Growth of Biomass energy plants is a new source for a Green/Low Carbon Data Center,

May 27, 2010 Dave Ohara

NPR has an article on the growth of Biomass energy generation.

Wood-Powered 'Biomass' Plants Have Critics Barking

by MARTIN KASTE

Listen to the Story

Billions of dollars in tax credits for alternative energy were included in the federal stimulus package. Some of the money is going to encourage Americans to do something man has done for centuries: burn wood.

Plans for electricity-generating "biomass" plants are in the works around the country — and they're under attack from critics who worry that burning more wood may not be as environmentally friendly as other kinds of alternative energy.

I've had multiple conversations with OSIsoft's Pat Kennedy on the opportunity for data centers to locate near pulp and paper mills which have an abundance of biomass, energy, water, and steam to support data centers.

But, data center site selectors and their customers are risk averse going with safe places. Google bought a decommissioned pulp and paper mill, and I blogged about biomass power generation here. I know of an existing pulp mill with 20 megawatts of current renewable biomass power with plenty of steam and space for a data center, but the owner has had a difficult time getting data center developers, engineering and customers interested in his site given there are no other data centers located in the area.

I am constantly amazed at how much money is wasted on data centers. The number of executives who want to reach out and touch their data center put data centers close to their corporate offices like the bay area. You don't see Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook building data centers in the bay area.

If you want to have a competitive advantage in data center services go where the power is cheap and sustainable.

Keep in mind when you have a $100 million plus budget, the data center con game is on and you can get played. Mike Manos describes some of this.

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.

I wonder if it is worthwhile to give tips on the signs of when you are being thrown a lot of BS.

One of the top tips I would make is don't let your corporate real estate who provides your office space be responsible for data centers. Data Centers are not office spaces, the people who you want to build your data center most likely are not the people who built your office space.

Due to the money spent on data centers, almost no one says "yeh, I made a bunch of mistakes building mine, and I could have saved a bunch of money if I had made some different decisions. Let me tell you what I would have done differently." Because, if he did, he would mostly be fired for admitting he made million dollar mistakes.

This is why people glowingly promote their data centers as being LEED certified and top efficiency, because it directly reflects on how smart they are. Beware of those who are promoting their data centers, and don't tell you the mistakes made.

No One Builds Perfect Data Centers.

Read my post again on top 9 data center mistakes.

Not Calculating PUE ROI, 1 of 9 Top Data Center Mistakes

Lee Technologies sent over their Top 9 data center mistakes paper, and I liked it right from the start as they made the point people don't calculate an ROI for PUE performance. PUE is closest to telling an efficiency of a data center which to a layman is the closest we have for data centers for a MPG, but who specifies a high MPG number and doesn't think about how much it costs for the extra MPG above the norm.

Freedom to think of things others don't, accepting different belief structures - Human Factors and the Data Center

May 19, 2010 Dave Ohara

Last week I blogged about some big thinking I participated in Portland with a cloud computing director and ten others. One of the things I do in big meetings is drop into an analyst mode watching the conversations, saying little, listening and watching the dynamics in the meeting. Normally, I would be discussing big ideas, but with 12 people in the room and plenty of brain power going and an extremely smart guy presenting I could be quiet. I frequently find I learn more and figure out things being quiet and watching the dynamics between the people. Isn't it funny how your brain stops listening when you want to talk.

One of the entertaining moments is when a VC came into the meeting late and spent 2 minutes telling the group how important he is and how much influence he has. I didn't say one word to him, even though he was the man with the money. I had more important conversations, and for a person like this, it is many times difficult to explain my role, and that this meeting wouldn't be happening if I hadn't been architecting the solution.

I was sitting next to my friend and we scribbled notes and whispered ideas during the presentation, taking the time to highlight important concepts. One of the concepts that was big is to model different belief structures to interpret data differently which allows you to put data in context of the user.

A side story, I worked with some data center construction guys and I found their belief and value system was totally different than what I had assumed. The construction guys thought I was not that smart the more I worked with them. What I understood is their value and belief system was brittle when exposed to openness and transparency which is requirement for building a knowledge model for the data center. Luckily I escaped that project. In the process, I learned a valuable lesson why it is so hard to bridge thinking across data center design, construction and operation. Most people are fixed in their belief and value system, they can't translate what others do into their beliefs, and vice versa. Openness and transparency is not compatible with many existing approaches in data centers where keeping things secret is a standard practice. Also, keeping secrets maximizes control and profits for the suppliers as the customers are mystified by the black magic skills to build a data center.

Note: I have met other data center construction guys who don't exhibit this behavior, so don't think I mean all data center construction is this way. And, I have met data center designers who believe data center efficiency can be achieved with simpler designs that are easier to operate and maintain when the black magic is not part of the design.

After this lesson, I've spent more time analyzing people and companies for how well they fit in open approaches like we intend to use in the "Open Source Data Center Initiative."

While most people in the meeting were down in the details reviewing ideas presented, I was watching the people and their beliefs, trying to figure out if they accept other people's belief systems. The more arrogant a person is the less they accept another person's view as being right in their context.

How many different belief systems do you accept as valid in the data center system?

Executive & CIO

Business Unit VP

Facility Operations

IT Operations

Application/Services Operations - Dev and Test

Enterprise Architect

Security

Networking

Database & Storage

Finance

Public Relations

Environmental Impact & Sustainability

Customers

Partners

Suppliers

Government, Finance, and Compliance Regulations

One view I haven't heard is Human factors. I wrote the above yesterday, but knew it was not finished to post, this morning at 6a it clicked. One view that touches almost all of the above, but is not discussed is the holistic view from Human Factors. I studied Human Factors in college and believed it was key to be a better Industrial Engineer. When I interviewed at IBM, one of the questions was "How do you know what to change?" Being young and naive, I said you have to care about the people. The IBM engineers probably thought I was a leftist tree-hugging radical thinker as I was graduating from UC Berkeley.

What is Human Factors?

Human factors involves the study of all aspects of the way humans relate to the world around them, with the aim of improving operational performance, safety, through life costs and/or adoption through improvement in the experience of the end user.

An area where Human Factors shows up in most data centers is in facilities due to the maturity of the equipment used, regulations like OSHA, and safety requirements around large mechanical and power systems. But, the application of Human Factors in data centers is relatively new. In talking to Mike Manos, he described how Microsoft designed its data centers to make it easier to receive fully assembled racks and deploy the heavy racks to their location.

In software and hardware, User Interface design is a more popular term.

In the industrial design field of human-machine interaction, the user interface is (a place) where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the machine which aids the operator in making operational decisions. Examples of this broad concept of user interfaces include the interactive aspects of computer operating systems, hand tools, heavy machinery operator controls. and process controls. The design considerations applicable when creating user interfaces are related to or involve such disciplines as ergonomics and psychology.

Human Factor and User Interface is discussed in isolated areas within the data center, but I don't think I have heard any one discussing human factors and data centers in the same breath.

The #1 risk to data center operations are human related. How much did it cost Microsoft and Hitachi Data Systems for the T-Mobile data loss disaster that was a human error.

While users will be relieved that their information looks likely to be recovered, the episode poses several questions over the competence of Danger’s staff; the technical ability of contractor Hitachi Data Systems; and the inherent stupidity of the Cloud concept.

While we are unlikely ever to be told the full story, it looks very much as if Hitachi’s attempts to upgrade Danger’s Storage Area Network failed big time and that the data was put at risk not by hardware failure, but by good old-fashioned human error.

This one event that had a multiple human errors did hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to Hitachi and Microsoft. Can Hitachi sell a storage system? Can Microsoft sell its Smartphones?

This problem was caused by people who didn't spend the time to think how the people are interacting with the data center systems.

This is one of my more rambling posts, there are some good ideas here, I need to think about them a bit more though.

Blogging like a Dog

May 19, 2010 Dave Ohara

I've been on a writing frenzy last few days, and my family says I am on the computer too much.

I can't tell if the dog is telling me I spend too much time at the computer or she figures one way to get me to stop is if she is using it. :-)

When a 451 Research employee blogs on ZDNet about Uptime Symposium which is owned by 451 Research, is this reporting or marketing?

May 18, 2010 Dave Ohara

Note as of today May 19, 2010. this issue is resolved with an update to the ZDNet blog post below. See this post as an example.

I’ve learned quite a bit from people attending the Uptime Symposium in New York City. (Note: Uptime Institute is another business unit of The 451 Group.) Quite a number of the members of the Site Uptime Network who are attending the symposium shared stories about looking for ways to reduce energy consumption without disrupting IT operations in their sites.

I found this article on ZDNet's Virtually Speaking by Dan Kusnetzky.

Datacenter effectiveness

By Dan Kusnetzky | May 18, 2010, 3:07am PDT

I’m attending the Uptime Symposium 2010 in New York this week and have been gathering a few thoughts about the event for you. I couldn’t listen in on all of the sessions so, this is just a tiny segment of what was really said.

I spoke with Pitt Turner, Executive Director of the Uptime Institute, and Ken Brill, Founder of the Institute, about the concept of datacenter effectiveness. (This is one of the main themes of Uptime Symposium 2010). There comments about making the IT infrastructure really fit the needs of the organization being a challenging balancing act appeared to be right on the mark to me. Ken likes to say that there is gold lying on the datacenter floor and that people need to just bend over and pick it up.

At the bottom of the article reference is made that Daniel works for 451 Group.

Daniel Kusnetzky is a member of the senior management team of The 451 Group.

But, I couldn't find in the blog post a statement that 451 Group owns Uptime Institute, like this PDF says.

Leading Independent IT Research and Analyst Firm The 451
Group Acquires The Uptime Institute

World-recognized authority on data center availability and leading voice on IT
energy efficiency and green IT joins expanding NYC-based research organization

NEW YORK, October 22, 2009 – The 451 Group, a leading independent IT research and analyst organization, today announced the acquisition of The Uptime Institute, a Santa Fe, NM-based think tank and professional services organization.

I would say common practice is a statement, saying "451 Group owns the Uptime Institute" should be somewhere in blog entry.

The 451 Group also owns and operates two independent divisions.

Tier1 Research analyzes the financial and industry implications of developments impacting public and private companies within the hosting, communications and Internet infrastructure sectors.

The Uptime Institute provides education, publications, consulting, certifications, conferences and seminars, independent research, and thought leadership for the enterprise data center industry and for data center professionals.

The CEO of 451 Group is Chairman of Uptime Institute.

W. Pitt Turner, IV, who currently leads the Uptime Institute Professional Services business – previously known as ComputerSite Engineering – has been appointed Executive Director, Uptime Institute. He will report to Martin V. McCarthy, CEO of The 451 Group. Mr. McCarthy will now also serve as Chairman, Uptime Institute.

Given you now know Daniel's employer owns Uptime Institute are his blog entries Uptime Institute marketing or reporting?

Skipped Uptime Symposium 2010, is it worth the time and money? Cost Effective Alternative Lee Technologies on Tap

May 18, 2010 Dave Ohara

I've had these ideas for a while and with Uptime Symposium this week, and my skipping the event it seemed the right time to take some ideas and put them in a post.

Uptime Institute Symposium 2010

Data Center Efficiency & Green Enterprise IT
May 17-19 Hilton New York

The Uptime Institute Symposium, one of the most influential events on the IT industry and data center operator calendar, is the only event focused entirely on data center efficiency and green enterprise IT.

It makes me laugh when I can take a quick call from an Uptime Symposium attendee while he is there, he stops our phone call and says "hi Andrew." I tell the caller to tell Andrew Fanara I say hi. The caller relays back Andrew needs to give me a call and gives me a ribbing about sitting in my home office staring at Lake Sammamish while they are at NYC Hilton in conference rooms. This morning I saw an Eagle swoop down and pick up a fish. Wish I had a video camera, but it was as cool as this YouTube video with the fish a bit smaller and he roosts in a tree 100 feet away.

This week is Uptime Symposium 2010 in NY. I have gone to the last two and met some great people at the conferences. My first Uptime Symposium was two years ago in Orlando, I was talking to Christian Belady and Mike Manos and they pointed out a guy from Google was at the conference. I asked them have you talked to him? They said they tried, but he doesn't say much. Open to a challenge, I spent a bit of time thinking how I could talk to him. The next day, I ran into Christian and Mike, and told them. "Hey I talked to the Google guy for 1 1/2 hours, and we sat together in a few sessions." and we still chat whenever we see each other at data center events.

When I told Matt Stansberry the story he said "you should blog about what you talked about." I told him no, I can't do that as all it will do is get me a bit of traffic and get him in trouble for not getting PR approval to talk to a blogger. I joke that blogging is only 10% of what I do, sometimes taking up more than 10% of my time, but it is not where I spend 10% of my concentration on problems. I blog 10% or less of what I know as I stick to public disclosures and ideas that are my own and can share.

Overall my past attendance to Uptime was well worth it as I made good friends at my first uptime event. I think that is where I met Andrew Fanara for the first time. and Michael Tran from Digital Sense.

I went to Uptime Symposium 2009 to speak on a panel regarding green data centers and media. It was fun sitting down with Rich Miller (DataCenterKnowledge), Matt Stansberry (SearchDataCenter), Kevin Heslin (Mission Critical Magazine) in front of 30 people. Between the group we get 10,000s hits a day, yet here we are in a conference room with 30 people. When Uptimes skimped on food and logistics, I started to see the problems in the conference execution as well.

This year, I made no attempt to go to Uptimes Symposium 2010. Two years in a row was sufficient. I know I would see many data center friends, but the important ones I can easily send e-mail to or call.

An indicator of the problems at the conference this year was a friend who had a speaking slot and was 10 min into his 30 min presentation when the Uptime conference logistics told him he was in the wrong conference room. Knowing the logistics at conferences can change, he had gone to the logistics area before hand to check on the room twice. I regularly wonder about the paying sponsors who have a booth and speaking positions as whether it is cost effective.

Interestingly on the side, I have been having e-mail conversations with Steve Manos from Lee Technologies and how well his local monthly data center events, "Lee Technologies on Tap" (the event is held in a bar) have been working. As a contrast to Uptime Symposium is it better to spend the time and money to develop local content for events like Lee Technologies on Tap? DataCenterDynamics uses the local content method to hold conferences frequently, minimizing travel and is part of a green strategy.

One of the main reasons why people go to events like Uptime is to get in front of Steve's brother, Mike. Now I am biased because I can call Mike when I need to, but I also know he is swamped running Nokia's online applications group. I know to contact Mike when it is worth his time and my time to connect. Which is one way to have a strategy for managing relationships. Connecting can have little value if you don't develop the quality of the relationship as mutually beneficial. Steve Manos is on the left in this picture.

When you are a sales driven guy, you are so excited to get Mike Manos's business card you can justify to your management it was worth the time to go to Uptime to get Mike's card and others. No one asking what is the quality of the relationship you built. You fall into the trap at events like Uptime, I met some of the top data center decision makers and got our company in the bidding process. You have now fallen into the trap of delusional expectations from attending industry events.

I asked Steve Manos to share some of his insight running their own local data center events in Chicago.

Hope this email will get you the balance of what you may need to complete your post as it relates to the effectiveness of my Chicago-based DC networking event. I have taken the time to contact several end user attendees, all of which represent 5 of the top 10 largest and most recognizable corporation names in Chicago and get there general feedback on why they continue to come to this event. The primary (and overwhelming) response is that it offers the perfect blend of industry contacts in a very manageable, intimate setting where not only can one connect with local peers but also create deeper relationships with those they share similar issues and challenges with.

Getting the right mix of attendees to vendors is a method Steve Manos exploits to keep attendees satisfied.

With a group of roughly 40-50 attendees and a ratio averaging 12:1 end user to vendor, it allows everyone from a data center operator to a CIO the opportunity to discuss real world issues, current innovations and foster’s an environment where they can learn about what each face on a day to day basis. We have heard loud and clear from the attendees that they are not opposed to talking to vendors that bring value, but that the bigger events make it tough as most of their time is occupied with those who are trying to sell to them and very little is spent on getting to discuss topics with peers (and how they are handling or have handled similar issues they face in their facilities).

But, not just any vendor can attend. Vendors need to be doing work for one of the attendees in order to attend. Which cuts down on the sales BS, as the user is right there.

Our event overcomes these issues by only allowing vendors that currently work for current members and have done an exceptional job. We then like to have those members make the introductions to the group based on what issues the client faced, how it was handled by vendor X and leave it up to members in the event to connect with that representative throughout the night if they are facing similar challenges. We are also at a point where we are featuring end users to share their stories as a keynote to the group to provide additional value in fostering mindshare. These topics can range anywhere from current projects (what is working, where they are struggling, new technology implemented), industry direction, green technologies (a big focus of many of our members), and good old fashion war stories. We believe that these types of keynotes/discussions offer more to the group than hearing about the latest in a particular “widget.” Finally, in knowing what particular issues our group will be facing or are currently challenged with, I can poll the group on trusted partners and invite them to that event so that they have the opportunity to possibly help without the need to force themselves on the group from a sales standpoint. It’s all about providing value above and beyond what Lee Tech does. Not that this isn't important to me in my quest to show how much we can help companies in the Central U.S, but I find that if you build the relationship on a solid foundation first, and do what’s best from the onset (whatever that may be), you will earn their business over time.

And, here is the focus on relationships.

With small groups, taking time to understand what each member is looking for and where I can help and then making sure they get that EVERY time, and a consistent gathering has created very strong relationships with one another in a very short amount of time. Over 25 of our active members are now coordinating, consulting and actively participating in one another’s endeavors to help each other where possible. This is what I feel what this industry sorely needs.

If you are interested in attending here is the next event with Steve's e-mail.

For your info, if you want to share, our next event will be on June 17^th in the Chicago area. Those that are interested in becoming a part of this group can reach me at smanos(at)leetechnologies(dot)com. We are always looking to grow the group and I’m certain others can contribute volumes to this endeavor.

Thanks Dave and please let me know if you need any additional information.

See the smiling faces. When is the last time you this many smiles at a data center event? Well, maybe in the bar after the event. Oh yeh, the Lee Technologies at Tap event is held in a bar. Is the secret to a successful data center events is to host them in bar? :-) I know DataCenterDynamics opens the bar at 4p, overlapping with presentations.

For those of you attending Uptime Symposium sorry I skipped the event. But, I am looking forward to visit my first Lee Technologies on Tap event.

The biggest thing I learn from sitting in presentations at Uptime is I don't have to go to Uptime to learn, the true value is in building relationships with the attendees.