meet me room
TATE CANTRELL – VERNE GLOBAL
Tate Cantrell , chief technology officer at Verne Global , is responsible for setting the technical direction for the company . He oversees the design and construction of all aspects of the facilities at Verne ’ s 100 per cent renewably powered data centre campus . His breadth of responsibility also encompasses the setup and oversight of operational and security strategies at the Verne Global campus . Aside from his internal leadership , he has a broad range of external responsibilities including client relations and industry-related mentoring . Tate draws on 20 + years of experience in the data centre industry . His experiences range from system administration for high performance computing environments to design , strategy and operational oversight during his tenure as vice president of technology at Dupont Fabros Technology .
Can you remember what job you wanted when you were a child ? I wanted to be a hematologist . My brother had a serious battle with hepatitis when I was younger which at first they were sure was leukemia . We spent a lot of late nights at the Los Angeles Children ’ s
Center waiting and wondering . I knew at that point I wanted to help people and that was clearly the most helpful thing I could think of . Luckily for all of us , youth was on his side and he pushed that disease into remission many years ago . The medical desires stayed with me and towards the end of my university studies , I turned my engineering studies to Biomedical Engineering .
Did you have a clear idea of the career you wanted by the time you left school and has your career path gone the way you expected ? After completing my Master ’ s degree in Biomedical Engineering , I decided to take a break before going into more advanced studies . I had become very interested in neural networks and chaos theory and considered either a pHd in Mathematics or a pHd in Biomedical Engineering . In order to help with the thinking process , I decided to go way outside of my element and landed in Fairbanks , Alaska , where I spent three years helping to design large power systems across the Lone Star State . I found this work very rewarding and interesting , and when I traveled back to the Eastern United States for a wedding , my own in fact , I found that the Internet Data Centre was just being born . I was lucky enough to land a position at the
14