Advisory board
Peter Gross
Managing Partner at HP’s Carbon, Power and Critical Facilities Services
Prior to his new role at HP, Peter Gross was CEO of EYP Mission Critical Facilities since its founding in 1997. He was a strategic force in the rapid growth and development of the company into a unique and truly global data center design consultancy, which was later acquired by HP. Peter is considered a leading thinker and practitioner of mission critical information and infrastructure design with numerous published technical papers and frequent international speaking engagements. His focus centers on mission critical facilities, high-reliability design and power quality. He has more than 20 years experience in the engineering and design of power systems as applied to data centers, trading floors, command and control centers, and telecommunication and broadcasting facilities. Before joining EYP MCF, Peter was Chief Engineer of Teledyne Inc. and a partner of PRK Associates. During his career, he has managed projects for numerous Fortune 500 companies and public sector clients such as AT&T, Bank of America, Charles Schwab, Citigroup, Exodus Communications, Fannie Mae, FAA, Fidelity Investments, Fox Television, IBM, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, Sprint, SBC and Wells Fargo Bank. Peter is a Senior IEEE Member and a Registered Professional Engineer in CA, AZ and NY. He is one of the founders of the Critical Power Coalition, an organization developing public policies for improving the reliability and the quality of electric power in the public and private sectors. Peter graduated from the Polytechnical Institute of Bucharest, Romania with a degree in electrical engineering, and he received an MBA from California State University.
Gordon Hollingsworth
Global Head of Critical Environment Management (EVP) at Jones Lang LaSalle
Gordon has extraordinanary professional attributes. His depth of knowledge across the spectrum of critical facilties is immense. He not only has strong abilities in concpetual planning and design; he is equally conversant with project management and practical implementation at system and component level, and at both theoretical and practical levels. This constitutes a highly knowledgable all rounder and yet a specialist in critical facilties. This might seem to be a paradox, however it is his ability to operate at both high and detailed level across a variety of disciplines that makes his engineering capabilities compelling. In terms of team leadership, Gordon is a high performer with great balance that can articulate equally well at senior management and grass roots levels
Steve O'Donnell
CEO at S1NED Limited
Steve O'Donnell has over 30 years global Data Center experience working at up to and including CEO level in large multinational organisations and is globally recognised as a specialist in Storage, Data Centers and Sustainability. He has significant experience in the Banking and Telecommunications industries as well as in Oil & Gas and Insurance. He is an inventor and holds a number of patents in the data center cooling area. Steve is a entrepreneur, a businessman, with a deep understanding of how to drive performance and efficiency in the organisations he manages. Steve was CEO at MEEZA, a major data centre and cloud services company based in Doha Qatar and serving the MENA region. MEZZA is a joint venture backed by the Qatar Foundation and based in the Qatar Science and Technology Park (QSTP). MEEZA offers advanced and innovative services to business clients underpinning Qatar’s stated objective to make the knowledge based society a reality in the region. Prior to MEEZA Steve was Managing Director EMEA and Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) he specialised in Data Centre Power & Cooling, Data Centre Strategy and Best Practices (planning, consolidation and migration), IT Service Management, Data Centre Automation and Server Hardware and Architectures (blades, server virtualization, cloud computing infrastructure & services). Prior to ESG Steve ran IT Infrastructure Internationally for FDC, the largest global credit, debit, gift and prepay card processing company in the world. He was Global Head of Data Centres at BT running the largest data centre estate and the biggest IT Operation in Europe. He has a worldwide reputation as a thought leader in Green IT having won six industry awards for his 21st Century Data Centre vision and design. He has developed a framework for categorizing Data Centre Efficiency, leveraging the maturity model ideas from CMM. O’Donnell became the first non manufacturer and first European based contributing member of The Green Grid when he took BT into membership. He is a professional member of the IEEE, the IET and the British Computer Society. He has always been an advocate of workforce education and improve as a means to reaching organisational goals in every company he has ever been part of.
Zahl Limbuwala
CEO Romonet / Chairman BCS Data Centre Sector Group
Zahl has been involved in information technology both from a career perspective and through personal interest over that last 15 years. Having started out as an electronic engineer he rapidly moved into software development, real-time system and embedded process control. He also embraced the systems, networks and security design and administration disciplines during the technical hands-on part of his career. Since then Zahl has held a number of operational management and strategic planning roles with the managed services/service provider world. Zahl has been involved with the evolution of the data centre from the initial engineering approach to the slightly more scientific approach that's taken nowadays. Zahl founded the DCSG after having spent a number of years unsuccessfully trying to find a forum through which data centre skills, experience and best practices could be shared.