Driving Data Center Performance, focus on your team, not on others

At 7x24 Exchange a panel discussion with Google, AOL, and IBM discussed the challenges for Driving Data Center Performance.

Panel Discussion

Moderator:
David Schirmacher
Senior Vice President of Operations
Digital Realty
and
President
7x24 Exchange International

Panelists:
Joe Kava
Vice President
Google Data Center Operations

Todd Traver, CDCDP, PMP
Data Center Strategy and Energy Efficiency Executive 
IBM Global Technology Services 

Michael J. Manos
Chief Technology Officer
AOL

You those of you who haven't seen Mike and Joe on stage, they both have lots of energy.  Todd was also chiming in.

It is difficult to write about all the ideas discussed.  Here are nuggets made during the session.

Joe - Dashboards allows visibility within Google to see operations including executives.

Mike - PUE as a metric has hit the diminishing return point.  The next issue is work per watt.

Todd - integration across the organizations is the next issue to address.

Manos -  It costs 30% overhead to develop the software infrastructure for redundancies and operations. but it pays long term. 

Overall message on measurement - wakeup create your own metrics for your team.

Kava - greatest cause of unavailability are the choices made to make changes, not failure of the electrical or mechanical systems.

There were many more things discussed and this blog post would get way too long if I tried to cover all the ideas.

FYI, I am biased on this blog post, because Mike Manos and Joe Kava are friends that I moderated 1 1/2 yrs ago at 7x24 Exchange, have known many years, and we had plenty of time in the bar and chatting in side conversations during the conference.  Oh and the moderator David Schirmacher is also a good friend.  So I am able to interpret and think more about what is presented, yet I need to go back to watch the video at some point to see more of what I missed. For those of you not at 7x24 Exchange Boca, you'll be able to watch the video to see what you missed too.

Below is a picture with Jack Glass, Mike Manos, and Joe Kava from the conference 1 1/2 years ago. 

Convention Photography are courtesy of Professional Images Photography Joe Rodriguez 2013. 

With IBM acquisition of SoftLayer joins battle of Microsoft & Google vs. Amazon Web Services

GigaOm's Barb Darrow posts on IBM's acquisition of SoftLayer.

Who would have thought 7 years ago when AWS launched that they would be a threat to IBM's business model.

IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer is a bid to make the IT giant relevant in a world where Amazon Web Services has come in from left field to snarf up workloads that IBM would very much like to own. That’s a big problem for Big Blue.

Increasingly, IBM is not just competing with age-old hardware and software rivals like Oracle and HP, but  also with Amazon. Going forward, IBM will butt heads more with Google and Microsoft, which have staked big claims in public cloud infrastructure.

It is interesting to think of this as a battle between IBM's software developers and Amazon Web Service's software developers.  IBM has acquired SoftLayers developers, IP and customers.   When start-ups outgrew AWS the two two places almost everyone evaluates is a move to Rackspace or SoftLayer.  Why the move?  Many times developers want to being run on dedicated hardware.

The second major change was us moving from Amazon Web Services - EC2 and RDS in particular - to running on dedicated hardware, which we rent through Softlayer.

There's nothing wrong with AWS - indeed, we still run a staging environment there - but our database benefits greatly from the low latencies of physical disks, and there aren't very many hosted PostgreSQL services on EC2 that fit our needs.

So, consider that SoftLayer is not just Cloud.

Mike Eruzione's Keynote inspires Data Center Audience at 7x24 Exchange

At this year's 7x24 Exchange in Boca Raton Mike Eruzione gave the opening keynote.

Going for the Gold

Mike Eruzione shares how to overcome any obstacle and go for the gold. When the 1980 US Olympic Men's hockey team, led by Coach Herb Brooks and captained by Mike Eruzione, defeated the mighty USSR team in the semifinals and went on to beat Finland for the gold medal, it truly shocked the world. This stunning achievement, which was captured in the popular 2004 Disney movie Miracle, is considered by many to be the "greatest sports moment of the 20th century." Drawing from his experiences in the 1980 Olympics, Eruzione reveals to audiences how true commitment is at the heart of super achievements

Mike Eruzione
Capitan of the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team and Subject of the Hit Film “Miracle”

The stories Mike told where insightful and entertaining.  A big part of the story was how the team was built and developed, the story behind the success.  Something that a data center crowd can relate to.

Mike played a video of the 1980 game winning goal vs. Russia as he admits many times the audience has people who were not born yet in 1980.

 The impact of Mike's presentation was more than many expected.  To give you an idea of how impactful Mike's 1980 game winning goal is consider his 1980 memorabilia sold for $1.3 mil.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The jersey worn by hockey great Mike Eruzione in the U.S. Miracle on Ice victory over the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Olympics was auctioned for almost $660,000 Saturday, though surprising strong interest in the stick he used to score the winning goal and his gold medal game jersey pushed the overall sale to more than $1.3 million.

Spirited bidding drove the value of the hockey stick to $262,900, more than five times the $50,000 it was expected to go for as a 9-year-old boy and his father outbid others, earning a high-five slap and a hug for the youth from Eruzione himself.

Convention Photography are courtesy of Professional Images Photography Joe Rodriguez 2013. 

Rumor is true, IBM buys Softlayer

There has been a pretty widely discussed rumor than IBM would buy SoftLayer.  And, GigaOm's Barb Darrow reports on the rumor being true.

It’s official: IBM to buy SoftLayer

by Barb Darrow

10 MINS AGO

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SUMMARY:

SoftLayer and IBM’s legacy SmartCloud will form the basis of a new Global Cloud Services division.

In one of the industry’s worst-kept secrets, IBM is buying SoftLayer, a respected cloud services provider.

Google secures Swedish Wind Power for its Hamina Finland Data Center

Google has a blog post on its latest renewable energy agreement in Sweden.  Below is a map of the location of power from origin, where it exists in the grid, and the location of the Hamina Finland data center.

Google bought 100% of the wind power for 10 years.

Here’s how it works: O2, the wind farm developer, has obtained planning approval to build a new 72MW wind farm at Maevaara, in Övertorneå and Pajala municipality in northern Sweden, using highly efficient 3MW wind turbines. We’ve committed to buying the entire output of that wind farm for 10 years so that we can power our Finnish data center with renewable energy. That agreement has helped O2 to secure 100% financing for the construction of the wind farm from the investment arm of German insurance company Allianz, which will assume ownership when the wind farm becomes operational in early 2015.