Next Three weeks of Data Center Events

It’s been a great 4 weeks where I haven’t been on a plane.  I went to DCD Seattle and Amazon’s Technology Open House as local events.  But, now I have three straight weeks of travel.  I’ll be at the following events. 

June 12 - 15 7x24 Exchange, and we will be having Data Center 2.0 on Monday event for thought leaders we have identified.  Version 1.0 we had at Uptime and we are changing the format a bit for 2.0.

http://www.7x24exchange.org/

June 22-23, GigaOm Structure.

June 30, Data Center Dynamics San Francisco.

Luckily I am from the Bay Area, and see my family while while I am down there, and my mom can fly back to Seattle with me, and we can fly back down to SJC after the weekend.  The house project is almost done.  Part of the fun we had a week ago was craning in the 1,000 lb marble countertop.

Data Center Dynamics Seattle, another great time with data center people

It is interesting to contrast Uptime Institute Symposium vs. DatacenterDynamics especially when I attend the conferences back to back.  Both of the conferences are good.

Here is CEO Martin McCarthy, CEO of the 451 Group with some passion.

Here is Stephen Worn CTO and CEO of North America, DatacenterDynamics with "talk to the hand" gesture.  Actually I don't remember what Stephen was saying.

I hope you get a good laugh looking at this candid picture of Stephen Worn during his presentation.  This picture was good for a few laughs from the DatacenterDynamics crew.

I've gone to 3 of the last 4 Uptime, but with all the DatacenterDynamics events around the country, I've had good times with the attendees and the DatacenterDynamics crew in SF, Seattle, Chicago, NY, and London.  I typically attended as press, but about 2 years ago I wrote a blog entry about heading to DCD SF and I was going to spend most of my time talking to attendees and not going to sessions.  In response to my post, Stephen Worn calls me in 30 minutes and tells me he is going to put me to work and be a hall chairman.

Part of the fun I have with DCD is going out to dinner with the crew after an event and we chat about all kinds of things.  Part of the fun is making the new employees play the role of the Birthday person at the dinner table until a new employee comes on board to take their place.  Ashley on the left had her first birthday dinner in Chicago, and Anabel had her first birthday dinner in Seattle a year ago.

But, this year it was actually Justin's Birthday, and it was opening day for Copper River Salmon in Seattle, so we headed to the Salmon House for a Birthday dinner.

I did have a bit of fun at Uptime Symposium with this picture when I caught Raging Wire's Jim Kennedy with a little nose scratch, and sent the high res 5184x3456 pixels to Raging Wire's VP of Marketing Doug Adams.

Both Uptime Symposium and DatacenterDynamics are great places to meet people.  But, as you can tell I have much more fun with the DatacenterDynamics crew.  I'll be at DCD SF next on June 30.

Wine Tasting in Healdsburg - Nalle, Unti, Deux Ami, Collier Falls, and Wattle Creek

Frequently in data center discussions good wine helps gather a group of people.  After Uptime Institute in Santa Clara, a group of us from Seattle got together for a 40th Birthday party at the Birthday girl's parent's house in Healdsburg.

Many of the people flew from Seattle to Sonoma/Santa Rosa airport and our first stop was Wattle Creek winery for a dinner party with one of the owners Kristine Williams as the host.

Christopher and Kristine Williams were living in Arizona when they found the Sonoma County property would change their lives. A rare opportunity to purchase an Alexander Valley vineyard and winery presented itself and the Williams flew to California in 1994 to view the property.

They were captivated with the beauty of the area and the special nature of the hillside property which is bordered by the famed Russian River. Within a day they made the decision to purchase the magical 51 acres that is Wattle Creek Winery. Family and dogs in tow, they relocated permanently to California in 2001 and dedicated themselves to making wine that they would enjoy and share with friends.

Before the Birthday party we wandered around downtown Healdsburg, CA, and visiting some wineries in Dry Creek area, but we were saving our taste buds for the evening.

I visit Healdsburg 2-3 times a year to work on a well water system and look at the IT system for the host of the party.  One of the things I learned is the wine flows more freely and the conversations are much more interesting when I bring up water issues when visiting wine tasting rooms.  Water is critical for winery operations, and any winery operator knows a lot about the local water issues.  If I instead talking about technology - Windows, Mac, or web, the conversations rarely are lengthy or increase the consumption of wine.

At the Birthday party, there were 4 winery tasting tables with most staffed with the owners of the wineries.  It was interesting talking to some of the people who visited Healdsburg for the first time and were a bit overwhelmed with the amount of wine.  I on the other hand sampled every winery, met each of the people pouring, and many times moved to the other side of serving table to have better conversations.

Many wine snobs talk about the wines they own, I much prefer meeting the people who have a passion to make great wine.  All of these wineries have owners who I thoroughly enjoyed meeting, and I'll remember the people much longer than the wine I tasted this past weekend.  Don't get me wrong the wine was awesome.  Meeting the people who made the wine made it more special

Happy 40th Birthday Megan!

Thanks Bob and Marcia for hosting an amazing two days of wine tasting.

Barbara thanks for sharing your home and letting us stay with you for two great days.

http://www.nallewinery.com/

Doug Nalle

http://www.deuxamiswines.com/

Phyllis Zouzounis

http://www.untivineyards.com/

http://www.collierfalls.com/

Attending DatacenterDynamics Seattle, May 17, 2011, you can find me in Hall 2

I’ll be at DatacenterDynamics Seattle all day today.

DatacenterDynamics returns to Seattle on 17th May to discuss important issues facing today's data center professionals in the Northwest region.  Our annual conference brings together hundreds of industry professionals for a full day of networking and industry seminars and case study presentations.

This year’s conference programme covers 3 tracks Design, Build and Operate, IT Optimisation, and Decisions Strategy, that focuses in particular on the world of data centre outsourcing. So no matter what their role in the data centre attendees will be able to benefit from the insight of the world’s industry-leading practitioners presenting case studies or technical papers on how to optimise internal and external IT requirements from a facility, IT, and business perspective.

I don’t know if I’ll have much time to live blog as I’ll be staffing Hall 2.  You can’t miss me as I’ll be the one wearing a green shirt.

I am looking forward to catch up with the local Seattle data center scene.

Another example of where I am so glad I have my Verizon 4G Mifi device, Uptime's event network 0.21 Mbps speed in keynote

I am sitting in the Uptime Institute Symposium, and  wrote a blog entry on Facebook's Data Center Design.  The upload was an excruciating 3 minutes or more.  Curious I went to run www.speedtest.net twice and look at the download and upload speeds.

 

Switching to my Verizon 4G mifi modem.

Ahh, now I fill like I can breath.  Crawling at 210 Kbps may be fine for free, but way too painful to blog at an event.

Ready to write about

Designing a Cloud-Friendly Data Center
Peter Panfil
Vice President and General Manager, Liebert AC Power
James Kennedy
Director - Data Center Operations and Construction, RagingWire Enterprise Solution