When we got the opportunity to talk to Vapor IO Founder and CEO Cole Crawford during our interviews for the high-density ebook “What High Density Means Today”, we were thrilled.
Interview with Cole Crawford
Crawford has a track record of disrupting the industry, whether through his previous work with OpenStack, an open-source platform that’s reshaping cloud services, or the fact that he was the founding executive director of the Open Compute Project, an initiative that’s redesigning data center hardware and making its designs accessible to all.
“There are a lot of legacy vendors that are trying to sell you very expensive equipment,” he told us. “But with open compute, there are other power shelves that can take the place of some of the fancy gear that’s happening in industry—that can make that additional power immediately available to you.”
The premise of Crawford’s new work at Vapor IO is creating products that help you get the most from the data center space you’re already using, to ultimately help you lower the capex and opex cost of that investment. His “hyper-collapsed” data center designs, such as the Vapor Chamber, turn legacy systems on their head.
“Vapor eliminates all cabling infrastructure. Through relationships with OEMs and ODMs, we have the ability to grab anything we want off the server,” Crawford explained. “I can grab band speed and power status. I can turn stuff on and turn stuff off. I can talk to a scavenger fan and an intelligent lighting platform. I can let the building and rack know what the server is doing. And I can let different data centers know what the applications running in those data centers are doing.”
Being in the business of rapidly evolving technology, Crawford recognizes the future of the industry—a projected 40 billion connected devices by 2020 and over 40 zettabytes of data—and he wants to do everything in his power to prepare for it.
“There’s another cloud that’s all IoT and IoE, and it’s all about the network, and it’s all about the edge,” Crawford said during an interview at the OCP Summit in 2015. “We need to move compute to the data … we need to get that [data] to the edge and to that consumer—as close to that consumer as efficiently as possible.”
OCP Summit source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC3WksWptaU
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