Getting back to writing again

I had an awesome vacation and a break from blogging.  And, then jumped on a plane to head to data center land in NC.  What is more fun Disneyland or DatacenterLand?  From a family perspective Disneyland.

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From a work aspect DatacenterLand is pretty fun too.  My family just may not relate as much to the excitement of solving technical and logistics problems.

No pictures, no blogging from DatacenterLand. :-)

Lower Probability James Glanz will continue his attack on Data Centers, NYTimes dismantles Environmental Reporting Group

James Glanz NYTimes articles attacking the data center industry made quite the rounds in the data center community.

THE CLOUD FACTORIES

Power, Pollution and the Internet

Ethan Pines for The New York Times

Data centers are filled with servers, which are like bulked-up desktop computers, minus screens and keyboards, that contain chips to process data.

It's been months waiting for the series to continue.  But, guess what the NYtimes has dismantled its environmental reporting group.

The New York Times’s decision is to dismantle its four-year-old environment “pod” has been called everything from “an unmitigated disaster” to potentially “a good thing.”

In fact, a lot remains to be seen. InsideClimate News reporter Katherine Bagley broke the story on Friday and quoted Times managing editor Dean Baquet insisting that the change is structural and that the paper remains as committed to environmental coverage as ever. But he and other top editors haven’t provided many details about what that means.

Over the next few weeks, the environment pod’s two editors and seven reporters will be reassigned to other desks, including, presumably, Science, National, Business, and Foreign, but word in the newsroom is that few, if any, people know where they’re headed. It’s also unclear what will happen to the Green blog, though Baquet has said, “If it has impact and audience it will survive.”

Will someone else carry the torch to attack the evil data centers who pollute the world?

7 things that are wrong with many Enterprise IT systems?

The Enterprise IT organization is an interesting entity.  The following are some observations I have made and are interesting problems to try and solve.

  1. The main priority of many people in Enterprise IT is to protect their jobs.  Due to the crappy way that many companies have treated their IT organizations.  It is a thankless job in many companies. In the past, efforts have been made to outsource the job to other companies and India.  So, the people who are still around have developed a harsh survival instinct to do whatever it takes to protect their job.
  2. Too many nice people who try to do the right thing are the victims not the heroes.
  3. 80% or more of enterprise IT is full of people who are not technical by education. I have been spoiled working in product development at HP, Apple, and Microsoft where you hire the the best technical people to develop products.  These are what I consider technical staff.  They really know how things work and be so valuable people will pay money for them.  Other than Amazon Web Services, what enterprise IT has built an IT system so well that people would pay money for it?
  4. So the 20% of enterprise IT that are technical, can they make the really tough decisions?  Many times no, because the decisions in most enterprise IT systems are not made by the most technical people it is made by the people who have the strongest survival instinct.
  5. The Cloud is a threat to the monopoly of enterprise IT.  Until the Cloud, users had to use the enterprise e-mail system, CRM, file servers, web hosting, etc.  Now the business units have choice.
  6. The private cloud's #1 goal in many companies is to shut down the choice of going outside the enterprise IT monopoly.
  7. The private cloud will be much more expensive than the public cloud, because the private cloud's goal is to protect jobs where the public cloud's goal is to reduce costs which means higher utilization of all resources including people.  Cloud environments have one admin per 1,000+ servers.  Many enterprises have one admin per 10-20 servers.  Some have moved to 100.  Few have achieved 1,000.

Huh, these things sound like they could be in a Dilbert cartoon.  They probably have been.

Here is today's Dilbert cartoon.

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