When we got the opportunity to talk to Vapor IO Founder and CEO Cole Crawford during our interviews for the high-density ebook \u201cWhat High Density Means Today\u201d, we were thrilled.<\/p>\r\n
Crawford has a track record of disrupting the industry, whether through his previous work with OpenStack, an open-source platform that\u2019s reshaping cloud services, or the fact that he was the founding executive director of the Open Compute Project, an initiative that\u2019s redesigning data center hardware and making its designs accessible to all.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
\u201cThere are a lot of legacy vendors that are trying to sell you very expensive equipment,\u201d he told us. \u201cBut with open compute, there are other power shelves that can take the place of some of the fancy gear that\u2019s happening in industry\u2014that can make that additional power immediately available to you.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
The premise of Crawford\u2019s new work at Vapor IO is creating products that help you get the most from the data center space you\u2019re already using, to ultimately help you lower the capex and opex cost of that investment. His \u201chyper-collapsed\u201d data center designs, such as the Vapor Chamber, turn legacy systems on their head.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
\u201cVapor eliminates all cabling infrastructure. Through relationships with OEMs and ODMs, we have the ability to grab anything we want off the server,\u201d Crawford explained. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Being in the business of rapidly evolving technology, Crawford recognizes the future of the industry\u2014a projected 40 billion connected devices by 2020 and over 40 zettabytes of data\u2014and he wants to do everything in his power to prepare for it.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
\u201cThere\u2019s another cloud that\u2019s all IoT and IoE, and it\u2019s all about the network, and it\u2019s all about the edge,\u201d Crawford said during an interview at the OCP Summit in 2015. \u201cWe need to move compute to the data \u2026 we need to get that [data] to the edge and to that consumer\u2014as close to that consumer as efficiently as possible.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n