Whale Hunting at Gartner DC LV 2010

December 9, 2010 Dave Ohara

I had dinner with a couple of senior data center executives who engineer and build datacenters for some of the top players in the industry. These guys are part of the data center industry that build the big data centers for the top players where the business must have large capacity and the best designs.

Part of the conversation was comparing data center conferences to go to. We were all at Gartner DC LV 2010.

Other conferences we agreed were good are DataCenterDynamics, 7X24 Exchange, and Uptime Symposium, SVLG DCEE. All of these conferences have more of a data center facilities focus whereas Gartner has little facilities discussion.

Gartner is different with a focus on data center operations from an IT perspective, not a facilities.

But, then I made the point that the big boys in data centers in general don't go to Gartner. The exception is the executives who attend for presentations and meet with clients. And, those who sell to the rest of the attendees

For example, Google sent two people who didn't look like they were from the data center group. Microsoft sent over a dozen, but again not from the data center group. No Facebook or Yahoo. No Twitter, Zynga, No AT&T. No Apple. A couple from Verizon Wireless, but again no data center group.

Who does intend in mass with 5 or more people?

Canada Dept of Defense

Delta Airlines

DePaul University

DirectTV

FAA

GSA

Kaiser Permante

Medtronic

McKesson

NASA

PG&E

Royal Bank of Canada

Sandia National Labs

Southern CA Edison

Social Security Adminstration

State Farm

US Dept of Defense

US Dept of Vet affairs

US Marine Corps

Lots of big fish. But not the whales of data center.

So is Gartner DC LV conference really the data center industry? Or those who look for Gartner for advice on data centers?

I run into many people I know in the industry at Gartner DC, but now that I think about it is the suppliers of the data center industry I run into at the event, not the end users I know who are the most innovative and biggest.

The end users I run into at DataCenterDynamics, Uptime, and 7X24 Exchange.

If you are hunting for the big whales in the data center industry Gartner is not the place to look, but there are still plenty of big fish. On the other hand, getting access to the right people is part of the challenge which is why the exhibit area is used so much.

Dave Barry's Guest Keynote Video at #gartnerdc LV 2010, making fun of the Cloud and IT

December 8, 2010 Dave Ohara

Dave Barry gave an entertaining presentation of his comedy act Wit and Wisdom.

Guest Keynote Speaker

Dave Barry

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author and Humorist

Dave Barry is a humor columnist. For 25 years he was a syndicated columnist whose work appeared in more than 500 newspapers in the United States and abroad. In 1988 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

Many people are still trying to figure out how this happened. Dave has also written a total of 30 books, although virtually none of them contain useful information. Two of his books were used as the basis for the CBS TV sitcom "Dave's World," in which Harry Anderson played a much taller version of Dave. Dave plays lead guitar in a literary rock band called the Rock Bottom Remainders, whose other members include Stephen King, Amy Tan, Ridley Pearson and Mitch Albom.

At dinner I was talking to some friends who missed Dave's presentation. To share the experience here is a YouTube video of Dave's discussing of Cloud Computing and IT.

Dave Barry Wit and Wisdom of Cloud

Enjoy and have a good laugh. I did which made it hard to keep the camera steady.

What the Private Cloud will bring? Really Bad $h*!

December 6, 2010 Dave Ohara

I had a full day at Gartner DC LV conference. At the end of the day I got a good question on what I saw in the future. Cloud is top of the topics being discussed.

Lots of people are thinking about building private clouds, but how many people know how to build an operating system for the cloud. A common tweet from #GartnerDC

barton808 Barton George

by sean_kelley_ms

66% of folks here say they will be pursuing private cloud by 2014.#gartnerDC

So a safe answer is private cloud is the future of IT. High utilized hardware. Dynamic Infrastructure.

Gartner has been saying the private cloud is coming for a while here is a post from 2009.

I believe that enterprises will spend more money building private cloud computing services over the next three years than buying services from cloud computing providers. But those investments will also make them better cloud computing customers in the future.

Building a private cloud computing environment is not just a technology thing – it also changes management processes, organization/culture, and relationship with business customers (our Infrastructure and Operations Maturity Model has a roadmap for all four). And these changes will make it easier for an IT organization and its customers to make good cloudsourcing decisions and transitions in the future.

The ability for people to understand the private cloud is daunting. The choices are large and growing faster than people can understand. All of this reminds me of the arrival of Desktop Publishing. with new issues for typography, color matching, images, layout, printers,scanners, and SW.

Desktop publishing began in 1985 with the introduction of MacPublisher, the first WYSIWYG layout program, which ran on the original 128K Macintosh computer. (Desktop typesetting, with only limited page makeup facilities, had arrived in 1978–9 with the introduction of TeX, and was extended in the early 1980s by LaTeX.) The DTP market exploded in 1985 with the introduction in January of the Apple LaserWriter printer, and later in July with the introduction of PageMaker software from Aldus which rapidly became the DTP industry standard software.

Before the advent of desktop publishing, the only option available to most persons for producing typed (as opposed to handwritten) documents was a typewriter, which offered only a handful of typefaces (usually fixed-width) and one or two font sizes. The ability to create WYSIWYG page layouts on screen and then print pages at crisp 300 dpi resolution was revolutionary for both the typesetting industry and the personal computer industry. Newspapers and other print publications made the move to DTP-based programs from older layout systems like Atex and other such programs in the early 1980s.

Now if you are an experienced Operating System developer and have a team who can make the design trade-offs in designing a private cloud the transition to private cloud will be like print publications that moved to Mac based DTP. But the number of IT organizations with this skill set are only a handful - Google, Microsoft, VMware, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Maybe at the most 6% of the installed base has these skills and ability to recruit top talent, so what happens to the remaining 60% of the 66% that are building private clouds?

We are going to see some really bad $h*!.

Private clouds that are bad performers. Clouds that have bad UI. Manageability requires giving a UI to the private cloud. How many IT organizations have a user interface design team?

Building a private cloud is like building an operating system to manage the resources in IT with UI for system administrators designed for your internal users.

Now the smart guys have figured out they can hire experience operating system staff. Why do you think Google hired so many Microsoft guys? Microsoft hired a bunch of DEC guys to work on NT.

If you don't want to build some really bad $h*! you should think of hiring some OS guys. I have a friend who runs a technical executive placement company and I think she should start up a private cloud placement service.

Are you in the 6% group with OS level talent or in the 60% group who is new to DTP and have an organization who sees the private cloud as the answer to take control.

Keep in mind this Gartner statement.

I believe that enterprises will spend more money building private cloud computing services over the next three years than buying services from cloud computing providers.

The analyst and vendors are going to market private cloud so it is unstoppable. Just saying no to the private cloud is not an option.

Gartner DC LV is a great event to meet people and circulate ideas. Today is a full day of interviews, business disconnections, and making new connections.

Skype’s Platform Push

December 5, 2010 Dave Ohara

Some of my data center friends have been making the switch to Skype, and here is some posts that mention Skype’s efforts to staff up to be a cloud computing platform.

TechCrunch covers the hiring efforts at Skype.

Skype Staffing Up For A Big Push To The Cloud

As Skype prepares for an IPO in the next year, the VoIP company has been looking for new ways to expand its business both in terms of revenue and product development. One avenue the company is exploring to bring in more revenue is throughenterprise offerings, via B2C and B2B offerings. However, it looks like Skype will be moving its VoIP offerings to the cloud.

Note the hiring efforts for cloud and web technology engineers.

We spotted these job postings on Skype’s website, indicating that the company is looking to build a team of cloud and web technology engineers. According to the postings, these staff members will “build an infrastructure capable of supporting hundreds of millions of users.” The products, will deliver “voice, video, chat and presence” to the web and “enable radically new Skype applications.”

GigaOm covers Skype’s copying NetFlix to a be a platform.

How Netflix Shaped Skype’s Platform Strategy

By Michael Wolf Jul. 1, 2010, 5:20pm PDT 1 Comment

Skype quietly announced SkypeKit, an SDK for CE manufacturers last week, to push Skype services beyond the PC. However, it wasn’t until the following day when Jonathan Christensen, the General Manager and Head of Platform at Skype, talked in depth about the company’s plans to mimic Netflix by following a platform-centric approach did the company’s broader intentions become clear.

An example of Carbon Reporting for Data Centers, HSBC

December 2, 2010 Dave Ohara

Yesterday, I blogged on The Green Grid CUE metric.

Will CUE be as popular as PUE? Don't think so

Today the Green Grid announced the CUE metric, Carbon Usage Effectiveness metric to help measure the carbon impact of IT equipment.

CUE is defined as

The carbon emissions divided by your IT load. Provides a ratio of kg/CO2/kWHr where the best is 0. Note you can be near zero with hydroelectric or nuclear power sourcing.

Later in the day I had a chance to run into Christian Belady and clarified that I meant no disrespect to the idea of CUE as he was the editor for the document. I explained most of what I saw people say out there was reporting, but little discussion or analysis. Getting people to debate a topic is what gets the idea to spread. Christian is a forward thinker and said he is always open for debate, and took no offense to my blog post.

To illustrate the point of how some companies are reporting their data center carbon footprint, check out HSBC’s environmental site.

Footprint management

The changing size and shape of a corporation is an ongoing challenge for those responsible for measuring and managing its environmental footprint. There a number of different ways to set a boundary around which parts of the organisation are included in target-setting and monitoring. At HSBC, our aim is to communicate our progress transparently, and, in response to stakeholder feedback, we updated our approach to setting and reporting environmental targets in 2009.

Data Centre’s are called out separately.

What about data centres?

Until 2009, data centres had not been subject to targets to reduce carbon emissions. We now have targets to improve the energy efficiency of our eight largest Group data centres by between 2 per cent and 8 per cent in 2010.

HSBC is in the process of building new highly efficient data centres, built to international green building standards such as BREEAM and LEED. We have chosen to separate data centres from the targets for the rest of our buildings because we are working through a programme of consolidating these facilities. This means that sometimes during a handover period, two are operating at once, or data centre operations are moving from one country to another, which can skew the data.

And hereee is the data center power footprint.

The Green Grid’s CUE and WUE are reporting per Kwhr. But, many are reporting on a per full time employee.

Carbon emissions

Our target is to reduce carbon emissions per FTE by 6 per cent between 2008 and 2011.

Water use

Our target is to reduce water use per FTE by 11 per cent between 2008 and 2011.

Thanks to some helpful people in the financial sector they have been pointing me to where various companies are reporting the data center impacts.

I am starting to believe the financial sector may the group who leads the rest of the industry in environmental/sustainability reporting.