so the extent to the extent we can create second lives for this equipment and avoid an equivalent amount of new manufacturing, we're having a meaningful impact on the overall carbon footprint of the industry.
[00:06:40] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. I think that's a really fresh perspective that I hadn't really encountered until I I'd seen it renew the typical.
[00:06:49] Matt Trifiro: Discussion around sustainability in data centers is around power consumption, which is a huge issue, but maybe you can play. Power consumption in the context [00:07:00] of all the carbon that goes into building a PC, the fact that it's embedded there and why it's so important for the overall equation to recycle a lot of this equipment.
[00:07:12] Matt Trifiro: Yeah,
[00:07:12] Ali Fenn: absolutely. So there's terminology associated with, with carbon and with emissions, greenhouse gases, which is called scope one, scope two and scope three scope one and scope two are what people have focused on in the past decade or increasingly in the past 2, 3, 4 years necessarily. Right? That's all of the energy that we consume.
[00:07:32] Ali Fenn: What is that energy and how was it made? What, what electrons power my data center. What electrons power might help. And are those electrons produced with coal or are they produced with solar or they produce with women, right? That's scope one scope two is the electricity and the carbon that went into producing that electricity.
[00:07:48] Matt Trifiro: So we say scope one and scope to do you literally mean scope? One is. Is the energy itself and scope two is the material used or the mechanism used to create it.
[00:07:57] Ali Fenn: Yup. Yup. And, and that [00:08:00] is obviously a massive component of greenhouse gas emissions and a huge and obvious first place to target. So everything that's gone into advancing PDB, which is the metric that over the past 10 years, the industry and the data center industry has been forced to really prioritize.
[00:08:20] Ali Fenn: How efficient is my data center itself. Right. And how much overhead beyond the powering of the it equipment itself? Do I consume? Right? How efficient is my data center operation? And we've made great gains there in the, in, in some cases we've gone from a PV of three, which means that you're running three times the amount of power that you would actually need to just run your it equipment, which is the purpose of a data center down to in the hyperscale case.
[00:08:42] Ali Fenn: 1.05, 1.07, very, very efficient data centers.
[00:08:47] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. So let's, let's pause here for a second and just break this down for the audience. So P stands for power usage effectiveness, is that correct? Yes. And the way it's calculated, the way to think about it is imagine you have a rack of computers and [00:09:00] let's say that that rack is.
[00:09:02] Matt Trifiro: 15 kilowatts of power that at the simplest level and the theoretical level, it should only take 15 kilowatts of power to power, that rack of computers, but you have to cool them and you have to dehumidify and you have to have fans and moving parts and all kinds of other things. The Peewee is the, the, the ratio of additional power you have to put on.
[00:09:22] Matt Trifiro: So as you said, a pew of three would be, it takes two times 25 kilowatts to power 25 kilowatt. So that'd be 75 kilowatts for 25 kilowatts. And what you're saying is now we're getting pus down into the, the one. That's what
[00:09:39] Ali Fenn: I heard in the hyperscale case. Yes. So in these big Mo you know, these big, big, modern, highly optimized data centers that are being run by people like Facebook and Google and Microsoft, yes.
[00:09:50] Ali Fenn: 1.05, 1.07, especially also some of the smaller facilities, but facilities that are, for example, situated up by the Arctic circle. [00:10:00] Eco data center is an interesting one up in Lulea Sweden, doing really efficient data. Designs that can be very, very low enterprise data centers, probably more 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, but still markedly better than they have been historically, which has a huge carbon impact.
[00:10:17] Ali Fenn: Right? So that's the use phase. Think of all of that as use phase energy and the topic about where do we go beyond that scope one scope two use phase. It's scope three and scope three encompasses everything that happened that all the carbon that goes into equipment before it ever gets powered on and after it gets turned off.
[00:10:37] Ali Fenn: So pre-use phase and end of life or post use phase collectively make up scope three, and that's the carbon together. They make up the whole carbon footprint of any it equipment.
[00:10:47] Matt Trifiro: So it was very easy for me to understand the carbon footprint of consuming electricity, but. Aren't there other footprints with hardware.
[00:10:55] Matt Trifiro: I mean the precious minerals and how does that figure into sustainability [00:11:00] and.
[00:11:01] Ali Fenn: The biggest part of scope three is the manufacturing, right? So everything that goes into making mining, what is the carbon? What are the emissions tied to mining? What are the carbon emissions tied to manufacturer of components?
[00:11:15] Ali Fenn: What are the emissions tied to assembly? What are the emissions tied to transportation of components from wherever their mind, to where they're assembled, all those kinds of things. All of that is collectively scope three. And there's a system boundary question of, okay. Do you encompass like the human labor transportation that went to the mining Priscilla and so forth, but we've done some work at it.
[00:11:35] Ali Fenn: Renew where the boundary is just starts with the mining facility itself, the manufacturer of components itself all the way through to assembly, and then on everything that goes into end of life, which is post shredding, smelting sorting all of that stuff. And in some. You know, very common deployment model, right?
[00:11:54] Ali Fenn: Where you have minerals mined in places like Africa components [00:12:00] manufactured in China, very common systems assembled in Eastern Europe data centers run in Europe in a place like Sweden, and then end of life practices done also in Europe that in that life cycle analysis, our data shows that as much as 75% of the total carbon footprint, Comes from the previous phase.
[00:12:19] Ali Fenn: So all of that manufacturing. So when we think about the business we're in, in circularity, what's the percentage. Again, it can be as much as 75% or more.
[00:12:28] Matt Trifiro: So the actual power consumed. Running the servers and the air conditioners and whatever else has to happen is only is three times less than the amount it took to create it.
[00:12:42] Matt Trifiro: We haven't gotten rid of it yet. We just, we just built the server. That's fascinating.
[00:12:47] Ali Fenn: And that's why the message I would give about, about circularity and the need to get much more sophisticated about how we think about regenerative systems, multiple lifetimes, maintaining the stuff that we've built for as [00:13:00] long as possible.
[00:13:01] Ali Fenn: In the aggregate is not that we shouldn't focus on the use phase. That's, there's an enormous amount of carbon emissions that we have to continue the pursuit of mitigating. There are people doing that. We must continue that, but if we assume success there, then there's an obvious, next place to look, which is manufacturing and the supply chain carbon.
[00:13:19] Ali Fenn: It's not just our data, right? Supply chain carbon. If. The CDP carbon disclosure project, which is an organization that we, and many, many other companies report into to disclose emissions of our com corporate footprints. I think their data is that across companies, an average of six times, the, the operating footprint comes from supply chain in cases like Microsoft, their data it's public 25 times.
[00:13:42] Ali Fenn: It's all supply chain, it's all manufacturing. So, and that's because they've done a really good job. At being efficient in the use phase, but supply chain is the next big place. We all have to look and it's the lion share of carbon emissions and it's not just it equipment, it's cement and construction and all of everything that [00:14:00] else that goes into the physical built infrastructure as well.
[00:14:03] Matt Trifiro: I remember 20 years ago actually hearing some of the first cradle-to-cradle type initiatives, usually out of Germany where the manufacturers are burdened with the responsibility of getting rid of whatever they built. And so they tend to build it. So it's easy to take apart and stuff like that. But reuse obviously is the, probably the most efficient thing to do with.
[00:14:24] Matt Trifiro: It at least towards the end of its life. So let's, let's talk a little bit about, about that and get specifically to it renew. So it renew you reclaim. Primarily hyperscaler equipment. Yes. And we talked about hyperscalers and I, I don't know if you name your sources or not, but we're talking about the Googles and Facebooks and the Amazons and the Oracles and the whoever else is in that list.
[00:14:46] Matt Trifiro: And they build these giant data centers. So how big is the hyperscale data center? Roughly? This
[00:14:51] Ali Fenn: is a closely held secret of all of them. Nobody likes to publicize the information about exactly their fleets, but. If you look at just [00:15:00] their capital expenditures, it's pretty easy to assume that they're all running many millions of servers at this point.
[00:15:05] Ali Fenn: And that those numbers are growing
[00:15:06] Matt Trifiro: very many, so many millions of servers. And these servers for people who haven't seen a data center are in these giant football stadium, sized warehouses, rows, and rows and rows after them. How do the hyperscalers decide? Okay. It's time to cycle this piece of.
[00:15:24] Ali Fenn: So they all have very sophisticated analytic data science teams that are doing capacity planning and they make those decisions based on optimizing for efficiency at the data center level.
[00:15:38] Ali Fenn: Right. So they are. Necessarily at the bleeding edge of form factor, innovation, density, innovation, anything, anything they can do because at that scale to squeeze a 1% or 2% or 3% of 4% efficiency is, is very, very material in the overall scheme of their, [00:16:00] their financial. And their capacity, right?
[00:16:03] Ali Fenn: Scalability. So when you think about a lot of people say, ah, wait a minute. Moore's law, it's really slowed down. We're not doubling our chip level efficiency every 18 months anymore. We're getting maybe 10%, maybe 20%, the Intel ticks and talks have slowed down. Why would people keep refreshing so quickly?
[00:16:22] Ali Fenn: Because each generation of a computer is nowhere near the generational advantage. It was a decade. But in the hyperscale case, these guys are still refreshing on average every three to four years. And that's because they're finding other ways to continuously push that efficiency envelope. Right. And so, so what happens is they, some cases longer, slower in many cases, they're now getting quite good at cascading.
[00:16:47] Ali Fenn: Some of that equipment in, from a primary workload into a secondary workload so that they actually have a longer life cycle, but in the primary workload, think about three
[00:16:55] Matt Trifiro: to four. For Google cloud, it goes to
[00:16:58] Ali Fenn: search. Yeah, [00:17:00] probably so probably so. Yep. And that's, that's great, right? I mean, that's the best, that's the best, most sustainable thing to do.
[00:17:06] Ali Fenn: Right? Keep it in, keep it in its highest utility values, zero transformation,
[00:17:10] Matt Trifiro: different
[00:17:11] Ali Fenn: traffic to it. Right. But in many cases, this equipment comes out after three or four years. And because they're again, necessarily pushing that envelope, but what happens is. For everybody else, enterprises around the world already run servers for 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years.
[00:17:26] Ali Fenn: Right. That is just the way of the way that the normal
[00:17:29] Matt Trifiro: to get rid of PCs running windows.
[00:17:32] Ali Fenn: Exactly. Right. So there's, so there's a, the technology treadmill is nine or 10. All right. That's that, that's a very logical place amount of time to run equipment for, for anybody who does not have to be squeezing every 1% in, you know, perpetually.
[00:17:48] Ali Fenn: Right. Well, and,
[00:17:49] Matt Trifiro: and it would also seem to me, and maybe this isn't true, but you would know this for sure that a three year old rack of equipment from one of the hyperscalers may be more performant than [00:18:00] anything I can buy off the shelf.
[00:18:01] Ali Fenn: That's a hundred percent true. That's a hundred percent true. So one of the interesting things is.
[00:18:06] Ali Fenn: We, and we talk more about this. We take those racks and recycling is kind of like the least worst alternative in this case now, right? Because recycling, yes. It's responsible to keep things out of the landfill, but we can do much more interesting things than that. And now that we have open hardware, we have it available.
[00:18:22] Ali Fenn: Very large volumes, predictably, homogeneous equipment, and so forth. We can think about how we create full product portfolios, that feed massive downstream global markets. Right? And so when we say, we say, I can sell a rack of this hyperscale equipment to our tens of racks, hundreds, or X, whatever it is to global enterprise.
[00:18:43] Ali Fenn: At 50% TCO advantage people say, well, wait a minute. But that's, that's compared to like refurbished stuff. And it's like, no, no, no. That's compare performance normalized to new equipment. And the reason is because this is the first time. At the rest of the market has been able to get into the slipstream of the hyperscale [00:19:00] innovation event.
[00:19:00] Ali Fenn: The purpose
[00:19:01] Matt Trifiro: usually means less, less, but
[00:19:04] Ali Fenn: it's because we're delivering a density gain. We're delivering the benefit that the hyperscalers did from a supply chain in a parts perspective where they radically.
[00:19:14] Matt Trifiro: Yup. That's, that's really interesting. Okay. So let's, let's talk about, more about the, how it renew gets into the, so what used to happen to.
[00:19:22] Matt Trifiro: Before it renew, like what did he what'd they do with them when they need to did commission a server?
[00:19:26] Ali Fenn: Well, so I mean, it render has been doing this for 20 years, right? So it's actually, it's actually, plus that has changed over time. Right? So what used to happen is, and this started long before there were hyperscalers, right?
[00:19:38] Ali Fenn: I to renew started in the corporate space where it was, it was about servers and workstations and whatever,
[00:19:45] Matt Trifiro: literally.
[00:19:47] Ali Fenn: Not re not refurbishing originally. Right? So not refurbishing. So we started the company started long before I was there. The company started basically decommissioning this equipment and then harvesting the components and selling [00:20:00] those components into other places.
[00:20:02] Ali Fenn: Right. And then recycling the remaining materials all the
[00:20:05] Matt Trifiro: way down to melt the gold off the PCB board.
[00:20:07] Ali Fenn: So we don't do I turn new, does not itself do the recycling. We work with a network of downstream recyclers. We have always been the engine. Decommissioning and then maximizing the financial value of whatever that equipment was in, whatever best way possible historically.
[00:20:23] Ali Fenn: When everything was proprietary, that was all as components. And we still do a lot of work in components. We feed components into system builders globally that are building everything from, from gaming stations to white box servers, to desktops, to crypto mining rigs, to whatever set top boxes. Right. So we still do a lot of components because in some cases, Especially where we're decommissioning proprietary OEM equipment.
[00:20:51] Ali Fenn: There's really no option other than to make use of the components. And so that's an interesting thing to do. It's always been a better alternative than just recycling, but what [00:21:00] changed in the last few years is that as the Piper all have moved, a their, their fleets have gotten to a sufficient scale that we can really, you can really build a solution portfolio around it reliably, but, but more importantly, they've moved to open an ODM style hardware, and that gives us the ability.
[00:21:17] Ali Fenn: To recertify, reconfigure support warranty, do software certifications, change power architectures, do whatever it's necessary to then make those same racks with minimal transformation, useful and usable by the broader markets. Right? So if you're an enterprise running a hundred racks in a. You don't have 48 volts to the rack.
[00:21:38] Ali Fenn: You need a VMware certification, you need other stuff. Right. And so we, we do that transformation and that's all enabled by open and ODM systems. Right. And so now we have on the one end. We facilitate internal reuse for our upstream hyperscale partners. And that's like the most sustainable inner most circle of a circular economic model.
[00:21:58] Ali Fenn: And then we take racks [00:22:00] that looked like racks, and we make them, we sell them as racks. That's the next best thing to do then third, we say, Hey, wait. Compute and storage nodes are just building blocks. Why can't we put those building blocks together in a variety of form factors for the edge, right? Why can't we make them four unit four node units?
[00:22:16] Ali Fenn: Why can't we put them in streetlamp towers? Why can't we put them hanging on walls and retail facilities? Why can't we put them along smart roadways in cabinets that are not maybe Rex, but they look and feel they need the same compute and storage. And then only after that, if we can't do that, do we strip things down to the components, so components and then recycle, right?
[00:22:32] Ali Fenn: So now you can see there's this much rich. Mix of things that collectively avoid as much manufacturing as possible.
[00:22:39] Matt Trifiro: Um, definitely appreciating the economic sophistication if your business, which is really interesting to me and explains prob probably also the other side of you, the non-technology side, coming at this from investment baking and economics, and you say, look, give us your old stuff and rely on us with our engineers and assembly lines or disassembly assembly lines or [00:23:00] partners, whatever to figure out the highest and best use.
[00:23:03] Matt Trifiro: And so do you, do you pay the hyperscalers? Is that part of the deal is like, look, we'll get the highest and best use and we'll we'll revenue share with
[00:23:09] Ali Fenn: you. We do revenue share. That is exactly right. And that's the way everybody's interests are aligned. Right. We rely on us to maximize the value of this, and then we pay a proportion back to back to the hyperscaler.
[00:23:21] Matt Trifiro: Right. So, so if I'm an, I'm an enterprise, the value proposition, I could go to any of the big manufacturers or any of the El 11. The assembly guys, and I could specify a clinic equipment and get something and I would pay whatever the dollar amount is or I could come to it renew. And I guess when you say Sesame, so Sesame is the product line of these re re yep.
[00:23:44] Matt Trifiro: Sesame
[00:23:44] Ali Fenn: is the Sesame is the brand that we sell the recertified racks and edge solutions under gosh,
[00:23:51] Matt Trifiro: all these other lines of business of decommissioning and selling into parts and stuff, success to me. So I come to you as Dubai. To buy a rack of computers. Like I might go to [00:24:00] Dell or HP or something.
[00:24:00] Matt Trifiro: Perfect. And now with your ed strategy, your decommissioning and reconfiguring into other form factors too, are you four? Are you so, so what's involved. Taking Iraq out of the hyperscale data centers. So you mentioned something like certification for enterprise. What about all the data that's on the desks and like what happens for all that
[00:24:20] Ali Fenn: stuff?
[00:24:21] Ali Fenn: Data security is, is table stakes, right? That's that, that is the essential foundation of our business. We have a data center station solution that's called terroir aware, which isn't used by many of the big hyperscalers to do secure logical erase. Unfortunately many still, even after they do logical.
[00:24:40] Ali Fenn: Physically destruct storage media. That's just the reality of, of the risk reward. Trade off currently from a sustainability perspective, not ideal, hopefully the ecosystem will move forward because we all know. I mean, in the 10 years that terroir has been running, we've done forensic audits throughout that time and never [00:25:00] has a piece of data been found on a terroir wiped disk.
[00:25:02] Ali Fenn: So we believe that. Logical arise is sufficient, but there, there are some hyperscalers that are not ready to accept that yet others do others. We sell storage, we resell storage media for, so it's really a it's, it's an individual decision by, by each, but that's the essential underpinning. So we, the discs come to us.
[00:25:26] Ali Fenn: Wiped one way or another, they either get distorted. They don't get destroyed. In many cases, we're then integrating new storage into the recertified racks because that's just kind of essential. Right. But then we go through a process where we, we physically receive everything. We track everything down to its asset tag.
[00:25:42] Ali Fenn: We test everything on an individual level. We configure it to. The needs of our downstream customers, right? So some of the transformation that goes in are the things that I mentioned, right? Increasingly people want onboard NBME they want higher converged infrastructure. We do that. [00:26:00] We add, we adapt whatever their power needs are, so that the single phase here, it's three phase here.
[00:26:05] Ali Fenn: It's whatever it is. For their specific environment. And then we do the solutions integration. So we'll do, if it's software-defined networking, we'll work with pluribus, we'll work with the risks. If it's VM-ware, if it's red hat we'll do, if it's Kubernetes will rancher, Souza, we do all of those kinds of certifications, just like you would expect with an OEM.
[00:26:24] Ali Fenn: So that then when we sell something, then it's no harder for the enterprise to do what they would expect for the traditional OEM solution. And then we deliver the fully integrated rack scale solution. Networking compute storage, and we do a full assert re-certification and support and warranty on the whole thing.
[00:26:41] Ali Fenn: So that literally we roll things in, we say 60 to 90 minutes, we just had a project a couple of weeks ago where we rolled in and from truck to workload was 30 minutes. So the idea here is demystify the hyperscale hardware demystify, open hardware, like open compute. It doesn't have to be hard. But we have to, [00:27:00] there is some work that goes into making it accessible to the broader market, and that's the stuff that we do to ultimately deliver.
[00:27:06] Ali Fenn: In a way that the enterprises can, can run super fast. Right? And that's time to value is a big one, especially right now in the supply chain that we're in. Right? You asked about the value proposition of this stuff. It's, it's available. We're not manufacturing this stuff, right. So that's a huge advantage right now.
[00:27:23] Ali Fenn: The total cost of ownership, we typically say 50% better TCO. Performance normalized and so huge cost savings. And then the last is sustainability, right? I mean, people increasingly are authentically driven by wanting to do the right thing from a sustainability
[00:27:39] Matt Trifiro: perspective. I think that's right. And, uh, I was recently doing some research on.
[00:27:43] Matt Trifiro: How marketing changes post pandemic or post recession, that sort of thing. And it's loosely studied, but there is some, some evidence that sentiment turns to sort of more societal. So it's actually the trend is, is I think spot on in a number of different [00:28:00] ways. How do you think education. Changes the equation for sustainability and equipment.
[00:28:07] Ali Fenn: It's a really great question. And I think not yet quantified, but on the surface, I think everything is a data center, every real estate, EV every real estate owner, every piece of real estate, whether you're a gas station, that's
[00:28:22] Matt Trifiro: a great line. It's true.
[00:28:23] Ali Fenn: It's true. Whether you're a gas station, a cell tower, a roadway, a a railway.
[00:28:29] Ali Fenn: A campus, an airport, a car, everything is edge, right. Everybody who is thinking about all the web three stuff, all these distributed networks, edge is everywhere. Data centers are everywhere. Right. And so when you think about that, And there's some, there's some stats out there. I think there's stats, people saying edge infrastructure could be as much as four times cloud infrastructure.
[00:28:54] Ali Fenn: And when you just look at compute and storage resources, not surprising when you think about all the connectedness of everything. Right? [00:29:00] So, so we have a massive sustainability challenge tied to all of that hardware, right? To the point we were just talking about, about manufacturing. If we're going to manufacture all that hardware, there's a massive carbon tax tied to that.
[00:29:10] Ali Fenn: On the other hand, maybe there's some gains, right? Because maybe we're saving a ton of. The today use to transport all the data back to the core data center, right. And back and forth and so forth. So maybe, maybe there's some benefits there. There's also a facility's consideration, right? In the core data centers, we talked about PUE and in a Google or wherever is 1.07.
[00:29:30] Ali Fenn: But if I'm using. Uh, a facility of some sort in a central urban location that wasn't, purpose-built designed to be a data center. You know, my efficiency's not going to be anywhere near as good. So I think we don't yet know the impact, but I think we do know that there's a huge sustainability cost to all of this physical infrastructure and we have to evolve to.
[00:29:56] Ali Fenn: A data center, a data, uh, compute infrastructure [00:30:00] model that is regenerative. Right? And that's, that's, that's things like, how do we think about second lives for equipment it's things about how do we think about the building materials we use? How do we avoid cement? How do we do heat recapture? Right? How do we limit the water usage?
[00:30:13] Ali Fenn: Right. We have to, we have to look at the whole picture and it is super complicated, right? I mean, there are, there are point solutions for a lot of. It's only just beginning to come in, where people are starting to try to grok the whole puzzle. And I don't, I don't pretend to, to be able to quantify the whole impact yet, but I, I do think that we have to think about, it's not a data center industry, right.
[00:30:37] Ali Fenn: It infrastructure is the underpinning and the backbone of every single thing that we do globally today. And it's physically located everywhere. And we have to start to be able to measure, which means data transparency. It means much different forms of carbon accounting standards, evolution. Like there's a lot, that's going to go in to making this stuff visible and then being able to [00:31:00] manage it.
[00:31:00] Ali Fenn: Right. Because if, if we can't measure it, we can't manage it. And that's, I think that's the big, next frontier on all this stuff is, is transparency around what actually is the environmental impact of all this.
[00:31:09] Matt Trifiro: Your passion for this is very infectious. Who else is working on this problem at? Cause it sounds like at the scale that you were just talking about, it's not enough for the point solution.
[00:31:20] Matt Trifiro: It's like somebody is gonna be looking at all of this together. Are there any industry groups that are collaborating to figure out how all these, these complex interactions affected? There
[00:31:30] Ali Fenn: are, there are both companies and industry groups, right? And I do absolutely believe that this is ultimately an ecosystem wide collaboration.
[00:31:39] Ali Fenn: Like nobody can solve this on by themselves, but there are, if we just start with companies, there's a company. As an example, there's a company in Europe called block heating, which is a customer of it, renews that is doing. Fully sustainable modular data centers where they're sitting container-based data centers next to greenhouses, massive scale greenhouses [00:32:00] in the Netherlands, which grow all the food, tomatoes, all this other stuff in the Netherlands.
[00:32:04] Ali Fenn: And they're using the heat from the servers to heat the greenhouses. That's awesome. There's another company in Sweden, which is doing heat recapture to go back into the municipal grid. Right? This is all, this is all really powerful stuff. Companies like some are doing great stuff on immersion cooling that have a huge environmental impact, right.
[00:32:20] Ali Fenn: And a water impact. So, so there are good examples at the company level, but we, we participate in three organizations that I think are all trying to bring together companies to address. Private sector companies, public interests, and others to try to figure all this stuff out. One of them is the world business council for sustainable development.
[00:32:42] Ali Fenn: That's across industry platform. That's got some interesting work going on on carbon accounting. I think. Hopefully an opportunity to cross pollinate from sector to sector. There's the circle electronics partnership, which is very specifically focused on as kind of an offshoot of the world economic forum and WBCs D which is, [00:33:00] which is trying to have a very specific focus on circularity and the electronics world.
[00:33:05] Ali Fenn: And then. From a very specific data center industry perspective. The open compute project is also has now prioritized sustainability and the sustainability working group as one of its key tenants and, and is trying to bring together this specific industry to think about everything from design, for circularity, designed, for repair, all of those kinds of things through to best practices around second lives end of life and so forth.
[00:33:31] Ali Fenn: So I'm glad to see that there's work going on. I would candidly say. W everybody needs to do way more, right? Like all these groups, it's hard to move coalitions forward. We need like real action to take place. And that's where I think I, I just personally come back to data transparency until we have people committed to sharing data publicizing data.
[00:33:50] Ali Fenn: So, so that it can be acted upon it's going to be hard to compel the right. What kind of
[00:33:55] Matt Trifiro: data would you like to
[00:33:56] Ali Fenn: see? I think we need a supply chain data published. I think we need [00:34:00] to know just like, I can see where my avocado came from and where it was, but it was organically produced here and how it was transported or whatever.
[00:34:08] Ali Fenn: I think we need to know. Where does that thing come from? What went into manufacturing? It was it using recycled material? Was it not your Susie? You would take your cycle material blocks
[00:34:17] Matt Trifiro: to the blockchain. Exactly.
[00:34:20] Ali Fenn: I know it's a cool optical scanner where you can just scan your PC and it just goes, boom.
[00:34:25] Ali Fenn: Here's the carbon content of your PC.
[00:34:29] Matt Trifiro: That's actually seems kind of doable. It's that's really interesting. I'm gonna have to give that some more thought. You mentioned 50% TCO. How D how do you get to that? That's that's really.
[00:34:41] Ali Fenn: Uh, it's three levels of TCO benefit, right? So the first is the first two really stemmed from the nature of our supply chain, which is the hyperscale fleets, right?
[00:34:50] Ali Fenn: So the hyperscalers did a fantastic job over the course of the past four or five, six years of saying, Hey, I don't need to pay a premium for OEM. [00:35:00] I'm going to design, I'm better at designing my own equipment. And then I'm going to do the deals with the component manufacturers. And I'm just going to pay somebody in Taiwan 2% to put this stuff together for me, and I'm going to hoard it.
[00:35:10] Ali Fenn: That's open compute. It's all the ODM stuff, open compute and otherwise. Right. And so, so they, the hyperscalers themselves lowered the cost by moving to standard components. And by designing purpose-built cloud style infrastructure, it's way more than. It's way more power efficient, it's way more cooling, efficient, right?
[00:35:28] Ali Fenn: So there's a technology driven cost advantage that that is fundamental to our portfolio. There's a second level one, which is the supply chain disruption, right? The hyperscalers it's up to the supply chain. They moved to all the standard components that brings the start cost down as well. Right. And
carries
[00:35:44] Matt Trifiro: through and just the huge purchasing.
[00:35:47] Ali Fenn: All of it. Right? And then the third bit is the re-certified piece. Think about it as this is, these are certified pre-owned BMW is that somebody else drove off the lot. They've got five, 10, 15,000 miles on them. You get [00:36:00] exactly the performance you want, you compromise nothing. It even smells like a new car.
[00:36:03] Ali Fenn: Right. Looks clean. It looks pristine. These, these machines are run in perfect environments in the best conditions, right? So you get this brand, this, this what feels like a new thing. Fully warrantied, fully supported. Somebody else drove it off the lot. You don't have to pay that price. Right. And so the combination of those three things is really what gives us the ability to come to market at significantly.
[00:36:25] Ali Fenn: Costs and again, super important performance normalized. Right? So you're not saying, oh, it's lower cost, but I've got to give up 20% performance
[00:36:34] Matt Trifiro: not getting the lease return of last year's BMW. You're getting the formula one. Right,
[00:36:39] Ali Fenn: right. And that's how we got to put the building blocks together. Right. So my CPU might be a previous generation than somebody else's CPU, but if I can get.
[00:36:49] Ali Fenn: 40% better density at the rack level, the cluster level. You're good. You're way ahead. You come out ahead,
[00:36:55] Matt Trifiro: right. So how dense are your racks
[00:36:56] Ali Fenn: typically wide range we can [00:37:00] do currently we can do up to 96 nodes in Iraq, in a ultra dense kind of a fashion, a lot of data centers. Yeah, well, exactly. So a lot of, a lot of data centers can handle that, right?
[00:37:10] Ali Fenn: So that could be 25 kilowatts. Right? Most data centers, most colos cannot handle that. So we optimize for whatever, uh, you know, whatever people need at the rack. Um, most people are not yet able to push the density and the light
[00:37:21] Matt Trifiro: with the right facilities. You can pack that to 20.5 kilowatts. Yeah.
[00:37:25] Ali Fenn: And you know what?
[00:37:26] Ali Fenn: Honest thing matters. People, public cloud taught people. I don't have to worry about the underlying piece parts. What I care about is outcomes per dollar. I want to click, click, click. I want small, medium, large. I want to go. And that's what we're trying to do. Right. We're trying to say outcomes for dollar cluster level.
[00:37:41] Ali Fenn: Don't worry about the building blocks. Let us put that together. Yeah,
[00:37:43] Matt Trifiro: that's interesting. You mentioned the, you know, the previously, the previously owned and I was just thinking nothing is actually. Like even the new iPhone came out of rocks out of the ground. Right. Nothing's actually new. And we just got this weird stigma, but you're right.
[00:37:57] Matt Trifiro: If it has the new car smell and it [00:38:00] drives like, or better than the new car you could typically buy, what's the difference. And I think it's just a psychological difference. It's really interesting. And I think we companies like it renew, we'll be changing that let's think about the business model innovation that I, I knew it had to do like 20 years ago.
[00:38:15] Matt Trifiro: I mean, I think it is true. Really creative in particular, because I think it'd be a lot easier to do if the true cost were built into the cost. Like we were talking about earlier with they're doing in Germany, right? The cost of disposing. So suddenly then, then the economic incentives are. They're carry around on the machine itself.
[00:38:35] Matt Trifiro: It's, you're operating on the fringes, bringing this new business model into reality, as opposed to just being the most obvious thing, right. Like bottle deposits. Right. You're just like, okay, we're gonna recycle it. Cause, cause it's, it's cheaper to recycle than it is to, to destroy. Yeah. So there's, there's some, there's some policy framework work that the industry needs to do as well.
[00:38:56] Matt Trifiro: A hundred percent.
[00:38:57] Ali Fenn: Yeah. And there's, there's a lot of it happening, [00:39:00] especially if you look in, in, in Europe is way ahead on all this stuff, as you would suspect in terms of mandating, you know, right. To repair mandating, there's a new initiative. That's called the. Circular it packed or something like this, and it's a public, it's a coalition of seven or eight European governments, which have entered a pack to team and drive procurement of circular it infrastructure, because it's like, they're, they're putting their dollars.
[00:39:28] Ali Fenn: They're putting the carrot out there. Right there. There can be sticks too. Right. There can be carbon tax. There can be other things, but. I absolutely see back to the subject of collaboration. This is public private work teaming that needs to happen. There's elements of both to be able to really compel the right behavior change.
[00:39:45] Matt Trifiro: Right. Yeah. And I was thinking about the impact of edge computing on the environment, sustainability and at a simple level, it could just be, we're just pulling more stuff out of the earth and sticking in a place where it's just trapped [00:40:00] and that's, there's a sort of depressing view of edge computing. And then there's a really.
[00:40:05] Matt Trifiro: I think encouraging view, which is, well, let's make it part of the circular economy. Let's figure out how to source the machines that go into these places in a different way. And let's figure out how to. All by T renew and send them back when we're done, but also one of the big hopes for edge computing, when as you say, there's a data center and everything is that our cities will have these data processing capabilities.
[00:40:29] Matt Trifiro: And in terms of running real-time algorithms against a. Fairly accurate digital twin of a city to optimize energy use or reduce pollution or something else like edge computing could have a lot of really, really positive effects on the environment that at least balanced out, if not completely negate its negative effects.
[00:40:51] Matt Trifiro: I have to give that a lot more thought a
[00:40:53] Ali Fenn: hundred percent. I mean, I think ultimately, and this gets to why this is such kind of a beast of a topic I'm actually quite [00:41:00] hopeful, right? To, to your point. I think you can no longer separate. It infrastructure, computer infrastructure from, from anything that anybody does in the world, whether it's commercial, personal, social health, whatever it is.
[00:41:13] Ali Fenn: Right. Um, and I'm actually hopeful that we can, we can do some, both business model and technology innovation in a way that that brings. The edge to life that simultaneously connects the 40% of the world. That's not online. That simultaneously is more sustainable. And that includes looking at the whole picture as you're suggesting, right?
[00:41:33] Ali Fenn: It's not just about edge infrastructure, it hardware we're focused on here. It has a huge impact. But, but how are we thinking about what this stuff is powering? Right. Let's look at the whole complete sustainability picture. Yeah.
[00:41:45] Matt Trifiro: Uh, which, which, which did sort of divides, uh, re bridging which jobs are we creating?
[00:41:50] Matt Trifiro: Which pollutions are we reducing? In addition to everything else, this has been really fast. Allie. I appreciate you giving me and our audience a lot to [00:42:00] think about. I wish as a consumer, I could buy it renew equipment.
[00:42:05] Ali Fenn: You cannot buy it as a consumer because we have a lot more volume of that than we need.
[00:42:10] Ali Fenn: We need, we need a more highly leveraged go to market strategy, but there are. Recertified laptops available, right? I mean, candidly apple is doing a really good job of using fully recycled
[00:42:21] Matt Trifiro: materials in the, like with my, with my Samsung phone and my apple computers. I'm trading them in every, every time.
[00:42:27] Matt Trifiro: And I'm getting a new computer every year and somebody else is getting a less expensive computer and Apple's making money for doing it. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's right. That is, that is all part of the circular economy. This has been a, this has been great, Allie. I really appreciate it. I hope that we get to continue this conversation outside this.
[00:42:44] Matt Trifiro: You've made me sort of passionate about it. So I appreciate you giving me that perspective.
[00:42:48] Ali Fenn: No, thanks for having me. I obviously love to talk about it and I do believe that this topic of sustainability and in the context of it, infrastructure is it's our global collective [00:43:00] imperative to solve. And, and it's at the same time, it's a huge opportunity, right?
[00:43:04] Ali Fenn: Data center infrastructure is going to fuel the transition economy, right? It's a trillion dollar opportunity. This is not just sustainability is not a tax. It's an opportunity if we do it. Right. Right. So we need all the collaboration we can do well.
[00:43:14] Matt Trifiro: And you're, and you're D you're demonstrating it, right?
[00:43:16] Matt Trifiro: The creativity in the business model is, is really impressive. Um, so Allie, if anybody wants to get ahold of you, where can they find you?
[00:43:25] Ali Fenn: They can find me on LinkedIn. That's probably the easiest way. I'm a more active there than on, on Twitter and other places. But yeah, that's, that's a great
[00:43:31] Matt Trifiro: place to start.
[00:43:32] Matt Trifiro: Okay. And, uh, the different groups that Allie mentioned, we'll put them in the show notes, Allie, thank you very much for being on our show. And I look forward to maybe having a check-in in a year from now.
[00:43:42] Ali Fenn: Absolutely. Matt, thanks for having me great to great to discuss it as always, that
[00:43:47] Narrator 2: does it for this episode of over the edge.
[00:43:49] Narrator 2: If you're enjoying the show, please leave a rating and a review and telephone. Over the edge is made possible through the generous sponsorship of our partners at Dell technologies. Simplify your edge so you can [00:44:00] generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com.