Think Different in the Data Center, change the world

I just spent 2 great days in Chicago at Data Center Dynamics, Lee Tech on Tap, Touring 601 Polk with Facility Gateway, and eating lunch at the best deli in Chicago with Jim Kerrigan. On Thursday it was announced Steve Jobs had passed away, and my wife text me that she was quite sad watching the news on TV with daughter.  I wrote a brief tribute to Steve Jobs here.

Apple is a company everyone knows, yet few think of it as a 35 year old company.

1976 - High-school buddies Steven Wozniak and Steve Jobs start Apple Computer. Their first product, Apple I, built in circuit board form, debuts at "the Homebrew Computer Club" in Palo Alto, California.

I joined Apple in 1985 and stayed until 1992, working with some great people who are good friends and some of the smartest people I know to work on some innovative data center ideas.  None of us worked on data center back then, but we drifted through companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Google working on innovative products.

The Think Different campaign is a classic.  And, one of the points made is people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

I hadn't been to Chicago in a year, and I had hopes it would be worth the trip.

After two days, I can say it exceeded my expectations.  Why?  Because I met people who want to change the data center world, and they are passionate about doing things in a better way.  I won't name the specific list of people, because the status quo in data centers is you don't say anything that gets published unless the marketing department has given you approval.  Do you think Apple PR ever told Steve Jobs what he should say?

Can you find the innovative people?  I did in Chicago.  I am off to LV next week for an IT Asset Management Conference, and there are group of getting together there.  At the end of month I'll be in NYC, and be at Facebook's Open Compute Summit with another innovative group.  November I'll be at 7x24 Exchange in Phoenix with lots of smart innovative people.

What is going to revolutionize data centers are people doing what is in the above video.  Creating solutions that change how data centers work.

My Tribute to Steve Jobs, Thanks for creating One of the Best Companies To Learn How to Change the World

My college education is from UC Berkeley, and normally people think of their education in college.  But, I have always treated my jobs as education, a place of learning. When I was in college I aspired to work at IBM, Xerox PARC, or HP.  After 5 years at HP, i went to Apple for an interview to check out this small computer manufacturer (compared to HP) in 1984.  Apple made me a job offer, but I was too busy working on a  project at HP to leave.  Luckily 6 months later after i finished the project, Apple called me back and wanted to see if I was still interested.  The Macintosh had shipped, and I was ready to move to a new place of learning.

At Apple, I changed jobs every year, learning new things, solving tough problems, and understanding a different way to think about product development. At Apple there was a passion to change the world.  Be Different.  How much of corporate life is the opposite?  Fit in. Do as your told.  Hit your metrics.  Defend the status quo.

How many companies have in their DNA, we are going to create products no one else has.

I left Apple back in 1992, during the dark years when Steve was not at the company.  When Steve returned, I would tell people Steve came back because there was no stage like Apple for Steve to perform his magic.  He had been busy at Next and Pixar, but Apple was his brand.

Steve will go down in history as one of the great innovators.  But, unlike his predecessors, he last left a company that teaches people to change the world by creating great products.  People will remember Steve for the products he created and the list is long.

But, I think Steve's greatest achievement is creating one of the best companies to learn how to change the world.

(Below is my last business card at Apple on top of my latest purchase, a MacBook Air.)

Michael Dell, end-to-end, PC to the Data Center

Michael Dell gave a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld, and there is blog post summarizing his presentation.

Michael emphasizes they go embrace the PC.

2. We Still Love Hardware: Without mentioning Hewlett-Packard by name, Dell took a few shots at HP’s potential PC division spin-out. Dell said his company has rapidly evolved from PCs to servers to cloud solutions.

“There are many reasons to stay committed to the PC, he said. “There will be two billion PCs in a few years.” Dell estimated that 95 percent of disk drives are in PCs, and five percent are in servers. A company without PCs can’t gain volume pricing advantages for server components, Dell asserted. “The client offers enormous scale,” said Dell. “Give up that scale and you need to raise your prices.”

Data Center is not specifically mentioned, but implied in this statement.

3. Total Picture: “Dell is not a PC company,” he said. “Dell is an end-to-end solutions company, and we understand the endpoint is a huge part of the solution. We are more than just hardware.”

Since it was Oracle's event, there is the Oracle statement.

6. The Dell-Oracle Relationship: JP Sarkis, VP of packaged applications for Dell Services, joined Dell on stage. Sarkis said Dell had been spending 70 percent of its IT budget on maintenance on 30 percent on innovation. More recently, 52 percent of Dell’s IT budget focuses on innovation, with 48 percent focused on maintenance. What drove the shift? Standardized business processes that leverage Oracle on Dell, plus a service oriented architecture (SOA), Sarkis claimed.

Servers are mentioned of course.

7. Dell PowerEdge Servers: Dell said his company is preparing the 12th generation of its PowerEdge servers. Dell asserted that the company will continue to offer the most comprehensive family of x86 servers. Dell said the PowerEdge systems will benefit from the little-watched acquisition of RNA Networks.

The last point that RNA Networks is a little-watched acquisition that I happen to visit 2 years ago and wrote this post.

So why not virtualize memory across multiple servers?

While in Portland I was able to visit with RNAnetworks and discuss their latest announcement.

RNA networks Brings Memory Virtualization Into the Enterprise Data Center

RNA Memory Virtualization Transforms Memory into a Shared, Networked Resource

Portland, Ore. – February 2, 2009 – RNA networks, a leader in memory virtualization software that transforms server memory into a shared network resource, today announced the launch of its Memory Virtualization Platform(MVP) and first product, RNAmessenger, based on the MVP.  Memory Virtualization unleashes high-performance computing from existing commodity hardware by decoupling memory from the processor and server.  Uniquely, the RNA Memory Virtualization Platform is transparent to existing applications and operating systems allowing enterprises to leverage their existing IT assets with no changes. 
“Reliance on fragmented local server memory has been a key roadblock to optimizing performance in data center clusters, but memory virtualization eliminates size limits and slashes access times by providing distributed shared memory for all CPUs in a cluster,” said Eyal Waldman, Chairman, President and CEO, Mellanox Technologies. “By combining RNA Networks' Memory Virtualization with Mellanox Technologies' unrivaled connectivity performance, data center architects can achieve new levels of performance with high efficiency and lower costs.”

The concept is simple.

RNA’s innovative Memory Virtualization Platform works by pooling or aggregating available memory across nodes, and making the memory pool available as a shared network resource available to all servers in the data center.  Servers can access the pool, contribute to it or both.

Where is the money savings? This is another problem I see with Cisco and VMware’s uber virtual data center solutions.  Where is the money savings?

I asked RNAnetworks CEO Clive Cook how much could be saved with memory Virtualization, and he said in grid computing type of scenarios where there is a high throughput requirement across multiple machines they have numbers below.

Bottom Line Economic Advantages

Performance Improvement 
10-30X

Cost Savings

Fewer Load Balancers 
$44,500

Less Aggregate Memory 
$64,500

Storage Savings 
$163,000

Power Savings 
$39,500

Additional Benefits

• Efficiency
• Simplicity
• Reliability
• Resource Sharing
• Low TCO
• Consolidation

Heading to Chicago for DataCenterDynamics, Lee Tech on Tap, and meeting the Chicago Data Center Community

I am about to get ready to leave to the airport to go to Chicago where I'll be attending/working Hall 2 at Data Center Dynamics.  If you want to find me it will be relatively easy because I will be hall chairman of hall 2.

6

OCT

Chicago

Hilton Chicago

The Chicago Way: Low Latency, Business Performance, Strategic Outsourcing, and IT Optimization

The growth of technology in the Chicago market is creating specific infrastructure and technology demands. Archaic business models have been replaced by technological advancement, thereby causing an increasing demand for more data center and IT mission critical infrastructure. As a result, some unique trends and obstacles have emerged for the end-user community. Issues previously unique only to major corporations are now shared by all end-users, adapting their IT infrastructure to meet growing business demands, take competitive advantage, and meet compliance.

In the evening I'll be at Lee Tech on Tap's Data Center Social across the street.

If you can make it you can register here.

Lee Tech on Tap October Event

Please join Lee Technologies and Schneider Electric for our first joint Lee Tech on Tap event Thursday, October 6th 2011 at Buddy Guy's Legends Blues Bar in Chicago.  Please RSVP as soon as possible as the venue has limited capacity.

• When:  Thursday, October 6th, 2011 from 6:30pm-10:30pm
• Where: Buddy Guy's Legends Blues Bar
• Who:  Data Center Professionals
• Why:  To network, trade war stories, and to meet/reconnect with industry peers.

On Friday, I am going to drop by Facility Gateway's new data center space.

tober, 2011 by Yevgeniy Sverdlik

Data center building and management company Facility Gateway has partnered with owner of a data center in downtown Chicago to add more data center floor and to manage the facility in one of the tightest markets in the US in terms of supply of data center space.

As Netflix Streaming declines, Netflix will save money with less AWS instances, but who cares?

Netflix will announce its Q3 results on Oct 24, and it is hard to say the numbers will look pretty.  Let alone what Q4 will look like.

Netflix to Announce Third-Quarter 2011 Financial Results

LOS GATOS, Calif., Oct. 4, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Netflix, Inc. NFLX -0.45% today announced it will post its third-quarter 2011 financial results and business outlook on its investor relations website at http://ir.netflix.com on Monday, October 24, 2011, at approximately 1:05 p.m. Pacific Time. At that time the company will issue a brief advisory release via newswire containing a link to the third-quarter 2011 financial results and letter to shareholders on its website.

Here is the one year stock performance.

One good thing about Netflix using AWS for its streaming instead of data centers is they can scale to demand which usually implies scaling up.  But with Amazon, Apple, and Google all focusing on video it is hard to imagine Netflix's growth will continue at its past pace, and they may decline.  Which means Netflix can just turn off AWS instances and save money.  But, who cares?  Can you image Netflix in a keynote presentation,  we have reduced our streaming content by 15% over the last year and we have saved 15% in our data center costs by turning off 15% of our AWS instances.

My kids use Netflix streaming constantly, but I also have Amazon Prime and have 2 Amazon Kindle Fires on order.  We'll see how the kids like streaming to their Kindle Fire and whether Netflix shows up on the Kindle Fire.  The Amazon Prime users are just about as loyal if not more than the Netflix user base was.