Partners need more education around data centres: Schneider Electric VP

Farokh Ghadially tells CRN Australia that education is needed because the technology is still quite new to the industry.

As more end users want to adopt AI capabilities, partners need to have a better understanding around data centres.

AI needs a large amount of power and cooling to ensure organisations can use AI to its full capacity. This is where data centres have a role to play.

During Ingram Micro Experience in Sydney, Farokh Ghadially, VP secure power at Schneider Electric told CRN Australia that partners don’t know where to start with power and cooling.

“There are times when they've had a server, but they don't know how to power it, how to cool it,” he explained.

“Many times the building they need an upgrade, or the core installation itself may need an upgrade to supply that amount of power which the building doesn't have.”

Some partners don’t have a full grasp of data centres and data centre cooling, because the concept of data centre cooling is still quite nascent.

“It's just happening right now,” Ghadially said.

“I was saying to someone it's easy to say, ‘I need 100 kilowatt rack’. We used to get 10, 20 kilowatt racks,” he said.

“Now it's a 100 kilowatt rack, but they don't realize it's 1.6 tonne in weight, and it's going to require water pipes coming into it, and you need to have a chilled water loop to it. The complexity of it changes significantly.”

Ghadially said it's natural for the industry to go through this education piece.

“The question is how can we speed that up? Because some of that hesitancy is stemming adoption of AI and the cost of adoption,” he noted.

To bring that education to Scheider’s partners, Ghadially said it will be through their own training and programs.

“We run the amplify program, which involves a lot of training. A big chunk of it is making sure that our partners are enabled, trained on design tools, on architectures,” he said

“That's what I meant when I said, ‘the base level of our partners needs to lift’. Today they've been doing lift and shift stuff, which needs to change.”

Ghadially explained it is not about partners doing everything but making sure they use all their tools at their disposal.

“It's not about them doing everything themselves, but it's about them being able to have the right nexuses, the right partnerships with people around who can enable them to be successful,” he said.

“It is finding the right partner ecosystem that will do the job.”