AlteredScale Opens Doors at 601 Polk in Chicago

• By: Jason Verge
  May 17th, 2013

601 West Polk in Chicago is the home of a new data center for AlteredScale. The facility will be managed by Norland Managed Services.

601 West Polk is alive and kicking. The 100 year old structure just west of the Loop in Chicago has been through a lot over the years, including a previous owner passing through bankruptcy. After several millions of dollars worth of renovations. AlteredScale, a provider of mission critical data center solutions, announced this week that it has chosen Norland Managed Services to operate and maintain its data center at 601 West Polk.

But, this opening is not so much news as a milestone in a long process.

First the President of AlteredScale, Kevin Francis is a good friend and we have had many conversations over the past 3 years.  We've had fun at SXSW.  Discussed many changes in the data center industry, and caught up on what's up with our personal lives.  A year and half ago I went into 601 Polk when it was a shell and met many of the people who were working on the project.

About 6 months ago, Kevin said he was looking for options of who could run facility operations at 601 Polk.  There is a short list of who could do the work and you know the list.  Given Kevin is a close friend, I made an introduction to another good friend Norland Managed Services, General Manager North America Steve Manos.  You could view this as a favoritism to take care of your buddies.   Or you could see that good people working together is what the industry needs more of.  This could be the end of the process, but I know I'll be chatting with Kevin again to hear how 601 Polk is running and how Norland is able to work with his co-location environment.  And, I'll be talking to Steve Manos soon (most likely at 7x24 Exchange in Boca) as well, and thinking of more interesting ways to work in the industry.  Steve started data center socials in Chicago and LV, mine is in Santa Clara. We'll see where we go next.

It is a milestone to make the announcement, but it is not really news when I saw the space 1 1/2 years ago, and made the introductions between AlteredScale and Norland 6 months ago.

In doing a quick review of some of the topical fodder that will be discussed at some of the data center industry’s upcoming confabs, I have to say that it looks like we’re stuck in a bit of a rut. Does an over abundance of Power Points expounding on the how it’s “DCiM’s time” and that the Cloud “will change everything” reflect some hidden industry wish that these things will come true? Should we cue Jiminy Cricket?

Chris closes imploring the event staff to change the formats.

While there is little that we can do about the topic’s that speakers will be covering this tradeshow season, I would ask—and I don’t think I’m alone here—that the companies that put on these extravaganzas endeavor to broaden the scope of topics before they implore us to “Join Them” in the one of the nation’s metropolis’s in the future. If I see one more product pitch presentation delivered by someone with the charisma of a newt, I may just lose my lunch. Get out on a limb and say something new. As for DCiM and the Cloud I say look to that Walt Disney classic, Pinnochio, for guidance. After all, after being turned into a donkey and being swallowed by a whale, his wish to become a real boy came true.

But, getting people to change is one of the hardest things in life.  Much harder than greening a data center and coming up with new ways to change the industry for a new performance per watt approach.  

So instead of asking for change, change yourself.  About two years ago I stopped going to AFCOM Data Center World and Uptime Symposium as media and started trying other conferences.  I started going to GigaOm Structure as a media attendee and thanks to Barton George he introduced me to Stacey Higginbotham as GigaOm needed a data center analyst.  So, I spend time (less than 20%)  as an analyst for GigaOm Pro as well as a bunch of other things (the other 80%).

In a month at GigaOm Structure I'll be moderating two panel discussions. 

One with following title and presenters

Compute everywhere: the architects behind the change

Chandra Pandey, Vice President, Platform Solutions, BTI Systems

Lane Patterson, CTO, Equinix

How infrastructure can transform business success

Cynthi Stoddard, SVP & CIO, NetApp

David Giambruno, SVP and CIO, Revlon

Facebook and the Open Compute Project are hosting their second hardware hackathon with the winners presenting at GigaOM’s Structure conference on June 19. So start thinking about your idea, and go register.

What our attendees are saying

 

• Structure has always been, and continues to be, the place with the most vibrant and provocative cloud discussion. I’ve tracked cloud for a long time and still find Structure to be an essential meeting in order to keep up.

   

  - Peter Christy

  Co-Founder, Internet Research Group

   

  Structure is a ‘multi-phasic examination’ report on Cloud. In two days, one gets a reading on the state of the technology, the commercial aspects, and the ability to engage in conversation with the people most influential in its evolution.

   

  -Rich Miller

  CEO, Telematica

   

   
• Structure has always been, and continues to be, the place with the most vibrant and provocative cloud discussion. I’ve tracked cloud for a long time and still find Structure to be an essential meeting in order to keep up.

   

  - Peter Christy

  Co-Founder, Internet Research Group

   

  Structure is a ‘multi-phasic examination’ report on Cloud. In two days, one gets a reading on the state of the technology, the commercial aspects, and the ability to engage in conversation with the people most influential in its evolution.

   

  -Rich Miller

  CEO, Telematica

   

   
• Structure has always been, and continues to be, the place with the most vibrant and provocative cloud discussion. I’ve tracked cloud for a long time and still find Structure to be an essential meeting in order to keep up.

   

  - Peter Christy

  Co-Founder, Internet Research Group

   

  Structure is a ‘multi-phasic examination’ report on Cloud. In two days, one gets a reading on the state of the technology, the commercial aspects, and the ability to engage in conversation with the people most influential in its evolution.

   

  -Rich Miller

  CEO, Telematica

The nice thing come home is the view.  Here is one of a double rainbow.

One interesting fact of a double rainbow is the color are inverted.

While a primary rainbow is visible when light is reflected once off the back of a raindrop, a secondary and usually dimmer rainbow is spotted when light is reflected twice in a more complicated pattern.

The colors of the second rainbow are inverted, with blue on the outside and red moved to the inside. The second bow appears dimmer or cloudier because much more light is released from two reflections, and both bows cover a larger portion of the sky.

Zooming into the above picture you can see the colors are inverted.

Here is an example of perception.  I was curios to read the exact words of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address.  We all take "four score and seven years ago…" as a truth.  But, guess what there are five different manuscripts of Abraham Lincoln's speech and each has its different place in history.

Despite the speech's prominent place in the history and popular culture of the United States, the exact wording and location of the speech are disputed. The five known manuscripts of the Gettysburg Address differ in a number of details and also differ from contemporary newspaper reprints of the speech.

Here are references to the 5 different manuscripts.

^a The Gettysburg Address: Nicolay copy. The Library of Congress. Retrieved on 2010-09-15.^b The Gettysburg Address: Hay copy. The Library of Congress. Retrieved on 2010-09-15.^c Everett copy (jpg). virtualgettsyburg.com. Retrieved from internet archive 2007-06-14 version on 2007-12-10.^d Bancroft copy cover letter (pic), Bancroft copy, page 1 (pic), page 2 (pic). Cornell University Library. Retrieved on 2007-12-11.^e Bliss copy, page 1 (jpg), page 2 (jpg), page 3 (jpg). Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. Retrieved on 2007-12-11.

One of the lessons learned is the perception (of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address) is stronger than the reality (5 different manuscripts).

How many of these perception issues exist in the data center that the mass majority believe is true, but actually there is little data to support the perceived truth.

If you want to make it worse, there are some who benefit from distortion of perception as they create a reality that benefits their agenda.

Some of the smartest people know how to question common accepted truths as they ask for the data.

And sometimes those who speak less say more.

Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln was the second speaker on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg. Lincoln was preceded on the podium by the famed orator Edward Everett, who spoke to the crowd for two hours. Lincoln followed with his now immortal Gettysburg Address. On November 20, Everett wrote to Lincoln: “Permit me also to express my great admiration of the thoughts expressed by you, with such eloquent simplicity & appropriateness, at the consecration of the Cemetery. I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

 

 

 

273 Words to a New America (2:59 min)

Curator: Dr. John R. Sellers 
Week of: September 23, 2009

 

Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered is a collection of essays by British economist E. F. Schumacher. The phrase "Small Is Beautiful" came from a phrase by his teacher Leopold Kohr.^[1] It is often used to champion small, appropriate technologies that are believed to empower people more, in contrast with phrases such as "bigger is better".

After two weeks of being in LV and then SJ hanging around data center people having interesting discussions it struck me how small the data center world is.  Yet it is growing.

With Social Networking and the bigger getting bigger, there is a small set of people who are driving the industry forward.  Yet, there is an increasing set of people who demand data center services including IT organizations who don't understand how the small data center world works.

I think part of the problem for an newbie to data centers is to filter through the marketing and sales positioning to get the core of how the data center works.  The marketing folks are not taking an approach that "Small is Beautiful" and it is about taking small steps in technology to empower people to design, build, and operate data centers better than the past.

The small is beautiful approach is an interesting one, that needs to be studied more.

After a few days in LV last week and a few days in Santa Clara catching up with friends and making new ones. I do think people know me through this blog.

This past week I hosted 30 - 40 people in a brew pub.  Went to a small dinner party that I helped reach out to some thought leaders who were in town to attend.  Last week was in LV was another pub social, dinner with IBM execs, and a 100 person party at PURE nightclub.  So kind of socially burnt out.  I have two days of rest before we host 50 people at our house for a going away party.  Only one guy going does any work in the data center industry that I know of, although there are a few real estate people who have done some data center work.  I think I'll take some pictures with my Canon 6D and post some.  I am surprised how photography does show up in some of the conversation I have on the road.

Part of what got me writing in the style to share more than data center stuff is when Olivier Sanche and I would jump into conversations and I would mention blog posts.  He cut me off and said I read everything you post, so let's just reference various ideas you have discussed and I'll tell you if I agree or disagree.  It's kind of like we were having linked cross referenced discussions with footnotes of relevant ideas.  It really tests my memory to remember what I posted on.  Sometimes I need to look at the daily e-mail posting from the site to remember what I posted on.  :-)  And, my local friends read my stuff more than my wife does and will send he posts to her with their comments.  In fact, I think the readers of my blog have a better idea of where I am going next than my wife does.  Next week is North Carolina,  then 7x24 Boca, then GigaOm Structure in SF.

Thanks for visiting this blog.  And, I guess people do know me through what I post.

-Dave Ohara

1. deep understanding of business
2. tremendous tenacity
3. a thick skin
4. courage
5. passion for people and making connections

If you are looking for Technical staff for other parts of a business The Pachera Group is some one worth checking out.

Disclosure:  Vikki Pachera a Partner of The Pachera Group is a great friend who I have known for 30 years.  I helped get her a job at Apple and we worked side by side on many projects.  She has worked at IBM, Apple, and HP on product development so she knows what is like to live the jobs she recruits for.

A respected Silicon Valley executive and widely-known new media and technology expert, Vikki Pachera is deeply conversant with a sweeping array of skill sets and disciplines. They include enterprise-level management, business development, strategy, hardware and software product development, consumer products, marketing, and professional services.

Vikki served as Vice President of Strategic Alliances & Business Development at Hewlett-Packard, where she brokered new business and developed frameworks to help Warner Bros., Disney, Oracle, and other company’s transition to digital media. She also held several other VP-level positions, served as an executive within Apple’s consumer electronics division, and co-founded a start-up software as a service (SaaS) company. She began her career as an engineer at IBM’s storage product group.

Vikki has placed executives in consumer electronics, media & entertainment, IT, retail & fashion, and enterprise companies. She holds a BSME degree from Michigan State and an MBA from Santa Clara University. She is an avid animal lover, and enjoys international and exotic travel.

The WSJ has an article that discusses cheating in children and advises to understand what is causing the child to cheat.

Other children start feeling pressured at this stage by busy sports and activity schedules that don't allow time to study, says Kenneth Shore, an East Windsor, N.J., author and psychologist. "Parents can get a little panicky" and compound the problem by orchestrating kids' science projects, dictating sentences or typing their kids' essays, he says. Not only does this send the message that presenting someone else's work as your own is OK, but it suggests that grades are more important than learning—an attitude linked in research to higher rates of cheating.

Besides lying to cheat the numbers, the other type of cheating is taking credit for other people's work.  This is used by those who are making it seem like the smartest in the class.

The lesson learned for the parent with 17, 20, 21 year old kids is a good one.

Looking back, Ms. Heffernan wishes she could correct one mistake—telling her sons that cheaters are always punished. "To say that kids who cheat will get caught and they will be punished—and they will not gain by cheating—isn't true anymore," she says. Insisting otherwise only leads kids to conclude, "Mom doesn't understand," she says. Her sons shot down that argument in elementary school, telling her they'd seen other students cheat without getting caught.

It worked better, she said, to tell her kids, "Cheating flies in the face of the values of our family and the rules of the school." She told them they'd be letting her down if they cheated, and she wouldn't defend them. "Not only will they be in trouble at school—they will be in hell at home."

The data center executive could have gotten away with cheating on PUE, most would not know and he would get a pat on back for supporting the company PR person.  But, he would be seen by the insiders as some on who cheats to look good, and someone who cannot be trusted to do the right thing and tell the truth.

Being obsessed by performance metrics and looking like you are the smartest in the class, can lead people to cheat.

Good data center operators have a low tolerance for cheating, because cheating leads to bad behaviors and sloppy work that can affect the performance and availability of the data center.  Wouldn't it be interesting if you see through a person's history how much they cheated when they were in school?  Did their parents instill good values. The one way to see this is to see how a person is with their kids.  Most likely if they took short cuts growing up they think it is OK that their kids do as well.

Ms. Avant explained to Kaci that cheating was wrong, said she was disappointed in her and met with her teacher and principal. She says she also spends more time now going over homework, lowering her voice and encouraging Kaci to "be more up front" when she doesn't understand something. Kaci has since been showing her mother all her papers, including answers she got wrong. The third-grader still gets mostly As, and she has learned that "cheating is bad," Kaci says in a phone interview. If she doesn't know a test answer, "I just do the best I can," she says.

For parents, stressing intrinsic goals, such as mastery, learning and doing one's best, can be tough. But research shows it is one of the best ways to prevent cheating.

When most hear the words of "Cloud Services" they think of Amazon Web Services.  Amazon.com being a great retailer has a phenomenal presence and selection of Cloud Services.  But, I'll tell you something that is not widely known, just because something is well marketing and looks like a good price doesn't mean it is built to last and to handle stress.  An example of this I've noticed is ski jackets that get used by ski mountain staff.  They wear the jackets multiple times a week, wash every week (we hope), putting more stress on a jacket in a month than most would put on their ski jackets over 5 years.  Quickly, they learn what will really last or not, and how it is priced and what brand is many times irrelevant.  They learn to look at the material, construction, and quality of the jacket and where their past jackets have broken.  fyi, AWS breaks in various areas that developers run into which can frustrate the hell out of them.  I know this first hand because my friends have gone through the hell of finding where AWS breaks, and had to make the choice to build the services themselves.

So, let me walk through Urs's keynote and point out some of the cool infrastructure things.  Note: I mention in the title than I'll compare to AWS.  Well I threw that up to get your attention, but actually there is very little out there if any that discusses AWS infrastructure.  It is like a retailer, it is all about price, selection, and selling to the target audience.

If you want to see the presentation go to about 21minute mark in this video.

Here is Urs's title slide.

The next slide, Urs's discusses the physical world of data centers to support the cloud.  It's not a bunch of fluffy stuff that scales infinitely.  It is built on physics.

Then slides showing the physical infrastructure that Connie Zhou documented in her pictures.  There weren't any new pictures that most of you haven't already seen.

The environmental message is delivered.

Google's announcements over the past year of expansion.

Besides building data centers, Google runs their own network with their own sub marine cables

The network spans the world and at some point will most likely reach Africa, Middle East, and India.

One of the thing Google does is it thinks of its SW as infrastructure.  Urs reviews the history of the Google SW infrastructure.

At about the 30:24 mark Urs discusses the obsolescence of features to learn from the past and make things better, focusing on quality and performance.  Sounds like my ski jacket story above. :-)

163 improvements are listed over 12 months.

Customer wins are discussed on the platform.

To disrupt the business model of an AWS, Google has added sub minute billing.

In the spirit of a little green server, Google has a micro VM of only 0.6 GB.

Getting Cloud to be useful many times requires integrating with on data center services in the company's data center if you can have an encrypted VPN connection.

Persistent disks are useful, but the standard is 1TB.  Google has announced 10 TB.

Platform infrastructure is great, but what good is it if you can't develop apps.

To meet the needs of Information Security, Google Cloud Service are ISO 27001 are certified.

If you want to see an app to build at the 45:00 mark you can see a demo of building an app.

In building applications this is what AWS has tons of content on. 

Those who lease data center space know the stranded power problem which is why they charge for the Power committed to your environment in addition to the power you consume.  If you strand 1/2 your power because you made bone headed decisions in how you designed your data center space, you’ll pay for that power as the data center operator cannot simply use that power some place else.

I read NYTimes’ James Glanz’s post on Landlords Double as Energy Brokers a few times and I am confused.  James makes the point that data centers moved from charging for space to an energy broker.

A result, an examination shows, is that the industry has evolved from a purveyor of space to an energy broker — making tremendous profits by reselling access to electrical power, and in some cases raising questions of whether the industry has become a kind of wildcat power utility.

When I hear the word Energy Broker it makes me think this is like an Enron type of deal. 

Soaring power prices have pushed the state’s utilities to the brink of bankruptcy and forced Third World-style blackouts across the world’s sixth-largest economy. Enron and other electricity marketers and generators are being investigated by the state attorney general and sued by consumers amid accusations of profiteering and market manipulation. ”Every trading company in the country has been feasting on California, and Enron is the shrewdest of them all. They are like sharks in a feeding frenzy,” says Michael Shames, executive director of the Utility Consumers’ Action Network in San Diego. Enron, an early critic of California’s deregulation plan, hotly denies those charges.

The reason why data centers charge more for power than what they pay is because of the cost of electrical systems and mechanical systems required to deliver the power.

Some data center companies, including Digital Realty Trust and DuPont Fabros Technology, charge tenants for the actual amount of electricity consumed and then add a fee calculated on capacity or square footage. Those deals, often for larger tenants, usually wind up with lower effective prices per square foot.

Regardless of the pricing model, Chris Crosby, chief executive of the Dallas-based Compass Datacenters, said that since data centers also provided protection from surges and power failures with backup generators, they could not be viewed as utilities. That backup equipment “is why people pay for our business,” Mr. Crosby said.

….

Melissa Neumann, a spokeswoman for Equinix, said that in the company’s leases, “power, cooling and space are very interrelated.” She added, “It’s simply not accurate to look at power in isolation.”

OK, data centers aren’t energy brokers.  They do a bad thing operating as a REIT to save on taxes.

Some of the biggest data center companies have won or are seeking Internal Revenue Service approval to organize themselves as real estate investment trusts, allowing them to eliminate most corporate taxes. At the same time, the companies have not drawn the scrutiny of utility regulators, who normally set prices for delivery of the power to residences and businesses.

…

Equinix is seeking a so-called private letter ruling from the I.R.S. to restructure itself, a move that has drawn criticism from tax watchdogs.

“This is an incredible example of how tax avoidance has become a major business strategy,” said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog. The I.R.S., she said, “is letting people broaden these definitions in a way that they kind of create the image of a loophole.”

So, data centers shouldn’t be able to operate as a REIT because they’ll save on taxes?

I am confused on what points James was trying to make.