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What's Up with Tech?
Keeping Critical Facilities Running: A Deep Dive with Radix IoT
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
The digital infrastructure powering our modern world faces unprecedented challenges – from AI's insatiable power demands to increasingly unpredictable weather events threatening uptime. How do data centers adapt and survive?
Dave Schaible, Chief Operating Officer at Radix IoT, pulls back the curtain on the sophisticated monitoring systems keeping critical facilities operational 24/7. Their cloud-native Mango platform collects second-by-second data from infrastructure components across four continents, providing the real-time intelligence needed to prevent costly outages and optimize performance.
The conversation explores the three pillars keeping data center operators awake at night: capacity constraints, reliability concerns, and environmental monitoring. With AI applications demanding up to thousands of kilowatts per rack, many facilities face difficult retrofitting decisions or must build entirely new infrastructure. Real-time visibility allows strategic workload balancing during extreme weather, potentially shifting processing power from storm-threatened regions to safer locations.
We also delve into the expanding edge of data center geography – from remote mountaintops to the Australian outback – and how cellular and satellite connections enable monitoring of these distant facilities. Dave explains how regulatory compliance, customer data sharing, and sustainability reporting have evolved from nice-to-have features to essential requirements for competitive operations.
Whether you manage critical infrastructure or simply depend on digital services, this conversation reveals the invisible systems and strategies ensuring our digital world keeps running even as technological demands intensify. Subscribe to learn more about the technological foundations supporting our increasingly digital lives.
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Hey everybody, fascinating chat today, diving into the evolving world of data centers and mission critical facilities and how to keep them running 24-7, with a veteran in automation and infrastructure monitoring at Reddx, dave, how are?
Speaker 2:you. I'm doing great, Evan. Thanks for having me this afternoon.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for being here. Really critical topic, no pun intended, these days. Before that, let's start with the big picture. What is radix iot all about? And a little bit about your bio and journey and background in this space sure, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Uh. Radix rt is a global leader in real-time insights and operational intelligence. Um, we are a cloud-based platform, cloud native platform. The Mango software that we develop allows all of our customers to gather data from all their critical systems. We've got customers right now across four continents that include the data center market, but also utilities, telecommunications, infrastructure, property management, intelligent buildings, energy and industrial operations, so really across any critical environment that our customers find a need for monitoring. The Mengo platform has a limitless scalability and we can deploy it in a very cost efficient manner using vendor neutral software and hardware solutions to gather all the data. That provides critical analytics and operational intelligence for all of our customers. Personally, I'm the chief operating officer for the company, so I run day-to-day operations for all of our customers for support and new platform deployments. As you said, I've been working in the data center, business and critical environments for the better part of 25 years through a few different software startups and happen to be a part of Radix for the last four and a half years.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. So, as we all know, outages are a way of life these days. How is your approach to them different from, maybe, the legacy or best practices that have been out there for decades?
Speaker 2:From an outage perspective, we are providing high-speed data from all of those edge components within the infrastructure that allows people to quickly analyze the state of their data centers and make adjustments and accommodations as needed right so when you've got power outages in one site, you're making sure that everything else across the portfolio is sustainable, so that you can shift critical workloads to where you have the most reliability.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. What would you say are the top two or three issues that keep data center operators up at night? What are some of the worst case scenarios you try to avoid?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, the capacity, reliability and environmental conditions are probably the three pillars of all the data centers and certainly keep plenty of them up at night, right? So, from a capacity perspective, we want to make sure that you've got enough power and cooling available to handle all the work that needs to be done in the data centers with the introduction of AI and all of the dynamic workloads that come along with that. Ensuring that you've got capacity to handle demand when everybody wants to come home and play with chat GPT after work. You need to make sure you've got capacity to handle demand when everybody wants to come home and play with chat GPT after work. You need to make sure you've got all the capacity to handle that headroom, as well as your projects and growth.
Speaker 2:Business is moving faster and faster these days, and being able to adapt to those new challenges is critical, of course, reliability making sure that those systems are up when you need them and ensuring that you've got resiliency. So, whether that's single racks or entire facilities failing to others, you need to make sure that you've got clear understanding of what capacity and failover paths you have within the systems. And, finally, the environmental conditions right. If everything gets too hot, everything shuts down, so ensuring that the temperatures are where they need to be, the systems are operational. That's tried and true statistics and KPIs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so AI is everywhere right now. We're all obsessed with it, but it demands a lot in data centers power cooling, new kinds of connectivity. What are the challenges you see when you're trying to retrofit data centers for all of this AI demand?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's making sure that your infrastructure's got enough capacity again, right, capacity is always the biggest killer for all projects, but making sure that you've got enough space and infrastructure available to support all those new projects. And a lot of cases the existing infrastructure doesn't have the physical power available or the cooling capacity really to adapt to hundreds of kilowatts per rack or even thousands of kilowatts per rack in some of these AI applications. So you have to often increase cooling and in some cases it ends up being you don't have enough and you have to start looking at building new facilities to accommodate that, because it's far more cost effective and, quite honestly, more time effective as well. Retrofit projects can take a lot of extra time, just planning and working around existing workloads and performance problems.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and you've got all kinds of crazy weather phenomenon now, which we all experienced firsthand. How critical is real-time visibility? What does real-time kind of mean to you? Is it, you know, minute, hour to hour? How should these networks, these data centers, the meds devices be managed and monitored?
Speaker 2:Yeah, real-time for me and for data centers, I think, in general, is down to the second right. It's fascinating to get that information in and deliver. Yeah, real time for me and for data centers, I think, in general, is down to the second right. It's fascinating to get that information in and deliver it to the users, the person asking the question or the system making the decision. A lot of our customers are using real time telemetry that we're gathering and feeding it into other software applications that are managing their AI workloads or just their virtual systems, so that when they've got problems developing like we've got storms here on the East Coast today that you may want to make a choice and say we're going to shift this workload out to the West Coast because it's a calmer weather day.
Speaker 2:There's less likelihood of having any sort of interruptions. But it also means faster data. Lets you potentially do demand shedding as well, right? These AI applications can consume huge amounts of data very quickly or, excuse me, huge amounts of power very quickly. That would shock the grid in some cases. So being able to do some load shedding and control how much power is being used is, again, another critical function.
Speaker 1:Interesting. There are also compliance requirements. Now. Emissions, energy usage, big topic, esg. I mean, how do you kind of collect all the necessary data points for the regulators that are increasingly asking for more?
Speaker 2:Yeah, data centers, historically and even off into the future, are huge consumers of power and environmental impact. They've, in some cases, notoriously been that way, being able to gather data, like we do with the Mango platform, from all of the different systems, as well as APIs into other applications If it's not a real-time meter, it may be another software system network tracking how much concrete's being used when we're building data centers. We can gather all that data into our data warehouse and then serve that up for ESG reporting, for compliance reporting. Customer billing is another huge aspect of the business. So making sure that you've got a reliable data stream coming into the system and then making it easy to access within the Mango platform helps all of our customers generate data from a reliable solution Interesting reliable solution Interesting and you know when it comes to the business model of data centers, you have, you know, multi-tenant environments.
Speaker 1:Now you have co-location, it's not just traditional providers anymore. How do you think about the supply?
Speaker 2:chain there and how to work with all the different stakeholders. Yeah, so obviously when you've got multiple customers within the building, you want to be able to share data with them. 10 years ago it wasn't a huge requirement, but I think all of the Colo customers and even the Hyperscale customers that are leasing facilities have it as a requirement from day one now. So the Mango platform is uniquely positioned to be able to share that data through our publisher technology and through our APIs, to be able to expose the data safely and securely and allow the customers access to that real-time telemetry feed so they can use it within their own workload control systems and other reporting platforms.
Speaker 1:Good stuff. And how do you work with customers? Do you just work with them directly? What's the you know best practice in terms of installing your solution? How long does it take and what sort of site access do you need? How quickly can you turn up a network?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we do work. You know my team especially works directly with all of our hosted customers and any of our users that purchase the software. We typically look at our deployments in a days versus weeks timeline. It's a fairly lightweight platform that we go cloud first with. So we set up a solution in our hosting environment, work with our customers to set up network connectivity out into the edge and then start gathering data with them. Ideally, during our sales process, we've prepped them with all of our data templates and what we need to get the system up and running, and then we work with them on the visualization and the style that they want to see the platform configured in.
Speaker 1:Interesting, and so you mentioned the edge. I mean it's no longer you know Virginia and Las Vegas that has. You know the data center capacity. It's everywhere. Now, how do you think about those super remote spots? You talk about IoT. How do you get to these rural and, you know, sometimes mountainous locations?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's another aspect of Mango that's very, I think, unique compared to a lot of other solutions in the fact that we can deploy things down onto small Linux appliances that let us plug a cell modem into them and wherever the critical data is, whether it's in an edge data center or a remote power facility that's far off the beaten path Mango can phone that data home over the cellular connections and in a couple of cases our customers are using, like Starlink, satellite connections to be able to get that connectivity out in the remote areas of the world. And collecting all the data and monitoring things that are out that far helps the customers be more tactical with what they're doing. Not having to roll a truck out into the middle of the outback in Australia to investigate something when you can just dial it up and see the real-time status of things.
Speaker 1:Very cool, or?
Speaker 2:hot in the case of the outback.
Speaker 1:But people are now putting data centers undersea. I heard about the first space-based data center. New markets for you, maybe.
Speaker 2:Wherever the customers take us, we're definitely interested in helping and collecting whatever information is out there that the customers deem critical.
Speaker 1:Very cool. And where are you headed this fall? Lots of interesting events out there in data center land. Where do you tend to travel and kind of market yourself?
Speaker 2:We've been hitting a lot. We always do the 7x24 conference down in San Antonio. That's always a big one for us. There's a new Yoda event that we attended last year. That was a good collection of data center folks and critical industry folks. But we typically do some of the DCD shows. But we're also branching out into other areas, looking at some of the facilities management trade shows that are available out there as well.
Speaker 1:Great Well enjoy. Congratulations on your success. Much needed help out there for the data center players and onwards and upwards thank you very much, evan.
Speaker 2:I appreciate the time this afternoon and thanks everyone for listening and watching take care.