Off to Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, Jan 16- 17

This week is the Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara.  Registration is still open, so you can still sign up.

Summit IV – 2013

The fourth Open Compute Summit is January 16-17, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center – 5001 Great America Parkway in Santa Clara, CA, USA. It’s sponsored by these organizations.

Registration is now open, and is still free, so register today!

Join the Open Compute Project group on Facebook for all OCP announcements.

AGENDA

To see full details of the agenda, please click here.

SUMMIT LOGISTICS

Wednesday, January 16

• 7:30a – 9:00a Registration
• 8:00a – 9:00a Breakfast/Sponsor Booths Open
• 9:00a – 12:00a Keynotes, Announcements and Presentations from Industry Luminaries
• 12:00a – 1:00p Lunch
• 1:00p – 6:00p Executive Sessions/Sponsor Presentations/Hardware Hackathon
• 3:00p – 6:00p Technical Tracks (registration required — see below)
• 6:00p – 6:30p Shuttles to Cocktail Reception
• 6:30p – 10:30p: Cocktail Reception – Computer History Museum

Thursday, January 17

• 8:00a – 9:00a Registration Opens/Breakfast/Sponsor Booths Open
• 9:00a – 12:00p Continuation of Technical Tracks/Hardware Hackathon
• 12:00p – 2:00p Lunch
• 2:00p – 5:00p Plenary/Hackathon Prizes/Round Up
• ~5:00p – Summit Concludes

Analysis of USA Geopolitic strengths, focuses a lot on water

Stratfor has an geopolitical analysis of the USA.

Part of this analysis focuses on the strength of the water systems.

The most distinctive and important feature of North America is the river network in the middle third of the continent. While its components are larger in both volume and length than most of the world's rivers, this is not what sets the network apart. Very few of its tributaries begin at high elevations, making vast tracts of these rivers easily navigable. In the case of the Mississippi, the head of navigation -- just north of Minneapolis -- is 3,000 kilometers inland.

The network consists of six distinct river systems: the Missouri, Arkansas, Red, Ohio, Tennessee and, of course, the Mississippi. The unified nature of this system greatly enhances the region's usefulness and potential economic and political power. First, shipping goods via water is an order of magnitude cheaper than shipping them via land. The specific ratio varies greatly based on technological era and local topography, but in the petroleum age in the United States, the cost of transport via water is roughly 10 to 30 times cheaper than overland. This simple fact makes countries with robust maritime transport options extremely capital-rich when compared to countries limited to land-only options. This factor is the primary reason why the major economic powers of the past half-millennia have been Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Water is a low cost transport system that supports economic growth.  Water is also critical to run power plants which is not touched on in the Stratfor report.  It would seem that the abundance of water in the USA support its geopolitical strength and the development of the data center industry.

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.