[00:00:00] Chris Grainger: Welcome to Nico. Ask why today we have a hero conversation and we'll have Brett Layman, who is the director of Strategic Accounts at Pcx. So welcome Brett. How are you doing? Good, 

[00:00:13] Bret Lehman: Chris. How are you? Thanks for having me. 

[00:00:15] Chris Grainger: Oh, I'm doing well, sir. Thank you so much. I lo I love these hero conversations cuz just get to know our people, the heroes of industry.

Get us started. Tell us about your journey. 

[00:00:24] Bret Lehman: Well, how much time do you have role? As much as you want. Yeah. So, so I'm, I'm, I'm a, I'm someone who's been very fortunate that I feel like everything I've done in my career has kind of led me to the next step. Mm-hmm. , you know, I started outta college at IBM long time ago, uh, in construction of a, a semiconductor fab plant up in.

And so I got familiarity with large building systems and, and things like that. Decided I wanted to try, you know, IBM offers a lot of opportunities, so I wanted to try product development. Got into the design of cooling systems for it, you know, network machines, uh, SE servers, system X servers. And so along about 2020, about 20 years ago, IBM introduced blade servers into the market, and blade servers are essentially very highly densely packed servers.

So it was a, it was a real game changer in terms of how much power could be stacked into a certain amount of space now in a data center. And, and IBM's customers were having horrible issues trying to figure out how do we cool this? Where do we put this, how do we spread it out? And so, As, as somebody who helped to design the cooling systems of the servers, but also had some building experience, building system experience, um, I had salespeople starting to call me and say, Hey, would you go talk to this bank or that customer and help them understand how they can accommodate this, this, this power density and, and the amount of space they have?

That led me into a, a global services role. You know, I held for some time where I just kind of was a subject matter expert with teams around the globe. Um, talking about data center design, build operations, all those kinds of things. And as my path started to stray away from, from data centers, that's really my passion.

Uh, it started to stray away there. Um, I recalled a company down here in North Carolina just down the road for me, that, that I had helped qualify as a supplier for ibm. And Pcx built a number of modular data centers, uh, for IBM customers. And so, uh, now I'm here and, uh, back in the data center space and really happy to, to be there.

That is awesome. So where'd you go to school at? I went to Penn State, grew up in Western Pennsylvania. 

[00:02:40] Chris Grainger: Okay. Okay. Great school. Love it. Love it. That's awesome. So how long have you been in, uh, North Carolina? 

[00:02:47] Bret Lehman: Long time since 1989. All right. So plus years. It's home. It's home now. Yeah. It's 

[00:02:54] Chris Grainger: gotta be home for you, but it's been that long, 

[00:02:56] Bret Lehman: right?

Yeah, very much. 

[00:02:59] Chris Grainger: That is great. So, you know, you've been out here a long time, you've been working with the industry. What do you see, because you're, you're a director of strategic strategic accounts, so you're definitely inside the know on a lot of accounts. What do you see as the biggest challenge? A lot of these accounts are, 

[00:03:14] Bret Lehman: I think there are two things.

So I I, I, I'll go back to where I, I, you know, I, I mentioned a minute ago, about 20 years ago, where, um, there was a time when, uh, uh, an IT operator, if they had a new application they wanted to deploy, they put a new server in the data center. And, you know, little by little, those racks filled up and then the racks kind of grew and, and you had what they called server sprawl and you had a lot.

IT servers sit and running at 6% utilization, consuming a lot of power. Uh, as, as somebody who tested those systems, I know that to go from an idle mode to a very heavily, uh, running heavy traffic, the power on them really doesn't go up that much. It's, it's incremental. The idle, the idle powers is quite high, pretty, pretty high in terms of how they, how they run.

And so the more you can run the server, utilize. The more power you get, the more compute power you get for less electric, for, for the amount of electricity you're, you're spending. Um, That led to, you know, multi-threading of processors and that led to multiprocessor systems. And then, then we started to virtualize machines and you used to carve up a server into X amount of compute, memory and storage.

And then that would become 10 servers, right? And you would get 10 servers for, for the price of one, essentially. And. With cloud, you've got microservices and, and containers and, and the compute power has been diced up so fine and it's managed at such a, such a, a, a fine increment. Um, I wonder what's next?

You know, we've really taken the kind of technology that that, that these things have been built on and, and really gotten a. Maybe, I don't wanna say as much mileage out of it as we're going to get. I'm not, I'm not an expert in the field, but we're getting an awful lot more compute power for the amp out of the wall socket than we used to.

Mm-hmm. . And so I wonder, you know, what will the challenges be around quantum computing? Um, I know it's gotta run really cold, so how do you build an environment that's both economical and reliable and practical to support the next generation of technology? I think that's, that's a little ways down the road, but that's one thing.

That I think comes to mind. Um, the other one I would touch on is, is about sustainability. Um, we've, we've, we've gotten a lot of mileage out of the IT equipment. It does a lot more than it used to do for the, uh, for the amount of power we put into it. So now it's, it's very, it's very efficient. We talk about scope one and two emissions.

A lot of customers do now, you know, it's scope One is how efficiently do I operate? Systems are already pretty efficient. We've gotten pretty good at running efficient cooling. Scope two emissions, uh, go to what kind of power am I, am I consuming? The big cloud companies are, are setting up pre-purchase agreements for wind power, solar power.

That's a big thing. So with my indirect costs in my supply chain, how do I, how do I limit that? And it's gonna become for the industry, how do we, we now have a, a very economical to build, very economical to operate modular data. How do we build it more efficiently? And so, you know, we're having conversations with people that build fully recyclable, recyclable wall panels that we could, that we could utilize that are, that are strong, um, that would provide all the same, you know, ease of ease of fabrication, but also be fully recyclable and better for the environment.

So I think we'll be looking for different materials to. Yeah, I mean, 

[00:06:48] Chris Grainger: it sounds like innovation is just at the, the forefront of everything that you're looking at in the future. Yeah. Love it. Love it. So I'm curious now we, you kind of, you talked about it earlier there, there's myths around data centers. Go ahead, let's debunk one for us.

[00:07:05] Bret Lehman: Yeah. I don't know if it's, if it's debunking a myth so much as it is. Um, Maybe a knock on, on the data center industry. I think for years we've been saying, and it's a fact, it's true that the data center industry probably consumes 2% of the power, uh, on the face of the planet, the equivalent of the, of the airline industry.

Um, but I think what gets lost in that is the world's growing power consumption's going up everywhere. And the fact that the IT industry is still at 2% is, is, is, is quite a statement when you think about what I talked about earlier from going from we take an entire pizza box server for a new application and put it in a rack to now, uh, we're running applications in the cloud that can run in Dallas, so they can run in Chicago or London.

And we just move those things around. They're constructed on such a fine, uh, amount of resource that you can move 'em anywhere and, and it's really very, very efficient. It's, I don't know what the, I don't know what the, the number is, but it's many, many times more efficient from a compute power standpoint than it was 20 years ago.

So I think sometimes we just get caught up in, you know, how much electricity is used and we lose sight of the fact that there's a whole lot more work being done 20 years ago than, than there was 20 years ago. There have been big efficiency gains made. Wow. That's 

[00:08:23] Chris Grainger: incredible. Now somebody who wants to get into this data center world, uh, What, what do they need to be studying going?

I mean, what, what, what's the degrees? I mean, what backgrounds I'm trying to 

[00:08:34] Bret Lehman: get like some advice. Yeah, that's a great question. That, that's a great question because that's, that's a topic that's getting a lot of discussion in the data center industry today. Uh, I went to a conference last week and, and, you know, one of the speakers said, look around the room.

Do you see anybody that doesn't look like you? And it, it really was, it was a bunch of middle-aged men and, and through attrition, um, The people with that knowledge are gonna be retiring in the next, you know, 10, 15 years. Mm-hmm. . And there's not a queer path into the data center industry. So there's a lot of discussion about how do we, how do we improve that?

Um, so, um, I think it speaks to mentoring, uh, fundamental background, electrical and mechanical engineers. Uh, computer engineers, that's where you get started. Okay. But typically that doesn't necessarily, that doesn't necessarily wind you up in a data center. Mechanical and electrical engineers can do, can do lots of things and, and data centers are kind of special like hospitals because of the mission critical nature of what they do.

So it's the kind of thing about building in reliability and, and things like, That takes some time to gain experience around, so mm-hmm. , there's a lot of talk about how we do that. The, the seven by 24 exchange, um, uh, group has started, uh, an international data center day. Um, that's, uh, something that we're, it's, it's, it's in kind of in conjunction with Earth Day.

It's around the same time. And, uh, it's, it's an opportunity for us to reach out to local community colleges, maybe high schools, in, in the Raleigh Durham area here. We have a lot of, a lot of major universities just to bring people in and see whether it's from an engineer down to a welder or an electrician.

We're going to need more people in this industry going forward. And, and the efforts are starting now to, to try and do that. Mm-hmm. . 

[00:10:26] Chris Grainger: Alright. So it sounds like, you know, there's a lot of, of opportunities in part. For, um, people that, that, that want to come into the data center world. I'm curious around co-ops and internships, you know, so far is, cause that's, that's one way you can develop mentorships as well, right?

You through those programs. So, you know, do they, do those exist and what do they look like? Are they more engineering, technical type co-ops, or more business related? Just curious, what, what are you seeing 

[00:10:51] Bret Lehman: there in your, in. So I, I think we need to get to that. Um, you know, when I've been in product development roles, I had a lot of great experience, especially in this area, being close to North Carolina State University, good engineering school.

Mm-hmm. , uh, being able to recruit, um, students as you know, essentially part-time help. Whether it was just the summer or whether, you know, they, they, they worked part-time through their school years and by the time they were ready to graduate, yeah, they were, in addition to their course load, they were very well versed in, in, in the work we were doing in, in the development lab.

I don't see that in the data center space right now. Um, I would say, um, uh, you know, Apprenticeships in the shop would be, would be a good way to go. Yeah. And we have talked about in, in, in addition, you know, finding some engineering students to come in and, and work a summer or work part-time while they're in college because, like you said there, there's no better way than, you know, at that age to be grooming somebody.

And if, if they have the same passion for the industry that everybody else around them does, that's pretty easy to convey. Then, um, yeah, you've got, you've got, you've got a, a, a channel of future employees coming in. I think we need to get 

[00:12:01] Chris Grainger: back to that. Absolutely. Absolutely. It sounds like that's, there's some opportunity there, which is, which is always good.

It's always good to talk about these things because you never know, you know, what can, what can grow from there. So, curious for you, Brett, when, at the work that you're doing at Pcx, when you've had a great day, you've crushed it, you're smiling, you're happy, you're, you're, you're petting the dog instead of kicking the dog.

What'd you do that? 

[00:12:23] Bret Lehman: Uh, I think it's something that has a meaningful outcome. Um, and maybe I'm, I'm gonna be a little pie in the sky here. Uh, cuz it doesn't happen every day, right? They're right. Sometimes these things are, these are, these are moonshots. Uh, but I just, one example, you know, I worked on a super computer cluster where, uh, my biggest challenge was how do I work with an engineer and a, and a and a data center, uh, service provider to get a solution installed as quickly as possible?

Because this univers. Was recruiting a high profile researcher and this compute cluster was tied very closely to, you know, his timing on arriving at the university. And so we were, we were very successful with it. Long story short, but that was great. But what, what really got me was when I got home after being invited to the grand opening of this, this facility and, you know, the lieutenant governor of the state of Georgia was there and talked about the tremendous benefit that this compute cluster was gonna provide.

You know, not just the local community, but you know, society in general with mm-hmm. , you know, looking for ways to cure cancer. You know, running all the, the, the simulations on protein simulations and things like that, that, that were part of this research and it's like, wow, you know, most of the time I, I get a set of requirements.

It's like, solve this problem. You don't always hear what the real world, there's always some type of real world application that's being satisfied there, and it's not always, As, as high an impact as what I just described, but that's, that's, that's what really gets me going. I love it. And 

[00:13:56] Chris Grainger: it sounds like such a, a great purpose right there as well.

So let's take some, uh, a turn off of your professional path. Brett, let's talk about you outside of work. What do you doing enjoy doing 

[00:14:06] Bret Lehman: for fun? Well, I've got, I've got three kids that are all grown and out of the house. And our, our, our oldest daughter is, uh, uh, Brought us our first grandchild in the last year and a half.

So they live close by. We get a, we get a lot of enjoyment out of, out of that part of our lives now. Um, like to play golf, I like music. Um, you know, a couple of my kids have the same kind of taste that I do in music. So, we'll, we'll from time to time, uh, go, uh, decide on, on a, on a show we want to go see together.

And pre covid, we did that an awful lot. We haven't done it as much lately, but that's, uh, that's always fun too. Um, you know, being an engineer where things are so very precise, I think, uh, one of the things I like most is photography. I like to try and find different ways of looking at things or, or capturing something in a moment or even over a, a lapse of time.

Right. That, uh, yeah, that isn't ordinarily how you would look at it. That's really cool, 

[00:15:01] Chris Grainger: man. So, you, so you do photography now from a music standpoint. What, what are you guys going to, what, what do you enjoy? 

[00:15:08] Bret Lehman: Oh, it's mostly, mostly eighties bands. , eighties, 90. Okay. Okay. But we, we've seen some of the big ones, right?

So we've seen, and I, I think one of my daughters is, is keeping a keeping track of, you know, how many people have we seen in Earn Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Now that's a pretty long list, right? But, but we've seen The Stones and Eric Clapton and, and Tom Petty, um, you know, lot of those eighties bands.

[00:15:33] Chris Grainger: That's awesome. So what's, what's your favorite. 

[00:15:37] Bret Lehman: Uh, you love Marie Hayden. Bruce Springsteen. 

[00:15:40] Chris Grainger: Okay. Okay, I hear you buddy. That's awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that information. So what about outside of Vans, podcasts, YouTube channels, books, anything that you find value in that you enjoy, love to hear, get that insight from you?

[00:15:55] Bret Lehman: Yeah. Def no real. Um, you know, I subscribe to a number of things that pop up in my inbox all the time. I've, I've found Data Center Frontier to, to offer an awful lot. Relevant, up to date, you know, current events information. That's, that's probably my main source for how I keep up, um, with the industry. Um, but, but YouTube's fantastic.

You know, if you wanna fix something, if you wanna wanna learn to play a song on something, I mean, you can find anything on YouTube. That's right. That's right. It's out there, 

[00:16:25] Chris Grainger: including this podcast. So hopefully that's right. If you're listening and you wanna see if the video go, check out our YouTube channel, subscribe.

Yeah. So let's, let's, let's jump into our lightning round. Brett, uh, have a little fun here with the, we always do this on every hero episode. This is, uh, just usually fun for our listeners as well. So, what's your favorite food? I always start off easy with the food stuff. So, what's your favorite food? Pizza.

Oh, man. What? Any, any type of, uh, what, what's on that pizza man? 

[00:16:53] Bret Lehman: Uh, best combination, pepperoni, onions, and green peppers. Okay. Alright. 

[00:16:59] Chris Grainger: Thin deep, deep crust, deep dish. What, what you going 

[00:17:01] Bret Lehman: with? Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I like it. I like it. Maybe not Chicago style, but definitely a thicker crust. Okay. All right. Not, not thin and 

crispy.

[00:17:09] Chris Grainger: I gotcha. Gotcha. What about adult beverage? Anything to watch that pizza down 

[00:17:13] Bret Lehman: with? Yeah, good red wine. Good red wine. Spent, uh, a two week vacation in Italy a few years ago and got to really come to like a lot of really good, uh, Italian wines. Locally though, I don't know if you've heard of The Prisoner.

It's a red, bland California wine. Okay, 

[00:17:30] Chris Grainger: really good one. That's awesome. Great. So what's, uh, what's something that's on your nightstand? 

[00:17:38] Bret Lehman: Oh, I don't have a nightstand. Um Oh, okay. Maybe. Maybe used to be a book. Probably now it's an iPad that's got an ebook on it. , there you go. There you go. And on that iPad, what's your favorite?

I thought you were gonna ask about an author. I'll give you, I'll give you an author instead. I mean, I'm about, about out of his books is Stephen King, um, app. I'm probably still, I'm still doing YouTube. Or, or, or sometime. Okay. Favorite game of the moment. Could be anything. Gotcha. . I gotcha. Okay. So what's your all time favorite movie?

All time. Favorite movie? Uh, probably, um, field of Dreams. Ooh, good movie. Nice. I like a lot of Chevy Chase comedies, but you know, those aren't, those aren't exactly, they're not award winners. I, they, field of Dreams was, was a, was a great story. 

[00:18:29] Chris Grainger: Love it. Now, Phil, a dream know some of you're a baseball guys, so what's your, what's your 

[00:18:33] Bret Lehman: sports team?

Uh, you know, ironically I don't follow a lot of baseball now. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, so, uh, I went to Penn State, so I'm a, I'm a huge Penn State football. Um, even though I've been in North Carolina 30 years, still a big Steeler fan going through the Steelers, Panthers game next week as a matter of fact.

But, uh, we've got a, we, I'm also a big hockey fan and we've got, uh, an n h L team here in, in Raleigh, so I'm a Big Carolina Hurricanes fan too. Oh yeah. 

[00:18:59] Chris Grainger: Love it, love it. Well, last question there, Brett. Dogs, 

[00:19:03] Bret Lehman: your cats. Oh, dogs. All the way. All right. All right. I'm surprise. Mine hasn't been in here. Jumping up on my chair while I've been on.

What kind of dog do you have? He's a black lab, two-year-old. Black lab. 

[00:19:14] Chris Grainger: Nice, nice. Awesome. Well this has been a great, great episode with you here, Brett. So we always wrap up ecos why with the why. So somebody wants to know what your personal why is. Where are you gonna 

[00:19:24] Bret Lehman: tell him? I like to keep busy. I like to be challenged.

Um, you know, I find when I have, there are times when I want nothing to. That any kind of extended period of time with nothing to do is, is, is not good time. So, mm-hmm. , uh, I'd like to be doing something meaningful, something that's of value. Uh, maybe something that helps somebody else. 

[00:19:46] Chris Grainger: I love it. Thank, well, it's been a pleasure to get to know you.

Where should the listeners go to connect with you or p cx to learn more? 

[00:19:53] Bret Lehman: Yeah, so p Pcx Corp. Www pcx corp.com is where we've got, uh, you know, all our information about our product offerings, blogs, uh, thought leadership content, things like that. Uh, personally, LinkedIn's the best place. I've got a, uh, I've got a WIC site linked to a WIC site on myself personally, where I've got some, some clips of, uh, conference presentations and, and, and some, you know, information on patents that I hold and things like that.

If anybody's that in. I do have some personal information linked up on LinkedIn. All right, well, we'll 

[00:20:29] Chris Grainger: make sure we, we have that stuff synced up in the show notes for you listeners. And Brett, is there anything else you'd like to share 

[00:20:33] Bret Lehman: today? Yeah, I think that's, I think I'm good. This has been, this has been fine Chris.

[00:20:39] Chris Grainger: Well thank you so much sir for taking the time and for all the information you shared today on Eco s y. Absolutely. Brett is one cool guy and I really enjoy getting to know him and, and from Pennsylvania to here in North. He has done doing some incredible things in industry, has a, uh, such a passion for helping others and, uh, the technology, he's so amped up about it, right?

You can just feel how energetic he was over the technology, what he's doing, his career. Definitely making a huge impact. Feels like he's a new granddad now, so he is. Got a lot going on at home too. Uh, just a really cool conversation there. So hopefully you wanna learn more about Brett and connect with him again.

Check out the show notes. There'll be. Ways for you to connect with him directly on LinkedIn and then definitely check out Pcx all the wonderful solutions that they're doing. We love those guys. They're, they're one of our, uh, premier partners here at Eco Highly recommend you checking out their solutions and seeing if a modular data center would fit your, would fit your needs.

So, If you're enjoying ecos, why we would ask you to give us a rating and review. Five stars will be wonderful. One to two sentence review will help tremendously. So thank you again for taking the time to listen to Brett's story from our hero there. So enjoy this comeback. Next week we'll have another episode for you and remember to keep asking why.

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[00:22:32] Bret Lehman: E C O 

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