Where I'll be at DCD SF, Chairing Hall 1 Morning Presentations

May & June are busy months for the data center conferences.  In two weeks, I’ll be at DCD SF, and there are many repeats of people I have seen at other conferences. You can find me in the Main Hall chairing the morning presentations.  Unfortunately, I need to leave before the end of the conference for another event related to Gigaom Structure in SF which follows the DCD event.

One of the interesting differences between DatacenterDynamics and other conferences is it is peer-led.

I just came back from 7x24 Exchange which is a non-profit and I think you could say they have the idea of peer-led as well. 

At the beginning of May was Data Center World, I went to LV to meet with friends, but didn’t have time for Data Center World or IBM’s conference.  In May also was Uptime Symposium.  On a plane flight to SJC, one of my data center friends asked if I was going to Uptime.  I told him no, I am blacklisted for both the conference and exposition.  He laughed and said I should get a badge and black out my name.  To complete the idea, I have now modified my badge from the last time I attend Uptime Symposium.  Some people will exchange conference badges to get into the conference.  There is no way this one is going to get me into Uptime. :-)  But it does get a bunch of laughs.

Seattle is the Cloudy City, Oracle joins, HP, Amazon, & Microsoft for Centers of Cloud Development

Today the weather shows clouds.

This is what the clouds look like now at 5:38a.  See those little strands of clouds?  Today is partially cloudy.

This morning I saw that Oracle is starting its Cloud Development Group in Seattle.

We're landing in Seattle. 

Oracle is building the next great cloud computing environment, from the ground up. We’re committed to building the best high-scale, cost competitive, multi-tenant cloud where the Fortune 1000 will run their businesses.

If you’re a rock star engineer and want to build cutting edge, innovative new services, come join us.

We are building a team of the very best software engineers with expertise and passion for distributed systems, virtualized infrastructure and highly available services.
Our aim? To provide our customers with best in class compute, storage, networking, database, security, and an ever expanding set of foundational cloud-based services.

Thanks to Amazon starting AWS, and Microsoft joining in there a large concentration of cloud talent to raid to start up a cloud development group.  HP recruited Bill Hilf from Microsoft.

Bill Hilf — who also served as general manager of Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud service — left Microsoft for HP this summer, and now serves as HP’s ‎vice president of converged cloud products and services. That means he oversees strategy not only for the HP cloud service — a direct competitor toWindows Azure and the leader in the cloud game, Amazon Web Services — but also for the HP software and hardware tools that let businesses build private cloud-like services in their own data centers. 

With Oracle and others looking to start-up cloud efforts, Seattle is one of the first choices to start development groups.  It is bit ironic that one of the most famous cities being Cloudy is the center of Cloud Software Development. 

The Performance of Water Based Cooling Systems have Problems Because of Bad Words, No Don't Listen to Gwyneth Paltrow

I like discussing water in relation to data centers.  So I pay attention to when water shows up in the news.  Didn’t expect this one though.  Water’s performance is affected by bad words according to Gwyneth Paltrow.

I am fascinated by the growing science behind the energy of consciousness and its effects on matter. I have long had Dr. Emoto's coffee table book on how negativity changes the structure of water, how the molecules behave differently depending on the words or music being expressed around it. Below, Dr. Sadeghi explores further.

The Dr. Sadeghi says.

In his experiments, Emoto poured pure water into vials labeled with negative phrases like "I hate you" or "fear." After 24 hours, the water was frozen, and no longer crystallized under the microscope: It yielded gray, misshapen clumps instead of beautiful lace-like crystals. In contrast, Emoto placed labels that said things like "I Love You," or "Peace" on vials of polluted water, and after 24 hours, they produced gleaming, perfectly hexagonal crystals.

So maybe what’s wrong with the performance in mechanical systems is the staff doesn’t spend enough time saying “I love you” and “Peace."

Gwyneth spoke at the Code Conference and said bad social media comments are like war.

Green Beret slams Gwyneth Paltrow: ‘Twitter hate is not war’

The Two 1st of-its-kind Fuel-cel Powered Data Centers? 1999 FNB Omaha & 2013 eBay

I was at 7x24 Exchange and there was keynote by eBay on Quantitative Comparison of Critical Facility Electrical System Architectures.  In this presentation eBay said they are the first Fuel-cel powered data center.  My immediate thought was, “hey didn’t we have someone else say they had the first fuel cel powered center present at 7x24?”  I checked the 7x24 Exchange conference program and yep one year ago was the presentation by First National Bank of Omaha.

Then I was thinking maybe I misheard what was said.  eBay hit the news with its fuel-cel powered data center and found Sept 2013 so its not anything new that eBay has the 1st fuel-cel powered data center in the news

eBay turns on first-of-its-kind fuel cell-powered data center

SUMMARY:

The world’s first data center powered primarily with fuel cells has finally been switched on in Utah by its owner, eBay. Its an unusual test bed which will give eBay insight into cleaner power and distributed energy.

Digging further I found on the official eBay site that the eBay data center is the first Bloom Energy Servers used as primary power for a data center.

Our newest data center is the first in the world to use Bloom Energy Servers™ as the primary, on-site power source, instead of the traditional electric utility grid.

So eBay is the first data center powered by Bloom Energy Fuel cels, not the first data center powered by fuel cels.  Maybe I did mishear the presentation, and eBay said this is the first bloom energy fuel cels used as primary power for a data center.

Here is the 7x24 Exchange video of FNB discussing the lifecycle issues of running fuel cels for 14 years.  It was quite informative.

7x24 Exchange Conference Spring, ending with the best conversations

7x24 Exchange Spring Conference ended yesterday and after 4 years and 7 conferences I’ve learned a lot by making great friends.  The closing of a conference is a race to the airport for almost everyone.  One of the things I tried a few years ago was to book my return flight in the evening and go to the resort pool to enjoy the facilities.  Yesterday by the pool I ended with some of the best conversations with friends at the conference who also choose to enjoy the facilities.

Chatting after the close of the event is so much more relaxing and many times you talk about other things.  I’ve already booked my travel to Phoenix with a 6p return flight.  I can always get on an earlier flight, but my hope is David Schirmacher and I will keep our regular catch up lunch after the conference.  David is the person who convinced me to attend 7x24 Exchange for the first time 4 years ago, and now that I think about I should count him as my 1st 7x24 Exchange friend in a long line of many other friends I see at 7x24 Exchange.  See many of you at Fall 2014 event.

Fall 2014
October 26-29, 2014
JW Marriott Desert Ridge
Phoenix, AZ
Scaling to the Future