In my previous post I had mentioned how extremely proud I was of the Technology teams here at AOL in delivering a truly state of the art Data Center facility with some incredible ground breaking technology.  As I mentioned the facility was actually in production use faster than we could get the ribbon cutting ceremony scheduled.  I thought I would share a small slice of the pictures of the internal Ribbon Cutting Event.

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Alex Gounares, former fellow Microsoft alum and AOL CTO and I presided over the celebration.   In this photo, Alex and I talk over some of the technologies used in our cloud with one our cloud engineers.  As the facility is based upon pre-racked technologies and modular facility and network build components it allows for significant cost and capital optimization. this allows us to build only when demand and growth dictates the need. All machines in the background are live and have been live for a few weeks.

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After receiving two very large scissors which were remarkably sharp and precise for their size we were ready to go.   A few short words about the phenomenal job our teams performed and it was time for some ribbon to kiss raised floor.

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At the end of the day the real reason why this project was such a success really breaks down to the team responsible for this incredible win.   An effort like this took incredibly smart people from different organizations working together to make this a reality.    The achievement is even more impressive in my mind when you think about the fact that in many cases our 90 day to live timeframe included design and execution on the go!   My guess is our next one may be significantly faster without all that design time. The true heroes of ATC are below!

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(Special thanks goes out to Krysta Scharlach for the permission and use of her pictures in this post)

When I first took my position at AOL I knew I was going to be in for some very significant challenges.   This position, perhaps more-so than any other in my career was going to push the bounds of my abilities.  As a technologist, as an operations professional, as a leader, and as someone who would hold measurable accountability to the operational success of an expansive suite of products and services.  As many of you may know, AOL has been engaged in what used to be called internally as a “Start-Around”.  Essentially an effort to try and fundamentally change the company from its historic roots to the premium content provider for the Internet. 

We no longer refer to this term internally as it is no longer about forming or defining that vision.  It has shifted to something more visceral.  More tangible.  It’s a challenge that most companies should be familiar with, It’s called Execution.  Execution is a very simple word but as any good operations professional knows, the devil is in the details, and those details have layers and layers of nuances.    Its where the proverbial rubber meets the road.  For my responsibilities within the company,  execution revolves 100% around delivering the technologies and services to ensure our products and content remain available to the world.   It is also about fundamentally transforming the infrastructural technologies and platform systems our products and content are based upon and providing the most agility and mobility we can to our business lines. 

One fact that is often forgotten in the fast-paced world of Internet Darlings, is that AOL had achieved a huge scale of infrastructure and technology investment long before many of these companies were gleams in the eyes of their founders.   While it may be fun and “new” to look at the tens of thousands of machines at Facebook, Google, or Microsoft – it is often overlooked that AOL had tens of thousands of machines (and still does!) and solved many of the same problems years ago.  To be honest it was a personal revelation for me when I joined.  There are few companies who have had to grow and operate at this kind of scale and every approach is a bit unique and different.  It was an interesting lesson, even for one who had a ton of experience doing something similar in “Internet Darling” infrastructures.

AOL has been around for over 27 years.  In technology circles, that’s like going back almost ten generations.   Almost 3 decades of “stuff”.  The stuff was not only gear and equipment from the natural growth of the business, but included the expansion of features and functionality of long standing services, increased systems interdependencies, and operational, technological, and programmatic “Cruft” as new systems / processes/ technologies were  built upon or bolted onto older systems. 

This “cruft” adds significant complexity to your operating environment and can truly limit your organization’s agility.  As someone tasked with making all this better, it struck me that we actually had at least two problems to solve.   The platform and foundation for the future, and a method and/or strategy for addressing the older products, systems, and environments and increase our overall agility as a company.

These are hard problems.  People have asked why I haven’t blogged in awhile externally.   This is the kind of challenge with multiple layers of challenges underneath that can keep one up at night.   From a strategy perspective do you target the new first?  Do you target the legacy environments to reduce the operational drag?  Or – Do you try and define a unified strategy to address both.  Its a lot harder and generally more complex, but they potential payoff is huge.   Luckily I have a world class team at AOL and together we built and entered our own cocoon and busily went to work.  We have gone down the path of changing out technology platforms, operational processes, outdated ways of thinking about data centers, infrastructure, and overall approach. Every inch fighting forward on this idea of unified infrastructure.

It was during this process that I came to realize that our particular legacy challenge, while at “Internet” scale, was more closely related to the challenges of most corporate or government environments than the biggest Internet players.  Sure we had big scale, we had hundreds of products and services, but the underlying “how to get there from here” problems were more universally like IT challenges than scaling out similar applications across commoditized infrastructure.   It ties into all the marketing promises, technological snake oil, and other baloney about the “cloud”.  The difference being that we had to quickly deliver something that worked and would not impact the business.  Whether we wanted to or not, we would be walking down some similar roads facing most IT organizations today.

As I look at the challenges facing modern IT departments across the world, their ability to “go to the cloud” or make use of new approaches is also securely anchored behind by the “cruft”  of their past.  Sometimes that cruft is so thick that the organization cannot move forward.  We were there, we were in the same boat.  We aren’t out of it yet – but we have made some pretty interesting developments that I think are pretty significant and I intend to share those learnings where appropriate. 

ATC IS BORN

Last week we launched a brand new data center facility we call, ATC.  This facility is fundamentally built upon the work that we have been doing around our own internal cloud technologies, shifts in operational process and methodology, and targeting our ability to be extremely agile in our new business model.  It represents a model on how to migrate the old, prepare for the new, and provide a platform upon which to build our future. 

Most people ignore the soft costs when looking at adoption of different cloud offerings, operational impacts are typically considered as afterthoughts.   What if you built those requirements in from day one… how would that change your design? your implementation? Your overall strategy?  I believe that ATC represents that kind of shift of thinking.  At least for us internally.

One of the key foundations for our ATC facility is our cloud platform and automation layer.  I like to think about this layer as a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.  There is tremendous value in the learning’s that have come before, and nowhere else is this self evident than at AOL.  As I mentioned, the great minds of the past (as well as those in the present) had invested in many great systems that made this company a giant in the industry.   There are many such systems here, but one of the key ones in my mind is the Configuration Management System.  All organizations invest significantly into this type of platform.  If done correctly, their uses can span from more than a rudimentary asset management system, to include cost allocation systems, dependency mapping, detailed configuration and environmental data, and in some cases like ours provide the base foundation of leading us into the cloud. 

Many companies I speak with abandon this work altogether or live in a strange split/hybrid model where they treat “Cloud” as different.  In our space – new government regulations, new safe harbor laws, etc are continuing to drive the relevance of a universal system to act as a central authority.   The fact that this technology actually sped our development efforts in this automation cannot be ignored.

We went from provisioning servers in days, to getting base virtual machines up and running in under 8 seconds.  Want Service and Application images (for established products)? Add another 8 seconds or so.   Want to roll it into production globally (changing global DNS/Load balancing/Security changes)?  Lets call that another minute to roll out.   We used Open Source products and added our own development glue into our own systems to make all  this happen.  I am incredibly proud of my Cloud teams here at AOL, because what they have been able to do in such a relatively short period of time is to roll out a world class cloud and service provisioning system that can be applied to new efforts and platforms or our older products.   Better yet, the provisioning systems were built to be universal so that if required we can do the same thing with stand-alone physical boxes or virtual machines.  No difference.  Same system. This technology platform was recently recognized by the Uptime Institute at its last Symposium in California. 

This technology was put to the test in the recently with the earthquake that hit the East Coast of the United States.  While thankfully the damage was minimal, the tremor of Internet traffic was incredible.   The AOL homepage, along with our news sites started to get hammered with traffic and requests.  In the past this would have required a massive people effort to provision more capacity for our users.  With the new technology in place we were able to start adding additional machines to take the load extremely quickly with very minimal impact to our users.  In this particular case these machines were provisioned from our systems in existing data centers (not ATC), but the technology is the same.

This kind of technology and agility has some interesting side effects too.   It allows your organization to move much more quickly and aggressively than ever before.   I have seen Jevon’s paradox manifest itself over and over again in the Technology world.    For those of you who need a refresher, Jevons paradox is is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. 

Its like when car manufacturers started putting the Miles per Gallon (MPG) efficiency on autos, the direct result was not a reduction of driving, but rather an overall increase of travel.

For ATC, which officially launched on October 1, 2011.  It took all of an hour to have almost 100 virtual machines deployed to it as soon as it was “turned on”.   It has since long passed that mark and in fact this technology usage is happening faster than coordinating executive schedules to attend our executive ribbon cutting ceremony this week.

While the Cloud development and technology efforts are cornerstones of the facility, it is not this work alone that is providing for something unique. After all however slick our virtualization and provisioning systems are, however deeply integrated they are into our internal tools and configuration management systems, those characteristics in and of themselves does not reflect the true evolution that ATC represents.

ATC is a 100% lights out facility.  There are absolutely no employees stationed at the facility full time, contract, or otherwise.   The entire premise is that we have moved from a reactive support model to a proactive or planned work support model.  If you compare this with other facilities (including some I built myself in the past) there is always personnel on site even if contractor.   This has fundamentally led to significant changes in how we operate our data centers, how, what, and when we do our work, and has impacted (downward) the overall costs to operate our environments.  Many of these are efficiencies and approaches I have used before (100% pre-racked/vendor integrated gear and systems integration) to fundamentally brand new approaches.  These changes have not been easy and a ton of credit goes to our operations and engineering staff in the Data Centers and across the Technology Operations world here at AOL.  Its always culturally tough to being open to fundamentally changing business as usual.   Another key aspect of this facility and infrastructure is that from network perspective its nearly 100% non-blocking.   My network engineers being network engineers pointed out that its not completely non-blocking for a few reasons, but I can honestly say that the network topology is the closest I have seen to “completely” non blocking deployed in real network environments ever especially compared to the industry standard of 2:1. 

Another incredible aspect of this new data center facility and the technology deployed is our ability to Quick Launch Compute Capacity.  The total time it took to go from idea inception (no data center) to delivering active capacity to our internal users was  90 days.  In my mind this made even more incredible by the fact that this was the first time that all these work-streams came together including the unified operations deployment model and included all of the physical aspects of just getting iron to the floor.    This time frame was made possible by a standardized / modular way to build out our compute capacity in logical segments based upon the the infrastructure cloud type being deployed (low tier, mid-tier, etc.).   This approach has given us a predictability to speed of deployment and cost which in my opinion is unparalleled.

The culmination of all of this work is the result of some incredible teams devoted to the desire to affect change, a little dash of renegade engineering, a heaping helping of some new perspective, blood, sweat, tears and vision.   I am extremely proud of the teams here at AOL to deliver this ground-breaking achievement.   But then again, I am more than a bit biased.   I have seen the passion of these teams manifested in some incredible technology.

As with all things like this, it’s been a journey and there is still a bunch of work to do.  Still more to optimize.  Deeper analysis and ease of aggregation for stubborn legacy environments.   We have already set our sights on the next generation of cloud development.  But for today, we have successfully built a new foundation upon which even more will be built.  For those of you who were not able to attend the Uptime Symposium this year I will be putting up some videos that give you some flavor of our work with driving a low cost cloud compute and provisioning system from Open Source components.

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AOL'ers packing up care packages for our troops

Today I had the honor and pleasure of working side by side with 50 other volunteers in support of Monster Help Day.  While there were lots of incredible efforts going on throughout the company for worthwhile causes, as the executive sponsor of the military support group here at AOL, I felt it right to participate in our large scale effort to support our men and women in the armed services.

For those of you unfamiliar with Monster Help Day, it is a companywide day of service for all employees worldwide. It is an all employee-inspired initiative and represents AOL’s commitment to helping people and continuing to hold a meaningful place in their lives. This year, more than 3,000 AOL employees will donate over 20,000 hours of service to more than 40 charities. By providing support to charitable organizations and local communities, AOL reinforces its core values and empowers its employees with rewarding experiences.  And to top it off, its not just for employees.  AOL will also be giving consumers the opportunity to show support for causes close to their hearts. For every visitor to monsterhelp.aol.com who posts an update from their Twitter account using the tweet button provided, AOL will donate 26 cents, in honor of AOL’s 26th year, to the Monster Help Day charity of their choice.  So hurry up, you still have plenty of hours left to support your favorite cause.

In my group, there were tables for writing cards, filling care packages filled with lots of goodies from home ranging from snacks, to common things our soldiers generally miss from home.   Stations were building boxes, wrapping batteries for shipment, filling out customs forms, folding t-shirts, and if I can get away with a pun – it all seemed to run with military efficiency.  Perhaps one of the most powerful moments for me came when Sydney Murphy, our lead recruiter and primary organizer of the event asked for the volunteers to introduce themselves and perhaps a little of why they chose this event over the many other worthwhile events.

The room listened as everyone in the room told their stories.  Those stories ranged from people who came just to help out and support our troops with no connection to the military, to those who have served, to those who have had family serve, to military brats -all grown up-, to quite a few who had children and family currently serving abroad.

There was an almost electric energy in the room as people went about their tasks and the entire area was abuzz with activity.  One of the items that was packed in every box was a special moisture-wicking t-shirt that we thought might be of use in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and hope they get some good use.

Today was one of those days where you get to see some of those traits that has made AOL the company it is today.   The dedication and effort by all was definitely inspiring.

To all our armed men and women in the military I would like to profoundly thank you for your service and wish you the best and ultimately a safe landing here at home.

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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?

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Joining a company during a big transition is a pretty exciting thing.   The amount of chaos and work to get done is immense especially when you are trying to fundamentally re-shape something that exists to best in class and ultimately industry leading again.  While I can’t tell you specifically what I am thinking yet, we have already begun making at some of the necessary changes to deliver on a big mission.   The overall content strategy that AOL is marching down is going to drive some very interesting infrastructure and operations related challenges (You may have seen the recent purchase of Huffington Post and some others) with even greater challenges ahead.  From time to time I am going to post some positions that I have open in my organization in case any of my readers may be interested or know someone that is interested.  I know some of you read this for more of my industry related thoughts – but you might be interested some of the things we are doing here as well.  If not, you can skip to the next post. 

So without further ado…

NOC Engineers

I am dramatically expanding the size of our Network Operations Center and capabilities – Do you know someone smart who is interested in breaking into one of the top ten largest Internet companies (as measured by infrastructure) and wants to get a good feel for managing Internet scale operations, multiple data center locations, and tens of thousands of machines?   Are you a returning veteran looking for your next career move?   Are you a college student wondering how to break into this space at scale? This is an area that is going to evolve greatly in the coming weeks and months within the organization and its a chance to get some great experience  and be at the ground floor of a company significantly driving automation and the next big thing.   This would include significant career paths into multiple technology directions.  These positions are based in Dulles, VA – so we would be looking at the Virginia, DC, and Maryland area for candidates.  I am extremely motivated to fill these roles quickly.

CDN/EDGE/Applications Engineering Manager

We are looking for strong candidates to manage a team that will be an integral part of our overall future delivery strategy specifically targeted at distributed CDN and Edge computing capabilities and help drive various application engineering efforts within the organization.   This position reports up through our Network Engineering organization but will be deeply embedded into other engineering teams, product teams, and architecture efforts.

DNS Engineer

We are looking for DNS engineers to join the engineering teams and help drive the future of our name space management and technologies along with some operational related responsibilities managing our global DNS infrastructure.  As we are significantly adding to the business from the content aggregation side of the house the DNS function will be an integral growth area for the business.

If you or someone you might know is interested in these postions please reach out to me via comment on this blog post (I’ll keep it private) so I can tell you where to send your resumes to.   I am not interested in sourcing these positions from outside agencies at this time.

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Tags: Hiring, DNS Engineers, NOC Engineers, CDN Engineers, Edge Engineers, Application Engineering, AOL

I just read that Chris Crosby has announced his departure at Digital Realty Trust. As an alumni of that great firm I can definitely tell you that Chris’ hand-prints are all over that company.  I had the pleasure of interacting with him, before I joined,  heavily in my role there, and have maintained our relationship since leaving.   Chris was an influential force in defining how that company ran, operated, and ultimately succeeded in dominating the wholesale data center market.  Not to mention that he was always a charismatic tour-de-force as one of its primary faces and pitchmen.

I don’t know what Chris is up to next but I wish him the greatest success and happiness.  If his near term goal is a little time off, Lord knows he has earned it.  I do know that his tornado like energy wont keep him out of the fray for long.

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This May, I once again have the distinct honor of presenting at the Uptime Institute’s Symposium. This year it will be held in Santa Clara, CA from May 9 through the 12th.  This year my primary topic is entitled ‘Preparing for the Cloud: A Data Center Survival Guide.’   I am really looking forward to this presentation on two fronts.  

First, it will allow me to share some of the challenges, observations, and opportunities I have seen over the last few years and package it up for Data Center Operators and IT professionals in a way that’s truly relevant to how to start preparing for the impact on their production environments. The whole ‘cloud’ industry is now rife with competing definitions, confusing marketing, and a broad spectrum of products and services meant to cure all ills. To your organization’s business leaders the cloud means lower costs, quicker time to market, and an opportunity to streamline IT Operations and reduce or eliminate the need for home-run data center environments. But what is the true impact on the operational environments? What plans do you need to have in place to ensure this kind of move can be successful? Is you organization even ready to make this kind of move? Is the nature of your applications and environments ‘Cloud-Ready? There are some very significant things to keep in mind when looking into this approach and many companies have not thought them all through.  My hope is that this talk will help prepare the professional with the necessary background and questions to ensure they are armed with the correct information to be an asset to the conversation within their organizations.

The second front is to really dig into the types of services available in the market and how to build an internal scorecard to ensure that your organization is approaching the analysis in a true – apples to apples kind of comparison.   So often I have heard horror stories of companies

caught up in the buzz of the Cloud and pursuing devastating cloud strategies that are either far more expensive than what they had to begin with.  The cloud can be a powerful tool and approach to serve the business, but you definitely need to go in with both eyes wide open.

I will try to post some material in the weeks ahead of the event to set the stage for the talk.  As always, If you are planning on attending Symposium this year feel free to reach out to me if you see me walking the halls.  

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You may have seen the announcement today about my recent decision and move to join the new leadership team at Aol.  To some of my friends in the Technorati, and most specifically the Valley, this move probably seems very contrarian.  Having built some of the largest cloud infrastructure’s in the world, re-aligning operational processes at massive scale, Aol at first stroke may seem an odd choice.  I have worked in some of the largest multi-national companies in the world, I have successfully (and unsuccessfully) launched start-ups, have been a cost center and carried a P&L.  I think I have a pretty good understanding of the range and complexity of challenges (especially from a technology perspective)  from small business to large.   Across the spectrum of these types and sized companies you get a different feel.   Different cultures.  Different attitudes.    Different Vibes.

Aol is aggressively moving to redefine itself in the industry, to significantly transform and morph itself into a world that Aol itself helped create and define over 25 years ago.   There is no arguing that the first true scale challenges in dealing with the Internet at large were experienced by those first AOL’ers as they had to deal with numbers of users never before seen in our industry.  They pushed the boundaries of technology, they pushed the boundary of operations, they created whole new paradigms.  To reinvent itself in a market with such competition, such diversity is a huge challenge.

One of the most surprising things to me is that Vibe-thing I talked about a few moements ago. When walking around the company you cannot help but notice that definitely has more of a technology start-up feel to it.   Its palpable.  One of the folks I ran into called it a start-around.   A combination of a Start-up and a Turn-around.  Perhaps thats the best description I have to describe that vibe.   Sure things have been tough, sure there is alot of legacy to work through, but the level of commitment to those folks that are here is incredible.  Moreso than that.  Its a culture of beleivers.  Its all the self-sacrafice and personal investment you find in a startup, but with a team of seasoned veterans.  Its quite unique in my experience.

As I mentioned, Aol has long held a place of respect in terms of Operational best practices at scale, and a culture that recognized the importance of technology in the delivery of its mission.  Tim Armstrong, the CEO and Google veteran, has built an incredible team of passionate technology veterans from places like Google, Microsoft, and others.  The mission is focused.  The mission is deliberate.  The mission is clear.   The mission is hard.   Its a huge challenge.   Its the kind of challenge I love.   If you think its impossible you are only encouraging my energy more.  I could have taken a safe bet.  But where is the excitement?  Where is the challenge?  As the saying goes, “A ship is safe in the harbour, but thats not what ships are for!”   This ship is setting sail and my commitment is that not only will we find a new world, we will define it!

In the coming days/weeks/months, I hope to share many of the exciting things we will be endeavoring to accomplish and give you a real taste of some of the big changes I will be attempting.   As always, technology and operational processes will be key to the success of the mission the company is on and I have some very definite ideas on how we can leap frog current thinking in this space and ensure that our technology and operational approach is no only a strategic value to the business, but also industry leading in execution.

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Tags: Michael Manos, AOL, Data Centers, Operations, start-around

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

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I will be back in San Francisco to speak at the CTIA’s Mobile Business Conference from October 6th through the 8th.    I will be on a panel discussing ‘Embracing the Cloud’.   My Hope in these talks is to continue to highlight the coming impacts of the use of hand-held technologies on a global basis, its intersection with personal usage and the ultimate technology challenges that this poses.  If you are in the area or looking to attend – Would love to connect.

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