I ran into Mazen before he presented his keynote at Gartner DC LV, and we caught up as we hadn’t chatted for a while.  I sat up front and created a video of Mazen discussing the process change that eBay made to improve the performance per watt for eBay systems.  Sitting with the eBay team we were also able to catch up a bit discussing Olivier Sanche passing away.

Mazen does a if good job of explaining what eBay did to change the behaviors in IT to be greener in the data center and reduce watts per transaction by 70%.

I apologize for the video quality as the camera was out of focus in manual focus mode. Here are better pictures with the camera in focus.  My Canon 7D rocks, and sometimes it feels like I am carrying rocks in my backpack as it is no light camera.

I learn a lot going to data center conferences, but I go to almost no sessions.  My calendar is booked with numerous meetings, but I leave time to network and find new connections.

This is my 2nd Gartner DC Conference in LV and it was well worth my time, but I kind of have a unique way of leveraging the conference.

Given my blog I attend the conference as media with a press badge.  Weeks before attending I start to get e-mails and phone calls from public relations company to meet with vendors who have executives at the conference.  I choose carefully who I will set up an appointment with.  Some of the companies on the list were HP, Dell, SGI, Nimbula, Equinix, and APC.

The Gartner keynotes start on Monday morning at 8a.  I arrive in LV at about noon and start my meetings, and within 48 hours I am on a plane leaving LV.

While I am at the Gartner conference I don’t speak to a single Gartner employee.  And, I actually don’t listen to any of their presentations.  There are many who find the sessions educational, but I don’t learn enough new content to make it worth the time.  Spend 1/2 hour with a senior HP executive or 45 minutes listening to Gartner explain its surveys of a group who are not the innovators.  I spend so much of my time talking to innovators, listening to how the masses think is convenient for tracking the market, but not for being more competitive than the rest.

All my interviews are with what people see as what the future data center will look like which many time are greener data centers too.

As soon as I get close to the conference I start saying hi to people who I have seen at other conferences.  My first stop after registering is going to the press room.  The press room is one of the sparsest media rooms - no food, water, coffee.  Some mints.  Rich Miller and Kevin Normandeau from DataCenterKnowledge are the first media guys I see and we catch up a bit.  Two months ago, we were all at AFCOM LV, so it has only been a short period since we chatted. Also, I see Matt Stansberry from SearchDataCenter who I hadn’t seen for a while.

Matt and I discuss Oregon Duck Football as he lives in Eugene, OR and his wife is completing her post graduate degree at UO.  I tell Matt that I educate many people it is he who broke the story on Facebook’s choice for coal power.

Maybe Facebook should have bought a Bloom Box to diffuse Greenpeace’s campaign against a coal powered data center

Thanks to Matt Stansberry’s reporting on SearchDataCenter, attention was drawn to Facebook’s Prineville Data Center being coal powered.

Tiered energy rates bring higher prices for new customers
By 2012, BPA will charge tiered rates for power. Customers that signed 20-year contracts in 2008 will pay tier-one (i.e., inexpensive) pricing for their current electricity demand. These customers use most of the power produced by the dams.

By 2012, Oregon's Bonneville Power Administration will charge tiered rates for power.

To meet new customer demand or increased demand from existing customers, BPA also purchases power from other sources. In 2012 this electricity will be classified as tier two, and it will be charged at a much higher rate than the BPA's current hydropower.

Which brings us back to Facebook: The company's new data center is being built in Prineville, Ore., a small town on Oregon's high desert. Pacific Power, a utility owned by PacifiCorp, will provide the electricity. While Pacific Power gets some hydropower from BPA, its primary power-generation fuel is coal, according to Jason Carr, the manager of the Prineville office of economic development for Central Oregon.

With the price of hydropower increasing in the Northwest, Facebook opted to bet on the incremental price increases associated with coal rather than face tier-two pricing from BPA.

I’ll see Matt and Rich many times at the conference as we interview many times the same executives.  I’ll ask what they are finding interesting.

Besides interviewing there are attendees who come to do business and we’ll meet to discuss what is going on in the industry and where there are new opportunities.  Who is doing some of the best work and who is starting up new projects.  I’ll start looking for new connections and interesting people to have discussions with at the conference.

When the exhibit area opens, I’ll look for people I know, and watch which vendors are getting lots of traffic.  I rarely spend much time at an exhibit unless I know people at the company.  Most of the time I talk to a booth person, I find I can learn more by surfing their website.  One booth I went to was Splunk which is one of the fastest growing IT management tools.  I ended up spending over 1/2 hr at the Splunk booth as the guy I was talking to just happened to work for a good friend of mine at Microsoft and I knew there was a guy who had interesting insight.  Within 24 hrs, I was able to have a telephone conversation with Splunk’s CTO to discuss an innovative use of Splunk which I hope to write more about in the future as we prove a scenario to green the data center using Splunk.

Throughout the 48 hours I talk to business friends in site selection, engineering services, construction, facility operations, containers, server hardware, cloud SW, networking, and management tools.  Looking for how the pieces fit together in interesting ways.  Making introductions, and discussing new ideas.

There were a couple of good “ah ha” moments when I figured out some new things.  One example is the big whales aren’t at Gartner.

In the end I talked to some amazing data center executives, found some new technologies sooner as they were brought to my attention, reinforced established connections, made new connections, and had a good time discussing new ideas.

BTW, I don’t expect the Gartner folks to talk to me as I am not going to pay for their advice as I am not a client.  But I will help talk about what goes on Gartner DC LV.  Everybody gets a different experience than others.   The above is my 48 hrs at Gartner DC LV 2010.

I had dinner with a couple of senior data center executives who engineer and build datacenters for some of the top players in the industry.  These guys are part of the data center industry that build the big data centers for the top players where the business must have large capacity and the best designs.

Part of the conversation was comparing data center conferences to go to.  We were all at Gartner DC LV 2010.

Other conferences we agreed were good are DataCenterDynamics, 7X24 Exchange, and Uptime Symposium, SVLG DCEE.  All of these conferences have more of a data center facilities focus whereas Gartner has little facilities discussion. 

Gartner is different with a focus on data center operations from an IT perspective, not a facilities.

But, then I made the point that the big boys in data centers in general don't go to Gartner.  The exception is the executives who attend for presentations and meet with clients.  And, those who sell to the rest of the attendees

For example, Google sent two people who didn't look like they were from the data center group.  Microsoft sent over a dozen, but again not from the data center group.  No Facebook or Yahoo.  No Twitter, Zynga,   No AT&T. No Apple.  A couple from Verizon Wireless, but again no data center group.

Who does intend in mass with 5 or more people? 

Canada Dept of Defense

Delta Airlines

DePaul University

DirectTV

FAA

GSA

Kaiser Permante

Medtronic

McKesson

NASA

PG&E

Royal Bank of Canada

Sandia National Labs

Southern CA Edison

Social Security Adminstration

State Farm

US Dept of Defense

US Dept of Vet affairs

US Marine Corps

Lots of big fish.  But not the whales of data center.

So is Gartner DC LV conference really the data center industry?  Or those who look for Gartner for advice on data centers?

I run into many people I know in the industry at Gartner DC, but now that I think about it is the suppliers of the data center industry I run into at the event, not the end users I know who are the most innovative and biggest. 

The end users I run into at DataCenterDynamics, Uptime, and 7X24 Exchange.

If you are hunting for the big whales in the data center industry Gartner is not the place to look, but there are still plenty of big fish.  On the other hand, getting access to the right people is part of the challenge which is why the exhibit area is used so much.

Dave Barry gave an entertaining presentation of his comedy act Wit and Wisdom.

Guest Keynote Speaker

Dave Barry

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author and Humorist

Dave Barry is a humor columnist. For 25 years he was a syndicated columnist whose work appeared in more than 500 newspapers in the United States and abroad. In 1988 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

Many people are still trying to figure out how this happened. Dave has also written a total of 30 books, although virtually none of them contain useful information. Two of his books were used as the basis for the CBS TV sitcom "Dave's World," in which Harry Anderson played a much taller version of Dave. Dave plays lead guitar in a literary rock band called the Rock Bottom Remainders, whose other members include Stephen King, Amy Tan, Ridley Pearson and Mitch Albom.

At dinner I was talking to some friends who missed Dave's presentation. To share the experience here is a YouTube video of Dave's discussing of Cloud Computing and IT.

Dave Barry Wit and Wisdom of Cloud

Enjoy and have a good laugh.   I did which made it hard to keep the camera steady.

Next week I am heading off to Gartner Data Center Conference in LV, Dec 6 - 9, 2010.  My calendar is pretty full; meeting with friends who will be there, meeting people in person I've met virtually, and interviewing many vendors on their green data center solutions.

It will be interesting going to see how the messaging has changed.  Also some of my past clients are presenting and it will be cool to see how well their presentations are accepted.

Green IT and Green Data Centers are viewed by some as not important as it was last year.  But, there SearchCIO throws this article up.

Consolidation, compliance pushing demand for a green data center

By Laura Smith, Features Writer

01 Dec 2010 | SearchCIO.com

John Phelps was not surprised when the Gartner Data Center Conferenceroundtable he's hosting -- its subject is the green data center -- was the first to fill up with reservations. He's been speaking about green IT for a few years now, and says the topic has just "gelled" for CIOs this year.

The Green Data Center is maturing as people figure out there is a regulatory aspect they need to think about along with energy efficiency.

In the past, conference audiences were a mix of a few IT managers looking at the green data center for its environmental benefits, and more people looking to the concept to save money, said Phelps, a research vice president at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. "Now we have both: the first group looking to save money, and the others realizing that with the possibility of regulations, 'I might bypass problems if I pay attention to the green issue too,'" he said.

Indeed, green IT has gone from a whisper to a shout. Understanding best practices in energy-efficient IT is critical to their profession, said two-thirds of IT managers responding to a recent survey by CDW LLC. The percentage of organizations that cite energy efficiency as a key consideration when they buy new IT equipment jumped from 26% in 2009 to 39% in 2010, according to CDW's third annual Energy Efficient IT Report. The Vernon Hills, Ill.-based IT solutions provider, which surveyed 756 IT professionals in the public and private sectors for the report, also found that 79% of organizations are consolidating data centers or have a strategy to do so, with many citing energy reduction as a top driver.

I'll have a busy couple of days at Gartner DC as it is one of the few data center conferences that has higher level executives who the data center managers work for.