Thanks to high visibility companies and the media, data centers are now a well known topic. Google and Microsoft competing. Amazon’s silence. Apple’s $1 billion dollar data center have all contributed to data centers now being something interesting to talk about.

Data centers are now hip, cool, and maybe even sexy to some to know some of the secrets of what is being built.  You are now part of the club, and the club is an exclusive set of people who make the data center decisions, spending hundreds of millions of dollars and critical for future business growth.

The make-up of this club used to be predominantly the real estate facilities team, but more often you are seeing IT staff having more votes.  Which makes absolute sense as they are the users of the data center not facilities.  When you talk to real estate, facilities, and data center operations about the services running in the data center, few know any details of what is running in the buildings.

The hard-core data center crowd would be offended by a term like being “hip”. And, Rich Miller makes an interesting comparison to “fight club.”  Rich first brought up fight club analogy in June 3, 2006.

Wal-Mart, Data Centers and The Fight Club Rule

June 3rd, 2006 : Rich Miller

“The first rule of Fight Club is - you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is - you DO NOT talk about Fight Club.”

Some companies take the Fight Club approach with their data centers. You DO NOT talk about the data centers. One of these companies is Wal-Mart, which has piqued the curiosity of the media with its closed-mouth response to curiosity about the company’s 125,000 square foot data center in Joplin, Mo. The Joplin Globe describes it as a “building that Wal-Mart considers so secret that it won’t even let the county assessor inside without a nondisclosure agreement.” Wal-Mart gladly supplied them with more ammunition. “This is not something that we discuss publicly,” Wal-Mart senior information officer Carrie Thum told the paper. “We have no comment. And that’s off the record.”

The Globe isn’t afraid to speculate, however:

Wal-Mart’s ability to crunch numbers is a favorite of conspiracy theorists, and its data centers are the corporate counterpart to Area 51 at Groom Lake in the state of Nevada. According to one consumer activist, Katherine Albrecht, even the wildest conspiracy buff might be surprised at just how much Wal-Mart knows about its customers - and how much more it would like to know.

Rich goes on telling another example.

I once got a call from a large institution insisting that we not identify the state in which their data center was located. Not the street address mind you, the state. This person felt that even identifying the state presented a security risk. What made this even stranger was that this organization had purchased the facility through a bankruptcy auction, and the sale agreement (including the address) was a public record. The Fight Club approach doesn’t work too well once that much information is public, but some facility operators will persist in invoking it anyway.

As tax incentives get thrown around in bigger numbers more information is in the public records, and tax payers are demanding to see the benefits of funding data center construction in their local community.

Whether you are a “fight club” or a “hip” group, keep in mind the more tax incentives you receive the public is wanted to have a peak inside.

It is popular to share the Top Best Practices in Data Centers.  Google, Microsoft, eBay, and Sun have done this as many others have.  But, what is interesting is how little time is spent on capturing the top data center mistakes.  There are lots of experts discussing details that feed into a better PUE, and their experiences.  New technology is promoted as being greener and energy efficient than other systems.

The latest term I’ve heard quite a bit is “holistic” approach in presentations at events like Data Center Dynamics. OK, I want a holistic solution where people are looking in the big picture.  This fits with someone saying we are going to lower your TCO.  Sounds good, I don’t want to buy from someone who is going to increase my TCO and create silo’d thinking.

If you don’t build data centers often you are at the mercy of the design and build data center construction trade. Mike Manos touched on the issues.

First a simple observation – the Data Center Industry as it stands today is in actuality an industry of cottage industries.   Its an industry dominated by boutique firms in specialized niches all in support of the building out of these large technically complex facilities.  For the initiated its a world full of religious arguments like battery versus rotary, air-side economization versus water-side economization, raised floor versus no raised floor.  To the uninitiated its an industry categorized by mysterious wizards of calculus and fluid dynamics and magical electrical energies.  Its an illusion the wizards of the collective cottage industries are well paid and incented to keep up.   They ply their trade in ensuring that each facility’s creation is a one-off event, and likewise, so is the next one.  Its a world of competing General Contractors, architecture firms, competing electrical and mechanical firms, of specialists in all sizes, shapes and colors.   Ultimately – in my mind there is absolutely nothing wrong with this.  Everyone has the right to earn a buck no matter how inefficient the process.

WSJ has an article on the mistakes of investing that can shed some light on how people think about their decisions and mistakes.

The Mistakes We Make—and Why We Make Them

How investors think often gets in the way of their results. Meir Statman looks into our heads and tells us what we're doing wrong.

By MEIR STATMAN

What was I thinking?

If there's one question that investors have asked themselves over the past year and a half, it's that one. If only I had acted differently, they say. If only, if only, if only.

Yet here's the problem: While we know that we made investment mistakes, and vow not to repeat them, most people have only the vaguest sense of what those mistakes were, or, more important, why they made them. Why did we think and feel and behave as we did? Why did we act in a way that today, in hindsight, seems so obviously stupid? Only by understanding the answer to these questions can we begin to improve our financial future.

The author throws out a simple idea of behavior.

This is where behavioral finance comes in. Most investors are intelligent people, neither irrational nor insane. But behavioral finance tells us we are also normal, with brains that are often full and emotions that are often overflowing. And that means we are normal smart at times, and normal stupid at others.

The trick, therefore, is to learn to increase our ratio of smart behavior to stupid. And since we cannot (thank goodness) turn ourselves into computer-like people, we need to find tools to help us act smart even when our thinking and feelings tempt us to be stupid.

The problem with the data center mistakes is it is an emotional event that you want to hide and go away.  But, if you had tools/software to help you act smarter as your thinking and feelings tempt you to do stupid things. Bad decisions are swept under the rug, fixed behind the scenes, costs transferred, excuses made, and as long as you are on schedule and budget, then most don’t care.

The tool can be simple, an excel spreadsheet tracking the decisions and SLAs of various technology used in a data center.  What people made the decisions, what problem was it addressing, what are the expected results, costs, and ROI. You can treat these as stocks in a portfolio of investments in your data center.

Your perspective changes when you think of a portfolio of data center technology investments that have expected returns.  Some will work, some will not.  If you don’t list them. How will your learn from your mistakes?

Throw your data center construction team a “whack on the side of head.”  Ask them, how are we going to track the mistakes we make in the data center construction?

I am waiting for the when someone adds this to their top data center practices. “We track our mistakes.”