People write (blog) for different reasons. Many only see a limited range of the reasons, and assume you are blogging with the goal of making money or drive a specific agenda like create visibility for yourself. I remember talking to a person who was digging on the reason why I blog. “You must be doing this with an agenda.” I started blogging when an old Microsoft friend said “I just Google’d Green Data Center, no one is writing on this. You should.” My response was I didn’t know. He pushed again and I started with one of these posts.
Beginning of GreenM3
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2007 AT 11:47AMDec 1, 2007
The WSJ with MIT Sloan published an article today which appropriately describes one of the reasons I started working on Green Data Centers. After 14 years at Microsoft, 7 years at Apple, and 5 years at HP, I felt that it was time to do something different, and I quit with no idea what I was going to do.
One area I started working on and had an interest in was how many systems, especially home automation systems were put together for short term objectives of making the sale, and how frustrating it was for home owners when things broke to know the root cause of what broke and whether the repair actually really fixed the problem or systems were just rebooted to mask the problem. Which took me down the path of monitoring and metering. Narrowing down the area of what to focus on I discovered water well systems had the largest value impact to real estate values. Land without water isn't worth a whole lot, and there were plenty of high end real estate being built on large acreage on the top of the hills with great views.15% of US homes are on well water systems, and the percentage is higher for vacation/2nd homes/future retirement.
Then my paths crossed with Pat Kennedy, CEO and founder of OSIsoft. In our discussion of real estate monitoring systems, Pat mentioned the problem of energy consumption in data centers, and how he wanted to measure the power consumption of applications. Having worked on system software and power management for both Microsoft and Apple, I was thinking how to do this, and how difficult it was given almost all the focus on power management was on laptops. I remember in 1999, talking to Server OEMs about using Windows 2000 power management features and they just looked at me strange and asked why would you want to save energy on a server.
In 2008 is when I connected with Mike Manos who I consider my first data center friend who happened to be a speaker at an OSIsoft executive summit.
This started me down the path of writing blog posts to be read by my friends. Things that are out there that are interesting to my friends. And, for my friends I try hard to find the original source of public disclosure.
Last night I was reading Gigaom.com, not because I work part-time for Gigaom Research (less than an hour a week), maybe I should call it micro-time instead of part-time, but because I have many friends there which include the writers. Knowing the people helps me interpret what is written. It is huge advantage I have versus most, spending time to know the perspective of the writer let’s you see things from their perspective as they write.
Last night I found a post by a new Gigaom writer who I don’t know yet Jonathan Vanian on Facebook commissioning an economic impact study for Prineville. This took me to Facebook’s post, and to the specific report. I posted at 9:33p on May 21, 2014. I did a News Google search to see if anyone else had picked up the news.
Facebook posted at 10a on May 21, 2014. This morning is when the tech journals posted on the news.
Facebook notes economic value of constructing data center in Prineville
The Republic - 7 minutes agoPRINEVILLE, Oregon — Facebook says 1,500 construction jobs were created during the four-year build-out of its data center in Prineville. The social media company operates two, 330,000-square-footdata centers and has a 62,000-square-foot "cold storage" ...
