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Episode One
The Future of Mission Critical Operations

Join industry leader Carrie Goetz and host Chrissy to explore mentorship, sustainability, and innovation which are essential for the future of mission-critical operations.
Learn how effective mentorship and a supportive environment can shape future leaders. Discover the impact of eco-friendly practices and see how AI is changing industries. Explore the latest in data centers, boosting efficiency, security, and scalability.
This engaging talk will inspire you with new insights into technology and leadership. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn, connect, and take action!
Episode Transcript
Voice Over Intro: Hi everyone, and welcome to Distribution Done Differently, a podcast that directs conversations with industry leaders, explores trending topics, and addresses challenges in the data center market. We are excited to launch episode number one, the future of mission-critical operations. This talk is led by GCG's very own Chrissy Olsen.
Chrissy Olsen: On today's episode, I'm super excited to be celebrating International Data Center Day. It is an opportunity to raise awareness about the importance of data centers in our digital world and recognize the individuals who make it possible. It celebrates the professionals who work in the industry and highlights the critical role data centers play in powering technology and supporting infrastructure. And of course, data centers, I eat, breathe, and sleep.
Chrissy Olsen: So I'm thrilled to have a special guest on today, a very good friend of mine, an icon in the industry, Ms. Carrie Goetz.
Carrie Goetz: Hi, thanks for having me.
Chrissy Olsen: So I'm going to do a little introduction of Carrie. You have basically the whole alphabet behind your name, so I'm not going to do those, but I am going to say that you are the principal of Strategic Comm. You're an Amazon best-selling author, and we're going to talk about your books here a little bit later. And you have over 40 years of global experience designing, running, auditing data centers, IT departments, and intelligent buildings. You have won a ton of different awards, and I'm just blessed to call you a good friend.
Carrie Goetz: Same.
Chrissy Olsen: So thanks for joining me today.
Carrie Goetz: Absolutely, my pleasure.
Chrissy Olsen: So on today's episode, we're going to talk about a lot of different topics, the importance of data centers, challenges with finding the workforce to ensure data centers are operational, career opportunities and awareness, challenges in the industry, sustainability and innovation, and maybe a little bit about data center retrofits and repurposes. So let's start out by talking the importance of data centers. Obviously, data centers are the backbone of modern technology and communication. What does this industry mean to you?
Carrie Goetz: So when I talk to students or people that don't know what data centers are, what I say is we all live in a data center, at least one. Most of us live in multiple data centers. It is where everything that we do digitally lives. It's where the cloud lives. It's where your Netflix lives. It's where your chats and your tweets and your or your exes, whatever you call them, and probably your exes live there too. But it is everything digital that we have and we consume. And most data centers are backed up by other data centers. So when we say that people live in multiple data centers, that's what we're talking about. We all have personas in multiple data centers. We bank in data centers. Anytime you touch something digital, you're touching a data center.
Chrissy Olsen: I know. And when we explain it to, like my kids always say, what do you do? I just hold up my phone. Everything, every application that we use on our phones today go back to a data center for storage, for compute, whatever it may be.
Carrie Goetz: I mean, technically your phone is a mini data center, right? It has the requirements. It has internet communications. It has the ability to store and save images, documents, and text. It can communicate. It has power. It has, you know, a battery backup. So we're running on battery when we're not plugged in.
So it has a lot of components of the data center, right, just in that little box. And when I talk to students, I tell them, hey, look, it's this on a much, much bigger scale, right? Because it is those things. It is the ability to store. It's the ability to communicate. It’s the ability to process and run applications, all of those things.
Chrissy Olsen: Absolutely. And I mean, we're all using it in our day-to-day lives, like streaming, you know, like you said, social media. We buy, we purchase e-commerce. I think most of us probably purchase online more than we do going to a store these days. So very important. How do data centers are essential for like cloud computing, big data and AI or the internet of things? We know they're the backbone of modern technology, but let's discuss that for a minute and the impacts of that.
Carrie Goetz: So I think it really depends on the kind of data center, right? So when we think of a data center, the easiest thing to do is think of it as a giant toolbox. And inside this toolbox, we have all different things. So depending on what the purpose of that data center is in the size of that toolbox, we're going to pick different things. If I have a giant toolbox, I might have five hammers, right? If I have a giant toolbox, I might be doing AI. I might be doing high performance computing. That'll be something that is at a much higher density than the average run of a middle data center or maybe an edge data center. Edge data centers could also be high density, just in a smaller footprint. So I think when we say data center as a whole, we really need to have some adjectives in front of that. We need to know what kind of data center we're talking about. Hyperscalers are the big ones. They get all the attention. They get all the products. Everybody goes after that business because they are the big guys, but they do something and they compute in a way that's very different than a lot of other data centers do just because of the sheer volume of information that they're pushing and what they're trying to do with that information. So when we add AI to those data centers, now they become even bigger monsters. But even if you disregard the size of the data center and the type of the data center, they all are going to have the same components. There's going to be communications to the internet. There's going to be that storage. There's going to be battery backup. There's going to be power conditioning equipment. And then of course, you know, your cabinets, your cable plant, and all of your compute that sits inside of those, they're all going to have that just at different scales, different sort of layouts. But those are the core components that are always going to be there. And then we add redundancy to that. You know, how much of that are we going to make redundant in that same facility versus another facility? Are we going to keep power components redundant and maybe have some of our compute that's not redundant because we don't care if it goes down and that's a way to save power? And that whole balancing act sort of comes into play there. But the core components are the same. And I think for a lot of people that think this is such a the daunting industry and they're really afraid of it.
Once you figure out what the core components do, the rest beyond that is just scale and manufacture. So you can apply those same principles and just sort of figure out how they work. And, you know, whether you cool with air or you cool with water or you cool with refrigerant, depending on how you do that, you know, all of those different nuances are going to come into the design, but the core components are going to be largely the same.
Chrissy Olsen: Absolutely. When we talk about data centers, I want to highlight some of the key roles. They're in different, whether it's suppliers or distribution or contractors, engineers, play in driving the success of the industry, thus creating a demand for jobs.
Chrissy Olsen: I'm going to talk about career opportunities and career awareness next, but let's just talk about all the different roles within the data center industry, how important they are, and maybe some of your concerns as we go into the future about our bench strength within the industry.
Carrie Goetz: Yeah, our bench strength is not spectacular. So I will say this, if you can think of and picture anything that would go into building a large commercial building, every bit of that is needed in the data center industry.
Carrie Goetz: We are woefully behind in hiring tradespeople and we need all of the trades. We need masons, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, pipe fitters, all of those, even diesel mechanics to work on the heavy equipment. There's site considerations. We need bulldozer drivers and backhoe drivers so that we can clear the land and set up forms for foundations and all of those things.
Carrie Goetz: So we have all of that on the construction side and a lot of those construction jobs turn into data center jobs. So people get out with an apprenticeship or they're working in the trades and then they start working on a data center and then a data center operator catches that talent.
Carrie Goetz: And this is a very demanding industry as far as talent goes and there's a huge competition for talent. There's a lot of poaching talent from one operator to another and one data center to another.
Carrie Goetz: But if you think about that commercial building, all of that construction is needed, plus everything that runs it. So data centers are very much like commercial buildings in that they are living ecosystems.
Carrie Goetz: We have to maintain environmental. We have to maintain power to the building. We need to maintain the infrastructure as it goes. So all of those support people are there. And then we also have people that work on things like sustainability, data center infrastructure management, doing that capacity planning on the floor and making sure that, hey, if we plug in server X, it's not going to blow a circuit breaker and take eight other servers down with it.
Carrie Goetz: We need to make sure that we have that balance and that we can provide that cooling. So all of this together, once you get past the building envelope and you get into the data center floor, the whole thing operates as an ecosystem. And any one piece of that that gets out of whack messes another one up, which is why I think it's so important when people come into this career to learn so much about everything else that has nothing to do with their job because it is an ecosystem. And the things that you do will impact other parts of the data center. It also is great job security. We have 300,000 open jobs in this industry right now, and that's not really figuring in the gray tsunami because we don't know how many of us are going to retire.
Chrissy Olsen: Did you just say the gray tsunami?
Carrie Goetz: The gray tsunami, that's what they call it, yes. For all of us that are going to retire at some point and get out of this industry and leave it to the younger folks. But I do think we do ourselves a huge disservice in this industry in that we don't embrace enough apprenticeships and internships. I think that all of those are very effective ways to address some of this talent shortage and even taking people from the trades and bringing them into the data center itself. But I think we have to do a much better job of reaching people how and where they want to work and how and where they want to learn.
Chrissy Olsen: So Kerry, you bring up some great ideas which leads into my next topic. How do we as an industry and as leaders in the industry drive awareness for and generate interest in the data center career path for today's youth? Where young professionals may be looking to make a career transition into data centers from some of those areas of construction that you just mentioned.
Carrie Goetz: So twofold. If we want people to be in this industry, we have to start much younger. Most kids figure out what they want to be by the time they're seven or eight years old. And if we don't talk to them about data centers, that's not going to be part of it. And certainly with women, women tend to seem to go into the same industries. We're not bringing in enough young women into some of these careers. But I think we have to do a much better job of introducing these careers. And then beyond that, once people get started in the industry, we have to do a better job of cross-educating people on what the other jobs are in the industry.
Carrie Goetz: When I wrote the first book, the attrition rate for women in tech was 67%. Not that leave their job, that leave an entire industry despite having absolutely applicable experience that they could take to any other job anywhere around them, which is why when I say it's so important to figure out how the rest of the ecosystem works, it's for a lot of reasons. One, because you're a better participant in the ecosystem, but should your job go belly up, instead of starting over from scratch in another industry, find another job within this industry. We have everything. We have marketing, accounting, and sales. all those things that you would find in another industry, I mean, you name it, apply here. And if you really need to figure out some of the places to go look to find a job, hit a distributor. How many products do you guys carry? Seriously.
Chrissy Olsen: Thousands, thousands.
Carrie Goetz: What an option for an education. Figuring out how those things work and where they fit into the whole ecosystem is a great education.
Chrissy Olsen: Oh, I agree. And I think, I mean, I think a lot of people do start in the industry, I mean, in distribution, or, you know, they're actually a tech. A tech in the field is a great way. If you want to not just be in the field the whole time, it's a great place to start work. You actually learn how everything gets put together and the importance of the infrastructure. But you could move into sales. You could move into management. There's just a lot, a ton of opportunity. How do we, and you and I've been on a lot of different panels and a lot of different groups where we're supporting women in the industry or trying to encourage STEM programs within high school and that sort of thing.
Chrissy Olsen: How do, what advice would you give someone interested in moving or transitioning? Or let's talk about some of the interesting things you and I've talked about before about disadvantaged youth and maybe people coming out of incarceration even.
Carrie Goetz: So let's talk about. All of those are really, really great ideas. And all of those are things we're actually working on. We're working on some national apprenticeship programs to try to get more people into the industry. A friend of mine out in California is actually working on some where he's heavily utilizing things like artificial intelligence and digital tools on the construction side to help people where English isn't their first language. Working with people in inner cities. But here's the thing. I do think that we have a problem in this country in that most kids' first exposure to anything technical is a coding class. I used to write code. Coding is a very specific skill. You can be really good at it and still hate it. Some people love coding and they're amazing at it. But my thing is, is that instead of just teaching kids, hey, by the way, this is how you code. they write off all of technology as a career, And then if they hate it, which is horrible because coding is such, don't tell the coders I said this, but coding is a really small portion of what we do in this industry. And so I think that we have an opportunity to really start showing some of these other things. Take these kids in trade schools. We're opening more trade schools. We never should have closed them to start with, in my opinion. But as we open up these trade schools, talk to them about, hey, here's a place you can apply that skill.
Carrie Goetz: Here's a place that you can go. Veterans coming out of military service, we have some of the best construction personnel in our military of anywhere because that's what they do. They go back and rebuild messed up places. And so there's this huge talent pool that we can garner. We have to do a better job, I think, in this industry of reaching a lot of those people. We have to really reach to the elementary school and bring them forward. And then we have to start attacking these other ones at job fairs and career fairs and talking to you about it. Most people to this day, if you did a poll in the industry, how many people had data centers as a chosen career field going into college or going into trade school? I'll bet you that number is less than 10% because we just don't talk about data centers. We do a little bit more these days, but not much.
Chrissy Olsen: Not to the degree that like you and I are into it in the various jobs we see across the industry. I love the fact about veterans. I think that's really important to me. Shout out to my daughter, Melanie, who's serving our country in Fairbanks, Alaska right now. In the army. It's really important to support those people as they come out of their service. One, they have a mass amount of industry experience. They know how to deal with conflict and tough situations. I'm a big proponent of that. I do think across the industry, we need to do a better job there. I also think that the skill centers and some of that education early on in high school, it gives, we don't have enough skilled labor in the industry as a whole or even in construction. So I think that's super important for us as leaders in the industry to get out there and do that.
Carrie Goetz: Also, so we have to meet people where and how they want to work, right? Not everybody wants a degree. Not everybody wants college debt. You can go through an apprenticeship program for an electrician, come out and make an 150,000 a year with no college debt. And I think that we've done kind of a disservice by forcing everybody into college. Not everybody wants to go. Not everybody's going to get something out of it. And the number of kids that spend five and six years trying to get a four-year degree because it's just not working for them, it is pretty significant. So I think we have to do a better job of embracing those and making sure that our job descriptions embrace those trades as well.
Chrissy Olsen: Absolutely, I think that there's a misnomer. Like you don't have to have a four-year degree to go into our data center industry. The opposite, I mean, sales doesn't require it. Some marketing jobs require it, but there's so many different areas. And I think that there's a lot of people who work in IT and technology, but they don't have a construction background. So I mean, any construction background, I think is huge segue into our industry. We don't have enough project managers or construction workers today. And a lot of colleges have construction management, but I still think that's not an absolute necessity to work in our industry.
Carrie Goetz: Well, and if you want a degree, the cool thing is if you start in the path with one of the trades, and then you decide you want a degree, most of the employers will cover that for you.
Chrissy Olsen: For sure.
Carrie Goetz: One other thing that I say, when I talk to employers about this, when we're talking about the apprenticeship program and stuff is, if you do college reimbursement and you take out the money that you spend on electives, which is about six classes per student by the time they get a four-year degree, depending on the institution, and you took the money out of those six classes and put it in an apprenticeship program, you could probably solve your HR problems and you'd have your self-grown talent. The problem with a lot of these apprenticeship programs is they're very user-specific. So one of the big hyperscalers might have an apprenticeship program, but it only applies to their stuff and to nobody else's. But there's tons of places that you can get this knowledge for free. I mean, it's not even, you don't have to necessarily be technical. You don't necessarily have to have money. There's all kinds of places that you can get this knowledge for nothing or for little of nothing. I think exposure is the big problem in those cases.
Chrissy Olsen: Let's touch on something that really resonated with me the last time we spoke, which was youth coming out of foster care or disadvantaged youth and programs. And how do we capture that? What are some of your ideas around that subject?
Carrie Goetz: I think those are really great places to start with some of these apprenticeship programs and really do some active outreach. I honestly believe that of all of us in the industry, if we could just talk to five people, five, right? Pick somebody at your church, pick somebody on your kids' baseball team or football team, or somebody working at your fast food store, somebody, you know, start spreading the word. We do have a knowledge problem. For years, we really operated as a silent industry very intentionally because we thought that that reduced our risk. And really what it did is it introduced risk as far as, you know, people knowing about us as a place to come for a job. But I do think, you know, coming out of foster care, some of these apprenticeship programs, people that don't have the same financial resources as other folks, we've got to meet people where they want to work and we have to meet people where they want to learn. And I think all of those are important. You know, exposure is so huge.
Chrissy Olsen: It's just an amazing idea. And I do, I think we need to, as an industry, put some programs together around that because once you're 18 and you move out of foster program, you know, you have to have a path, right? This is a path to success and stability. So I just love that idea. So I think more to come on that.
Carrie Goetz: I hope so, yeah. In the works.
Chrissy Olsen: I want to pivot a little bit and talk about some of the challenges we have in the industry today, which we probably don't have enough time to talk about, but let's discuss some of the common challenges data centers are facing right now. Capacity, power constraints, operational costs, or the demand for scalability, and how some of the, you know, issues around AI and what that's going to, how that's going to challenge our industry.
Carrie Goetz: So I think that, first off, if we talk about AI, AI is a tool, back to that toolkit, right? And that toolbox. I think companies need to figure out what they want to do with AI. The low hanging fruit for AI is getting rid of all the minutia, all the mundane stuff that people do that frees them up then to do more strategic things. I think a lot of people feel like AI is going to take their job. It's really going to help their job and enhance their job and be able to help you move forward, right? If there's a project that you have at work that involves all this stuff that you don't know about, it is a great way to shortcut research. I do a ton of technical writing. I love AI for that purpose, right? But I think we have to figure out strategically as a company what services we want to use and where the best place for those to reside is. Is it going to be a cloud-based service? Well, if it's AI, it's probably not, right? Just because of the input output, it's going to be very difficult.
Carrie Goetz: Maybe it's a certain application we're going to use a portion of somebody else's AI to do help desk or something along that, and then move on from there. But I think, really, you have to be a little bit methodical to figure out what you want to do. I do think that we're going to see a lot of repurposed sort of left-to-die data center space because it's got a lot of that capital equipment in it, and it might not sustain an entire data center, but maybe it sustains some engines while you are working on your models going forward and those kind of things. So, we do have supply chain problems. We do have problems with product availability. Like I said earlier, the hyperscalers are buying stuff as fast as they can, which leaves the average everybody else going, wait, what do I do now? And so, I think there's going to be a small period of correction there, but power is one of those things that is an issue all the time everywhere. And I don't see that one, honestly, going away.
Chrissy Olsen: How do we deal with that power issue?
Carrie Goetz: Well, I think we have to be
Chrissy Olsen: Is it natural gas? Is it nuclear?
Carrie Goetz: So, 60% of all our power in the U.S. is natural gas. I do think that right now, today, it is 100% possible to do carbon-captured or carbon-sequestered natural gas. If we capture the carbon, we can sell it off to agriculture. Some really smart person is going to be, I've been working with this company for a long time that's a natural gas producer, and they would love to build a data center on their pad and then put agriculture right next to it so that the CO2 that's captured feeds the agriculture and it naturally filters. I mean, some of those projects are, I know, they're actually implemented and they're using it in Holland and some other areas. And I think that we really, if we're gonna solve some of these problems, we have to solve them together, whether it's turning up nuclear, doing small nuclear reactors, which, natural gas, the one good thing about natural gas is that we don't have all of the afterlife byproducts we have to deal with. We don't have to bury a reactor. We don't have to bury metal blades. We don't have to bury the solar panels or whatever happens to those for the afterlife. I think we have the same problem with a circular economy and recycling some of the products we use today. Lithium would be a great one. Most of that ends up in landfills. So I think kind of where we are right now with the growth and the trajectory of the industry and how fast it's growing is that we are in a super opportunity phase. We can figure out for what part of the country what makes the most sense. Geothermal is another one, very inexpensive, highly renewable.
Carrie Goetz: Why we're not doing more with geothermal? I don’t know, I worked on a project in Canada years ago I don't know. and we were talking about power savings. They're like, oh, dude, we don't even care about power. It is so cheap up here. It means nothing to us. And I thought, God, wouldn't that be a great problem to have especially nowadays, right? So I think we're on the cusp of figuring out what some of that new kind of things are going to be. And I think, you know, really the engineering companies and the architectural firms and the design firms that are keeping up with new equipment and what's hitting the market are going to be the most successful. Well, and just from a sustainability standpoint, I think our industry needs to be more responsible in getting out there and talking to communities, not even just on the labor piece, but about the power piece, right? Because people are like, oh, we don't want a data center to move into our area because it's going to suck up all the power and these types of things. So there's a lot of economics and community outreach that I think needs to be done overall in our industry when we're thinking about building a data center somewhere. Well, here's another little one to throw in. Why aren't we teaching users to be better consumers? Right. If you do an AI search, it takes 30 times the power of a regular search engines search, for instance, on average. So why aren't we teaching-
Chrissy Olsen: Interesting. I didn't know that.
Carrie Goetz: Yeah, why aren't we teaching kids to do that? So, one of the things that I did in the educators reference was come up with some of those. So one of the exercises in the book is, look up how much power it takes to send a snap. How many snaps do you send a day? How many kids are in this class? How many snaps do they send a day? What does that look like in a year? Now, how much power does it take to heat a home? How many homes can we heat with your Snapchats? Those kinds of things. And I think we're missing some of that disconnection too. We talk to younger kids and we work on some of the sustainability projects in college and all, is thinking how we can hit this from both sides. Because right now, as long as we're currency to internet firms, they have no incentive for us to throttle down, use less, do less, right? And it's how we communicate. So what we have to do is figure out how to do that smartly, figure out which ones are necessary versus the unnecessary, and then figure out how we can do that as sustainable as possible. And understand that it might be a mixed bag of tricks. You might have part of a data center that runs off your utility power and a different part that runs on something temporary that's been brought in. You know, now we can do things like thermal capture. We can take the wasted heat and turn that back into energy and feed it back into our data centers. That solution was not even available 10 years ago. So I think, you know, when we talk about this opportunity cycle, we're right square in the middle of solving some big problems.
Chrissy Olsen: There's definitely some innovative and energy efficient technologies that will enhance the user and reduce environmental impact. I think we could do a whole segment just on energy and power when it comes to innovations. Talking about innovations and sustainability, one thing we've talked about a lot, and we may have some interesting things to come, but talking about space retrofits and repurposing some of the older data centers or even office space for data center use or AI use for that matter, I think that that is going to be a next big trend coming. But there's a lot of challenges that come along with that. So what do you see? What's your outlook on that?
Carrie Goetz: Well, I think part of it depends on the age of the facility, right? So there's a lot of facilities that are sitting out there where that capital equipment hasn't fully depreciated. So it's still on the books, still usable. You're not going to be able to get rid of that until it's fully depreciated because no CFO wants to recapture that depreciation. So that stuff can either be updated, repurposed. But I do think, you know, if you take a facility and then add things like liquid cooling, immersion cooling, you've just completely reconfigured what that facility or what that space is capable of because you've supplemented something. And I think we have a lot of that space that's there when people move to COLOs. It either got repurposed or it's just sitting there dormant doing little to nothing or it's got a wiring closet in it now. I do think that that is some space that's going to be, you know, ripe for use, you know, for training and some of the other things. I mean, once you get your LLMs trained, the power consumption clearly goes down a little bit, but I think having some of that space available, I think we're going to see more of that as, you know, as edge deployments happen. And I think some of these big guys, you know, when the cloud first came around, remember they would send around the storage devices so you could dump everything on it locally because there's no way that you could do that, right, over the air. It would take way too long. I think we're going to see some of that with the LLMs too. I think we're going to see some containerized data centers rolling up onsite, or we're going to see some temporary equipment rolling onsite to do some of that learning and configuration. And those might be temporary until the AI kicks in or they're trained or, you know, whatever they're doing with that particular AI. I think we're going to see some mixed purpose stuff. And I think we're going to see some repatriation out of some of the colocations and some of the clouds for some of this load, if for no other reason than proprietary information. You know, you have, there's liabilities, you know, depending on what you put in AI and what you put in there. And I think companies should be very careful what they allow their employees to do on AI. You know, a great example, dial into a big conference call and somebody has got their AI bot recording the call. Everything said on that call now becomes part of that, that language model, right?
Chrissy Olsen: And it's stored somewhere.
Carrie Goetz: Yeah, if somebody takes a user manual that a company is developing on a proprietary information and uploads it to AI and says, hey, correct my grammar, your proprietary book just became part of somebody's LLM. And so there's certain AI engines that allow that and ones that don't. And I think figuring out what the, you know, what all of those end user license agreements are is daunting enough, but it's going to be even crazier with AI. But I do think that we're going to see a lot of repurposing just for that reason. It's so IO intensive. It's, you know, you're not going to do it in the cloud. You're going to do it somewhere. And maybe that is, you know, those portable learning module deployments, you know, that do that. I think so too.
Chrissy Olsen: I think we're going to see a lot more of that. There is a lot of new build coming up, new construction, but I do think-
Carrie Goetz: There is, but a lot of it doesn't have power yet.
Chrissy Olsen: Well, and that's the thing. And some of these, you know, older buildings or older data centers, whatever they be, they're already ready to go, right? So I think we're going to see a lot more repurposing as well.
Carrie Goetz: I do too.
Chrissy Olsen: I think that we have all learned quite a bit about encouraging people to get into this industry. You know, some of the challenges around that, some different ideas. So I encourage our listeners to get out there and start having conversations. And we will do the same. It only takes a few minutes of a day to reach out to a young professional industry or high school youth trying to figure out a career path. We're all going to need that bench strength here. So we look forward to talking to you the next time.
Voice Over Closing: And that's a wrap on today's episode. We thank you all for tuning in to Distribution Done Differently, a podcast from GCG, your strategic partner for data center project solutions. And a huge thank you to today's speaker. It was a pleasure having you. We hope everyone enjoyed today's episode. If you would like to keep the conversation going or tell us about your next project's needs, you can give us a call or visit our website. And of course, don't forget to like, share, and follow us at GCG Data Centers.

Host: Chrissy Olsen
Data Center Innovation Leader
With over thirty years of experience in the technology and data center industry, her expertise in data center design, deployment, and operational efficiency makes her a key resource for enhancing industry practices globally.
Chrissy has spoken at numerous industry events worldwide and has received several awards for her contributions to the field. She is also a strong advocate for women in technology, actively participating in organizations like iMasons and Women in Tech.

Guest: Carrie Goetz
Principal/CTO - StrategITcom
Carrie is a philanthropist, international speaker, and best-selling author. Her series, “Jumpstart Your Career in Data Centers,” inspires both young and older minds in the internet and mission-critical industry. Recognized as one of the Top 25 Women in Mission Critical and awarded the Data Center World Lifetime Achievement Award, she is also listed among the 30 Most Influential Women in Tech and the Top 10 Most Influential Tech Women 2020. With over 40 years in the industry, Carrie now works as a technical writer, offering design services and education.
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