Why Lee Technologies on Tap event works, a declaration of independence from typical data center events

July 4, 2010 Dave Ohara

Anyone who has gone to three or more data center events finds the repetition of content numbing and boring. Your first event is exciting as you learn new things, but when you go to the next you look for what you missed, then your third you look for what is new and you realize over 90% of what is presented is regurgitated content.

Why? Because most of the content is being presented by speakers and vendors as their standard slides as they go from one data center event to the next.

The vendors pay money for the event, you pay money to go to the event, but do these people get good value for the taxes and time they pay? No, but what choice do they have?

In the end you go to meet the other people there.

As today is the 4th of July, a declaration of independence theme made sense.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Above is the infamous presentation of the declaration of independence. Thomas Jefferson gets much of the credit of the work along with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The five prominent figures depicted are, from left to right, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.

As there were a bunch of radical thinkers challenging the rule of British Empire. There a few rethinking how data center executives meet and discuss ideas. What happens if you focus on freedom of discussion and remove the taxes paid by vendors and attendees?

What happens if you attended an event where the main reason you go is to meet the people there and talk about anything you want? You have independence to talk to anyone you want about anything you want.

Steve Manos has been doing this with Lee Technologies on Tap. He has been growing attendance month to month by 58% and has some of top data center executives in the Chicago area attending.

When people say this.

Other favorite comments by participants that night:

“This is insane”

“Thank God you brought name tags”

“Who ISN’T here?”

“If this gets any bigger, you are going to have to rent our Wrigley Field”

And Steve adds this.

..but the most self gratifying was hearing that everyone thought it brought an incredible amount of value to them and that they were very appreciate to be invited to participate.

And you see this.

You see that focusing on end users freedom to discuss ideas unleashes energy that is constrained by the current data center event model. The social mixers at typical data center events are hosted in the exhibit area. That isn't free form thinking, it is traffic management that justifies the booth fees paid.

Atlanta Lee Technologies on Tap had its first event on June 17 as well.

I was talking to Lee Kirby who is on the left in the last picture above and we are thinking how Lee Technologies on Tap should be hosted in the SF bay area.

The idea of data center information exchange independent from the data center events is growing. And, the ideas being exchanged and connections being made have huge value to the attendees.

The 4th of July is celebrated as a day of independence once a year. Lee Technologies on Tap provides a venue where the lucky few who get to attend will be able to celebrate independent data center thinking once a month.

This makes so much more sense than another specification or data center standard.

Breaking down the silos. getting people discussing ideas.

Happy 4th of July. Celebrate Independence Day!

BTW, look at these pictures again when is the last time you saw this many data center people smiling. :-)

Intel Anthropologists Validates SeaMicro approach, multiple low power cores

July 3, 2010 Dave Ohara

ars technica has an interview with Intel CTO and discussed the role of anthropologists at Intel.

How Moore's Law drove Intel into the arms of anthropologists

By Jon Stokes | Last updated a day ago

MOUNTAIN VIEW — Intel CTO Justin Rattner took the stage at Intel's annual Research Day to host what was something of a launch party for Intel's new Interaction and Experience Research Lab—essentially a place to put all of the anthropologists and ethnographers that the company has been hiring over the past decade, and also a very high-profile validation of the value that the chipmaker places on the work of these folks.

The author wanted to dig into the impact of SeaMicro

Rattner also took up the topic of Atom vs. Xeon for cloud computing in a later Q&A session, and his response to my question of what he thought about SeaMicro's 512-Atom server might surprise you.

and here is what he uncovered.

"There's a growing body of evidence that suggests that for these massive datacenters there's a different optimum—a different set of tradeoffs—between performance and energy," he explained.

...

Rattner went on to say that the research backs up the idea that large clusters of fairly weak processors can be "dramatically more efficient" on certain types of cloud workloads than traditional enterprise servers (of the kind that Intel currently sells hardware for), which is why the company is eager to get to market with either SCCC or something like it.

Analog vs. Digital thinking, a cooking example

July 2, 2010 Dave Ohara

Society as a whole has embraced digital as better than analog. Audio and video have been marketed that digital is better. Digital is concerned modern and more powerful. But your eyes and ears are analog devices. Your taste and smell are analog.

When I was in Tuscany I noticed the digital thinking when in the cooking class at www.tuscanwomencook.com when the other people attending would ask questions what temperature and how long to cook a dish. And, a focus on the recipe. As the class went on people would discuss what recipe they were going to try when got home. When they asked me what recipe I was going to try. Being honest, I said I don't know. Huh? How can you attend a cooking class and not be thinking about the recipe? Because I was decomposing the cook's techniques looking for what I could use. How people approach cooking was more interesting to me than the recipes. The complexity of cooking can be simplified when you see how someone makes cooking easier and more effective.

Then it hit me. When I wrote about the Apple iPhone 4 Antenna problem. Most people have lost the art of thinking in analog.

Here is an example of an awesome restaurant I ate at in Florence, Trattoria Sostanza

Trattoria Sostanza Troia S.A.S. - TrattoriaVia della Porcellana, 25, 50123 Firenze, Italia055 212691‎ 77 reviews

"IME, having Italian beef cooked beyond medium rare is not worth the price" - fodors.com ... "Don't skip dessert" -tripadvisor.com ... "The service was wonderful and the food was fantastic" - tripadvisor.com ... "the wine list is also excellent value" - tripadvisor.com ... "The food is out of this world" - tripadvisor.com ... "A true Italian experience!" - tripadvisor.com

Frommer's says.

Sostanza is popularly called "Il Troia" (The Trough) because people have been lining up at the long communal tables since 1869 to enjoy huge amounts of some of the best traditional food in the city. The primi are very simple: pasta in sauce, tortellini in brodo (meat-stuffed pasta in chicken broth), and zuppa alla paesana (peasant soup ribollita). The secondi don't steer far from Florentine traditions either, with trippa alla fiorentina or their mighty specialty petti di pollo al burro (thick chicken breasts fried in butter). It's an extremely unassuming place, so laid-back you may not realize you're meant to be ordering when the waiter wanders over to chat. They also frown on anybody trying to cheat his or her own taste buds out of a full Tuscan meal.
Read more: http://www.frommers.com/destinations/florence/D34473.html#ixzz0scmTsDEq

So, here is a top restaurant cooking some of the best food in Florence. And their main cooking appliance is?

A wood fired grilling area.

In this small kitchen

Now if the chefs told you the temperatures they cooked at and how long, do you think any of that translates to what you should do when you go home?

Here is a close up of their top two dishes being cooked bistecca fiorentina and pollo al burro

Good cooks use their senses - smell, sight, sound, touch, temperature, and taste to cook. It's not digital. Cooking has turned into a digital experience for most, but good cooking is analog.

This is the same point made for Christian Belady, Mike Manos, and Chris Malone when they discuss metrics like PUE. PUE is a number, but not the end. For those who get the analog experience of running their data centers they know when things are right.

Do you think of your power and cooling systems as analog?

Your people are analog devices too. But how many of them are treated as digital components? You can replace any individual without changing the system.

Digital thinking is easier, but it is not right and it doesn't taste good.

Note: correction to Frommer's statement Il Troia in Italian is The Whore not the The Trough.

Google's action to limit speed trap avoidance used in France declaring Google a monopoly

July 2, 2010 Dave Ohara

NYTimes posts on France's declaration of Google a monopoly.

Google Ruled a Monopoly in France
July 2, 2010, 3:53 AM

From Floyd Norris in his latest High and Low Finance column:

It is fun to run a monopoly. But in the long run, it can be a lot less enjoyable to own one.

Why?

Companies change as they grow larger and more profitable. Bureaucracy and success slow innovation. Will this new product hurt an old one? If so, should we delay, or price it very high? Old monopolists find themselves outrun by newer companies with no stake in the old ways.

What did Google do?

In a preliminary ruling, the Authorité de la Concurrence said that Google's Adwords system, which prompts ads to appear alongside search results, lacked transparency and "resulted in discriminatory treatment."

The ruling followed a complaint by Navx, a French company that provides data on the location of road traffic speed cameras and petrol prices, as well as other services and content for GPS devices. Navx said its ads were removed without warning from AdWords in 2009, and accused Google of anti-competitive practices.

Google said the reason for the disappearance of the Navx ads was a change of policy in 2008, when it decided no longer to promote services helping people to avoid speed cameras and fines.

The issue being debated is whether Google has the rights to limit a French companies business model.

"The competition authority is saying that Google has a dominant position," said Ron Soffer, Navx's lawyer. "When you have that position you can't just do what you want."

Google is confident it is in the right.

A final decision is expected in September, and a Google spokesman said the company remained "confident of a positive outcome."

But this is politics and gov'ts around the the world are looking for ways to regulate Google.

IBM was one of the first high tech companies to have monopoly problems.

However, IBM's dominant market share in the mid-1960s led to antitrust inquiries by the U.S. Department of Justice, which filed a complaint for the case U.S. v. IBM in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, on January 17, 1969. The suit alleged that IBM violated the Section 2 of the Sherman Act by monopolizing or attempting to monopolize the general purpose electronic digital computer system market, specifically computers designed primarily for business. The case dragged out for 13 years, turning into a resource-sapping war of attrition. In 1982, the Justice Department finally concluded that the case was “without merit” and dropped it, But having to operate under the pall of antitrust litigation significantly impacted IBM's business decisions and operations during all of the 1970s and a good portion of the 1980s.

Microsoft monopoly history is well known.

Google is next.

Employers have problem finding skilled workers

July 1, 2010 Dave Ohara

Finding data center staff is one of the top jobs of data center executives and part of the reason they are out at the data center conferences. NYTimes has an article about the skill worker mismatch in manufacturing.

Factory Jobs Return, but Employers Find Skills Shortage

David Maxwell for The New York Times

Students at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland are training for manufacturing jobs. More Photos »

By MOTOKO RICH

BEDFORD, Ohio — Factory owners have been adding jobs slowly but steadily since the beginning of the year, giving a lift to the fragile economic recovery. And because they laid off so many workers — more than two million since the end of 2007 — manufacturers now have a vast pool of people to choose from.

Yet some of these employers complain that they cannot fill their openings.

The job shortage is for the type of workers in data centers.

Now they are looking to hire people who can operate sophisticated computerized machinery, follow complex blueprints and demonstrate higher math proficiency than was previously required of the typical assembly line worker.

Makers of innovative products like advanced medical devices and wind turbines are among those growing quickly and looking to hire, and they too need higher skills.

Given the labor shortage in data centers, I am curious how many people are coming from other industries.

Employers say they are looking for aptitude as much as specific skills. “We are trying to find people with the right mindset and intelligence,” said Mr. Murphy.

Ben Venue has recruited about half its new factory hires from outside the pool of former manufacturing workers. Zachary Flyer, a 32-year-old Army veteran, had been laid off from a law firm filing room when he applied at the drug maker last summer.

He spent four months this year learning how to operate a 400-square-foot freeze dryer that helps preserve vials of medicine. Monitoring vacuum pressure and temperatures on a color-coded computer screen with flashing numbers, Mr. Flyer said last month that he preferred his new work to the law firm, where he had spent seven years.

The vast majority of you outsource your data center maintenance and operations.

How do you manage your Service Level Agreements (SLA) for your data center maintenance?