What I am working on next? Product Life Cycle, Supply Chain, Asset Management

I ran into Kevin Heslin and Rich Miller at the Open Compute Project hosted by Facebook.  I figured I would run into Kevin and Rich given the NYC was in their backyard.  Luckily i had been planning a trip with some data center executives to the NYC area for months and it just so happened we were planning on being in NYC at the same time as the Open Compute Project which is also very convenient as many of us had gone to the Open Compute Project in Palo Alto.

Many people know me through my blogging role as I have now reached 4 years writing on the green data center topic.  Prior to that I spent 14 years at Microsoft working on mostly Windows from Win3.1, NT3.1, NT3.5, NT4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows XP on a whole bunch of different OS features.  TrueType font technology is where I spent the most time on a technology cumulatively between Microsoft and Apple.  Fonts is where I made some great friends I still work with today.

At Apple I re-engineered the distribution system to handle triple the capacity with a 1/3 of the labor by analyzing batches of orders to process them as a group instead of individually.  Some ideas stick and can be re-used over and over. After distribution logistics I moved on to OEM supply chain for Apple products, with the best being the Mac II, and even though it was a market flop it was fun traveling all over to get the parts for the Mac Portable.  I cut my teeth on operating systems for the Mac II and Portable, and moved to the OS group to work on KanjiTalk, then work on System 7.

Kevin Heslin asked me what I am busy working on.  I told him I am working on supply chain and asset management systems.  Kevin said, "I thought you were working on Green IT."  There are huge ways to Green IT addressing the supply chain in the data center ecosystem.  Analyzing the overall hardware flowing through the product life cycle will allow you to see things you can't see when staring at servers in a rack which pretty don't move for 3-4 years.  PUE and green technologies can reduce the carbon impact required in the power and cooling systems.  But, there is probably at least a 3X improvement potential in how the IT systems are put together in the data center

After 4 years of blogging on green data centers it is easy for me to write on the topic, spending on average an hour a day and I can write 3 posts.

There are other ideas i am working on like what does a location service look like in a supply chain system.  This stuff takes hundreds of hours over months to figure out, talking to some really smart people.

4 years ago I started working on green data center ideas, and it has been a great experience.  Now, I am spending more time on greening the IT systems, and solving the problems in different way with systems, knowledge, and data analytics.  The data center is a critical part of the solution, and I will still spend time on data centers, but I am more excited to think of new information systems for the data center.

I don't know if this answers the question Kevin asked, "what I am busy working on?"  And, most likely in 6 months there will be something new to study.  But, for now I am thinking about Supply Chain Management, Asset Management and Inventory Control.

Water impacts Industries Gap, Nestle, Kraft, think about Water in the Data Center

Microsoft recently announced transferring its water treatment plant to the City of Quincy.

Here is an article on how water is impacting other industries.

Water Woes Hit Gap, Kraft, Nestle, MillerCoors

Companies including Gap, Kraft and MillerCoors are all dealing with financial hits from water shortages and floods, according to news reports.



Companies including Gap, Kraft and MillerCoors are all dealing with financial hits from water shortages and floods, according to news reports.

The Gap cut its profit forecast by 22 percent after the Texas drought killed much of the year’s cotton crop, Reuters said. Kraft, Sara Lee and Nestle have all announced plans to raise product prices after droughts and floods drove up commodity prices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For you beer drinkers which I think there are a few in the data center crowd.  Water efficiency in an initiative in beer companies.

In the Guardian, MillerCoors head of corporate social responsibility Kim Marotta said the company has had to put “considerable funds” into water-related projects that don’t offer the kinds of returns on investment the company looks for, simply because the initiatives are  necessary to keep the business going. In one major investment, the company recently bought a new pasteurizer water reclaim system that it says will save up to 20 million gallons a year.

MillerCoors is also working with farmers to reform their irrigation practices. It has created a “showcase farm,” in collaboration with the Nature Conservancy and an Idaho farmer, and plans to invite all 500 of its suppliers there.

Although one of its parent companies, SABMiller, reported an eight percent improvement in water efficiency from 2008 to 2010, MillerCoors’ water-to-beer ratio has remained constant. The company has a goal of reducing the ratio by 15 percent to 3.5:1 by 2015.

At some point we are going to hear about water impacting a data center.  Quite a few years ago, T-Mobile's data center was flooded and they moved to Sabey data centers in Quincy.

Who is building Facebook's Sweden Data Center? DPR Construction

Chatting with data center executives we laugh how vendors will call for weeks after a data center project is announced.  For those of you looking up Facebook's data center construction staff like Dan Lee here presenting at Facebook's Open Compute Project in NYC.

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Don't keep your hopes to high.  DPR Construction has a press announcement that they are the construction company for Facebook's Sweden Data Center.

DPR Construction to Build Facebook's Sweden Data Center

Construction to Commence This Month on Social Networking Giant's First Data Center Outside the U.S.

 

 

REDWOOD CITY, CA, Oct 27, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- DPR Construction, one of the nation's top technical builders and a leading builder of data centers, has been awarded a $121 million contract from Facebook to construct a data center in Lulea, Sweden. The project will be constructed in a joint venture between NCC Construction Sweden and Fortis Construction in Portland. This is the first of three data centers planned for the area.

With construction commencing this month, the 300,000-square-foot project is scheduled for completion in December 2012. Facebook has imposed stringent energy-classification requirements, and the data center will be certified in accordance with LEED Gold-level certification.

Intersection of Mobile and Data Centers

I went to GigaOm's Mobilize conference to get an introduction to the Moblie ecosystem.  One of the people I was able to meet was GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham.

Stacey Higginbotham

BIO:Stacey Higginbotham is happy when immersed in SEC filings, tech specs or poking through a data center. She has spent the last ten years covering technology and finance for publications such as The Deal, the Austin Business Journal, The Bond Buyer and Business Week, and works remotely from Austin, Texas.

 

 

 

 

And, Stacey just posted a post on the top 20 Mobile Operators WW.  If you want to think about the intersection of Mobile and Data Centers check out this post to see who are the biggest and will be expanding their data center capacities.

Meet the top 20 mobile operators

By  Oct. 27, 2011, 8:22am PT No Comments

There are more than 5 billion mobile subscribers in the world, but the growth is coming from Asia and Latin America, according to data out on Thursday from Wireless Intelligence, the analyst arm of the GSM Association. The group reports that China Mobile has the highest number of subscribers with 616.8 million, followed by Vodafone and America Movil Group.