Google's Data Center Secret, Leadership is top in industry

There are lots of opinions out there from Data Center Leadership with Google making an occasional appearance.  Google is the biggest data center operator out there and as one Google employee has said "many dismiss what we do as unique to Google, but we actually work on many issues that are general industry issues."  And, as another friend who knows someone in the Google data center group has said the best manager he has had is Urs Hölzle.  Which fits in with this post I have been thinking about for a while.

Is Google's Data Center advantage due to its leadership?  Not the size of its data center footprint?

For those of you who don't know Urs here is his profile on Wikipedia.

Urs Hoelzle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Urs Hölzle is senior vice president of operations and Google Fellow at Google. As one of Google's first ten employees and its first VP of Engineering, he has shaped much of Google's development processes and infrastructure.

Before joining Google, he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. He received a master's degree in computer science from ETH Zurich in 1988 and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship that same year. In 1994, he earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University, where his research focused on programming languages and their efficient implementation. Via a startup founded by Urs and Lars Bak, that work then evolved into a high-performance Java VM named HotSpot, acquired by Sun' JavaSoft unit in 1997 and from there became Sun's premier JVM implementation.[1]

WSJ had a recent post on the issue that CIOs don't make good leaders.

Why CIOs Are Last Among Equals

Their perceived shortcomings are often real. But they can be overcome.

By PETER S. DELISI, DENNIS MOBERG and RONALD DANIELSON

Are CIOs doomed to forever be second-class citizens among top executives?

We don't think so, but they've got a lot of work to do to avoid that fate.

Chief information officers are more important than ever to the success of their companies, given the crucial role information technology has come to play in every aspect of business. But in most companies, the CIO still isn't viewed as a peer by other senior executives, who tend to see CIOs as specialists lacking the full set of broad management skills. Very few CIOs have become CEOs, especially outside the high-tech industry.

CIO

Wesley Bedrosian

What's holding CIOs back? The problem is that, for the most part, their fellow executives' perceptions are correct. Based on our research, it's clear that most CIOs don't have the broad business understanding, strategic vision and interpersonal skills that it takes to run a company or at least play a bigger role in running one.

Well Urs doesn't have this problem as he is on Google Operating Committee, was Google's first VP of Eng, and has access and influence to Google Executives.


Urs Hölzle
Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow

Urs Hölzle served as the company's first vice president of engineering and led the development of Google's technical infrastructure. His current responsibilities include the design and operation of the servers, networks and datacenters that power Google. He is also renowned for both his red socks and his free-range Leonberger, Yoshka (Google's top dog).

A year ago Google's Data Center team held their Energy Efficiency summit, and there was a peak into the staff who works for Urs like Chris Malone, Ben Jai, Jimmy Clidaras, Luiz Barroso, and Joe Kava.

I was impressed that Urs stayed the whole time at the Summit, and I was able to have side conversations that built upon my interview I had with him back in Oct 2008.  His knowledge and understanding of the business and technical issues are impressive.

So, is Urs the keystone that keeps the whole Google Data Center group running?  And without him the arch (organization collapses).

A keystone is the architectural piece at the crown of a vault or arch which marks its apex, locking the other pieces into position.[1] This makes a keystone very important structurally.[

I would argue as good as Urs is he has built up a solid organization and embedded the importance of the data center infrastructure (buildings, HW, and software) at the executive level.  I am constantly amazed at how much money is spent on data center redundancy, and people are treated as expendable.  If you spend money on getting the best equipment, why don't companies spend money on getting the best people for the data center?

One fact that beats all the rest of the data center leadership is Urs is the richest being one of the first ten Google employees, but it also means he wants Google to survive long term.  What is a sustainable data center organization when Urs leaves?

I can think of other executives who have the talent to present their ideas at the executive level, like Mike Manos and Olivier Sanche. 

Can you think of other Data Center executives who can present compelling presentations to the executive staff, and his organization looks to for data center leadership?

James Hamilton pointed out folks at Netflix and RIM.

After the talk I got into a more detailed discussion with many folks from Netflix and Canada’s Research in Motion, the maker of theBlackberry. The discussion ended up in a long lunch over a big table with folks from both teams. The common theme of the discussion was predictably, given the companies and folks involved, innovation in high scale service and how to deal with incredible growth rates. Both RIM and Netflix are very successful and, until you have experienced and attempted to manage internet growth rates, you really just don’t know. I'm impressed with what they are doing. Growth brings super interesting problems and I learned from both and really enjoyed spending time with them.

Are the companies who have the most sustainable data centers the one who have the best leadership?  BTW, these executives get the value of a green data center strategy.

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Calculating Land Use in your Renewable Energy Projects

CNET's Green Tech reports on a report discussing land use required for renewable energy projects.

Figuring land use into renewable-energy equation

by Martin LaMonica

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Imagine if your country had an unlimited budget but a limited amount of land: what renewable energy has the most potential?

Rutgers University professor Clinton Andrews and colleagues ran the numbers on this thought experiment and came up with some surprises. They identified clear limits on some technologies, notably biofuels, but concluded that the bigger challenges to renewable energy and land relate to siting energy facilities, particularly transmission lines.

...

Whenever some one says to put PV on a data centers roof you are lucky to get 10% of the power used generated by PV.

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Fool's Gold, Lawsuit against over hype of LEED Gold claims

LEED is marketed as a green building certification by many and has spread to data centers.  Here is a post where a resident of a NY residential building has filed a lawsuit identifying the buildings performance does not match up to claims.

Fool’s Gold? Resident Files Suit Against Developers of LEED Gold Riverhouse For Not Delivering LEED Gold Goods

David Roth | Thursday, May 27, 2010 | no comments

One thing that Battery Park City’s LEED Gold hopeful Riverhouse has never lacked for: publicity. Some of that media attention has been of the brand-friendly kind — Leonardo Di Caprio bought a condo! Tyra Banks bought a condo! These people are very famous! Or at least Leo is! But much of the recent attention directed at Riverhouse has not been very flattering. A series of legal squabbles between the developers – the Sheldrake Organization and the zombie iteration of the Lehman Brothers real estate partnership — were both notably ugly and notably public, although Riverhouse condos continued to sell well during the exchange of lawsuits and accusations and vague intimations of pre-foreclosure legal action.

...

The suit’s demand for $1.5 million in damages is kind of a grabber, but Stephen identified something more intriguing — and which could possibly make a bigger impact across the green building spectrum — than the intimation that one high-profile green building didn’t live up to its own hype. “This type of construction litigation is not uncommon, the purchasers also claim that ‘the building’s much-heralded ‘green’ heating system consistently fails to provide adequate heat’ to their unit and that this failure is a condition which is ‘is materially different from those represented by the project sponsor and its principals in the condominium offering plan,’”

it is hard to  identify the performance of a data center given it can take years before the space is build up with load.

Which reminds of a rumor I heard once that Google put a bunch of toasters in its data center.  Why?  To simulate the electrical and heat load on the infrastructure.

Black & Decker T4569B 4-Slice Toaster, Black

I don't think we'll ever see a lawsuit for a LEED certified data center, but it was bound to happen that the over hype of LEED catches up to reality of a buildings performance. 

If the hype of LEED was combine with hype of Smart Grid.  The Smart Grid could be used to prove what LEED buildings perform as expected.

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Greenpeace strikes fear in Uptime Symposium, continues No Coal Data Center efforts

I was talking to a friend who was at Uptime Symposium and he asked if  I heard that Greenpeace was there and Greenpeace asked Mike Manos a question in his CO2K presentation.  The fear in the crowd reached levels not typical as they knew they knew Greenpeace has target data centers as the IT polluters like the way Greenpeace has targeted Facebook, and no one knew Greenpeace was attending.  No sane data center event is going to promote that Greenpeace will be there.  See below for Greenpeace's latest move versus Dell.

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He commented that the Greenpeace question to Mike was a softball question.  I told him of course, Mike is out there discussing issues Greenpeace supports.  They are not going to attack Mike.

Another friend send me a link to the Greenpeace blog post based on Uptime attendance.

Mike was safe.

At the Uptime Institute Symposium last week, speakers discussed the economic impacts that a “carbon tax” or carbon regulation could have on data center operators. Mike Manos of Nokia, pointing to the U.K.’s existing carbon legislation, indicated that the IT sector is ill-equipped to deal with inevitable penalties that will be associated with a heavy reliance on coal when U.S. climate legislation passes.


“Carbon emissions differ for a facility in Washington State and a facility in West Virginia,” said Manos. “Where your data centers are located today is an important criteria.”

I bet the Greenpeace person was looking for Facebook as the "we want Facebook to use 100% renewable energy" is now up to 450,000 users.  Facebook wasn't presenting so Greenpeace reports on eBay.

Unfortunately, a strategy that is still being employed by many IT companies to keep the overhead down is to locate data centers in places where “cheap” coal-fired electricity is available. In January, for example, Facebook commissioned a new data center in Oregon and entered a power service agreement with a utility called PacificCorp, which gets most of its electricity from coal-fired power stations. Just this week, eBay unveiled its new flagship data center, located in South Jordan, Utah, a state that derives 81% of its electricity from coal.

You can tell the Greenpeace reporter was in the audience listening to the presentations.

The Topaz data center, as the new hosting facility for eBay’s Marketplace and Paypal.com is called, is a US$287 million facility with top-of-the-line energy efficiency features, which help to make Topaz 50% less expensive for eBay to operate and 30% more efficient than any of the other data centers it uses. And eBay is very proud of its energy and cost savings accomplishment (as evidenced by the break dancers that performed at the launch party). But, is a diet on which you eat 30% less per meal, but eat MANY more meals than you previously did, AND exclusively live on Twinkies, ultimately going to save you from an untimely and serious health problem?

Who is next?  What is the next data center event Greenpeace will be in the audience?  American Express in North Carolina?

American Express to Build in North Carolina

May 20th, 2010 : Rich Miller

Local economic development officials in North Carolina are confirming that American Express will build a large data center in Guilford County. The financial services company plans to build a $400 million center that would employ up to 150 people and open sometime in 2012, according to the Greensboro News-Record.

I am not worried about Greenpeace as when I am speaking at a data center conference I am in sessions like this. 

Panel: The Greening of the Data Center – Opportunities in Renewable Energy
Understanding the True Value of Renewables: Energy Efficiency, Cost, Redundancy, Availability & Security of Supply
Dave Ohara, President - GreenM3
Paul Harris, Vice President & General Manager - NetRiver International
Tom Schmall, Director of Project Development, Solar and other Renewables - Mortenson Construction

I was talking to another experienced data center engineer and he mentioned how the same stuff gets presented over and over at conferences like Uptime. 

Greenpeace attending data center conferences may drive some of the biggest changes as presenters know Greenpeace is in the audience.

Are you ready for a question from Greenpeace in the audience?

And, you thought being asked a question from media was bad.  Greenpeace has an agenda, and they are looking for the high carbon data centers. 

How about this for a possible change?  The customers who have high carbon data centers no longer will give permission for case studies and public presentations.  The data centers vendors are frustrated and desperate to get reference customers.  The few willing to give permission are those customers who have a Low Carbon data center site, so more and more the end users hear about low carbon data centers and how data centers fit well in a corporate sustainability and environmental strategy. 

Ericsson is one company Greenpeace held up in its blog post.

Some IT companies are starting to get it.  An Ericsson white paper, “Minimizing Carbon Intensity in Telecom Networks Using TCO (Total Cost of Operation) Techniques,” demonstrates the company’s methodology (which gets it second-place ranking on the Cool IT Leaderboard) for understanding both the cost and environmental impacts of its operations, recognizing that the absolute amount of energy consumed by telecom networks is growing, along with carbon emissions, which must be managed. The same is true for cloud computing and the infrastructure that runs it.

And, Greenpeace feels good driving change and keeps going.  Sounds scary doesn't it?

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