Danielle Rossi

A mechanical engineer by training, like many data centre professionals, Danielle Rossi’s entry into the space was far from conventional. But what sets her apart is how her career in the space advanced like the booming industry around her. 

“I basically grew up in the data centre space,” she begins. “I’ve been working in data centres for 19 years. I've seen a lot of iterations of data centres. Ten to 15 years ago, 1MW was a very large data centre,  and now we're looking at, if it's under 10MW for hyperscale or colo, it’s small.”

Starting her career at APC after graduating with a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Danielle then went on to work for data centre giant Schneider Electric as a Enterprise Systems Engineer for more than a decade. Here, she honed her craft in the data centre space, specialising in data centre solution design and engineering for hyperscale, colocation, enterprise, edge and government environments.

The biggest observation from Danielle looking back on her career today is the rate of change, driving data centre excellence and capacity to lofty new heights and bringing an abundance of opportunity and challenge.

“Recent market growth has created some unique challenges within the last few years, but it has also given us an opportunity to expand innovation,” she says of the greatest challenge in her role. “But I like that there is a lot of change. The calculations we did 10 years ago look very different than they would today, the density of the chips is increasing - there's all these different changes, think and changes in technology from the support side to the structure side. It makes it challenging and it makes your brain work. You can't just get into that lull and say, ‘well, I've been doing this for 30 years and don't need to do anything different.’

“This industry is very dynamic and it changes regularly, but across the industry it’s really nice to share commonality. It's like speaking our own language, in a sense.”

Making the most of the evolving nature of the field, Danielle is laser-focused on sustainability and efficiency, ensuring a large, power heavy field provides the best service it can, all with the planet in mind. For Danielle, it’s about tackling this head-on, as demand in this space is expected to grow exponentially.

“It's not going to go away,” she adds. “As long as everyone’s watching videos on Instagram or sending messages on WhatsApp, it's going to be around. That growth is constant and we need to try and make sure that growth isn’t causing as much of an impact. We can try to ensure that it has less of a footprint than it would've in the past, that's a driver in itself.

“These conversations have happened a lot over the last couple of years and yes, people are throwing around buzzwords, but also putting their money where their mouth is.”

Diversity and inclusion in the data centre and technology industries is something close to Danielle’s heart. Instilled with the message ‘girls can do anything boys can do, most times even better’ by her father, a nurse, Danielle never identified the engineering or data centre circles she moved in as ‘male’ entities. 

“This perspective allowed me to pursue my career in this field without gender stereotypes and assumptions,” she says looking back. “Diversity and inclusion is all very popular to talk about, but in reality it's wonderful from a lot of different aspects. There’s obviously the standard ideas of diversity, but then the background diversity of someone’s career. When there’s a lot of different perspectives, that’s always a benefit.

“I love my job, I love the people I work with. There's a lot of growth to happen, but I look back and feel proud of myself and my team on how far we’ve come.”

Read the full story HERE.

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