Attending 2011 Data Center Efficiency Summit

Nov 18, 2011 is Silicon Valley Leadership Group's 2011 Data Center Efficiency Summit.  Registration is here.

2011 Data Center Efficiency Summit Friday, November 18, 2011 from 7:30 AM to 6:00 PM (PT) San Jose, CA

I"ll be there as besides great presentations, there are some great people attending.

It is sad to think that the 2010 summit is the last time I saw my departed friend Olivier Sanche, and we didn't get a chance to connect for dinner.  My thought was that's OK I'll see Olivier next time.  I was so wrong.  I am sure i'll have a tear or two when I go to the event and I reminisce with others the last time we saw Olivier energetically walking the group, greeting many with a smile and high energy.

Microsoft comes a long way with Water use in Quincy, Transfers water treatment plant to City of Quincy

When Microsoft's Quincy data center opened, I was able to get a tour of the data center.  One of the questions I asked is how much water does the data center use.  I asked the data center operations staff, they didn't know.  I asked the data center design team, they didn't know either.  And, a response was why do you want to know?  Because I think you use lots of water, and it is an issue in a green data center.

When I went back out to the data center a few months later, the data center operation team said they are storing blow-down water in tanks, and they have 6 months before the tanks fill up.  This problem was not unique to Microsoft as other data center operators had blow-down water that cannot be put into the waste stream.

A water treatment plant was built to reduce the environmental impact.  And now, Microsoft has put a plan in place to transfer the water treatment plant to the City of Quincy.

Microsoft’s Data Center Takes Fresh Approach On Water Reuse

msdcblog

13 Oct 2011 10:00 AM

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Today we are transferring our $ multi-million water treatment plant to city of Quincy, WA

By: Christian Belady, General Manager of Data Center Advanced Development

Around the globe, water is becoming a scarcer and more valuable commodity, and that’s an important factor for data center operators and cloud service providers to consider as consumers and businesses aggressively adopt cloud-based computing. It’s even more critical that all of us in the industry make sure that beyond building sustainability into our designs, running data centers to higher standardize efficiencies, and measuring impact constantly, that we are helping the industry at large in thinking out of the box.

Today offers one of those opportunities. In Quincy, Washington, we are taking steps to transfer the operations of our Water Treatment Plant, located on our data center site, to the City of Quincy. This project involves innovative agreements for promoting a long term sustainable use of a limited natural resource, water, in a desert area that has the added benefit of supporting the foundation of Quincy and Grant County’s growing economy for years to come. To my knowledge, it is the first known transfer of a water treatment plant to a municipality in our industry and I would like to share why I think this type of collaborative project helps the industry and environment benefit as a whole.

Microsoft’s Quincy, Washington Water Treatment Plant

Google's Joe Kava discussed water use in data centers in its 2009 data center summit.  Joe's presentation on water start at the 9:20 mark.

A green data center has smart water use in addition to efficient power and cooling systems.

Day One, at IT Asset Management Conference

A few months ago, I decided to start studying the state of Asset Management in data centers.  Fortunately, there is a conference on Asset Management, and when checking with some friends they were also attending the same conference.

When people think about greening the data center they think about the building.  Some are thinking about the energy efficiency of their equipment.

But, only a few are thinking of how asset management and better utilization of their assets fits in a green data center strategy.

I am used to going to conferences that can be a little geeky.  This conference is about people who live and drink (even in the bars) asset management.

There are a lot of eWaste companies here and software asset management.  Hardware asset management is covered as well and RFID has a  presence with companies like RF Code which many of us have run into at other data center conferences and given many of the guys came from APC NetBotz team there are familiar faces.

There is a small group of people I've been hanging with who are focused on data center asset management at the scale that is interesting, not 10,000 servers, but more around 100,000.

Overall the first day was a good, and I am looking forward to a 2nd day of diving in deeper.

Syska opens Data Center office in Dubai to serve Middle East and Africa

Data Center Growth in emerging markets is hot, and one of the regions growing fast is the Middle East and Africa.  It can be difficult to understand those markets and I was quite excited to hear one of my data center friends has relocated to Dubai to be a local resource for the market.

Syska has made a press release announcing their office in Dubai with VP Greg Jasmin running the local office.  I met Greg years ago as he was one of my early followers on this blog.  We have had many great conversations about green data centers and how sustainable approaches can be applied, and I am sure we will have many more interesting conversations as he services one of the high growth data center markets.  Connecting with great people makes my day. :-)

Syska Hennessy Group Establishes an Office in Dubai

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Syska Hennessy Group, Inc. a leading global consulting, engineering and commissioning firm, is underscoring its commitment to clients in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region by opening a permanent office in Dubai’s Internet City, United Arab Emirates (UAE).

...

Syska Hennessy Group's global presence is continuing to expand with the formation of Syska Hennessy Group MENA. The new entity is the result of a joint venture between SH Group, Inc., the parent company of Syska Hennessy Group and LZ Technologies Middle East FZ-LLC. The new company will be led by Greg Jasmin, a vice president of Syska Hennessy Group, and Bassem Hariri, of LZ Technologies Middle East FZ-LLC. Mr. Jasmin will serve as co-managing director of the firm's Dubai office, overseeing operations and assuming technical leadership of the enterprise, while Mr. Hariri, also co-managing director, will oversee client relations and business development.

Syska Hennessy Group has enjoyed long term success in the region with signature projects throughout Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. Jasmin commented, "Syska has been active in the Middle East for more than 30 years but we've never had a permanent presence. Now we both live and work here, elevating our commitment to this strategic region. Being in the region will certainly help Syska Hennessy broaden its array of platinum-level clients, as these clients seek out the experience and technical expertise that we bring from the U.S. to help solve the challenges these clients face in building exceptional buildings."

Shifting mindset to an Information Factory from a Data Center, the industrialization of the data

There is a different way to think about data centers where the goal of a company is to bring raw unprocessed bits and turn them into higher value bits just like a factory brings in raw materials and transforms the materials into higher value finished goods. The factory uses huge amounts of power in special buildings with lots of equipment and custom processes to support the transformation.   This is the industrialization of the data center.

Barton George writes a post on Big Data any how in general 5% of data is only used.

Big Data is the new Cloud

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Big Data represents the next not-completely-understood got-to-have strategy.  This first dawned on me about a year ago and has continued to become clearer as the phenomenon has gained momentum.  Contributing to Big Data-mania is Hadoop, today’s weapon of choice in the taming and harnessing of  mountains of unstructured data, a project that has its own immense gravitational pull of celebrity.

So what

But what is the value of slogging through these mountains of data?  In a recent Forrester blog, Brian Hopkins lays it out very simply:

We estimate that firms effectively utilize less than 5% of available data. Why so little? The rest is simply too expensive to deal with. Big data is new because it lets firms affordably dip into that other 95%. If two companies use data with the same effectiveness but one can handle 15% of available data and one is stuck at 5%, who do you think will win?

But, do you think Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Zynga use only 5% of the data.  These companies are analyzing all their users and information looking where to make more money.

The new way of thinking is all that data is both market intelligence and the raw materials for information factories.

Barton goes on to point out that Google Facebook, and Yahoo are big Hadoop type of users analyzing unstructured big data.

Deal with it

Hadoop, which I mentioned above, is your first line of offense when attacking big data.  Hadoop is an open source highly scalable compute and storage platform.  It can be used to collect, tidy up and store boatloads of structure and unstructured data.  In the case of enterprises it can be combined with a data warehouse and then linked to analytics (in the case web companies they forgo the warehouse).

And speaking of web companies Hopkins explains

Google, Yahoo, and Facebook used big data to deal with web scale search, content relevance, and social connections, and we see what happened to those markets. If you are not thinking about how to leverage big data to get the value from the other 95%, your competition is.

Some of you may think of this is new, but this is standard practice for many.  The winners think like an information factory integrating across many different systems.  The losers are thinking of a data center as a place their data is stored in silos to support internal organizational structures.