Green Data Center Discussion with Ex-Cisco Director WW Real Estate

Had a chance to talk to an old acquaintance, Chris Hampton who gets the issues for a Green Data Center.  Chris was at Cisco for 14 years with his last job as Director of WW Real Estate development. First hand Chris knows what it is like to develop challenging infrastructures facilities in India and China as he was based for a period in Hong Kong, heading up Cisco's Asia building development. Cisco in general owns its buildings, and given its heavy IT use, many facilities had a sizeable IT equipment footprint. It was fun discussing the issues people need to understand and the challenges to get facilities for a sustainable solution.

In our facilities discussion, we got into issues like people rarely think about water use. Chris used as an example he knows water was needed for the cooling chillers, but he had no idea on what the water usage is of the chillers as a percentage of total water use at a facilities, but he should. Interestingly, we both knew of the guys at http://www.weathertrak.com/index.php who provide smart water management solutions, and how their system could give him this information.

One of the best things I got out of the conversation with Chris is the need for people to think about ResEx, Resource Expenditures in the same way at Capex and Opex. This is another idea I'll work on writing for a publication as it makes a lot of sense that to go Green people need to think about resource (electricity and water) usage in the same way they think about capital and operating. ResEx is not a known term for the industry, and search doesn't have worthwhile results. The popularity of the ResEx term will be an interesting way to measure whether people are thinking about resource use.