The AOL Micro-DC adds new capability

Back in July, I announced AOL’s Data Center Independence Day with the release of our new ‘Micro Data Center’ approach.   In that post we highlighted the terrific work that the teams put in to revolutionize our data center approach and align it completely to not only technology goals but business goals as well.   It was an incredible amount of engineering and work to get to that point and it would be foolish to think that the work represented a ‘One and Done’ type of effort.  

So today I am happy to announce the roll out of a new capability for our Micro-DC – An indoor version of the Micro-DC.

While the first instantiations of our new capability were focused on outdoor environments, we were also hard at work at an indoor version with the same set of goals.   Why work on an indoor version as well?   Well you might recall in the original post I stated:

We are no longer tied to traditional data center facilities or colocation markets.   That doesn’t mean we wont use them, it means we now have a choice.  Of course this is only possible because of the internally developed cloud infrastructure but we have freed ourselves from having to be bolted onto or into existing big infrastructure.   It allows us to have an incredible amount geo-distributed capacity at a very low cost point in terms of upfront capital and ongoing operational expense.

We need to maintain a portfolio of options for our products and services.  In this case – having an indoor version of our capabilities to ensure that our solution can live absolutely anywhere.   This will allow our footprint, automation and all, to live inside any data center co-location environment or the interior of any office building anywhere around the planet, and retain the extremely low maintenance profile that we were targeting from an operational cost perspective.  In a sense you can think of it as “productizing” our infrastructure.  Could we have just deployed racks of servers, network kit, etc. like we have always done?  Sure.   But by continuing to productize our infrastructure we continue to drive down the costs relating to our short term and long term infrastructure costs.  In my mind, Productizing your infrastructure, is actually the next evolution in standardization of your infrastructure.   You can have infrastructure standards in place – Server Model, RAM, HD space, Access switches, Core switches, and the like.  But until you get to that next phase of standardizing, automating, and ‘productizing’ it into a discrete set of capabilities – you only get a partial win.

Some people have asked me, “Why didn’t you begin with the interior version to start with? It seems like it would be the easier one to accomplish.”  Indeed I cannot argue with them, it would have probably been easier as there were much less challenges to solve.  You can make basic assumptions around where this kind of indoor solution would live in, and reduce much of the complexity.   I guess it all nets out to a philosophy of solving the harder problems first.   Once you prove the more complicated use case, the easier ones come much faster.   This is definitely the situation here.  

While this new capability continues the success we are seeing in re-defining the cost and operations of our particular engineering environments, the real challenge here (as with all sorts infrastructure and cloud automation) is whether or not we can map similar success of our applications and services to work correctly in that space.   On that note, I should have more to post soon. Stay Tuned! 

 

\Mm

Read Full Post »

DataCentres 2012 – Nice,France

This week I am headed off to France to be a keynote speaker at DataCentres2012.   In my opinion this event is the pre-eminent infrastructure and operations conference across the whole of Europe if not the world.   Regularly attracting the best speakers and infrastructure professionals in the industry (myself excluded of course – perhaps they are looking for some comic relief?) along with an incredible list of attendees which is a veritable who’s who of our industry world-wide. 

By the looks of it, Cloud and Energy concerns will be the topic of many of the conversations.    No doubt many will focus on the impact  of technology, its usefulness, features, and capabilities.   But those of you who have heard me speak before know, that I believe there is a larger more personal story – for both the professional and the companies they represent.  The problems we are facing in the industry today are complicated, multi-faceted, and deep-rooted in the past of our own decisions or the decisions of our predecessors.   We sometimes think technology alone is the salve for all ills.   This is no more true than the purchase of a pen being the solution to writers block. 

My talk will center on this multi-faceted problem space.   I will use real world examples of how I have, and am tackling those issues.  Who knows?  I might even let loose some of the top secret work we have been doing internally to position us for the future.   

As always – If you happen to be at the conference or in Nice -  Don’t be a stranger!  

\Mm

Read Full Post »

Uptime, Cowgirls, and Success in California

This week my teams have descended upon the Uptime Institute Symposium in Santa Clara.  The moment is extremely bittersweet for me as this is the first Symposium in quite sometime I have been unable to attend.  With my responsibilities expanding at AOL beginning this week there was simply too much going on for me to make the trip out.  It’s a down right shame too.  Why?

We (AOL) will be featured in two key parts at Symposiums this time around for some incredibly ground breaking work happening at the company.   The first is a recap of the incredible work going on in the development of our own cloud platforms.  Last year you may recall that we were asked to talk about some of the wins and achievements we were able to accomplish with the development of our cloud platform.   The session was extremely well received.   We were asked to come back, one year on, to discuss about how that work has progressed even more.   Aaron Lake, the primary developer of our cloud platforms and my Infrastructure Development Team, will be talking on the continued success, features, and functionality, and the launch of our ATC Cloud Only Data Center.   Its been an incredible break neck pace for Aaron and his team and they have delivered world-class capabilities for us internally.

Much of Aaron’s work has also enabled us to win the Uptime Institutes First Annual Server Round Up Award.  I am especially proud of this particular honor as it is the result of an amazing amount of hard work within the organization on a problem faced by companies all over the planet.   Essentially this is Operations Hygiene at a huge scale, getting rid of old servers, driving consolidation, moving platforms to our cloud environments and more.  This talk will be lead by Julie Edwards, our Director of Business Operations and Christy Abramson, our Director of Service Management.  Together these two teams led the effort to drive out “Operational Absurdities” and our “Power Hog” programs.  We have sent along Lee Ann Macerelli and Rachel Paiva who were the primary project managers instrumental in making this initiative such a huge success.  These “Cowgirls” drove an insane amount of work across the company resulting in over 5 million dollars of un-forecasted operational savings, proving that there is always room for good operational practices.  They even starred in a funny internal video to celebrate their win which can be found here using the AOL Studio Now service.

If you happen to be attending Symposium this year feel free to stop by and say hello to these amazing individuals.   I am incredibly proud of the work that they have driven within the company.

 

\Mm

Read Full Post »

Patent Wars may Chill Data Center Innovation

Yahoo may have just sent a cold chill across the data center industry at large and begun a stifling of data center innovation.  In a May 3, 2012 article, Forbes did a quick and dirty analysis on the patent wars between Facebook and Yahoo. It’s a quick read but shines an interesting light on the potential impact something like this can have across the industry.   The article, found here,  highlights that :

In a new disclosure, Facebook added in the latest version of the filing that on April 23 Yahoo sent a letter to Facebook indicating that Yahoo believes it holds 16 patents that “may be relevant” to open source technology Yahoo asserts is being used in Facebook’s data centers and servers.

While these types of patent infringement cases happen all the time in the Corporate world, this one could have far greater ramifications on an industry that has only recently emerged into the light of sharing of ideas.    While details remain sketchy at the time of this writing, its clear that the specific call out of data center and servers is an allusion to more than just server technology or applications running in their facilities.  In fact, there is a specific call out of data centers and infrastructure. 

With this revelation one has to wonder about its impact on the Open Compute Project which is being led by Facebook.   It leads to some interesting questions. Has their effort to be more open in their designs and approaches to data center operations and design led them to a position of risk and exposure legally?  Will this open the flood gates for design firms to become more aggressive around functionality designed into their buildings?  Could companies use their patents to freeze competitors out of colocation facilities in certain markets by threatening colo providers with these types of lawsuits?  Perhaps I am reaching a bit but I never underestimate litigious fervor once the  proverbial blood gets in the water. 

In my own estimation, there is a ton of “prior art”, to use an intellectual property term, out there to settle this down long term, but the question remains – will firms go through that lengthy process to prove it out or opt to re-enter their shells of secrecy?  

After almost a decade of fighting to open up the collective industry to share technologies, designs, and techniques this is a very disheartening move.   The general Glasnost that has descended over the industry has led to real and material change for the industry.  

We have seen the mental shift of companies move from measuring facilities purely around “Up Time” measurements to one that is primarily more focused around efficiency as well.  We have seen more willingness to share best practices and find like minded firms to share in innovation.  One has to wonder, will this impact the larger “greening” of data centers in general.   Without that kind of pressure – will people move back to what is comfortable?

Time will certainly tell.   I was going to make a joke about the fact that until time proves out I may have to “lawyer” up just to be safe.  Its not really a joke however because I’m going to bet other firms do something similar and that, my dear friends, is how the innovation will start to freeze.

 

\Mm

Read Full Post »

DataCentres2012–Nice, France

Next month I will be one of the key note speakers at the DataCentres2012 conference in Nice, France.   This event produced and put on by the BroadGroup is far and away the most pre-eminent conference for the Data Center Industry in Europe.   As an alumni of other BroadGroup events I can assure you that the quality of the presentations and training available is of the highest quality. I am also looking forward to re-connecting  with some great friends such as Christian Belady of Microsoft, Tom Furlong from Facebook and others.   If you are planning on attending please feel free to reach out and say hello.   It’s a great opportunity to network, build friendships, and discuss the issues pressing our industry today.   You can find out more by visiting the event website below.

http://www.datacentres2012.com/

 

\Mm

Read Full Post »

AOL Power Hog Award

I have received a ton of emails after my post about our Uptime Institute Server Round Up Award asking me about our “Power Hog” Award.   In case you missed it, part of our internal analysis was going through and identifying inefficient servers and systems and we motivated the owners of those systems to migrate their installations to the cloud infrastructure that we built out.  You definitely knew you were in trouble when a Power Hog Award arrived on your desk.   I guess we were not below shame as a tactic.   So for those of you who were interested in seeing our illustrious(?) award I thought I would share a photo of one.

 

\Mm

Read Full Post »

Attacking the Cruft

Today the Uptime Institute announced that AOL won the Server Roundup Award.  The achievement has gotten some press already (At Computerworld, PCWorld, and related sites) and I cannot begin to tell you how proud I am of my teams.   One of the more personal transitions and journeys I have made since my experience scaling the Microsoft environments from tens of thousands of servers to hundreds of thousands of servers has been truly understanding the complexity facing a problem most larger established IT departments have been dealing with for years.  In some respects, scaling infrastructure, while incredibly challenging and hard, is in large part a uni-directional problem space.   You are faced with growth and more growth followed by even more growth.  All sorts of interesting things break when you get to big scale. Processes, methodologies, technologies, all quickly fall to the wayside as you climb ever up the ladder of scale.

At AOL I faced a multi-directional problem space in that, as a company and as a technology platform we were still growing.  Added to that there was 27 years of what I call “Cruft”.   I define “Cruft” as years of build-up of technology, processes, politics, fiscal orphaning and poor operational hygiene.  This cruft can act as a huge boat anchor and barrier to an organization to drive agility in its online and IT operations.  On top of this Cruft a layer of what can best be described as lethargy or perhaps apathy can sometimes develop and add even more difficulty to the problem space.

One of the first things I encountered at AOL was the cruft.  In any organization, everyone always wants to work on the new, cool, interesting things. Mainly because they are new and interesting..out of the norm.  Essentially the fun stuff!  But the ability for the organization to really drive the adoption of new technologies and methods was always slowed, gated or in some cases altogether prevented by years interconnected systems, lost owners, servers of unknown purpose lost in the distant historical memory and the like.   This I found in healthy populations at AOL. 

We initially set about building a plan to attack this cruft.   To earnestly remove as much of the cruft  as possible and drive the organization towards agility.  Initially we called this list of properties, servers, equipment and the like the Operations $/-\!+ list. As this name was not very user-friendly it migrated into a series of initiatives grouped the name of Ops-Surdities.   These programs attacked different types of cruft and were at a high level grouped into three main categories:

The Absurdity List – A list of projects/properties/applications that had a questionable value, lack of owner, lack of direction, or the like but was still drawing load and resources from our data centers.   The plan here was to develop action plans for each of the items that appeared on this list.

Power Hog – An effort to audit our data center facilities, equipment, and the like looking for inefficient servers, installations, and /or technology and migrating them to new more efficient platforms or our AOL Cloud infrastructure.  You knew you were in trouble when you had a trophy of a bronze pig appear on your desk or office and that you were marked. 

Ops Hygiene – The sometimes tedious task of tracking down older machines and systems that may have been decomissioned in the past, marked for removal, or were fully depreciated and were never truly removed.  Pure Vampiric load.  You may or may not be surprised how much of this exists in modern data centers.  It’s a common issue I have had with most data center management professionals in the industry.

So here we are, in a timeline measured in under a year, and being told all along the way by“crufty old-timers” that we would never make any progress, my teams have de-comissioned almost 10,000 servers from our environments. (Actually this number is greater now, but the submission deadline for the award was earlier in the year).  What an amazing accomplishment.  What an amazing team!

So how did we do it?

As we will be presenting this in a lot more detail at the Uptime Symposium, I am not going to give away all of our secrets in a blog post and give you a good reason to head to the Uptime event and listen to and ask the primary leaders of this effort how they did it in person.  It may be a good use of that Travel budget your company has been sitting on this year.

What I will share is some guidelines on approach and some things to be wary of if you are facing similar challenges in your organization.

FOCUS AND ATTENTION

I cannot tell you how many I have spoken with that have tried to go after ‘cruft’ like this time and time again and failed.   One of the key drivers for success in my mind is ensuring that there is focus and attention on this kind of project at all levels, across all organizations, and most importantly from the TOP.   To often executives give out blind directives with little to no follow through and assume this kind of thing gets done.   They are generally unaware of the natural resistance to this kind of work there is in most IT organizations.    Having a motivated, engaged, and focused leadership on these types of efforts goes and extraordinarily long way to making headway here.  

BEWARE of ORGANIZATIONAL APATHY

The human factors that stack up against a project like this are impressive.  While they may not be openly in revolt over such projects there is a natural resistance to getting things done.  This work is not sexy.  This work is hard.  This work is tedious.  This likely means going back and touching equipment and kit that has not been messed with for a long time.   You may have competing organizational priorities which place this kind of work at the bottom of the workload priority list.   In addition to having Executive buy in and focus, make sure you have some really driven people running these programs.  You are looking for CAN DO people, not MAKE DO people.

TECHNOLOGY CAN HELP, BUT ITS NOT YOUR HEAVY LIFTER

Probably a bit strange for a technology blog to say, but its true.  We have an incredible CMDB and Asset System at AOL.  This was hugely helpful to the effort in really getting to the bottom of the list.   However no amount of Technology in place will be able to perform the myriad of tasks required to actually make material movement on this kind of work.   Some of it requires negotiation, some of it requires strength of will, some of it takes pure persistence in running these issues down…working with the people.  Understanding what is still required, what can be moved.  This requires people.   We had great technologies in place from the perspective of knowing where are stuff was, what it did, and what it was connected to.  We had great technologies like our Cloud to move some of these platforms to ultimately.    However, you need to make sure you don’t go to far down the people trap.  I have a saying in my organization – There is a perfect number of project managers and security people in any organization.  Where the work output and value delivered is highest.   What is that number?  Depends – but you definitely know when you have one too many of each.

MAKE IT FUN IF YOU CAN

From the brass pigs, to minor celebrations each month as we worked through the process we ensured that the attention given the effort was not negative. Sure it can be tough work, but you are at the end of the day substantially investing in the overall agility of your organization.  Its something to be celebrated.    In fact at the completion of our aggressive goals the primary project leads involved did a great video (which you can see here) to highlight and celebrate the win.   Everyone had a great laugh and a ton of fun doing what was ultimately a tough grind of work.  If you are headed to Symposium I strongly encourage you to reach out to my incredible project leads.  You will be able to recognize them from the video….without the mustaches of course!

\Mm

Read Full Post »

Chaos Monkeys, Donkeys and the Innovation of Action

Last week I once again had the pleasure of speaking at the Uptime Institute’s Symposium.  As one of the premiere events in the Data Center industry it is definitely one of those conferences that is a must attend to get a view into what’s new, what’s changing, and where we are going as an industry.  Having attended the event numerous times in the past, this year I set out on my adventure with a slightly different agenda.

Oh sure I would definitely attend the various sessions on technology, process, and approach.  But this time I was also going with the intent to listen equally to the presenters as well as the scuttlebutt, side conversations, and hushed whispers of the attendees.   Think of it as a cultural experiment in being a professional busy body.  As I wove my way around from session to session I was growing increasingly anxious that while the topics were of great quality, and discussed much needed areas of improvement in our technology sector – most of them were issues we have covered, talked about and have been dealing with as an industry for many years.   In fact I was hard pressed to find anything of real significance in the new category.   These thoughts were mirrored in those side conversations and hushed whispers I heard around the various rooms as well.

One of the new features of Symposium is that the 451 Group has opted to expand the scope of the event to be more far reaching covering all aspects of the issues facing our industry.   It has brought in speakers from Tier 1 Research and other groups that have added an incredible depth to the conference.    With that depth came some really good data.   In many respects the data reflected (in my interpretation) that while technology and processes are improving in small pockets, our industry ranges from stagnant to largely slow to act.  Despite mountains of data showing energy efficiency benefits, resulting cost benefits, and the like we just are not moving the proverbial ball down the field.

In a purely unscientific poll I was astounded to find out that some of the most popular sessions were directly related to those folks who have actually done something.  Those that took the new technologies (or old technologies) and put them into practice were roundly more interesting than more generic technology conversations.   Giving very specific attention to detail on the how they accomplished the tasks at hand, what they learned, what they would do differently.   Most of these “favorites” were not necessarily in those topics of “bleeding edge” thought leadership but specifically the implementation of technologies and approaches we have talked about the event for many years.   If I am honest, one of those sessions that surprised me the most was our own.   AOL had the honor of winning an IT Innovation Award from Uptime and as a result the teams responsible for driving our cloud and virtualization platforms were allowed to give a talk about what we did, what the impact was and how it all worked out.   I was surprised because I was not sure how many people would come to this side session and listen to presentation or find the presentation relevant.  Of course I thought it was relevant (We were after all going to get a nifty plaque for the achievement) but to my surprise the room was packed full, ran out of chairs, and had numerous people standing for the presentation.   During the talk we had a good interaction of questions from the audience and after the talk we were inundated with people coming up to specifically dig into more details.  We had many comments around the usefulness of the talk because we were giving real life experiences in making the kinds of changes that we as an industry have been talking about for years.  Our talk and adaption of technology even got a little conversation in some of the Industry press such as Data Center Dynamics.

Another session that got incredible reviews was the presentation by Andrew Stokes of Deutsche Bank who guided the audience through their adoption of 100% free air cooled data center in the middle of New York City.  Again, the technology here was not new (I had built large scale facilities using this in 2007) – but it was the fact that Andrew and the folks at Deutsche Bank actually went out and did something.   Not someone from those building large-scale cloud facilities, not some new experimental type of server infrastructure.  Someone who used this technology servicing IT equipment that everyone uses, in a fairly standard facility who actually went ahead and did something Innovative.  They put into practice something that others have not. Backed back facts, and data, and real life experiences the presentation went off incredibly and was roundly applauded by those I spoke with as one of the most eye-opening presentations of the event.

By listening the audiences, the hallway conversations, and the multitude of networking opportunities throughout the event a pattern started to emerge,  a pattern that reinforced the belief that I was already coming to in my mind.   Despite a myriad of talk on very cool technology, application, and evolving thought leadership innovations – the most popular and most impactful sessions seemed to center on those folks who actually did something, not with the new bleeding edge technologies, but utilizing those recurring themes that have carried from Symposium to Symposium over the years.   Air Side economization?  Not new.   Someone (outside Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc) doing it?  Very New-Very Exciting.  It was what I am calling the Innovation of ACTION.  Actually doing those things we have talked about for so long.

While this Innovation of Action had really gotten many people buzzing at the conference there was still a healthy population of people who were downplaying those technologies.  Downplaying their own ability to do those things.    Re-stating the perennial dogmatic chant that these types of things (essentially any new ideas post 2001 in my mind) would never work for their companies.

This got me thinking (and a little upset) about our industry.  If you listen to those general complaints, and combine it with the data that we have been mostly stagnant in adopting these new technologies – we really only have ourselves to blame.   There is a pervasive defeatist attitude amongst a large population of our industry who view anything new with suspicion, or surround it with the fear that it will ultimately take their jobs away.  Even when the technologies or “new things” aren’t even very new any more.  This phenomenon is clearly visible in any conversation around ‘The Cloud’ and its impact on our industry.    The data center professional should be front and center on any conversation on this topic but more often than not self-selects out of the conversation because they view it more as an application thing, or more IT than data center thing.   Which is of course complete bunk.   Listening to those in attendance complain that the ‘Cloud’ is going to take their jobs away, or that only big companies like Google , Amazon, Rackspace, or  Microsoft would ever need them in the future were driving me mad.   As my keynote at Uptime was to be centered around a Cloud survival guide – I had to change my presentation to account for what I was hearing at the conference.

In my talk I tried to focus on what I felt to be emerging camps at the conference.    To the first, I placed a slide prominently featuring Eeyore (from Winnie the Pooh fame) and captured many of the quotes I had heard at the conference referring to how the Cloud, and new technologies were something to be mistrusted rather than an opportunity to help drive the conversation.     I then stated that we as an industry were an industry of donkeys.  That fact seems to be backed up by data.   I have to admit, I was a bit nervous calling a room full of perhaps the most dedicated professionals in our industry a bunch of donkeys – but I always call it like I see it.

I contrasted this with those willing to evolve their thought forward, embrace that Innovation of Action by highlighting the Cloud example of Netflix.   When Netflix moved heavily into the cloud they clearly wanted to evolve past the normal IT environment and build real resiliency into their product.   They did so by creating a rogue process (on purpose) call the Chaos Monkey which randomly shut down processes and wreaked havoc in their environment.   At first the Chaos Monkey was painful, but as they architected around those impacts their environments got stronger.   This was no ordinary IT environment.  This was something similar, but new.  The Chaos Monkey creates Action, results in Action and on the whole moves the ball forward.

Interestingly after my talk I literally have dozens of people come up and admit they had been donkeys and offered to reconnect next year to demonstrate what they had done to evolve their operations.

My challenge to the audience at Uptime, and ultimately my challenge to you the industry is to stop being donkeys.   Lets embrace the Innovation of Action and evolve into our own versions of Chaos Monkeys.    Lets do more to put the technologies and approaches we have talked about for so long into action.    Next Year at Uptime (and across a host of other conferences) lets highlight those things that we are doing.  Lets put our Chaos Monkeys on display.

As you contemplate your own job – whether IT or Data Center professional….Are you a Donkey or Chaos Monkey?

\Mm

Read Full Post »

Olivier Sanche, My Dear Friend, Adieu

The data center industry has suffered a huge loss this holiday weekend with the passing of Olivier Sanche, head of Apple’s Data Center program. He was an incredibly thoughtful man, a great father and husband, and very sincerely a great friend. As I got off the phone with his brother and wife in France who gave me this devastating news and I could not help but remember my first encounter with Olivier.  At the time he worked for Ebay and we were both invited to speak and debate at an industry event in Las Vegas.  As we sat in a room full of  ‘experts’  to discuss the future of our industry, the conversation quickly turned controversial.  Passions were raised and I found myself standing side by side with this enigmatic French giant on numerous topics.  His passion for the space coupled with his cool logic were items that endeared me greatly to the man.  We were comrades in ideas, and soon became fast friends.

Olivier was the type of person who could light up a room with his mere presence.   It was as if he embraced the entire room in one giant hug even if they were strangers.  He could sit quietly mulling a topic, pensively going through his calculations and explode into the conversation and rigorously debate everyone.  That passion never belied his ability to learn, to adapt, to incorporate new thinking into his persona either.  Through the years we knew each other I saw him forge his ideas through debate, always evolving.   Many people know the public Olivier, the Olivier they saw at press conferences, or speaking engagements, and the like. Some of us, got to know Olivier much better.  The data center industry is small indeed and those of us who have had the pleasure and terror at working in the worlds largest infrastructures know a special kind of bond.   We routinely meet off-hours and have dinner and drinks.   Its a small cadre of names you probably know, or have heard about, joined in the fact that we have all dealt with or are dealing with challenges most data center environments will never see.  In these less formal affairs, company positions melted away, technological challenges came to the fore, and most importantly the real people behind these companies emerge.   In these forums, you could always count on Olivier to be a warm and calming force.   He was incredibly intelligent, and although he might disagree, you could count on him to champion the free discussion of ideas.

It was in those types of forums where I truly met Olivier.   The man who was so dedicated to his family, and the light of his life little Emilie.  His honesty and direct to the point style made it easy to understand where you stood, and where he was coming from.

More information about memorial services and the like will be coming out shortly and they are trying to get the word out to all of his friends.

The world has lost a great mind, Apple has lost a visionary, His family has lost their world, and I have lost a good friend.

Adieu, Dear Olivier, You and your family will be in my thoughts and prayers.

Your friend,

Mike Manos

\Mm

Read Full Post »

C02K Doubter? Watch the Presidential address today

Are you a Data Center professional who doubts that Carbon legislation is going to happen or that this initiative will never get off the ground?   This afternoon President Obama plans to outline his intention to assess a cost for Carbon consumption at a conference highlighting his economic accomplishments to date.   The backdrop of this of course is the massive oil rig disaster in the Gulf.

As my talk at the Uptime Institute Symposium highlighted this type of legislation will have a big impact on data center and mission critical professionals.  Whether you know it or not, you will be front and center in assisting with the response, collection and reporting required to react to this kind of potential legislation.  In my talk where I questioned the audience in attendance it was quite clear that most of those in the room were vastly ill-prepared and ill-equipped to this kind of effort. 

If passed this type of legislation is going to cause a severe reaction inside organizations to ensure that they are in compliance and likely lead to a huge increase of spending in an effort to collect energy information along with reporting.  For many organizations this will result in significant spending.

The US House of Representatives has already passed a version of this known as the Waxman Markey bill.   You can bet that there will be a huge amount of pressure to get a Senate version passed and out the door in the coming weeks and months.

This should be a clarion call for data center managers to step up and raise awareness within their organizations about this pending legislation and take a proactive role in establishing a plan for a corporate response.   Take an inventory of your infrastructure and assess what will you need to begin collecting this information?  It might even be wise to get a few quotes to get an idea or ballpark cost of what it might take to bring your organization up to the task.  Its probably better to start doing this now, than to be told by the business to get it done.

\Mm

Read Full Post »