After 13 years Kevin Heslin switches from Publishing to Research

There are a lot of people making job changes in December and now that their LinkedIn profile is updated the information is public.  One of the latest changes is Kevin Heslin leaving the publishing world at Mission Critical Magazine for Research Manager with 451 group.

Kevin Heslin

Research Manager at The 451 Group

Albany, New York Area

Publishing

Previous	Mission Critical magazine, a BNP Media publication, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,  IESNA
Education	Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Kevin spent 13 years at Mission Critical.

Editor

Mission Critical magazine, a BNP Media publication

December 1999 – January 2013 (13 years 2 months)Coxsackie, NY

I'm the editor of Mission Critical magazine, which is just a lot of fun, considering the dynamism of the industry and the great people in it. As editor, I get to talk to and work with real experts in power, cooling, IT, and management to develop content for Mission Critical's print and electronic editions, webinars, enewsletters, and website.

I once was on a panel with Matt Stansberry, Kevin Heslin, Rich Miller to discuss data center publishing.  Since that presentation everyone has changed organizations.  Matt is now with 451 Group along with Kevin.  And Rich Miller is part of iNetinteractive.  http://www.inetinteractive.com/blog/news/data-center-knowledge-acquired-by-inet-interactive/

Change is constant even in the data center industry.

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.