Data Center POST recently spoke with AJ Byers, President and CEO at ROOT Data Center, about what the company plans to accomplish at the upcoming IMN Fall Forum in Chicago and heading into the New Year. In our Q&A with Mr. Byers, we discussed developments that are underway for the company and hot trends in the data center space relating to cloud deployment. ROOT Data Center is an innovative Montréal based company that leverages Quebec’s low power costs, cool climate, and proximity to major urban markets such as New York, Boston, and Toronto to provide fast data connections within a next-gen data center.
(DCP) What do you do and what problems are you attempting to solve?
ROOT Data Center is one of Canada’s largest wholesale data center providers. We are helping the world’s most advanced technology companies bring their services to the Canadian and Eastern US markets in an affordable and sustainable way.
(DCP) What do you attribute to your company’s success?
ROOT has changed the way companies deploy data center capacity. We deliver multi-MW implementations in less than 120 days, and offer a PUE of 1.17, combined with 100% sustainable power and densities of up to 40kW per rack.
(DCP) What do you think is the greatest challenge in the data center industry?
The industry has seen remarkable change in the past few years with dramatic movement to cloud deployments. On one hand, this will challenge data centers to have capacity and space available for these massive implementations. On another level, the amount of data going into data centers overall is increasing enormously, which has a very real draw on resource utilization. At ROOT we are thinking ahead to not only have the capacity and capability to expand as our customers need, but also doing it in a sustainable way that has a very small footprint on the environment.
(DCP) What new developments are on the horizon for your company?
We have recently secured $90 million in a new round of financing, which makes ROOT ready to expand even further into existing and new regions. We have also embarked on a project to use leading-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to maintain our uptime, which will be an industry first. We will have more details on that coming to market soon!
(DCP) What topics are you most excited to learn about at IMN Chicago 2017?
We are most excited to talk to organizations that are looking at the same problems and challenges we have, and learning about their approach to handling the ever-changing data center requirements.
AJ Byers will be speaking on the panel, “Tier 2 & 3 Market Growth Strategies – Evaluating the Edge vs. Urban and Latest” at 5:05 pm this Thursday November 16th at IMN’s 8th Annual Fall Forum on Data Centers & Cloud Services Infrastructure.
