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I have had a variety of people request to place ads on this site, taking no one up on their offer. I choose early on to embed Google ads to see how it worked, how much money would come in, and to see what ads would show up.
I don’t write on this blog to make money, so I decided to turn off Google banner ads and eliminate the ad placement.
There is a gaping hole where the banner ads were. That is not a bug. Ad banners are gone. and now I can say I make $0 money from this blog.
I did the thing you are not supposed to do posting on Friday, Oct 24 2014 at 5:07p on 10 years of Microsoft data center executives. Friday is a slow media day and posting after 5p on a Friday is something you don’t want to do to spread news, but rules are being broken all over in media.
I was curious to see how well the post distributed. After a day it popped into the top 10 google search results for “microsoft data center executives"
Curious today I checked and my post made it to #1.
Thanks for reading this blog and forwarding posts to your friends.
I wrote a popular post on 10 years of Microsoft data center executives. Writing about Google’s data center executives is a good follow up.
Google’s current Data Center executive leadership are Urs Hoelzle, Ben Treynor, and Joe Kava. Urs has no LinkedIn profile, but he does have a wikipedia post and has been with Google since the beginning being Google employee #8. The data center group is part of Ben Treynor’s organization. Ben joined Google in 2003. VP of Data Centers is Joe Kava, joining Google in 2008.
Urs posted on its Google datacenter in 1999.
Urs Hölzle
Shared publicly - Feb 4, 201415 years ago (on Feb 1st, 1999) I first set foot in a Google datacenter. Well, not really -- in the Google cage in the Exodus datacenter in Santa Clara. Larry had led me there for a tour (I wasn't an employee yet) and it was my first time in any datacenter. And you couldn't really "set foot" in the first Google cage because it was tiny (7'x4', 2.5 sqm) and filled with about 30 PCs on shelves. a1 through a24 were the main servers to build and serve the index and c1 through c4 were the crawl machines.
It is not easy to find who were people who were data center executives from 1999 to 2003. Ben Treynor in 2003 was the start of the site reliability engineering at Google and according to Ben’s linkedin profile he picked up the data center group in 2010 and in 2014 is responsible for the Google Cloud.
Vice President, Engineering
October 2003 – Present (11 years 1 month)Mountain View, CA
Responsibilities:
Site Reliability Engineering: 2003-present
Global Networking: backbone, egress, datacenter, and corporate: 2004-present
Global Datacenters: construction, engineering & operations: 2010-present
Global Servers: operations 2010-present
Google Cloud: 2014-present
Joe Kava has been the consistent presenter from Google on what is happening in the data center group, presenting at 7x24 Exchange, Uptime Symposium, Datacenter Dynamics, and many other industry events.
Vice President - Data Centers
April 2008 – Present (6 years 7 months)Mountain View, California
Responsible for design, engineering, construction, operations and sustainability for Google's global data centers.
Microsoft’s latest VP of Data Centers (Global Foundation Services) now called the Cloud Infrastructure and Operations is Suresh Kumar. There have been a lot of changes in the past 10 years of Microsoft’s data center group. The following is an accumulation of looking at Linkedin Profiles.
Currently Suresh Kumar is VP of Cloud Infrastructure and Operations with Christian Belady General Manager of Data Centers.
Dayne Sampson was VP of Global Foundation Services (GFS) from 2009 - 2014 with Christian Belady and Kevin Timmons as GMs of data centers.
Debra Chrapty was VP of GFS (until 2009) with Arne Josefsberg who brought in Mike Manos from Disney Interactive in 2005 to run data centers and this was the beginning of Microsoft’s transition to building data centers.
Before 2005 data centers also existed part of Microsoft IT and that was run by John Coster.
I have talked to some of the above people, but the only one I worked with is Mike Manos.
Mike and I overlapped by a year at Microsoft, and we didn't worked together when employees. But, we did work together after I left the company and we had many interesting conversations. The most memorable one was in Mar 2009 in his office when Mike said he was thinking of leaving Microsoft, and he wanted to know what I thought of leaving. Mike had been at Microsoft for 4 years. I had been at the company 14 years. Mike explained the situation, and I was 100% supportive of Mike’s decision to leave Microsoft, and I knew with almost the same 100% certainty that Mike would eventually be a senior executive at the CIO/CTO level. What I didn’t expect is how quickly Mike achieved CTO status. Which reminds me of one of the points I shared with Mike is where would he be after 5 more years at Microsoft? He would be a senior general manager with a slim chance of being a VP. It may seem obvious that Mike would be VP of data centers/cloud vs. Dayne Sampson, but Dayne had internal support from other senior executives as Microsoft replaced Debra Chrapty. One supporter of Mike was Satya Nadella, so it is possible if Mike was still at Microsoft he would be the VP of Cloud Infrastructure and Operations, but not a certainty.
Since I had posted comparing Suresh to Google’s Joe Kava using LinkedIn. I was curious what happens if you compare Suresh to Mike using LinkedIn. Here is a picture with Mike and Joe at 7x24 Exchange. Don’t think I have ever seen Suresh at a data center event. Will to be fair you hardly ever see an Amazon.com employee at a data center event. :-)
What became clear in the LinkedIn data is that Mike has a higher peer review, and is probably one of the best VPs Microsoft could have had to run Cloud Infrastructure and Operations in the opinion of his LinkedIn connections.
Both Mike and Suresh have 500+ connections, and I think Mike’s actual connections may be a bit bigger. Why? Because data like Mike’s #1 skill is cloud computing 241, #2 data centers 225, and #3 IT Operations 136. Suresh’s #1 skill is e-commerce 28 and his Cloud Computing # is 11. Whoa. Mike Manos Cloud Computing skill # is 241 and Suresh’s 11. A 22x difference. Data Centers for Mike is 225 and Suresh is 0.
Mike did a short stint at Nokia and if Stephen Elop backed Mike Manos, then Mike could have come back to Microsoft through the Nokia acquisition. We’ve all witnessed boomerang executives.
Those executives who know how to operate data centers are rare. Those who know how to run Cloud Infrastructure seem more plentiful. But, I somehow don’t feel comfortable taking direction from a Cloud Executive who doesn’t understand the way data centers operate.
Here are Mike’s top skills
Suresh’s top skills
WSJ has a post on Berkshire Hathaway’s renewable energy efforts.
In the neighboring Hawkeye State, the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. chairman has sunk billions into wind-farm projects, part of a big gambit on renewable energy by a utility company he acquired in 2000 and has built into one of the country’s largest power suppliers.
Through a majority-owned subsidiary, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Mr. Buffett plans to double the $15 billion already committed to renewable-energy projects through early this year, and he is on the hunt for more utility acquisitions.
Charles T. Munger , Mr. Buffett’s longtime business partner and Berkshire’s vice chairman, last month predicted that the company would be “the biggest utilities business in the United States” in a few years.
Seems like more and more green data center efforts are going to work with companies that are owned by Berkshire Hathaway.
