Intel's Video on Reusing Water in Fab Facilities

Intel has a nice video with 19,000 views after a month on water reuse in its wafer fab facilities.

Published on May 12, 2015
Meet Geetha Shankar, Environmental Health & Safety Engineer at Intel. Her job is to manage water treatment facilities that recycle and purify the water used during the manufacturing of silicon wafers within Intel Fabs.

City water is used to clean silicon wafer during the production process at Intel, that water is then filtered back to drinking water standards and re-used, or filtered to gray water standards and re-used throughout the community in a variety of forms. Geetha and her team insure that the water treatment facilities run correctly, thereby providing the necessary water for production while also providing usable water back to the community in which Intel is a part of.

7x24 Exchange Spring Conference Publishes its Attendance and Updates its Mission to include Sustainability

How many people attending a conference can be hard to find.  The staff at 7x24 Exchange make it easy to know as they share the current and past attendance numbers.  (Note: SC is spring conference and FC is fall conference)

This sharing fits with 7x24 Exchange updating its mission to include sustainability and social responsibility which is built on being open and transparent.

As you look at what data center conferences to attend look for whether they disclose past conference attendance to gauge whether the conference is appealing to its user base.

7x24 Exchange has been discussing energy efficiency, renewable energy, and other sustainability ideas for years.  And, now its part of their official mission statement.

7x24 Exchange Spring 2015 Keynote Astronaut Mark Kelly - "Endeavour to Succeed"

Astronaut Mark Kelly gave the opening keynote at the Spring 2015 7x24 Exchange Conference in Orlando on June 8, 2015 - "Endeavour to Succeed"

The keynote was well received and a memorable one. The opening video was an excerpt from this U2 video to a concert in Seattle at Qwest Field.

One of the main themes that Mark Kelly covered is having a Goal, a Plan, and Working hard.  One of my data center friends had just seen Mark Kelly at another executive event and he noticed there were parts of the presentation that are his theme, and how he customized the presentation to the data center audience.

To give you an idea of what Mark spoke about here is a Ted video.

7x24 Exchange spends a lot of effort to get inspirational keynotes and this keynote by Mark Kelly is amongst the top ones.

Fun Project, Video System for Ski Race Team at Crystal Mountain

The Crystal Mountain Alpine Club (CMAC) is the race ski club my kids ski with.  Last year the new president asked me to take on the project to add a video system to one of the race hills (Gold Hill).  Below is a map with distances.

When they first approached me they were pumped to use wireless.  But, here a few problems.  There would be 4 access points - Start, 2 midpoint access points, and finish.  The suggested wireless equipment had no data on working in snow and rain.  There is a Verizon Cel tower at the top of lift.

Good things is we can get access to each ski lift tower and there is power available.  Snow making gear is being installed this summer which adds additional areas to add conduit.

After talking to some friends at Corning Fiber I had enough information to look at single mode fiber with one pair going between each of the 4 access points, another pair from the start to finish, and one more pair as backup.  After a bit more time thinking this through I got worried that having 4 access points/switches to get a signal from the start to finish would have issues with performance and a failure in a switch or fiber would affect the overall availability of the system.

Given we were now using single mode fiber we could run the fiber from the race hill to the lodge, allowing video distribution to areas in the lodge when there is a race.  Also we could put switch gear and servers in the lodge instead of only having the heated start shack.

One way to solve the problem of having up to 4 switches in the fiber optic network is to home run the fiber optic run to each of the switches on the ski lift towers.  So we would now have 4 pairs of fiber optic, home running to the lodge and after the splice add another home run with the 4 pairs to the start shack.  There are now fewer switches in any video feed run.  There are 4 fiber optic cables we can isolate and run each at 1 gbps for the video stream from each individual switch/access point.  If a connection from the lodge fails to a given switch, we can see if we have connection from the start shack to the same switch.  If both connections don't work, then most likely the switch on the ski tower is bad.  We can also set up the switches with two network connections with fail over.

I'll be writing more on this project as we get into more of the details.  As far as I know no one has gone through this much effort to think through the network and operating issues in a video system for a ski racing with snow and rain conditions.

Will I go to DCD Internet July 30-31, 2015 in SF? Yes - Speakers Look Good

DatacenterDynamics built its events on being in many cities around the world.  They have scaled back and their next US event is in SF on July 30-31.  Looking at the speaker list convinced me it was worth going to.  What you will not find is Uptime Institute, 451 Group, or Gartner on the speaker list.  They are competitors.  Is it really that bad that you don't have analysts there presenting?  All to often they are trying to sell you on their services.  (So glad I stopped doing that analyst stuff years ago.  Was not fun and too many times you would just make up stuff to support the sale.)  :-)

It is interesting that Uptime Institute is planning on going to Dallas from Santa Clara in 2016 whereas DCD is sticking to SF one of its most popular shows.  Here is a list of DCD's shows.

The other indicator of how well the show is doing financially are the # of sponsors.  I had written about the sponsors at 7x24 Exchange vs. Uptime Symposium. http://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2015/5/18/uptime-symposium-vs-7x24-exchange-sponsors.

Below is the DCD sponsor list.  Now some of you may want to go to a show with less sponsors, but those sponsorship dollars is what help pays for the event.