A History of Data Center Power


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Steve Carlini discusses his role with Schneider Electric and their approach to innovation and the world of data centers.

Announcer: Welcome to Not Your Father’s Data Center Podcast, brought to you by Compass Datacenters. We build for what’s next. Now here’s your host, Raymond Hawkins.

Raymond Hawkins: Welcome to another episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center. I’m your host, Raymond Hawkins. Today we are joined by Schneider Electric’s vice president of innovation and data centers. Steven Carlini. Steven, welcome.

Steve Carlini: Thanks. Thanks for having me, very happy to be here.

Raymond Hawkins: Steven and I are recording today on April 8th, the opening day of the Masters. So if I sound a bit distracted, it is not because the TV is on in my office at all. No, that couldn’t be it. No, we are recording. The world is coming out of a pandemic, and lots of vaccinations and things are changing. All right, well, a couple of reminders as we get going with the show. Reminder number one is, we will do four trivia questions. We’re going to do three trivia questions right at the beginning, and we’ll do one at the end. Remember, all the people who email me the correct answers will be entered in a drawing to win a $500 Amazon gift card. Unfortunately, neither Steven or I are eligible to win, but you can Tweet your answers @compassdcs, or you can email me at rhawkins@compassdatacenters.com. In honor of Steven’s background, all of today’s trivia questions will be focused on Oklahoma football.

Steve Carlini: Great.

Raymond Hawkins: You don’t get to answer, unfortunately, Steven, but trivia questions one, two, three, and then we’ll get rolling. Question number one, who has the most rushing yards in the history of Oklahoma football? Who has the most passing yards in the history of Oklahoma football? And who has the most receiving yards? Two of them, I think I’m not surprised by any of the three answers, but two of them I can make the argument that I would have guessed someone else. So those are your first three trivia questions for all of our Data Center listeners. We’ll get trivia question number four at the end. Email your answers, again, to me at rhawkins@compassdatacenters.com.

Raymond Hawkins: All right, Steven, let’s get rolling. I would love it if you would just give us a little bit of your background, all the way back to where’s home, how’d you get in the technology and power management business, and we’ll talk through. I think the best way, when you and I spoke before, you handle everything from the medium voltage switch gear all the way out to outlets in the data center and how Schneider Electric thinks about innovation in those spaces. Tell us a little bit about you as we get rolling.

Steve Carlini: I was born in Youngstown, Ohio, grew up in Cleveland initially, and then I moved out to Connecticut. My father was actually in the technology industry. He was with IBM, so we moved around quite a bit. We moved every four years like clockwork. IBM used to be called, I’ve Been Moved, back in those days, because of how often you would relocate. I had the opportunity when I was 10 years old to actually visit one of the first ever data centers in existence, in New York, with my father. He took me to the data center, which was really kind of a underground bunker. Data centers in those days were just, just getting started. And a lot of the data was a lot of personal information about people, and they wanted to keep it very safe. So there was a lot of emphasis put on security back in those days.

Steve Carlini: Then I went to Atlanta for high school, so I partly claim to be a Georgian. After that, I went to University of Oklahoma and got an electrical engineering degree from there, emphasized in power systems, which is kind of an odd way to go. Most of the electrical engineers were mainly interested in electronics at the time, and Oklahoma have one of the few power system degrees for electrical engineering. After that, I went to Texas, actually in Houston, and I had my first job at Toshiba. I started as an engineer and after nine years, ended up running their UPS power systems group for Toshiba International out of Houston. I also went to University of Houston, where I got my MBA in International Business.

Raymond Hawkins: This is amazing Steven, to me, a little bit fascinating to me. I went to high school in Dayton, Ohio, so also in Ohio.

Steve Carlini: Oh, wow.

Raymond Hawkins: I lived in Atlanta for 16 years, and now I live in Dallas. So not Houston, but Texas, so very similar routes around the country, although I’ve not ended up in the Northeast as you have now. But all right, so Toshiba, talk me through Toshiba to what was next after that, and then ultimately to Schneider.

Steve Carlini: Toshiba was interesting. In those days, the whole UPS market was really these industrial companies. You had companies like Teledyne, CyberX, and you had the big focus on industrial systems for UPSs. It was all bid spec market. It was all very, very much in the realm of industrial systems, how they were produced, who sold them. They were sold direct. There was manufacturers’ reps involved.

Steve Carlini: At the time, back in the ’80s, there was a little upstart company called American Power Conversion. American Power Conversion kind of took a different view on the whole market. Their idea was that the IT systems were going to evolve. If you look at the history of IT, it very much goes from centralizing, doing mainframes, and this was the start of what we call distributed IT, or back then it was called local area networks, distributed computing, basically servers. The old client server architecture started back then, and APC jumped on that. They saw that that’s where the market was going, and they formed relationships with a lot of the IT vendors in the IT channel. And it caught everybody by surprise that the market shifted, and APC did a great job.

Steve Carlini: The reason I’m bringing up APC is because, I had a staff of people working for me. I ran sales, I ran operations, I ran field service, I ran marketing and engineering, as well. So I was the general manager at the Toshiba UPS group, and person-by-person, they started moving over to American Power Conversion, APC, and they started trickling over there, and then a massive wave of people went over to American Power Conversion. Then the software company that we were using for management of the systems, it was System Enhancement out of St. Louis, APC ended up purchasing them. So I had a great relationship with them.

Steve Carlini: When I went over to APC nine years later, after starting with Toshiba, it was basically a homecoming for me, because I knew a lot of the people over there, were my ex-employees, and the software group that I used to work with was all over there, too. It was a transition for me, and I went over there and I was in charge of what they called the core product. At that time, APC only had smaller UPS systems, which were the SmartUps. They had the Matrix, was the first modular UPS ever made, and then the Symmetra. There were no data center-sized UPSs at the time.

Steve Carlini: They hired me to run or initially run the core product group, and I ran that. Then a few years later, we really ran out of market potential. We did a tremendous job of expanding our sales globally, to the point where we had, depending on the geo, 30 to 70% market share. It was an incredible market share, so we ran out of runway for expansion. That’s when we decided to move into the larger UPS, and I was involved with one of the first acquisitions of a company in Denmark that actually manufactured a three-phase UPS.

Steve Carlini: The technology of the three-phase UPS that they had was called a Delta Conversion UPS. That was kind of new and innovative in the market. It was my job to build out that group and build out the expansion. That was the start of our venture into the data center world, larger data center world.

Raymond Hawkins: So that got you into the big systems, and then along comes Schneider. Didn’t Schneider end up buying APC, and I apologize, my memory, isn’t that how that went down?

Steve Carlini: It was actually right on, day or two before or after Valentine’s day. I don’t remember the exact date, but it was 15 years ago now. It’s been quite a while since that acquisition. It was a $6 billion acquisition, and it was a little bit of a surprise to the people at APC. Because the company had done very, very well. The other thing that APC did is, they kind of changed the game. When there’s a game, there’s bid spec market, there’s entrenched competitors. What you want to do is look at the game and how it’s being played, and if possible, go ahead and change it.

Steve Carlini: The things that we did, which were unheard of at the time is, we started packaging together data center systems, so the power UPS, the power distribution, the rack systems, the cooling systems, all of the environmental systems, like the access control and the environmental sensors for humidity and temperature, the door locks, and we started packaging those all together and offering them as systems. When you offer them as systems, there’s a lot of value-added resellers and integrators that weren’t exactly very happy with us, because we were taking a lot of the work they were charging for and providing it for free.

Steve Carlini: Then the other thing that we did is, we made the systems so they were user serviceable. We made them modular, so instead of having to dispatch a service technician, you could keep power modules, battery modules onsite, and whenever you had an issue, you could easily replace them yourself. That was really changing the game of the design, the plan, design and deploy model, which was very, very disruptive at the time. But we had nothing to lose, because we didn’t really have a presence in those markets. We were huge in the distributed single server in an office environment, but in the bigger data centers, we really had nothing.

Raymond Hawkins: So what years are we talking about, when you guys started offering those integrated pieces in the data center?

Steve Carlini: Originally it was called Power Structure. That was roughly 20 years ago. Then we changed the name to Infrastructure where we added more and more components to it. Software management was also a big feature of that. So everything was packaged together. One of the advantages of packaging together when you’re building a data center, a lot of times it’s not like you could build 90% of it and have it function. It has to be a hundred percent complete for it to work, and a lot of times there were pieces left off, pieces forgot, or pieces on back ordered. Taking us a system approach to that really eliminated a lot of the risk for the deployment and operations.

Steve Carlini: And we still do today, by the way, we still do that. You could have your pre-configured systems, and we looked at even prefabricating, which is something where you take the concept, and instead of assembling on-site with all the pieces, you actually put it together in a factory and ship it onsite. So it really is very favorable from a supply chain perspective.

Raymond Hawkins: Steven I got to say, I had not thought about part of APC’s success was really the timing around, as we left monolithics, centralized computers, we left mainframes and service bureaus, and started having the client-server model and distributing compute. I hadn’t thought about that going hand-in-hand with APCs growth and acceleration and capturing of the market. But it is a great point to think about. Those two events coinciding were just a really, really beneficial to APC, right? As we got away from everybody running terminals, I know that’s a term that a lot of people that listen to our podcast won’t remember, but everybody running dumb terminals wired back to a mainframe, as we got away from that and put personal computers on everybody’s desk and then connected those to servers, that all happened right as APC took off. I hadn’t even thought about that being a big catalyst for APC.

Steve Carlini: Yeah. It’s something that, Novell at the time, Novell Networking was starting up and partnering up with Novell. Novell was one of the first companies to actually certify UPS as compatible and built in UPS management into their systems. Later, Microsoft did, as well, but Novell was way ahead then. It was kind of funny because the technology of the UPSs wasn’t… The other thing in the industry was, it had to be a double conversion online for it to work.

Steve Carlini: Computer power supplies had advanced a lot during those days, and they actually had capacitors, so they could ride through a certain amount of outage. But nobody believed it. So our sales guys used to carry around these suitcases, they would call these blackout boxes. They would hook them up to computers and light bulbs, and they would actually have a little voltage regulator, and they’d turn the voltage down, the UPS would switch, the light bulb would stay on and the computer would stay on.

Raymond Hawkins: Oh, wow.

Steve Carlini: So it was-

Raymond Hawkins: You literally had to demonstrate it for people. Wow.

Steve Carlini: Absolutely had to demonstrate it or they didn’t believe it.

Raymond Hawkins: It is amazing to think how much things have changed, that the concept of, “Hey, we can keep you running on that battery long enough for you to get your backup power source online,” that that wasn’t even a thing, no one even understood it at the time, is fascinating. Blackout boxes. That’s great.

Steve Carlini: Yeah.

Raymond Hawkins: “Let me prove it to you. Here.” So did you just have a little model built into this case that had us a little UPS in it, and enough to run a light bulb and get-

Steve Carlini: Yes, exactly.

Raymond Hawkins: Awesome. How great. Boy, I look today and I see some of the original Mac Lisas and the Apple IIcs, and so some of those early compute devices, I bet if you could find one of those blackout boxes, that’d be a cool technology history component today.

Steve Carlini: In the APC headquarters, they actually had a showcase and they had the first UP APC ever built, but they had one of the blackout boxes too.

Raymond Hawkins: Yeah. Yeah. That’d be awesome to see. We literally had to turn a light bulb off for people. That’s pretty cool. Good. Okay. So that’s APC, the Schneider acquisition comes in, and now it’s not just UPSs and managing people’s downtime. It’s all things Schneider, from medium voltage all the way out to the outlet. So in the world of innovation, what things are interesting, fascinating? What’s going on at Schneider, and what are you and your team who are always thinking about the future what’s got a y’all’s mindshare today?

Steve Carlini: Yeah, that’s a good question, because there’s… What I do is, I kind of look at, what are the trends that are going to take place, not necessarily what’s happening now. The acquisition of APC was an interesting one from a cultural perspective, because Schneider at that time, and still is, it’s more of a global company now, but when they bought us, the headquarters are still in, right outside of Paris, France. But a lot of the executive committee now works in Hong Kong, and then some in the US. So it’s spread across the world. But at that time, primarily a very industrial company that liked to have markets proven out before they jumped into everything, so much more conservative than APC. APC was out to show that there was a better way to do things. So there was a little bit of, a lot of cultural learning between the companies.

Steve Carlini: Schneider actually had a big power protection group already, through the acquisition of Merlin Gerin, or MGE. We had to merge those two groups together. So we went through that process. Schneider, the way they think of data centers is kind of more of a larger, standalone system, because all the data center work that that had been done at Schneider was focused on the larger systems. So there was also a merging of a whole solution, like we talked about, for a medium voltage to low voltage switch gear, the big mechanical cooling systems, like chiller plants that are outside, they’re going into the IT room.

Steve Carlini: The way we look at data centers is kind of three domains. You have the power domain, which also has big busbars, as well. You have the switchgear, you have the busbars, then you have the power panels feeding the data centers. And then the IT room, where you have the power distribution that sits on what used to be, still is the white space. Fewer and fewer raised floors anymore, but still is the white space. And then we have the cooling, or what we call the building systems. And then Schneider’s approach, we want to look at the entire data centers as an individual system. There has been this tendency of the industry to have the silos between the power, the cooling and the IT room.

Raymond Hawkins: So there’s the power domain, the IT room and the cooling systems and building systems. Those are the way Schneider thinks about it. Okay, I just want to make sure I got it right. Okay.

Steve Carlini: Yep, those are the three systems. From a technology perspective, we’ve been on a mission to make a very, very large amount of solutions to support those systems. But then we’re on a mission to connect those solutions, as well. So connect them to a management system, and not just monitor the solutions, but provide more useful information, so taking all the systems, looking at the performance of the system, number one, also looking at issues that, you know, alerts and alarming, but also look at analytics, so make sure the systems are operating as intended, but also are not at risk of failing.

Steve Carlini: Running analytics on the system, you have the ability to do advanced warning when systems are about to fail. For example, if you have a transformer that’s, the heat is starting to rise and it’s starting to get into a danger zone, we can generate not only an alert, but also a recommendation. Either take some load off the transformer, depending on your situation, of course, but it could be that that transformer’s failing and breakers are nearing capacity, recommend taking some load off those. Or some batteries on the UPS side are the big one, because having any kind of advanced warning of battery failures is huge. If you get a notification that 70% chance the batteries are going to fail in the next three months, then you can make a decision of what you want to do, but we also would provide recommendations.

Steve Carlini: The way that the system works is, we advanced it to the point where you do receive the recommendations, and depending on your relationship with Schneider, you could have the ability to talk live to a service representative through text or phone or however you want, and then integrating the repairs or the service dispatch with the monitoring system. It’s what we’re doing now, and we’re doing that across all three domains of the data center.

Raymond Hawkins: Steven, as I think about power to the IT room, where’s that demarcation? Is it the busbar? Is it the rack? At what point do I think, “Okay, I’m now IT room from a domain perspective, and I’m no longer power”?

Steve Carlini: It varies. From a technology perspective, we are trying to blend all these silos together. We are giving companies the ability to look at the different power systems in the IT room and the power systems in the electrical room together, through the same systems. There’s obviously a lot of organizational constructs that exist. Companies like Compass that are in the data center business, they may benefit from not having these organizational silos, but other companies do. So we are giving people the ability to merge the systems and the management of those systems together, and integrate them all.

Steve Carlini: But I would say looking at it, where it breaks from a building system or a power system to the IT room is, whatever is sitting on the IT floor, if you have your PDUs, sitting on the white space or the IT room floor, that’s part of IT room. If it’s a panel feeding the IT room, then that’s still considered part of the power system in the building, usually, by a lot of companies.

Raymond Hawkins: Gotcha.

Steve Carlini: But like I said, we’re trying to eliminate those walls and make it one happy-

Raymond Hawkins: Yeah, well coordinated, monitored system. No, I like the integration of the three domains. But also thinking about how they’re they’re unique is fascinating. Yeah, panel and PDU seems to be the right demarcation point. I just wanted to talk that out with you a little.

Raymond Hawkins: All right. The things that keep you and your team up at night? Not what’s like, I liked the way you said it, not what’s happening today, but what might happen in the future? What are the things that might happen in the future that would interest us, and that you think are fascinating and exciting and things you got to figure out?

Steve Carlini: Well, from a data center perspective, I would say the whole hybrid architecture of data centers. It used to be that companies had a single data center, but then cloud came into existence and there started to be a hybrid environment. There was the whole movement to the cloud, which happened relatively quickly. There was a lot of movement, but there was a lot of discussions. I remember being on panels with people 15 years ago and talking about cloud, and we were trying to explain, what exactly is a cloud? How does it work? You have this platform is a service, infrastructure is a service, software is a service. It really confused a lot of people. I think now, people really understand. But at the time was kind of a mystery on what this cloud was and how it worked.

Steve Carlini: A lot of companies, they offloaded all of their email, their email systems, their HR systems, everything that was kind of easy. Then they got to the point where they just couldn’t offload anymore. So we ended up in, it’s usually some kind of operation or CRM systems that you can’t offload to clouds, or you have these hybrid architectures. Hybrid architectures are a little bit more difficult to manage, so we’ve invested a lot in building our data center infrastructure management solutions to be able to work across the different domains.

Steve Carlini: The one thing that we were looking at, that’s really starting to gain momentum is the move to Edge, and everyone’s talking about move to Edge. But I remember talking five years ago at some data center conferences about this move to the Edge. And there were so many skeptics and people telling me I was crazy. There was just really a negative kind of backlash, “Oh, it doesn’t make any sense.” You had John Chambers saying that the world only needed one data center and the network would take care of everything else.

Steve Carlini: But as I said earlier, you go through all these cycles. We seem to be at the beginning of the movement to the Edge cycle. You have a lot of the cloud providers that are moving closer to the Edge. They’ve been doing that for four or five years into, into kind of urban areas or what we call a regional Edge. Now we’re talking local Edge, they’re moving things really, really close to where the users are and where the data’s being generated.

Steve Carlini: So it doesn’t make a lot of sense. You have these new communication technologies that are coming, up like 5G and Wi-Fi 6, and you’re going to have the ability to leverage a lot more technology that’s going to leverage high definition cameras, which are going to generate a tremendous amount of data. You don’t want to be sending any of that hundreds of miles, thousands of miles, to larger data centers. You want these Edge data centers to be able to process the data and then discard what’s used, just take the results.

Steve Carlini: It was interesting, an example is agriculture. A couple of years ago, when IOT was kind of the buzzword, people were metering or putting all these IOT sensors, thousand of them, in their agriculture site, whether it was a vineyard or any kind of produce. Today what they do is, they use these high definition cameras and they could be stationary, or they could be through drones, that are communicating high definition video. So if you’re looking at moisture content, fertilizer content, how much sun the crops are getting, you don’t need to have these thousands of sensors. You could actually do it with high definition video. You could actually look at the plant and see what kind of condition it’s in and what kind of attention it needs, if it needs more water, it needs more fertilizer, needs more sun, needs less sun. Things like that are all going to move to video. It’s all going to move to video, which is really going to drive more and more Edge computing.

Steve Carlini: The other thing that’s going to drive more and more Edge computing is the contact-less, touch-free society that’s emerging. We have this contact society here, but it was innovative to go to restaurants and they have the touch screens. Now the touch screens are taboo. No one wants to touch anything. It’s going to be gestures and voice and facial recognition. There’s going to be a tremendous amount of facial recognition that’s going to be popping up in a lot more. The hospitality industry, the food service industry, the transportation industry, especially, are all going to be leveraging these facial recognition. And facial recognition, there’s been a little bit of a hesitancy, because of privacy issues and people are a little bit worried about it. But I think for society to be able to go through this digital transformation to a contact-less, touch-free, we’re going to have to use more facial recognition to enable that.

Raymond Hawkins: Steven, I’m going to go back to something you said just a little bit ago. You were talking about, we’re going to have more and more video with 5G and Wi-Fi 6. We’re going to be able to handle much more, much richer content. I liked your agricultural example. Instead of me asking a sensor to tell me what the humidity is, why don’t I just look at the plant? That an easy one for me to get my arms around.

Raymond Hawkins: As I think about Edge computing, I hear lots of people talk about that the Edge is about pushing the compute function as close to the user as possible from a latency perspective. And I thought your answer, I tend to think that it’s less about that, and it’s more about the cost of backhaul.

Steve Carlini: Yeah.

Raymond Hawkins: That if you take all of that data at the end point and push it all the way back to a centralized data center, especially as the richness and the size, the quantity of the content gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it’s backhaul avoidance is what I think makes the Edge make sense, because all of that backhaul cost would be through the roof. Even if it’s a short video clip, having to send that, to your point, hundreds or thousands of miles away, and then decide what to do with it and then send it back, is just cost prohibitive. I think it’s the, just what you described, it’s the ability to decide, analyze, evaluate, decide as close as possible, so that we can avoid backhaul, is as big a driver, if not more, for the Edge. What’s your thoughts on that?

Steve Carlini: I don’t think it’s transparent to a lot of people that there’s costs involved with this backhaul. I’ve tried to explain it and it just does default to the latency that people can get their arms around, but even though I think people are using latency wrong. Because latency is really not speed. It’s the amount of jitter and freezing that’s caused by latency.

Raymond Hawkins: Right.

Steve Carlini: But you’re absolutely right. There’s a tremendous amount of cost, if you’re going to spend that much data over these lines. And there’s also the issue of network congestion.

Raymond Hawkins: Just simple capacity will cause a problem. That’s right.

Steve Carlini: Exactly.

Raymond Hawkins: You take this incredibly rich, high definition video, and fly it over every farm in the country, and then try to analyze it, the network’s just going to shut down. It’s just too much content. It’s just too heavy. Yeah, yeah.

Steve Carlini: Exactly.

Raymond Hawkins: The network infrastructure is so established in our country, we can’t. This is when I go back to my early days in the compute business. We used to talk about that we would move the bottleneck in the computer around. At one point, the processors weren’t fast enough, so we’d focus on the processor. Once the processor got faster, then the busway would be not fast enough, so you’d focus on the busway. Then the memory wasn’t fast enough, so you’d focus on the memory, and that’s how. So we were just moving the electronic bottleneck around the computer and addressing it wherever we found the resistance. On a macro scale, that’s a bit of what I think about when I think about Edge and 5G and Wi-Fi 6. We’re going to run into an electronic inhibitor by just sheer volume in the network.

Steve Carlini: Right.

Raymond Hawkins: Which is going to force us to do things at the Edge.

Steve Carlini: Exactly, exactly. When we talk about 5G, it’s another area that’s not well understood. There’s a lot of talk about 5G and how it’s already been rolled out and there’s nationwide coverage of 5G. But that’s low band 5G. That’s 600, 700 megahertz 5G. It’s not the ultra reliable, low latency, millimeter wave 5G that’s going to enable these new technologies. Because to process video and move video, the low band 5G and 4G are pretty much the same. There’s no advantage of using low band 5G over 4G for that application.

Steve Carlini: The ultra reliable, low latency, millimeter wave, or high band 5G, people were calling it 5G+, and it’s a different technology because of the frequencies that it operates at, the millimeter waves, are a much, much faster frequency. But they don’t travel well, so you need the RAN, or the antenna ray, to be very, very close to the application, and it has to be line of sight. You can’t have any obstruction in the way. You can’t even have, some of the testing, trees with leaves. So it’s not really suitable for anything like inside of a building, because you have to have this line of sight and you have to have, from the data center side, and the reason I was involved for the World Economic Forum Program, was because you need many more of these, what they call MEK data centers, which are mobile Edge compute, mobile Edge cloud, multi-access Edge. People call them different things, but their MEK data centers.

Steve Carlini: For high band 5G to operate, right now, you have 4G base stations and you see them, they’re a mile-and-a-half, two miles apart. For 5G to operate, you’re going to need, for the cluster, you’re going to need three to five times more of those, depending on how much activity you have in your network. So you’re going to have to have the additional incremental data centers, to be able to operate the high band 5G. In the city, they’re going to be on building tops, parking garages, basements. They’re going to be deployed everywhere. Because of this little pandemic that we had, the governments were focused on different issues, so that stalled a lot of the testing and the initial roll outs of the higher band 5G for urban application.

Steve Carlini: So it’s going to be a long journey to deploy 5G at scale. And there’s also the business case issue that has to be addressed when deploying all these data centers. There’s the business issue, and it’s the issue of, who’s going to do it, and who’s going to manage all of these data centers?

Raymond Hawkins: Yeah, Steven, I think we get a little bit wrapped up in the consumer concept of 5G.

Steve Carlini: Yeah.

Raymond Hawkins: Of, “Oh, my phone says it’s 5G.” The ultimate high performance and the things that we’re going to really be able to do with enhanced 5G or 5G+ at its absolute highest performance, the infrastructure to support it is astronomical. I heard an estimate somewhere that globally, to convert everything, the whole network to 5G, would be a $12 trillion, 10 year project. That was just somebody’s estimate. But I think the spirit of that is correct. It’s big. It’s big, expensive, and going to take a long time.

Steve Carlini: Yeah, that’s if you have anybody working on it, too.

Raymond Hawkins: Yeah, right. Right, right.

Steve Carlini: That’s an estimate with everybody completely focused on it. What happened during the pandemic was, there was a big push to just increase the capacity of the current technologies.

Steve Carlini: The other technology of 5G that makes it interesting is that it’s really software defined, where the IT is disaggregated from the software, which is great. The IT will run on standard IT systems that are more AC, where the 4G uses specialized DC systems. But what happened during the pandemic was, there was a huge build-out of 4G LTE, and Advanced Pro and Advanced Pro Plus. So there was a lot more capacity added to the traditional type of telco infrastructure.

Raymond Hawkins: Well, Steven, this has been super awesome. We’re going to get our fourth trivia question in, in our ode to Oklahoma, and we’ll wrap up. First three questions are, in Oklahoma football history, number one rushing yards, number one passing yards, number one in receiving yards, so those three. I’m certain Steven could guess all of those on his own. And then, who is the winningest coach in Oklahoma history?

Steve Carlini: Oh.

Raymond Hawkins: So no answers, email us your answers, those four. We’ll do a drawing for anyone who gets the four correct, and you’ll get a $500 Amazon gift card.

Raymond Hawkins: Steven, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you talking about Schneider’s view of the world and what’s going on, and also what’s coming. We appreciate hearing your background and your history. This has been great, and we look forward to doing a more business together with you guys in the future. You guys handle the vast majority of our power systems, and we really appreciate it. Thank you for that.

Steve Carlini: Yeah, thanks, Randy. It was great to be here talking to you today.

Raymond Hawkins: Thank you so much for joining us, Steven. I appreciate it.

Steve Carlini: No, it was pleasure. Thank you. Have a great day.

Raymond Hawkins: Thank you. Bye.