Some six years ago, the bare bones equipment housed in a small caged area, provided limited services to students and faculty. Outages occurred frequently and negatively impacted a multitude of campus events. The Las Vegas heat easily seeped its way into the “data center” via a cinder block wall and nearby door that opened to the dusty, suffocating air from outside.

Johnson recognized the urgency of the situation and drastic changes that had to occur if campus needs were to be met on any consistent basis. Due to his admitted inexperience in the data center world up to that point, he faced two major challenges after volunteering himself: becoming educated and convincing his cohorts that he was “the right man for the job.”

“Hitting the road” and actually visiting data centers in the Las Vegas area served as a conduit for meeting both goals. Once he could see first-hand how other companies approached location, size, placement of equipment and cooling strategies, Johnson took bits and pieces and applied them to his vision of the UNLV data center.

As his experiences grew and knowledge expanded, so did his confidence in making proposals and ultimately decisions that convinced his peers to hop on the Johnson data center bandwagon.

Flash forward to today, and you can see why Johnson has clearly earned bragging rights.

It didn’t come easy or in a short amount of time, but the 1,800-square-foot data center now meets all the campus’ needs…and some. Utilizing Hot Aisle Containment (HAC) for cooling and virtualization to reduce the number of servers, Johnson’s design has allowed UNLV to save 20 percent on energy costs.

With so many details behind the success and so little time during the webinar, Johnson promised a “dazzling” virtual data center tour of UNLV at Data Center World on March 18 at 1 p.m.

It’s a great way for Johnson to pass on the inspiration and empowerment he gleaned from visiting other data centers to his peers as they gather to soak in as much knowledge as they can from each other in Las Vegas March 18-22.

To listen to the Meet-a-Speaker webinar in its entirely, click here, or go straight to registration: Data Center World, visit www.datacenterworld.com/registration.

Welcome to Data Center World