One Role to Rule All Server HW, Facebook's Manager of Supply Chain Operations

December 19, 2010 Dave Ohara

I've run some analysis thanks to a variety of contributors on the Facebook Server count and the number is bigger than anybody else I have seen discuss. Over 100,000 servers. When server counts get that high managing them takes a different type of person than the purchasing department.

I found this job posting on Facebook for Manager, Supply Chain Operations. The Facebook guys have identified a Wal-mart type of supply chain manager.

Manager, Supply Chain Operations

Facebook is seeking a seasoned leader to be responsible for managing the Supply Chain Operations organization and supplier/partner strategy for all Facebook server suppliers. This includes strategic direction applied to tools development, supplier performance management, vendor relationships, and business processes. This is a full-time position based at our headquarters in Palo Alto.

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Responsibilities

Manages up to ensure executives are informed of a partner performance/development/investment/escalation/negotiation approach

Manages a complex supplier, and fully understands the interdependencies and the impact to the business.

Responsible for the commercial relationship with the partner

Consults and partners with others, offers views and advice that add value and perspective to situations

Jointly responsible for supplier sourcing strategy, including risk mitigation

Responsible for partner based strategy – including industry understanding and driving competitive advantage for Facebook

Responsible for delivering a supplier’s productivity and overall cost performance

Responsible for benchmarking a supplier’s costs globally. Delivers and identifies a supplier’s pipeline productivity

Green IT is most sought after post for new China civil servants

December 18, 2010 Dave Ohara

Economist has an article about the number of Chinese graduates applying for gov't jobs.

Aspiring mandarins

Testing time for college graduates

China's civil service

Dec 16th 2010 | BEIJING | from PRINT EDITION

“A HEALTHY society cannot come about when people study not for the purpose of gaining wisdom and knowledge but for the purpose of becoming government officials.” When Ye Shi, a Chinese philosopher, bemoaned this 800 years ago, China had already been choosing officials for hundreds of years on the basis of exams that required rote learning of ancient classics. The exams are different now but Ye would still have much to complain about.

Growing numbers of Chinese graduates aspire to join China’s massive bureaucracy. On December 5th over 1m would-be mandarins spent a Sunday sitting the annual civil-service exam. Many of them had not planned to get a government job when they entered university. But college enrolment in China has boomed in recent years (see chart). New graduates face a brutally tight jobs market.

The competition is fierce.

This year there were 16,000 jobs on offer, one for every 64 test-takers.

And the most sought-after post? Energy Conservation and Technology Equipment Officer, aka Green IT.

There were nearly 5,000 applications for the most sought-after post, that of “energy conservation and technology equipment officer”.

You may wonder what the selection tests are like.

Jessica Zhang of Beijing Foreign Studies University, who applied for a job this year in the foreign ministry, says she found the multiple-choice general knowledge questions easier than she expected. But she was caught unawares by the written section, which required several essays about management of the Yellow River.

Some worry that the craze for government jobs may be bad for business. But Mr Shu says surprises like the one for Ms Zhang are good tests of bureaucratic talent. He says that civil-service exams, unlike in imperial days, “emphasise thinking and innovation and not just repeating the same old thing”. Some consolation for Ye Shi.

I would feel more comfortable with China's test methodology than the USA's method to select a civil servant for Green IT.

What about you?

Modular Data Center Momentum builds, Dell and Ascent projects

December 16, 2010 Dave Ohara

Dell announced the start of Tier 5 using the Dell Modular Data Center solution.

Tier5 first to fire up Dell’s 3rd-gen Modular Data Center

Last week, Tier5 who has taken over an old Mitsubishi facility in Adelaide was the first company globally to deploy Dell’s third generation Modular Data Center. Tier5 is an eight-person start up that is turning the former auto plant into a state-of-the-art data center park to be leased by wholesale tenants including managed service providers, resellers and large users.

Instead of building out a traditional data center Tier5 went with Dell’s Modular Data Center (MDC) which snaps together like ginormous Legos allowing systems to be up and running in as little as a week. The MDC’s modular nature also allows capacity to be added incrementally as needed.

For a great overview, check out the short video that ITNews did at the opening press conference on Tuesday.

Hand-in-hand

To get Tier5 exactly what they wanted Dell’s DCS team worked collaboratively with the Tier5 engineers over a period of nine to 10 months to nail down the exact specs. As Tier5 founder Marty Gauvin said, “Our engagement with Dell DCS was enormously collaborative. We were able to achieve our objectives in a very collaborative way, and then go beyond them.”

Ascent just announced their anchor tenant for their CH2 facility.

Ascent Corporation Builds Out First Dynamic Data Center Suite™ in Chicago CH2 Data Center

CHICAGO, Dec., 16, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Ascent Corporation, a leading provider of comprehensive data center solutions, has signed a FORTUNE 100 multimedia company as the first tenant of its Chicago CH2 Data Center. Ascent will provide a custom-built autonomous suite offering up to 4MW of critical power, which will enable the tenant to develop and expand its services within a highly efficient, completely autonomous data center space.

CH2 is a multi-tenant data center facility in Northlake, Illinois that offers autonomous Suites featuring customized infrastructure for companies seeking to build or lease data center space via Powered shell or Turnkey Infrastructure. Each CH2 data center suite will provide its tenant with an independent secured entrance, dedicated shipping area, and non-shared infrastructure and support space. Tenants can choose from a wide range of design options, including power density, Tier level and operational services.

"Our ability to quickly sign the anchor tenant for CH2 is a real validation of our product and the continued strength of the greater Chicago market," said Phil Horstmann, CEO, Ascent Corporation. "The autonomous suite model has proved to be very popular with customers that want a customized, build-to-suit data center space that takes advantage of hyper-entitled data center attributes. By letting our tenants control their Suites' design parameters, we can provide them with a flexible, cost-effective custom data center solution that maximizes energy efficiency with no capital outlay through a turnkey lease."

I’ve been to the CH2 Ascent facility, and it will be interesting to see who is the next tenant and whose modular data center design will be used.

eBay VP of IT Operations, Mazen Rawashdeh keynote at Gartner DC LV

December 16, 2010 Dave Ohara

I ran into Mazen before he presented his keynote at Gartner DC LV, and we caught up as we hadn’t chatted for a while. I sat up front and created a video of Mazen discussing the process change that eBay made to improve the performance per watt for eBay systems. Sitting with the eBay team we were also able to catch up a bit discussing Olivier Sanche passing away.

Mazen does a if good job of explaining what eBay did to change the behaviors in IT to be greener in the data center and reduce watts per transaction by 70%.

I apologize for the video quality as the camera was out of focus in manual focus mode. Here are better pictures with the camera in focus. My Canon 7D rocks, and sometimes it feels like I am carrying rocks in my backpack as it is no light camera.

Starting your own blogging site, asking the platform question

December 16, 2010 Dave Ohara

Twitter is popular and so is Facebook. For many blogging is considered old, and many of the youth have moved off of blogs.

Interestingly enough, blogging is not one of them, as only half as many online teens blog compared to 2006, while users ages 18 to 33 also blog less than before. Blogging did see a slight uptick among older generations (ages 33 and up), but still accounts for a relatively small number of total users.

Overall, virtual worlds and blogging aren’t very popular in any age group, which probably indicates that tools such as Facebook and Twitter – which also enables users to express themselves online – have substituted blogging for many users. E-mail, on the other hand, has become nearly ubiquitous, even among adults ages 74 or over.

Being a platform is a hot topic, and Seth Godin makes a good point thinking of your job as a platform.

Where's your platform?

That needs to be the goal when you seek out a job.

Bob Dylan earned the right to make records, and instead of using it to create ever more commercial versions of his old stuff, he used it as a platform to do art.

A brilliant programmer finds a job in a small company and instead of seeing it as a grind, churning out what's asked, he uses it as a platform to hone his skills and to ship code that changes everything.

A waiter uses his job serving patrons as a platform for engagement, for building a reputation and for learning how to delight.

A blogger starts measuring pageviews and ends up racing to the bottom with nothing but scintillating gossip and pandering. Or, perhaps, she decides to use the blog as a platform to take herself and her readers somewhere they will be glad to go...

So, one way to think of a blog as a platform. Which is why I wouldn’t use Facebook or Twitter. When I blog at Typepad I own the content. I can take it somewhere else. I own the url www.greenm3.com which crosslinks to greenm3.typepad.com. I can take all of this and move the hosting of my blog to somewhere else.

Using Twitter and Facebook is easy for many, but is this how you want to run your platform?

If you create a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, Blogger, etc, your platform to reach your audience can be shut down, and you have no way to bring yourself back up.

The same applies if you choose to blog on corporate blogs. The corporation can shut you down, remove all your posts, and when you leave all you wrote and the readers/subscribers are property of the corporation.

The best move Robert Scoble did was keep www.scobleizer.com when he was a Microsoft employee. All the traffic he gained became his IP and Microsoft did not have any ownership.

BTW, at some point I may get tired using TypePad and the blogging style which then means I can transform www.greenm3.com into the next thing.

GreenM3 is my platform to build new ideas. What is yours?