EXPERT OPINION
Why encouraging youth
is fundamental to our technological future
Technology is constantly evolving and
many of the future jobs that children
today will be employed in do not even
currently exist. Steve Bowes-Phipps,
Senior Data Centre Consultant, PTS
Consulting and Chair DCA Workforce
Development and Capability SIG, tells
us why it’s so important that young
people see the data centre industry
as a career option to ensure our
technological future is successful.
40
Issue 10
rawling through the various networking events that
the data centre industry hosts on a regular basis
and wandering around the various conferences that
dominate the autumn season in the UK and Europe,
one can’t help but notice the average profile of a DC Professional
is mid-40s to mid-60s and male.
T
As recently as the 1990s, organisations started to move away from
the locked-in, single-vendor environment of the likes of IBM, ICL,
Bull and others and develop their own IT strategies that involved a
multiplicity of vendors, systems and services being delivered from
‘data centres’. The rooms that these systems inhabited became
ever more crowded and required ever more power.
Chip manufacturers were turning up the heat, literally, by ever-
increasing CPU clock speeds and these rooms struggled to cope.
The data centre, as a professionally managed facility, began to
evolve. Initially, air conditioning systems and power systems
were borrowed from other industries, but soon, in the 2000s,
data centre facilities were targeted by the manufacturers and
specialised equipment began appearing, catering for the specific
role of cooling IT systems.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com