The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) designs sustainable technology standards for the built environment, including server rooms.

Don Beaty is an ASHRAE fellow and co-founder of the TC 9.9 - the technical committee responsible for data center standards. He’s also the founder and CEO of DLB Associates Consulting Engineers.

In this interview, Beaty shares his thoughts on the greatest challenge facing the data center industry – the fact that the worlds of software, hardware and facilities are still too divided.

Beaty warns that, with the rise of containerised workloads, it will be getting progressively harder to estimate the amount of power and cooling capacity required to run a facility. Unless engineers start talking to sysadmins, and sysadmins start talking to vendors, data center design will become a lot more complicated and some projects are going to fail.

The conversation took place at the DCD Internet conference in San Francisco, which concluded on Monday.