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DEEP DIVE
WE ‘DEEP DIVE’ WITH STEVE BOWES-PHIPPS,
SENIOR CONSULTANT IN THE DATA CENTRE
PRACTICE AT PTS CONSULTING, WHO TELLS US
ABOUT LIFE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE OFFICE.
In his current role, Bowes-Phipps is involved
with all elements of the data centre stack
– from strategy to procurement to fit-
out to design validation to data centre
migrations and operational excellence.
What first prompted your
interest in a career in
technology/data centres?
In terms of data centres, I kind of
fell into that which I think is pretty
common amongst my peers.
I was at a credit card bank where I
was looking after all the back-end
processing and got promoted.
The IT director turned around and
said ‘you’re now running the data
centres’ and I kind of thought
‘who runs the data centres – don’t
they run themselves? Isn’t that a
facilities thing?’.
Of course, in those days you
didn’t have very high-powered
equipment, so you could put
your servers anywhere and most
were the ones I looked after so I
managed where they would go.
Then, around 2000 it all
started to change when the
higher-powered chips started
to come in. They used a
lot more energy and the
traditional data centre power
and cooling model couldn’t
cope with those high levels
of power required.
They just didn’t have the
capacity so there was a
worry we were advancing
to a state we couldn’t
actually support.
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So then the ‘data centre’
itself became a specialist
niche in IT because you now
had to put some thought into
it. You couldn’t just put servers
anywhere – you had to think
about whether you could cool them
or power them.
As the importance of this increased, I then
made that transition into sitting centre
stage between IT and the facility M&E.
What would you describe as your
most memorable achievement
within the data centre sector?
I am extremely proud to have won multi-
national industry awards while working
at a university, for data centre efficiency
and operational efficiency.
While at the university, we also entered
a higher and further education award
called the Green Gowns which focuses on
sustainability within the education sector
– and there’s a particular award for ‘Green
IT’, which is fairly broad, so to win it for
my data centre was really special.
What style of management
philosophy do you employ with
your current position?
I think it’s very nurturing: I work with a
range of different people, with different
skillsets and different levels of experience.
It’s all about being very explicit in what it
is that you need from people and
how they can support you. It is
also about being very fair and
feeding back constantly to make
sure they’re on the right path or
to check whether they’ve slightly
moved off it.
I cannot afford for someone to
go off on a completely different
route but I also don’t want to
micromanage so it’s about striking
that balance.
What do you think is the
current hot talking point
within the data centre space?
With the Edge and Fog, Mist,
Cloud, or however you want to
label it, software is driving all of the
improvements and management of
data centres to the point where pretty
much everything will have some sort
of software management which is just
as or even more important than the
physical pieces, pulling it all together
to work in harmony.
Tomorrow’s cooling engineers and
electrical engineers will have to be more
adept at the software side than the
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