If Silver Lake brokers Yahoo deal, don't you think there will be a data center deal for Silver Lake?

WSJ writes on Silver Lake brokering a purchase of Yahoo.

Private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners is working with one of its investors, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and Microsoft Corp. to put together a proposal to buy Yahoo Inc., people familiar with the matter said.Under the proposal being discussed, Microsoft would put up several billion dollars of funding, with additional financing being arranged by banks, the people said. Silver Lake and the CPP Investment Board would kick in the rest of the amount, which would be less than what Microsoft contributes, the people said.

Now, if Silver Lake is smart which they are. Don't you think there is a good chance that there is a data center deal in there somewhere?

Another deal scenario being discussed by interested parties is a complex, multipart bid for Yahoo led by Alibaba, where the Chinese company gets back Yahoo's 40% stake and sells Yahoo's U.S. assets to private equity, according to people familiar with the matter. A transaction can be structured in a way that avoids heavy tax bills on a sale of assets, they added.

Shifting mindset to an Information Factory from a Data Center, the industrialization of the data

There is a different way to think about data centers where the goal of a company is to bring raw unprocessed bits and turn them into higher value bits just like a factory brings in raw materials and transforms the materials into higher value finished goods. The factory uses huge amounts of power in special buildings with lots of equipment and custom processes to support the transformation.   This is the industrialization of the data center.

Barton George writes a post on Big Data any how in general 5% of data is only used.

Big Data is the new Cloud

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Big Data represents the next not-completely-understood got-to-have strategy.  This first dawned on me about a year ago and has continued to become clearer as the phenomenon has gained momentum.  Contributing to Big Data-mania is Hadoop, today’s weapon of choice in the taming and harnessing of  mountains of unstructured data, a project that has its own immense gravitational pull of celebrity.

So what

But what is the value of slogging through these mountains of data?  In a recent Forrester blog, Brian Hopkins lays it out very simply:

We estimate that firms effectively utilize less than 5% of available data. Why so little? The rest is simply too expensive to deal with. Big data is new because it lets firms affordably dip into that other 95%. If two companies use data with the same effectiveness but one can handle 15% of available data and one is stuck at 5%, who do you think will win?

But, do you think Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Zynga use only 5% of the data.  These companies are analyzing all their users and information looking where to make more money.

The new way of thinking is all that data is both market intelligence and the raw materials for information factories.

Barton goes on to point out that Google Facebook, and Yahoo are big Hadoop type of users analyzing unstructured big data.

Deal with it

Hadoop, which I mentioned above, is your first line of offense when attacking big data.  Hadoop is an open source highly scalable compute and storage platform.  It can be used to collect, tidy up and store boatloads of structure and unstructured data.  In the case of enterprises it can be combined with a data warehouse and then linked to analytics (in the case web companies they forgo the warehouse).

And speaking of web companies Hopkins explains

Google, Yahoo, and Facebook used big data to deal with web scale search, content relevance, and social connections, and we see what happened to those markets. If you are not thinking about how to leverage big data to get the value from the other 95%, your competition is.

Some of you may think of this is new, but this is standard practice for many.  The winners think like an information factory integrating across many different systems.  The losers are thinking of a data center as a place their data is stored in silos to support internal organizational structures.

Who are Netflix's proponents after throwing supporters of divide the business under the bus?

Netfilx upset lots of users when they announced the splitting into Netflix and Qwikster.  There were a handful of analyst type of people who were saying that it was a good business decision.  So there were a large group of frustrated users, a small band of business people who said Netflix is doing the right thing and they should hold course.

Now that Netflix has thrown Qwikster under the bus, it also threw the handful of supporters who said dividing the business is the right thing.  How bad do you look saying Qwikster was the right thing, and 3 weeks later Netflix cancels Qwikster.

So, who is left to say Netflix is great company?

This situation will be a big lesson for companies who don't treat customers as their #1 priority.  It is clear to Netflix users that they are 2nd class citizens in Netflix's grand plans.

Also, an unintended consequence is the value of ex-Netflix employees on the job market has decreased.  This situation sure hasn't increased their value, even though there is an increase in quantity of Netflix employees thinking of exiting now that they have seen the stock drop from $300 to $110.  Morale at Netflix cannot be good.  I wonder if Amazon, Google, and a bunch of others have fired up the recruiters to hang around Netflix HQ.

The #1 resource of Netflix is great people.  The #1 proponents is loyal fans.  How many #1 things surround the Netflix brand?

The one thing that could change perception is throwing the CEO under the bus and take the blame.  How much do you think the Netflix stock would go up if the CEO quit?

Think about some of these things when running your data center.  Who is your #1 customer and how do they feel about their service?  Are they a proponent of your operations?  If not, if may explain why the business units are running to the cloud.

The opposite of the Amazon Kindle Fire, your Cable HD Set Top box

The Amazon Kindle Fire is getting lots of news, and part of the excitement is storing your content in the cloud, and not on the device.  But, let's be clear, much of the content that will be stored will simply be a small unique identifier that says  you have rights to a book, music, or movie.  Storing, thousands of copies of the same MP3 music file in individual could accounts is wasteful and costly.  Store one copy and point to the copy in individual accounts is a greener way.

Look at a device that is in millions of homes consuming as much power as a refrigerator, your cable STB.

The Natural Resources Defense Council has conducted a study that places the spotlight on how inefficient cable boxes and DVR's are in American homes.

These boxes, which guide cable signals and digital recording capacity into televisions, run at a constant rate and can utilize more power than a new refrigerator or air conditioning unit.

There are millions of these STBs.

According to the study, there are 160 million set-top boxes in the U.S., and this number is increasing. These boxes run 24 hours per day, even when they're not being used. The study found that add-on DVR's use an additional 40 percent more power than the set-top box.

The Natural Resources Defense Council found that these boxes consume $3 billion in electricity per year in the U.S., and 66 percent of this power is drained when no one is even using it. Also, one high definition cable box and one high definition DVR use about 446 kilowatt-hours per year, which is 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot refrigerator that is energy efficient.

Maybe the Amazon Kindle Fire will gradually replace the cable STB.  It is a much more energy efficient and storage efficient device.

The cable industry has pushed the STB a high energy cost to the consumer.  Turning off the power to STB is a pain as turning it on means the device needs to reload the channel content which can take an hour.  Doesn't this sound like an Enterprise IT solution?  a monopoly?

An energy efficient green data center changes your strategy.  Think of what the cable providers have vs. what Amazon has.

Think Different in the Data Center, change the world

I just spent 2 great days in Chicago at Data Center Dynamics, Lee Tech on Tap, Touring 601 Polk with Facility Gateway, and eating lunch at the best deli in Chicago with Jim Kerrigan. On Thursday it was announced Steve Jobs had passed away, and my wife text me that she was quite sad watching the news on TV with daughter.  I wrote a brief tribute to Steve Jobs here.

Apple is a company everyone knows, yet few think of it as a 35 year old company.

1976 - High-school buddies Steven Wozniak and Steve Jobs start Apple Computer. Their first product, Apple I, built in circuit board form, debuts at "the Homebrew Computer Club" in Palo Alto, California.

I joined Apple in 1985 and stayed until 1992, working with some great people who are good friends and some of the smartest people I know to work on some innovative data center ideas.  None of us worked on data center back then, but we drifted through companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Google working on innovative products.

The Think Different campaign is a classic.  And, one of the points made is people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

I hadn't been to Chicago in a year, and I had hopes it would be worth the trip.

After two days, I can say it exceeded my expectations.  Why?  Because I met people who want to change the data center world, and they are passionate about doing things in a better way.  I won't name the specific list of people, because the status quo in data centers is you don't say anything that gets published unless the marketing department has given you approval.  Do you think Apple PR ever told Steve Jobs what he should say?

Can you find the innovative people?  I did in Chicago.  I am off to LV next week for an IT Asset Management Conference, and there are group of getting together there.  At the end of month I'll be in NYC, and be at Facebook's Open Compute Summit with another innovative group.  November I'll be at 7x24 Exchange in Phoenix with lots of smart innovative people.

What is going to revolutionize data centers are people doing what is in the above video.  Creating solutions that change how data centers work.