Google follows Microsoft's Lead, Hired a Power and Cooling Expert from HP

Christian Belady has been widely covered in in the industry and was a big hire for Microsoft. Google followed Microsoft's lead and hired his successor at HP, Christopher Malone.  Christian and Chris's names are listed on many HP papers.

1  HP, Christopher Malone, PhD, Christian Belady, P.E., “Metrics to Characterize Data Center & IT Equipment Energy Use”, Digital Power Forum, Richardson, TX (September 2006).  Energy-to-Acquisition Cost Ratio (EAC) is defined as the ratio of the 3 year cost of power and cooling for IT equipment to the acquisition cost of the IT equipment. For instance, the EAC for blades, 1U, and 2U servers may be greater than 100%. This indicates that the 3 year cost of power and cooling exceeds the cost of the hardware.
3  HP, Christopher Malone, PhD, Christian Belady, P.E., “Metrics to Characterize Data Center & IT Equipment Energy Use”, Digital Power Forum, Richardson, TX (September 2006) & “How to Minimize Data Center Utility Bills”, HP C. Belady, P.E., Sept 2006, https://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7881&pg=1&topicID=0
4  HP, Christopher Malone, PhD, Christian Belady, P.E., “Metrics to Characterize Data Center & IT Equipment Energy Use”, Digital Power Forum, Richardson, TX (September 2006) & “How to Minimize Data Center Utility Bills”, HP C. Belady, P.E., Sept 2006, https://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7881&pg=1&topicID=0

I would say Microsoft got the best guy picking first. Also, it will be interesting if Google & Microsoft go down the path of water cooled servers as both Christopher and Christian were believers of water cooling while at HP.

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Google Drops More than 160 points, culture shift?

Goog Drops 166

Are people getting nervous about the economy and advertising budgets? John Battelles' Blog writes about how Google's culture shift.

It's on a steep decline in the past few days, perhaps due to the new search stats from Nielsen, as well as jitters about the economy at large.

I can only imagine what this is doing to the Google culture. Don't tell me no one watches the stock there. Anyone who's joined since September of 2007 - and that's a lot of folks - now find their options underwater.

2008 will be the year Wall Street gets frustrated with Google. The company has incredible numbers, and will continue to impress, but analysts, tired of bidding up the stock, will start to question the company's myriad ocean-boiling projects - after all, it's merely trying to reinvent Health, Energy, Telecom, IT (both consumer apps and OSes), and a few other major portions of the GDP.

Seems like Google is spending more time marketing itself as a company to work for.  Lots of press articles about their cafeteria's, office, game rooms which is usually a sign they are having a hard time recruiting.  We can all remember back when other technology companies were "the" company to work for and they had no problem recruiting.  Times change.

This is significant for data center development in that once Google's cachet becomes tarnished, it will be more difficult for them to get their attractive tax breaks.  Many of us think there is a misperception on what the value of Google data center to a local economy.  I am waiting for some one to do a study on the economic impact of a data center to an area, and I'll blog it as soon as it pops up, or volunteer to help research it.

Another interesting view  is of Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo in the last 3 months.

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Synovus Financial Joins Columbia Data Center Neighbors with fewer than 25 employees. Why does Google's data center need 200 employees?

I've received quite a bit of traffic on my post on # of data center employees, and Synovus just announced their data center with fewer than 25 employees.

The new facility won't mean any more employees in Columbus, however. Synovus has about 200 people in its information technology division. Fewer than 25 will work at the new data center, and they will transfer from within the division.

The analysts an Tier1Research were nice enough to respond to my email address and discuss this subject. 

I fully believe you can run a near-zero person datacenter – outside of constant care and maintenance of mechanical systems like cooling and generators.  Security is important; however do you staff for sparse perimeter review or potential assault?  Both have very low multipliers from size of datacenter to people.  Servers and storage doubly so!  As you know; any good rack of hardware (including load balancing and monitoring hardware) can be managed from five feet or five time zones away.

Tier1Research and I both think that Google is inflating their employment #'s in data centers in a style of the New Deal and Works Program Administration.  Google coming to town has a high expectation of what it will do to the local economy, but I doubt any area Google builds in will be as significant economically as Microsoft's move to Quincy, and the following of firms to the Columbia Basin.

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# of Data Center Employees (Yahoo, Ask.com, Intuit, and Microsoft) in Washington Columbia Basin

I've seen #'s thrown around that Google employs 200 people at a data center

Eventually, we plan to employ approximately 200 people, ranging from technology assistants to experienced data center managers. We’re confident this $600 million investment will be good for Council Bluffs, Google and our Internet users.

In the Columbia Basin Herald reports on total employment changes, if you add up Yahoo, Ask,com, Intuit and Microsoft employee #'s they add up to 180.  Something seems strange that 4 big data centers in the Columbia Basin have less employees than one Google data center.  What are those 200 people doing?  Are they maintaining and building Google's custom servers?  All of the below people use industry standard servers.

In April the first of three data centers in Quincy went live. The Microsoft data center will be used to house information that is essential to Microsoft's Windows Live Internet service. Employment at Microsoft was around 50 employees in April and will continue to increase as more servers are added to the facility.

In mid June, Intuit, the makers of TurboTax and Quickbooks, broke ground for a data center in Quincy across the street from the Yahoo! data center. The facility is expected to be complete by fall of 2008 and will employ around 50 people.

In December Yahoo! officially declared its data center in Quincy operational as it held a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The data center will employ around 50 people and will house information for the Yahoo! search engine and other properties.

Ask.com , Moses Lake, Data Center, 30 people.

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