GM announces Atlanta Data Center with 1,000 employees, realizing outsourcing IT was not such a good idea

WSJ has an article on GM's new Atlanta data center.  The part that caught attention is how GM is choosing reduce its outsourcing to 10% of its IT.

GM wants to bring 90% of its IT work back in house to direct new developments and reduce the overlap of current services. The auto maker has already hired more than 700 IT workers to staff innovation centers in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Mich. A fourth site, of similar scale, will be announced later this year.

"Our strategy is to reach the top talent in the US market and tap the nearby universities," GM Chief Information Officer Randy Mott said on Thursday. "These are going to be the best jobs in the IT industry over the next five years since GM is on a transformation journey. They will work on everything from design of vehicles to high touch for the consumer to what is offered in our vehicles."

Part of what got GM in this spot is its history with EDS who it acquired in 1984.

At one time, the bulk of GM's IT work was done by Electronic Data Systems, which it acquired from billionaire businessman and former presidential candidate Ross Perot in 1984. GM spun off EDS in 1996. H-P bought EDS in 2008 and has been cutting jobs ever since.

Coal use is going up in Europe vs. the USA, renewable energy replaces nuclear and gas, not coal

The Economist has an article on the use of Coal in Europe and how the renewable energy deployed is not replacing coal.

WHILE coal production and use plummet in America, in Europe “we have some kind of golden age of coal,” says Anne-Sophie Corbeau of the International Energy Agency. The amount of electricity generated from coal is rising at annualised rates of as much as 50% in some European countries. Since coal is by the far the most polluting source of electricity, with more greenhouse gas produced per kilowatt hour than any other fossil fuel, this is making a mockery of European environmental aspirations. How did it happen?

The article closes with a summary of the situation.

If policies work as intended, electricity from renewables will gradually take a larger share of overall generation, and Europe will end up with a much greener form of energy. But at the moment, EU energy policy is boosting usage of the most polluting fuel, increasing carbon emissions, damaging the creditworthiness of utilities and diverting investment into energy projects elsewhere. The EU’s climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, likes to claim that in energy and emissions Europe is “leading by example”. Uh-oh.

Happy Holidays 2012

It's getting close to the Holidays, and I'll be taking a break from blogging until the new year.  Even this week has been busy with my daughters annual Xmas cookie decorating party that my wife is turned into a well run production.  Here are some pictures.  Why use Instagram to share when I can share them here. :-)

Have a Happy Holidays

-Dave Ohara

Calling Data Center Hardware Hacks, Open Compute Project event on Jan 16-17

Open Compute Project is hosting for the first time a hardware hack event.

OCP Hardware Hack!

Wednesday, December 5, 2012· Posted by John Kenevey at 16:07 PM

OCP is hosting its first hardware hackathon at the upcoming Open Compute Summit, January 16-17, 2013 in Santa Clara, California. Starting today, you can register for the hack. We are limiting attendance to 100 people. Registering for the hack also registers you for the entire OCP summit, so you can register for both events at once. The summit and the hack are both being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

We ask that once you register for the hack, you participate in the entire hack, which will last 6-10 hours over the course of the two day summit.

An example hack project is.

Example hack project: Use low-power sensors for temperature information across a data center. Use the Zigbee wireless protocol and aggregate the heat data across the data center. This has the benefit of not requiring any additional wiring or interfaces.

Here is what you can expect.

Goals, Tools and an Example

Goal: Design a set of “Lego” blocks that can be applied to the scale compute data center space with a focus on improving energy efficiency, operational efficiency and cost reduction.

Design tools:

• ECAD, electrical and holistic collaboration: Upverter
• Software collaboration: GitHub
• Mechanical collaboration: GrabCAD

Skill set: electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, software engineer, designer. (Ideally each team has a combination of these skill sets.)

Starting point: We recommend starting with a really simple circuit that can be modified, or even whole-scale deleted, but provides a great base to scaffold onto. It could be a connector, a micro-controller or a power circuit.

Kfir Godrich discusses Data Center Commissioning role in delivering availability

I've had the pleasure of some great conversations with Kfir Godrich.  Kfir has a guest post on Compass Data Centers blog that discusses Data Center Commissioning.

Kfir starts with a subject that reminds me of my first summer jobs at HP working in Quality engineering at HP where I worked on warranty and reliability issues.

The data center commissioning (or Cx) journey starts with understanding the basics of reliability engineering contained in the IEEE Gold Book. First, we need to define the difference between reliability and availability. Availability is the probability that a system will work as required during the period of the mission while Reliability is the probability that the system will in fact maintain operations during the mission. The related terminology that helps us introduce the Cx, is the data center predicted performance model. This model follows a failure mode typical to electronic equipment also known as the “bathtub curve” (see Fig. 1).

In Phase 1, also called the Infant Mortality Period, data centers are going through a decreasing failure rate that it is very much desired to be as short as possible. This can be achieved through performing a full commissioning as described later. It is the author’s humble opinion that the level of commissioning must be proportional to the level of criticality and design Tier (per Uptime Institute) of the data center.

In Phase 2, referred to as the Random Failure Period, the failure rate is constant and mostly known by the fact that MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) is calculated during this phase. The desire here is to take that flat curve as low as possible. In Phase 3, The Wear-out Period – is where components begin to reach the end of their usable life. Replacing components proactively aids in delaying the ultimate upturn in the graph.

This post is the first in a series so if you are interested in this topic there will be more.

Therefore, data center commissioning is about enabling the business through performance validation and functional testing of integrated platforms. This should typically be performed by an independent agent as part of the customers trusted advisory team and as a core part of the overall project schedule. The cost for a commissioning agent can be in the range of 0.8-2% of the total budget. Since commissioning is essential for government facilities, the US Department of Energy is publishing certain guidelines for commissioning scope and cost. Geographically, commissioning is more popular and comprehensive in North America and parts of Western Europe while the rest of the world is becoming more familiar these concepts. Our next Blog will go a bit deeper into the Integrated Testing—stay tuned. Till next time, Kfir

Kfir's new company is here.