Do you want DCIM (Infrastructure Management) or DCOM (Operations Management)?

DCIM is a topic almost all data center executives have heard and many have evaluated.

Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) is an emerging (2012) form of data center management which extends the more traditional systems and network management approaches to now include the physical and asset-level components. DCIM leverages the integration of information technology (IT) and facility management disciplines to centralize monitoring, management and intelligent capacity planning of a data center's critical systems. Essentially it provides a significantly more comprehensive view of ALL of the resources within the data center.

DCIM has not taken over the industry. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft build their own solutions.  Here is a question.  Does the data center need Infrastructure Management or Operations Management? Operations Management is a mature concept.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, operations management is the field concerned with managing and directing the physical and/or technical functions of afirm or organization, particularly those relating to development, production, and manufacturing. Operations management programs typically include instruction in principles of general management, manufacturing and production systems, plant management, equipment maintenance management, production control, industrial labor relations and skilled trades supervision, strategic manufacturing policy, systems analysis, productivity analysis and cost control, and materials planning.[1][2]Management, including operations management, is like engineering in that it blends art with applied science. People skills, creativity, rational analysis, and knowledge of technology are all required for success.

MIT and other universities target Operations Management.  The below could easily be applied to data centers.

What is Operations Management?

Operations Management deals with the design and management of products, processes, services and supply chains. It considers the acquisition, development, and utilization of resources that firms need to deliver the goods and services their clients want.

The purvey of OM ranges from strategic to tactical and operational levels. Representative strategic issues include determining the size and location of manufacturing plants, deciding the structure of service or telecommunications networks, and designing technology supply chains.

Tactical issues include plant layout and structure, project management methods, and equipment selection and replacement. Operational issues include production scheduling and control, inventory management, quality control and inspection, traffic and materials handling, and equipment maintenance policies.

I would bet if more people were building Operations Management systems for the data center, then there would be a higher chance of DCOM being used than DCIM.

There may be some who say their DCIM solution does DCOM.  But, my question is where is the Operations Management expert in your company?

Here is a Google data point to prove Operations Management is a valued skill - their Director of Operations and Strategy for the data center group.

Experience

Director, Operations Strategy & Decision Support

Google
March 2011 – Present (2 years 5 months)

Lead a team of quantitative analysts to provide model-based decision support for Google's cloud infrastructure planning. Scope includes datacenter capacity planning, fleet planning, compute and storage resource optimization, network planning, and supply chain planning.

And what degree does he have?  PhD Management Science & Engineering.

Education

Stanford University

PhD, Management Science & Engineering
1996 – 2001

• Expertise: applications of advanced analytics to business and public policy problems. 
• Dissertation: dynamic pricing of capacity in relationship-based supply chains.
• Advanced analytics coursework: decision analysis, probability and statistics, systems modeling and optimization, simulation, economic analysis, mathematical finance, advanced supply chain models.

Problem analyzing data, know your source - example Consumer Reports Hospital Ranking based on Medicare Billing

We all want to go to the best hospitals.  I read the Consumer Reports ranking on Hospitals.  What I didn't know is the ranking is based on billing information from Medicare.  What does billing information from Medicare have to do with the quality of your hospital?  The ability for a hospital to format the data according to Medicare standards could be what gives a hospital a higher ranking.  Some hospitals weren't ranked because their data did not meet medicare standards.

Hope this gets you thinking about your big data projects.

NBCnews reports on this situation.

Dr. Peter Pronovost, senior vice president for patient safety and quality at Johns Hopkins and one of the leaders in the fight to improve hospital quality, applauds the idea but says the data the report is based on is flawed. “I really applaud the Consumer Report effort to get information to consumers about complications,” he said.

“The overall concept is spot-on,” Pronovost told NBC News. “One of the concerns is they measured these complications using administrative data, which is completely understandable, but we know it’s not completely accurate.”

...

Many of the biggest and most famous hospitals aren’t listed. Consumer Reports used Medicare reporting data for its report and could only include hospitals that reported data in a certain way.

 

The article points out an accuracy of 25% correlation of infections base on billing information filed.

Unfortunately, he said, there’s not much better data out there yet. One of the measures – infections among patients fitted with a catheter – is only right 25 percent of the time when calculated using billing information filed to Medicare, Pronovost says.

5 Golden Rules of Plane Design that could work for Data Centers

BBC has a post on the 5 Golden Rules of Plane Design.

Classic aircraft: Five golden rules for enduring design

ByStephen Dowling

HIDE CAPTION

Best of British
The Supermarine Spitfire was designed to protect Britain from aerial attack; it later served from aircraft carriers and nearly broke the sound barrier. (Copyright: Getty Images)

When I read the 5 rules, 4 rules looked like good ones for data centers.

Rule one: Be adaptable and flexible

Rule two: Be easy to fly (operate and use)

Rule three: Be resilient

Rule four – Be easy to maintain (YES!!!!!)

Rule five – Be easy on the eye

The fifth rule "Be easy on the eye" may seem like it doesn't fit, but some of the best data centers are good looking in the details.  Some of the worse are kind of ugly and causes discomfort looking at.

Winning a DCIM deal with a company like Facebook - sell vs. partner

I wrote a blog post on the Facebook DCIM deal that got away from the DCIM vendors.

So let's hypothetically go through a way that a company could work with Facebook on a DCIM solution.  Part of what I am going to describe as a method is knowing people inside Facebook and other of the big data center operators.

First, make a choice, are you going to try and sell what you have or work with Facebook to develop a solution.  Most would try to sell what they have.  I would try to put a proposal on the table to work with Facebook to create a DCIM solution that works for Facebook.  This is NOT a customization of your solution for Facebook.  It is an opportunity to get insight on what is of real value to Facebook for a DCIM solution.

An example of the concept of insight is Slate's article on Google's Jeff Dean.

The real Jeff Dean admits he isn’t a machine-learning expert but says he’s eager to help out with his skills in building scalable, high-performance systems.

Contrary to what the Jeff Dean facts imply, Dean says simply sitting down to write the perfect program is rarely the best way to tackle a problem. Instead, his process often begins with back-of-the-envelope calculations to find the optimal trade-off between quality and speed for a given process. “In a lot of these areas, from machine translation to search quality, you’re always trying to balance what you can do computationally with each query,” he says. “Maybe you can’t afford the ideal [solution], but if we can approximate it in a certain way, you can get 98 percent of the benefit with 1 percent of the computation.”

Another choice is are you building your solution on a Microsoft stack or on open source.  Most don't know that companies like Facebook have many people who have a preference which favors open source.  Down this path is whether you have built on top of NoSQL.  Why NoSQL as described below - simplicity, scaling and availability are easier with NoSQL and it can be a platform for big data and real-time web applications.

A NoSQL database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that uses looser consistency models than traditional relational databases. Motivations for this approach include simplicity of design, horizontal scaling and finer control over availability. NoSQL databases are often highly optimized key–value stores intended for simple retrieval and appending operations, with the goal being significant performance benefits in terms oflatency and throughput. NoSQL databases are finding significant and growing industry use in big data and real-time web applications. NoSQL systems are also referred to as "Not only SQL" to emphasize that they do in fact allow SQL-like query languages to be used.

When I run a Google search of "NoSQL DCIM" most of the results I see are pages with one word in an article and advertisements with the other.

By this point it is easy to stand out vs. other DCIM vendors and you can start a dialog with Facebook on what DCIM should do.

I could go on and on, but it gets more esoteric.  You get the basic ideas.  Once you get past the partnership the really hard part comes up to create something that Facebook wants to buy.

Germany trades Nuclear for Coal, renewable energy is not a viable alternative

Salon has an article on Germany's increase in Coal power production from 43% to 52% with the retirement of Nuclear Power.

Germany’s clean energy plan backfired

The nation's move away from nuclear power drove it right back to coal

Environmental groups like Greenpeace can make all the noise they want, but the state of renewable energy and its costs are not there yet.

Said a campaigner for Greenpeace, “The Merkel government doesn’t do enough to protect the climate anymore.”

Besides Germany.  Spain tried to push Renewable Energy and met an unsustainable cost with sustainable energy.

Mr Miralda is the victim of a bungled, overambitious renewables programme. Governments everywhere want to turn green and create environmentally friendly jobs. But as Spain shows, good intentions are not enough. If the policies are wrong, the benefits are wasted, the jobs disappear, the costs remain—and business investors bear the brunt.

...

But costs exploded, too. Subsidies to solar energy rose from €190m in 2007 to €3.5 billion in 2012 (an 18-fold increase). Total subsidies to all renewables reached €8.1 billion in 2012, see chart. Since the government was unwilling to pass the full costs on to consumers, the cumulative tariff deficit (the cost of the system minus revenues from consumers) reached €26 billion, having risen by about €5 billion a year.

Expectations are high for renewable energy, and there are plenty of politicians who pushed for renewable energy projects and subsidies.  But, given Germany and Spain's results it looks like wind and solar renewable didn't work this time around.

If you are anti-nuclear, then you may cheer France's EDF withdrawing from Nuclear projects in the US.  But the withdrawal is driven by cheap US natural gas not renewables.

PARIS—French power group Electricité de France SA EDF.FR +7.39% said Tuesday it has signed a deal with U.S. partner Exelon Corp., EXC -0.73% marking the start of the French firm's gradual withdrawal from its multibillion-dollar foray into U.S. nuclear power and illustrating the shale-gas boom's continued wide impact on energy companies' strategies.

Cheap, plentiful U.S. natural gas extracted from shale rock formations is undercutting nuclear power as a form of energy for generating electricity. As a result, building and operating new nuclear power plants now looks even riskier and less attractive, damping enthusiasm for a resurgence in the sector and prompting EDF—the world's largest nuclear power operator—to prepare a strategy to exit its U.S. operations.