We all know that the data center business is booming, but how can someone looking to become part of this venture align their personal needs with business success?

Rob Rockwood, president of Sabey Data Centers, shares his insights on becoming an industry veteran. Reeling from a long and fruitful career in the US Army, during which time he lived in six or seven locations across the US, Rockwood sought a new career path that would allow him to better support his family and stay in one place. By nurturing relationships that transitioned from business to friendship, he found himself in the right rooms for mentorship and business acumen:

“I had two once-in-a-lifetime opportunities,” Rockwood reveals. “The first was joining Tom Ray of the Carlisle Group, who was putting together CoreSite in the early part of this century. We became great friends, and he became an invaluable mentor in understanding how business gets done.

“The second opportunity was to join the Sabey team, where Dave Sabey (chairman and president), John Sabey (business director), and Patty Sewell (CFO) had already linked a data center business plan to the rocket ship that is Sabey Culture, and I was able to step on board and contribute what I had to offer.”

“Accomplish the mission” mindset

Rockwood’s core skills from his army experience have certainly not gone to waste; his dedicated commitment to achieving outcomes produces impressive results, no matter the industry.

“There’s a perception that military personnel are useful in executing business plans because we don’t give up and we accomplish the mission, but we also tend not to complicate things by asking difficult questions about strategy. I made a commitment at that moment to never lose my enthusiasm, desire, and joy for tackling challenges. At the same time, I vowed to keep sight of the big picture – never forget the strategy and always ask the question, ‘Why am I taking that approach?’”

The first wave of profit

Toward the beginning of his career at Sabey, Rockwood identified carrier hotels – physical structures in large urban areas – as the first wave of profitable third-party data centers.

Customers were seeking proximity and easy interconnection to other network service providers. However, the challenge arose when industry players recognized that carrier hotels were not purpose-built to provide the necessary support.

This realization prompted carrier hotel providers to consider how they could optimize power redundancy and deliver adequate cooling and technical support in a scalable way. As a result, the demand for purpose-built environments capable of supporting high-performance computing drove customers away from carrier hotels and into purpose-built data centers.

Maximum bandwidth and minimum latency spell success

Today’s data centers are responding to the demand for closer proximity between processors and servers to maximize bandwidth and minimize latency.

“​​In both the carrier hotel era and today's high-performance computing and AI era, data centers dictate the upper limits of a customer's system capabilities. In the carrier hotel days, the limits of interconnections determined what customers could achieve, and today, limitations on the proximity of processors and servers to one another present similar challenges.”

Rockwood reflects on the similarity in the way that problems were addressed in the carrier hotel era 25 years or so ago, and how they are addressed today, the key difference being the luxury that carrier hotel providers had in protecting their profit-generating solutions. Today, the breadth and availability of solutions require data center providers to adopt a cooperative approach:

“This begins with third-party data center providers and their customers, extending to the utilities supplying power to the campuses, and, most importantly, the communities that host us.”

A significant issue facing data center providers today is the vast amount of capital needed to launch the large-scale projects now emerging. Rockwood shares his insights on the evolving landscape of capital raising compared to his early career experiences:

“The level of sophistication of the questions that we get from investors in the data center industry has evolved alongside the industry itself. One of the most productive uses of my time is engaging with investors and addressing their inquiries. Inevitably, their questions prompt me to revisit and refine our business plan – this creates a tremendous synergy within the industry.”

Future demand signals

Looking ahead, Rockwood predicts that future demand signals will emphasize increasingly dense configurations of equipment to meet growing power and efficiency needs. He highlights that while total megawatt capacity is essential, the configuration of this capacity within the data center space is equally important.

He notes that these denser arrays will require advanced cooling solutions, telemetry, and automation to manage rising power and cooling loads. To achieve this effectively, third-party providers must anticipate customer requirements and design their data centers accordingly. This leads to a thought-provoking insight:

“Our ability to do that will define and determine the upper limits of our customers’ ability to operate efficiently. They can only operate as efficiently as their data centers allow, and we don't want to be the limiting factor in that equation.”

To watch the full DCD>Talk with Rob Rockwood, click here.