Microsoft's Bill Laing Keynotes at Open Compute Summit Jan 28, 2014, "Microsoft Datacenters at Cloud Scale"

I think the last time I saw a Microsoft Presentation at Open Compute Summit is Dileep Bhandardar’s talk in 2011 for the first Open Compute Summit.  There are a handful of people besides Facebook employees who have gone to all the Open Compute Summits.  I’ve gone to all so I know first hand who presented.  I remember Dileep’s talk as I coincidentally  sat next to Dileep on the flight from SEA to SJC in first class and we spent some time going over his presentation.  Dileep is now with Qualcomm and since then I think I can count the number of Microsoft employees I’ve seen at OCP on one hand who I recognize.  (note: given it has been 8 years since I left Microsoft i missed a whole set of Microsoft attendees.

When I checked out the latest schedule for OCP.

Bill Laing is keynoting right after Frank Frankovsky. Given Bill is keynoting I got a feeling there will be a bunch more Microsoft employees at this event.

Oops, Supply and Demand problems for EV chargers at Bay Area companies

I grew up in the SF bay area and live there for 32 years before making the the move to Redmond and now I work from home.  Back when I used to commute to Microsoft, I had a less than a 3 mile drive and used to gas the car up every other month.  This would in theory a good scenario for an electric car, but I don’t think an electric car pays for itself when you drive less than 3,000 miles a year.

When I go to the bay area I borrow one of family’s cars and can get 45 mpg in a VW diesel.  When driving I see lots of EV.  Given Bay Area commutes there are probably many who count on getting a charge at work.  All sounds good until you get to work and find there are no EV spots.

Here is a MercuryNews article on the problem of not enough EV chargers.

'Charge rage': Too many electric cars, not enough workplace chargers

By Dana Hull

dhull@mercurynews.com

SAP is one company highlighted.

Just three years later, SAP faces a problem that is increasingly common at Silicon Valley companies -- far more electric cars than chargers. Sixty-one of the roughly 1,800 employees on the campus now drive a plug-in vehicle, overwhelming the 16 available chargers. And as demand for chargers exceeds supply, a host of thorny etiquette issues have arisen, along with some rare but notorious incidents of "charge rage."

"In the beginning, all of our EV drivers knew each other, we had enough infrastructure, and everyone was happy. That didn't last for long," said Peter Graf, SAP's chief sustainability officer and the driver of a Nissan Leaf. "Cars are getting unplugged while they are actively charging, and that's a problem. Employees are calling and messaging each other, saying, 'I see you're fully charged, can you please move your car?'"

This is probably just the beginning of EV charging problems.  Can you imagine running power all over a parking lot?  EV charging tends to be close to a building.

Is data center growth slowing? Intel says its enterprise server chips slowed

It can be hard to figure out the growth of the data center industry.  One data point is Intel’s sales of its data center server chips.

ZDNet’s Larry Dignan digs into this aspect.

Regarding the data center, Smith said on a conference call:

If you look at the trends in the fourth quarter, I think the trends actually reinforce the growth rate among cloud, high performance computing, networking, storage. They all came in consistent with what we thought. As we entered Q4, we saw that we had more inventory out in the world than we knew when we started the quarter so that had to be burned off. And then secondly, we saw a tapering off in order patterns across certain customers. We think that was driven by the government shutdown and the uncertainty around the debt ceiling. Because when you look at the customers and the segments it's pretty clearly in those segments. We had a range around growth rates for 2014 and the investor meeting we said 10 to 15%. Based on a slower growth in enterprise in Q4 and maybe a slower recovery in enterprise over the course of 2014, I'd say we're now at the lower end of that range. So we're more at the 10% range than the 15% part.

Making a Life Change, Om Malik's serious heart attack

Yesterday, my business partner just had a friend’s father suffer a heart attack.  Yesterday I was at UCSF’s new Hospital Project at Mission Bay working on some process ideas.  And this morning I saw this inspiring post by Om Malik on his life changing experience spurred by his serious heart attack.

Almost exactly six years ago, I survived a serious heart attack thanks to the team at UCSF Medical Center – specifically the cardiology division. 

Because of their diligence, patience and care, I learned a lot about my health and how I wanted to live the rest of my life. Those three weeks spent in the hospital were as healing for my spirit as for my body. 

At my doctor's suggestion, I adopted better lifestyle habits such as a mostly vegetarian diet, more exercise and no alcohol or smoking. But the bigger change came in my approach to life. 

One of the two promises I made to myself when I was released from the hospital was that I was going to stop trying to control everything. As life’s unpredictability showed me, the best you can do is control the inputs (or your own efforts). We cannot control the outcome. The other promise I made was to stop evaluating life by the moment and instead live in the moment. Or, as Mahatma Gandhi put it, “Live as if you would die tomorrow, learn as if you would live forever.”

These past six years have added up to what could be the best years of my life – for now. And I will forever be grateful to the UCSF cardiology team. They saved me from near disaster and gave me a chance to rewrite my life story. 

Now it's my turn to give back to the team that gave so much to me. My goal is to raise $25,000 to help fund various heart disease-related projects at UCSF, and I would really appreciate your support.

There are three things you can do to help:

1. Contribute any amount to the campaign before January 31. 
2. Get more bang for your buck by contributing on Tuesday, December 3. To sweeten the pot, Indiegogo will kick in $1 for every $20 contributed to a #GivingTues campaign on December 3. 
   
3. Tell your friends about this campaign and ask them to contribute. 

UCSF is at the forefront of some of the most exciting research in cardiology. Private support is vital to their work. It allows UCSF to recruit outstanding faculty and trainees, launch cutting-edge research projects, and incubate them until they become competitive for government funding sources. All funds raised will go directly to the division of cardiology in the department of medicine. 

Isn’t it sad that sometimes to change your life needs to be at risk?

How many things finally change habits in the data center after a critical outage?

What Data Center Company will be first to experiment with Hydrogen Solar Cell? Apple, Google, Facebook

For environmental thought leadership in the data center industry the short list is Apple, Google, and Facebook.  Others also have environmental efforts, but these three are consistently in the news sharing their efforts, and the media loves writing about them. 

Here is a press release on a solar powered cell to create hydrogen.

UNC researchers harness sun's energy during day for use at night

Solar energy has long been used as a clean alternative to fossil fuels such as coal and oil, but it could only be harnessed during the day when the sun's rays were strongest. Now researchers led by Tom Meyer at the Energy Frontier Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have built a system that converts the sun's energy not into electricity but hydrogen fuel and stores it for later use, allowing us to power our devices long after the sun goes down.

"So called 'solar fuels' like hydrogen offer a solution to how to store energy for nighttime use by taking a cue from natural photosynthesis," said Meyer, Arey Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at UNC's College of Arts and Sciences. "Our new findings may provide a last major piece of a puzzle for a new way to store the sun's energy – it could be a tipping point for a solar energy future."

Caption: Tom Meyer's new system generates hydrogen fuel by using the sun's energy to split water into its component parts. After the split, hydrogen is sequestered and stored, while the byproduct, oxygen, is released into the air.

Credit: Courtesy: Tom Meyer