That is why I am extremely happy to announce my involvement with the University of Missouri in the launch of a Not-For-Profit Data Center specific organization.   You might have read the formal announcement by Dave Ohara who launched the news via his industry website, GreenM3.   Dave is another of of those industry insiders who has long been perplexed by the lack of movement and initiative we have had on some great ideas and stand outs doing great work.  More importantly, it doesn’t stop there.  We have been able to put together quite a team of industry heavy-weights to get involved in this effort.  Those announcements are forthcoming, and when they do, I think you will get a sense of the type of sea-change this effort could potentially have.

One of the largest challenges we have with regards to data centers is education.   Those of you who follow my blog know that I believe that some engineering and construction firms are incented ‘not to change’ or implementing new approaches.  The cover of complexity allows customers to remain in the dark while innovation is stifled. Those forces who desire to maintain an aura of black box complexity  around this space and repeatedly speak to the arcane arts of building out  data center facilities have been at this a long time.  To them, the interplay of systems requiring one-off monumental temples to technology on every single build is the norm.  Its how you maximize profit, and keep yourself in a profitable position. 

When I discussed this idea briefly with a close industry friend, his first question naturally revolved around how this work would compete with that of the Green Grid, or Uptime Institute, Data Center Pulse, or the other competing industry groups.  Essentially  was this going to be yet another competing though-leadership organization.  The very specific answer to this is no, absolutely not.   

These groups have been out espousing best practices for years.  They have embraced different technologies, they have tried to educate the industry.  They have been pushing for change (for the most part).  They do a great job of highlighting the challenges we face, but for the most part have waited around for universal good will and monetary pressures to make them happen.  It dawned on us that there was another way.   You need to ensure that you build something that gains mindshare, that gets the business leadership attention, that causes a paradigm shift.   As we put the pieces together we realized that the solution had to be credible, technical, and above all have a business case around it.   It seemed to us the parallels to the Open Source movement and the applicability of the approach were a perfect match.

To be clear, this Open Source Data Center Initiative is focused around execution.   Its focused around putting together an open and free engineering framework upon which data center designs, technologies, and the like can be quickly put together and more-over standardize the approaches that both end-users and engineering firms approach the data center industry. 

Imagine if you will a base framework upon which engineering firms, or even individual engineers can propose technologies and designs, specific solution vendors could pitch technologies for inclusion and highlight their effectiveness, more over than all of that it will remove much mystery behind the work that happens in designing facilities and normalize conversations.    

If you think of the Linux movement, and all of those who actively participate in submitting enhancements, features, even pulling together specific build packages for distribution, one could even see such things emerging in the data center engineering realm.   In fact with the myriad of emerging technologies assisting in more energy efficiency, greater densities, differences in approach to economization (air or water), use of containers or non use of containers, its easy to see the potential for this component based design.  

One might think that we are effectively trying to put formal engineering firms out of business with this kind of work.  I would argue that this is definitely not the case.  While it may have the effect of removing some of the extra-profit that results from the current ‘complexity’ factor, this initiative should specifically drive common requirements, and lead to better educated customers, drive specific standards, and result in real world testing and data from the manufacturing community.  Plus, as anyone knows who has ever actually built a data center, the devil is in the localization and details.  Plus as this is an open-source initiative we will not be formally signing the drawings from a professional engineering perspective. 

Manufacturers could submit their technologies, sample application of their solutions, and have those designs plugged into a ‘package’ or ‘RPM’ if I could steal a term from the Redhat Linux nomenclature.  Moreover, we will be able to start driving true visibility of costs both upfront and operating and associate those costs with the set designs with differences and trending from regions around the world.  If its successful, it could be a very good thing.  

We are not naive about this however.  We certainly expect there to be some resistance to this approach out there and in fact some outright negativity from those firms that make the most of the black box complexity components. 

We will have more information on the approach and what it is we are trying to accomplish very soon.  

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I am betting the topics will range from data center legislation, impact of the cloud, technologies, and key trends.

I am looking forward to some good mid-western steak, great conversation, and walking away from the meeting with more important perspectives on what we are facing as an industry. 

I will try and post a summary of topics discussed later this week. 

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I recently got an interesting note from Joel Stone, the Global Operations Chief at Global Switch.  As some of you might know Joel used to run North American Operations for me at Microsoft.  I guess he was digging through some old pictures and found this old photo of our initial site selection trip to Quincy, Washington.

As you can see, the open expanse of farmland behind me, ultimately became Microsoft’s showcase facilities in the Northwest.  In fact you can even see some farm equipment just behind me.   It got me reminiscing about that time and how exciting and horrifying that experience can be.

At the time Quincy, Washington was not much more than a small agricultural town, whose leaders did some very good things (infrastructurally speaking) and benefitted by the presence of large amounts of hydro-power.  When we went there, there were no other active data centers for hundreds of miles, there were no other technology firms present, and discussions around locating a giant industrial-technology complex here seemed as foreign as landing on the moon might have sounded during World War Two.

Yet if you fast forward to today companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Sabey, Intuit, and others have all located technology parks in this one time agricultural hub.   Data Center Knowledge recently did an article on the impacts to Quincy. 

Many people I speak to at conferences generally think that the site selection process is largely academic.   Find the right intersection of a few key criteria and locate areas on a map that seem to fit those requirements.   In fact, the site selection strategy that we employed took many different factors into consideration each with its own weight leading ultimately to a ‘heat map’ in which to investigate possible locations. 

Even with some of the brightest minds, and substantial research being done, its interesting to me that ultimately the process breaks down into something I call ‘Kickin Dirt’.   Those ivory tower exercises ultimately help you narrow down your decisions to a few locations, but the true value of the process is when you get out to the location itself and ‘kick the dirt around’.   You get a feel for the infrastructure, local culture, and those hard to quantify factors that no modeling software can tell you.  

Once you have gone out and kicked the dirt,  its decision time.  The decision you make, backed by all the data and process in the world, backed by personal experience of the locations in question,  ultimately nets out to someone making a decision.   My experience is that this is something that rarely works well if left up to committee.  At some point someone needs the courage and conviction, and in some cases outright insanity to make the call. 

If you are someone with this responsibility in your job today – Do your homework, Kick the Dirt, and make the best call you can.  

To my friends in Quincy – You have come along way baby!  Merry Christmas!

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My talk centered around the coming Carbon Cap and Trade Regulation and its specific impact on IT organizations and the data center industry.  I started my talk with a joke about how excited I was to be addressing a room of tomorrow’s eco-terrorists.  The joke went flat and the audience definitely had a fairly serious demeanor.   This was reinforced when I asked how many people in the audience thought that regulation was a real and coming concern for IT organizations.  Their response startled me.

I was surprised because nearly 85% of the audience had raised their hands.  If I contrast that to the response to the exact same question asked three months earlier at the Tier One Research Data Center Conference where only about 5% of the audience raised their hands, its clear that this is a message that is beginning to resonate, especially in the larger organizations.  

In my talk, I went through the Carbon Reduction Commitment legislation passed in the UK and the negative effects it is having upon data center and IT industry there, as well as the negative impacts to Site Selection Activity that it is causing firms to skip investing Data Center capital in the UK by and large.   I also went through the specifics of the Waxman-Markey bill in the US House of Representatives and the most recent thought on the various Senate based initiatives on this topic.   I have talked here about these topics before, so I will not rehash those issues for this post.  Most specifically I talked about the potential cost impacts to IT organizations and Data Center Operations and the complexity of managing both carbon reporting and both direct and indirect costs resulting from these efforts.  

While I was pleasantly surprised by the increased awareness of senior IT,  business managers, and Data Center Operators around the coming regulation impacts, I was not surprised by the responses I received with regards to their level of preparedness to reacting these initiatives.   Less than 10% of the room had the technology in place to even begin to collect the needed base information for such reporting and roughly 5% had begun a search for software or initiate development efforts to aggregate and report this information.

With this broad lack of infrastructural systems in place, let alone software for reporting -  I predict we are going to see a phenomena similar to the Y2K craziness in the next 2-3 years.  As the regulatory efforts here in the United States and across the EU begin to crystallize, organizations will need to scramble to get the proper systems and infrastructure in place to ensure compliance.   I call this coming phenomena – CO2K.  Regardless what you call it, I suspect, the coming years will be good for those firms with power management infrastructure and reporting capabilities.

\Mm

I for one would never trust some data center dork in a video.

\Mm

The entire event should be quite super-charged especially given the recent Carbon Reduction Commitment legislation in the UK.  For those of you keeping a close eye on the emerging impact of carbon legislation across the world this event is likely to source a number of lightning rods and thought leadership to watch out for.  

If you have not signed up and will be in London, I would strongly encourage you to do so.   As always if you happen to see me wandering about, please feel free to stop and chat awhile. 

\Mm

LIVE CHILLER SIDE CHAT

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When you have a couple of hundred people logged in, its unrealistic and all but impossible to answer all of the questions.  However, I think Rich did a great job bouncing around to clue into key themes that he saw emerging from the questions.    One thing is for sure is that we will try to do another one of those given the amount of unanswered questions.  I have already been receiving some great ideas on how to possibly structure these moving forward.  Hopefully everyone got some value or insight out of the exercise.  As I warned before the meeting, you may not get the right answer, but you will definitely get my answer.  

One of the topics that we touched on briefly during the call, and went a bit under-discussed was regulation associated with data centers or more correctly, regulation and legislation that will affect our industry.    For those of you who are interested I recently completed an executive primer video on the subject of data center regulation.  The link can be found here:

Data Center Regulation Video.

Thanks again for spending your valuable time with me today and hope we can do it again!

\Mm

Hope to see you there!

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I think perhaps the most interesting aspect of this to me is that this will be a live event and focused on answering questions that come in from the audience.   As you know I usually use my ‘Chiller Side Chat’ posts to discuss some topic or other that interests or frustrates me.    Sometimes, even others think they may be interesting or relevant too.    I am planning on meeting up with Rich and doing the webcast from Las Vegas, where I am speaking at the Tier One Hosting Transformation Summit.

I am incredibly excited about this event and hope that if you have time you will join us.  While I will endeavor to give you the right answers – one thing you can be sure of is that you will get MY answers. 

See you then!

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