Mike Manos Expands His Role, Again – Repeats an Organizational Pattern

September 5, 2009 Dave Ohara

Mike changes so often here is the latest on his job change.

Talking to a few friends we were discussing Mike Manos's running Digital Realty Trust's POD development. The conversations was, “Oh did you hear. He got more. He did??? What? Mike got Operations, Operation Engineering, and Future Innovation with Jim Smith the CTO. Hey doesn't this look like the way Mike organized his group at Microsoft? Yes it does. And, now he reports to the CEO.”

As we look to the challenges ahead we are faced with the kinds of problems all companies wish they had. We are challenged by an increased amount of customer demand for capacity coupled with a desire for the most technologically advanced facilities in the market today. Additionally new offerings such as Pod Architecture Services is giving us visibility and penetration into opportunities that historically we could not be a part of. This considerable growth is combined with an increasing amount of complexity in managing a world-wide facility portfolio of tens of facilities with power capacity that is measured in the hundreds of megawatts!

Mike has used his organizational skills to pull a team together that rivals will have a hard to match. Why? Because Mike can perform data center organizational magic, and people like to work for him.

You may not have thought as Digital Realty Trust as a construction company, and they aren't a typical construction management solution. They are out to drive a change in the data center industry by looking at the TCO to provide data center services. This may not be as sexy as watching Apple and Google data center moves, but it is going to drive significant changes.

One of the changes coming through the industry is combination of IT with Facilities/Real Estate in Site Selection, Design, and Construction of Data Centers. There are data center rules ready to be broken as others figure out how much these rules limit and increase data center costs. We are about to see data centers built in totally different ways in places you would not typically consider. In this recession, there are huge opportunities for those who can see a different way of business to take advantage of the economic incentives by federal, state, and local gov’t.

Here is a tough question I haven’t seen many people ask. We have these long list of site selection and design criteria, how do each of these criteria affect the TCO of our data center? If we are going to have a lower TCO shouldn’t we question the requirements and understand how much it costs.

You mean I could lower my TCO by changing the requirements? Well, yeh. Don’t you think that is easier to do, than adopting the latest technology with the hope of a high ROI.

There are a few who are thinking this way, and it is fun discussing how data center costs could be dramatically lower than the competition. You know Google thinks this way, but we usually have to wait 3 years before they share their ideas.

I think Mike sees the way things are shifting, and has a vision which is why he has acted so quickly at Digital Realty Trust.

Are you ready?

Microsoft’s Smart Grid Water Solution, OSIsoft Vancouver, BC Video

September 4, 2009 Dave Ohara

I just blogged about IBM’s Water Smart Grid, and my readers pointed out there is an existing solution from Microsoft with OSIsoft as a partner.

The below video has details.

Environmental Sustainability IT Software by OSIsoft

The above picture is CEO of OSIsoft Pat Kenndy, and here is a case study that discusses some of his views.

OSIsoft

Cleaner Air, Cleaner Water

At age 64, J. Patrick Kennedy still plays a great game of tennis. But, as he’s the first to admit, it’s not the same game of tennis he played almost half a century ago in high school.

“I find that as I get older, the game is less about pure force and more about placement,” says Kennedy. “It’s about conserving your energy and directing the ball right where you want it to go.”

Kennedy might just as well be talking about the environmental sustainability. That’s another interest of Kennedy’s—a professional interest this time, given that Kennedy is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of OSIsoft, the San Leandro, California-based maker of the PI System: a real-time performance management infrastructure that measures and records the activity of equipment, products, and processes throughout a company.

Although Kennedy and OSIsoft didn’t set out to become major players in the global effort for environmental sustainability, that’s the way it’s turned out. OSIsoft’s software products help companies worldwide to address this pressing global issue. Many companies know only their aggregated energy or water consumption and their carbon emissions—long after the fact. OSIsoft provides companies with timely information about exactly where and how energy is being consumed and emissions generated. This information is made available to those who can act on it in a timely way, and see the result. Companies use this data to identify work practices and faults that result in resource loss, address those inefficiencies and, thus, reduce greenhouse gas production while lowering their resource consumption.

…

Another of OSIsoft’s customers is the Halifax Regional Water Commission (HRWC), the first regulated water, wastewater, and storm water utility in Canada. HRWC is a fully-metered utility that provides drinking water to about 325,000 residents of Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) through a 1,300km (more than 1,000 miles) pipe network.

The PI System enables HRWC to collect, analyze, and disseminate data from more than 120 meters across its treatment and distribution facilities. With this information, it can then determine the period of a leak, the amount of leakage, and narrow the location to a specific district-metered area. Consequently, the PI System has been a key contributor to HRWC’s daily reduction in leakage of almost 9 million gallons of potable water. This reduction translates to a savings of more than U.S.$550,000 per year.

And, you can use OSISoft in the data center, Microsoft does.

OSIsoft software is also helping to address energy consumption in an area that affects virtually every large company and every person with an e-mail address or access to the Internet: the data center. Data centers may account for between 1.2 and 2 percent of all electricity consumed in the United States—and, if counted as its own industry, would be the fastest-growing electrical energy consumer in the U.S. and one of the top five in terms of energy use. Microsoft, which is rapidly expanding its datacenter operations to support its Microsoft Live and related service offerings, is one of the growing number of companies using OSIsoft software to help conserve data center energy consumption.

IBM Launches Water Smart Grid

September 4, 2009 Dave Ohara

From the first day I started this blog I had a topic category for Water, and one of the companies I was amazed to see the importance of water is IBM. They have a youtube video created for Australia and New Zealand where water is treated as a more valuable resource than the US.

And News.com has a headline story on the topic of IBM, Smart Grid, Water.

IBM plunges into the 'smart grid for water'

by Martin LaMonica

Even as billions of dollars are being spent around the world to modernize the electricity grid, the systems to delivery fresh water are also in desperate need of a 21st century upgrade.

IBM is developing a portfolio of IT-related water management technologies, a business that it estimates can total $20 billion within five years. At a water conference next week, IBM and Intel will be forming a working group to study how information and technology can be used to improve water management, according to IBM.

The goal is to sketch out the technical architecture required to more efficiently use fresh water, only one percent of the available water on Earth.

Water systems even in developed countries like the U.S. are notoriously outdated, with faulty pipes--some of them still made of wood--result in 25 percent to 45 percent lost water. That means high-tech approaches, such as using sensors to gauge water quality, are a tough sell to cash-strapped municipalities, most of which are more concerned with maintaining the basic infrastructure.

IBM is betting, though, that fresh water will have more value attached to it from the public, governments, and corporations.

If you are looking for alternatives to an IBM army of consultants for water solutions. I have a post I wrote about OSIsoft’s solution for power plants.

Monitoring Water Use at a Power Station

I just blogged about water use at a electric power plant. I mentioned the article to OSIsoft’s Martin Otterson, and he pointed me to a solution for measuring water use at power plant.

Pin-pointing water usage

April 2009

Emerson’s Smart Wireless technology is helping E.ON UK to accurately monitor and measure treated water usage, thus allowing trending and analysis to formulate target values at its Kingsnorth dual-fired power station. Using Emerson’s Rosemount wireless transmitters, E.ON is now able to collect flow measurement data from new flowmeters installed throughout the turbine hall. The self-organising wireless network delivers the data for trending in an OSIsoft PI historian which helps personnel monitor water usage within the system.

Solution evaluation
E.ON Kingsnorth, a 1940 MW generating facility located on the Medway Estuary in Kent needed a solution to monitor and measure water usage within its main plant. They decided to install new non-intrusive ultrasonic flowmeters to carry out this task. The high cost of wiring associated with a conventional cabled solution and a desire to embrace the very latest networking technology led E.ON to evaluate wireless technologies that could meet their needs.
“E.ON is keen to adopt the very latest technology to help improve productivity, efficiency and availability, and wireless technology provides the ideal networking solution to access the flow measurement data from the turbine building without having to install new cabling," said Chet Mistry, team leader, E.ON UK.

Emerson’s wireless transmitters provide access to flow readings from non-intrusive ultrasonic flowmeters

Google Search “data center construction companies”, Turner Construction only 1 in top 10

September 3, 2009 Dave Ohara

Going through my site traffic I saw a hit to my Mike Manos post regarding his comments on data center construction through google search. The search was for

The top ten were the following. #2 is Turner Construction. #8 is my blog entry about Mike talking about data center construction. out of 30,500,000.

Does this seem strange that Turner Construction was the only data center construction company that can figure out how to create a website that can answer this simple specific Google Search?

Green Data Center Degree Launched by IBM at Community College

September 2, 2009 Dave Ohara

Greener Computing has an article on IBM’s efforts to educate future data center staff.

ARMONK, NY — A new, two-year associate's degree from the Metropolitan Community Collegein Omaha, Neb., is being touted as the first of its kind to give students an intensive focus on designing and managing green data centers.
The program was launched today in cooperation with IBM, and will offer students coursework on virtualization and server consolidation, energy efficiency, security and compliance skills. The training center is built on IBM hardware, software and online training resources.

If you can’t make it Omaha, NB the degree is available for remote students.

The online component was developed between the MCC and IBM's Academic Initiative, a project that provides online training to more than 3,000 schools worldwide. As a result, the courses in MCC's green data center program will be offered online to remote students.

"We're seeing a dramatic increase in demand here in Nebraska for specialists who understand how to help companies reduce the costs associated with running an energy-intensive data center," said Tom Pensabene, Dean of Information Technology of Metropolitan Community College. "Now, our students are getting exposure to leading edge IBM technologies, increasing their chances of being hired for jobs in this growing area."
Among the courses on offer in the program are:

• Hardware, Disaster Recovery, & Troubleshooting;
• Introduction to Data Center Management;
• Virtualization, Remote Access, & Monitoring• Data Center Racks & Cabling;
• Building a Secure Environment;
• Applied Data Center Management;
• Networking Security; and
• Data Center Internship

The college we site for the degree is here.