7x24 Exchange Keynote lesson - Networking is Everything

One of the highlights of the 7x24 Exchange conference is the opening keynote. This year it was Alison Levine, the leader of the 1st all women's expedition to climb Everest.

Alison covered many topics and if you want an overview of the concepts you can read her book "On the Edge." If you want a shorter version here is a Forbes article.

The #1 thing I enjoyed from Alison's talk is her emphasis on networking. My notes from her talk.

Networking: build relationships - networking can save your life. Who can you work with outside your team. This is why the smart people go to a DC conference like 7x24 Exchange.

Instead of writing a long post on all the things I liked I am going to through up short words. Blog posts. :-)

Do people think about how the data center bulding shapes the Internet Services and its team?

Winston Churchill is know for a well known quote.

In October 1943, following the destruction of the Commons Chamber by incendiary bombs during the Blitz, the Commons debated the question of rebuilding the chamber. With Winston Churchill’s approval, they agreed to retain its adversarial rectangular pattern instead changing to a semi-circular or horse-shoe design favoured by some legislative assemblies. Churchill insisted that the shape of the old Chamber was responsible for the two-party system which is the essence of British parliamentary democracy: ‘we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.’

Data Centers look like warehouses from the outside.  Their efficient and over time determined as the lowest cost way to house the equipment for Internet Services.  Just like any other commercial building design.

Like Winston Churchill says "we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us."

What happens if you are focused on a creative collaborative team who would run a data center. Should the data center be designed differently?

An example of different is Pixar's headquarters covered by Buzzfeed.

The beating heart of the campus — and of Pixar itself — is the two-story Steve Jobs Building that provides a tremendous 218,000 square feet of space for roughly 700 people to work, eat, and play. The name is not just an honorific to the late Jobs, who bought the company from LucasArts in 1986 and served as its Chairman and then CEO until it was purchased by Disney in 2006. In a very real sense, the building is Steve Jobs.


“Since Steve didn’t actually make our movies, the building itself became his project,” says company President Ed Catmull, one of Pixar’s co-founders with John Lasetter. “This is the only building that Steve ever designed and built and carried through [with finishing] it.”

How many data centers look all the same? Data halls, electrical rooms, mechanical rooms, and last the office space.

 

 

Microsoft buys LinkedIn, what happens to the DC Infrastructure when integration starts?

There is a lot of news out there about the acquisition and what it means. One question that is interesting to the data center community is what happens to LinkedIn's data center infrastructure when they are part of Microsoft.

Let's start with the press release which is here. http://news.microsoft.com/2016/06/13/microsoft-to-acquire-linkedin/#sm.0001oz1nmex7gedxpaa28q5zji3ou

LinkedIn will retain its distinct brand, culture and independence.
...
“The LinkedIn team has grown a fantastic business centered on connecting the world’s professionals,” Nadella said. “Together we can accelerate the growth of LinkedIn, as well as Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics as we seek to empower every person and organization on the planet.”
...
“Just as we have changed the way the world connects to opportunity, this relationship with Microsoft, and the combination of their cloud and LinkedIn’s network, now gives us a chance to also change the way the world works,” Weiner said

So part of making the LinkedIn customers feel good is to let them know the brand and culture will be maintained and LinkedIn will be independent.  Satya then states with Microsoft LinkedIn will grow faster while supporting growth of Office 365 and Dynamics. And, there will be a combination of Microsoft's Cloud and LinkedIn's network.

So the independence is for the brand and some teams in LinkedIn, but not the team that runs the DC infrastructure which includes the data centers, network, and some software services. An example of a software service is the ability to sign-in to LinkedIn with a Microsoft sign-in. Simple. what about the data center infrastructure that will be connected to the Microsoft Cloud? Not so easy.

Where is LinkedIn's DC infrastructure? They celebrated their last move from retail to wholesale space in this blog post. https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2015/11/introducing-linkedins-west-coast-data-center. This post announces their green data center efforts in Informart's data center in Hillsboro.

When LinkedIn made decisions on its datacenter locations it focused on how best to service their users.  Now their biggest user and their owner Microsoft needs to be served. And part of that service is lower latency and higher bandwidth connections to Microsoft's Cloud. It's a long ways from Hillsboro to Quincy, WA. Seems things would work so much better if LinkedIn was at the same site as Microsoft's cloud.

In the last twelve months LinkedIn’s storage and processing needs have grown by 34 percent. That’s massive. And that growth is on top of the 29 megawatts of capacity in our current data centers worldwide – 26 megawatts are domestic and the other three international. We are also working to deploy applications on the nearly 6,500 servers in our Singapore data center before it goes live in early 2016.

The Production Engineering Operations (PEO) team has to work to stay ahead of this always growing demand to allow us to continue to provide our members the dependable and reliable services they expect from LinkedIn. But it’s also important that we remain environmentally sound. For these reasons, we’re excited to announce that LinkedIn’s third domestic data center will be located in Hillsboro, Oregon, just outside of Portland.

DatacenterKnowledge reports on the other LinkedIn locations. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/02/12/linkedin-will-add-third-data-center-next-year/

Microsoft and Facebook Partner for Atlantic cable from VA to Spain, a step in connecting the World

Microsoft's PR group sent me the announcement of the new Atlantic cable project with Facebook. There is a race to wire the world and this is just one more step by a couple of the big players.

There is a blog entry. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/server-cloud/2016/05/26/microsoft-and-facebook-to-build-subsea-cable-across-atlantic/

Wired has some statement from Facebook. http://www.wired.com/2016/05/facebook-microsoft-laying-giant-cable-across-atlantic/

“If you look at the cable systems across the Atlantic, a majority land in the Northeast somewhere,” says Najam Ahmad, Facebook’s vice president of network engineering. “This gives us so many more options.”