Sites and Sounds of DataCentre2012: My Presentation, Day 2, and Final Observations

Today marked the closing lot of sessions for DataCentres2012 and my keynote session to the attendees.    After sitting through a series of product, technology, and industry trend presentations over the last two days I was feeling that my conversation would at the very least be something different.   Before I get to that – I wanted to share some observations from the morning. 

It all began with an interesting run-down of the Data Center and infrastructure industry trends across Europe from Steve Wallage of The BroadGroup.   It contained some really compelling information and highlighted some interesting divergence between the European market and the US market in terms of adoption and trends of infrastructure.   It looks like they have a method for those interested to get their hand on the detailed data (for purchase) if you are interested.  The parts I found particularly industry was the significant slow down of the Wholesale data center market across Europe while Colocation providers continued to do well.   Additionally the percentages of change within the customer base of those providers by category was compelling and demonstrated a fundamental shift and move of content related customers across the board.

This presentation was followed by a panel of European Thought Leaders made up mostly of those same colocation providers.  Given the presentation by Wallage I was expecting some interesting data-points to emerge.  While there was a range of ideas and perspectives represented by the panel, I have to say it really got me worked up and not in a good way.   In many ways I felt the responses from many (not all) on the panel highlighted a continued resistance to change in thinking around everything from efficiency, to technology approach.  It represented the things I despise most about about our industry at large.  Namely the slow adoption of change. The warm embrace of the familiar.  The outright resistance to new ideas.    At one point, a woman in the front row whom I believe was from Germany got up to ask a question if the panelists had any plans to move their facilities outside of the major metros.  She referenced Christian Belady’s presentation around the idea of Data as Energy and remote locations like Quincy, Washington or Lulea, Sweden.   She referred to the overall approach and thinking differently as quite visionary.   Now the panel could have easily have referred to the fact that companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and the like have much greater software level control than a colo-provider could provide.   Or perhaps they could have referenced that most of their customers are limited by distance to existing infrastructure deployments due to inefficiencies in commercial or custom internally deployed applications. Databases with response times architected for in-rack or in-facility levels of response times.   They did at least reference that most customers tend to be server huggers and want their infrastructure close by.  

Instead the initial response was quite strange in my mind.  It was to go after the ideas as “innovative” and to imply that nothing was really innovative about what Microsoft had done and the fact that they built a “mega data center” in Dublin shows that there is nothing innovative really happening.  Really?   The adoption of 100% Air Side economization is something everyone does?   The deployment of containerized compute capacity is run of the mill?  The concepts about the industrialization of compute is old-hat?  I had to do a mental double take and question whether they were even listening during ANY of the earlier sessions.   Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to be an apologist for the Microsoft program, in fact there are some tenets of the program I find myself not in agreement with.  However – You cannot deny that they are doing VERY different things.   It illustrated an interesting undercurrent I felt during the entire event (and maybe even our industry).  I definitely got the sensation of a growing gap between users requirements and their forward roadmaps and desires and what manufacturers and service providers are providing.  This panel, and a previous panel on modularization really highlighted these gulfs pretty demonstrably.   At a minimum I definitely walked away with an interesting new perspective on some of the companies represented.

It was then time for me to give my talk.   Every discussion up until this point had really focused on technology or industry trends.  I was going to talk about something else. Something more important.  The one thing seemingly missing from the entire event.   That is – the people attending.   All the technology in the world, all of the understanding of the trends in our industry are nothing unless the people in the room were willing to act. Willing to step up and take active roles in their companies to drive strategy.  As I have said before – to get out of the basement and into the penthouse.   The pressures on our industry and our job roles has never been more complicated.   So I walked through regulations, technologies, and cloud discussions.  Using the work that we did at AOL as a backdrop and example – I really tried to drive my main point.   That our industry – specifically the people doing all the work – were moving to a role of managing a complex portfolio of technologies, contracts, and a continuum of solutions.  Gone are the days where we can hide sheltered in our data center facilities.   Our resistance to embrace change, need to evolve with us, or it will evolve around us.   I walked through specific examples of how AOL has had to broaden its own perspective and approach to this widening view of our work roles at all levels.   I even pre-announced something we are calling Data Center Independence Day.   An aggressive adoption of modularized compute capacity that we call MicroData Centers  to help solve many of the issues we are facing as a business and the rough business case as to why it makes sense for us to move to this model.    I will speak more of that in the weeks to come with a greater degree of specifics, but stressed again the need for a wider perspective to manage a large portfolio of technologies and approaches to be successful in the future.

In closing – the event was fantastic.   The ability this event provides to network with leaders and professionals across the industry was first rate.   If I had any real constructive feedback it would be to either lengthen sessions, or reduce panel sizes to encourage more active and lively conversations.  Or both!

Perhaps at the end of the day, it’s truly the best measure of a good conference if you walk away wishing that more time could be spent on the topics.  As for me I am headed back Stateside and to digging into the challenges of my day job.    To the wonderful host city of Nice, I say Adieu!

 

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Sites and Sounds of DataCentre2012: Thoughts and my Personal Favorite presentations Day 1

We wrapped our first full day of talks here at DataCentre2012 and I have to say the content was incredibly good.    A couple of the key highlights that really stuck out in my mind were the talk given by Christian Belady who covered some interesting bits of the Microsoft Data Center Strategy moving forward.   Of course I have a personal interest in that program having been there for Generation1 through Generation4 of the evolutions of the program.   Christian covered some of the technology trends that they are incorporating into their Generation 5 facilities.  It was some very interesting stuff and he went into deeper detail than I have heard so far around the concept of co-generation of power at data center locations.   While I personally have some doubts about the all-in costs and immediacy of its applicability it was great to see some deep meaningful thought and differentiation out of the Microsoft program.  He also went into a some interesting “future” visions which talked about data being the next energy source.  While he took this concept to an entirely new level  I do feel he is directionally correct.  His correlations between the delivery of “data” in a utility model rang very true to me as I have long preached about the fact that we are at the dawning of the Information Utility for over 5 years.

Another fascinating talk came from Oliver J Jones of a company called Chayora.   Few people and companies really understand the complexities and idiosyncrasies of doing business let alone dealing with the development and deployment of large scale infrastructure there.    The presentation done by Mr. Jones was incredibly well done.  Articulating the size, opportunity, and challenges of working in China through the lens of the data center market he nimbly worked in the benefits of working with a company with this kind of expertise.   It was a great way to quietly sell Chayora’s value proposition and looking around the room I could tell the room was enthralled.   His thoughts and data points had me thinking and running through scenarios all day long.  Having been to many infrastructure conferences and seeing hundreds if not thousands of presentations, anyone who can capture that much of my mindshare for the day is a clear winner. 

Tom Furlong and Jay Park of Facebook gave a great talk on OCP with a great focus on their new facility in Sweden.  They also talked  a bit about their other facilities in Prineville and North Carolina as well.   With Furlong taking the Mechanical innovations and Park going through the electrical it was a great talk to created lots of interesting questions.  An incredibly captivating portion of the talk was around calculating data center availability.   In all honesty it was the first time I had ever seen this topic taken head on at a data center conference. In my experience, like PUE, Availability calculations can fall under the spell of marketing departments who truly don’t understand that there SHOULD be real math behind the calculation.   There were two interesting take aways for me.  The first was just how impactful this portion of the talk had on the room in general.   There was an incredible amount of people taking notes as Jay Park went through the equation and way to think about it.   It led me to my second revelation – There are large parts of our industry who don’t know how to do this.   In private conversations after their talk some people confided that had never truly understood how to calculate this.   It was an interesting wake-up call for me to ensure I covered the basics even in my own talks.

After the Facebook talk it was time for me to mount the stage for Global Thought Leadership Panel.   I was joined on stage by some great industry thinkers including Christian Belady of Microsoft, Len Bosack (founder of Cisco Systems) now CEO XKL Systems, Jack Tison-CTO of Panduit, Kfir Godrich-VP and Chief Technologist at HP, John Corcoran-Executive Chairman of Global Switch, and Paul-Francois Cattier-Global VP of Data Centers  at Schneider Electric.   That’s a lot of people and brainpower to fit on a single stage.  We really needed three times the amount of time allotted for this panel, but that is the way these things go.   Perhaps one of the most interesting recurring themes from question to question was the general agreement that at the end of the day – great technology means nothing without the will do something different.   There was an interesting debate on the differences between enterprise users and large scale users like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and AOL.  I was quite chagrined and a little proud to hear AOL named in that list of luminaries (it wasn’t me who brought it up).   But I was quick to point out that AOL is a bit different in that it has been around for 30 years and our challenges are EXACTLY like Enterprise data center environments.   More on that tomorrow in my keynote I guess.

All in all, it was a good day – there were lots of moments of brilliance in the panel discussions throughout the day.  One regret I have was on the panel regarding DCIM.   They ran out of time for questions from the audience which was unfortunate.   People continue to confuse DCIM as BMS version 2.0 and really miss capturing the work and soft costs, let alone the ongoing commitment to the effort once started.   Additionally there is the question of once you have mountains of collected data, what do you do with that.   I had a bunch of questions on this topic for the panel, including if any of the major manufacturers were thinking about building a decision engine over the data collection.  To me it’s a natural outgrowth and next phase of DCIM.  The one case study they discussed was InterXion.  It was a great effort but I think in the end maintained the confusion around a BMS with a web interface versus true Facilities and IT integration.     Another panel on Modularization got some really lively discussion on feature/functionality and differentiation, and lack of adoption.  To a real degree it highlighted an interesting gulf between manufacturers (mostly represented by the panel) who need to differentiate their products and the users who require vendor interoperability of the solution space.   It probably doesn’t help to have Microsoft or myself in the audience when it comes to discussions around modular capacity.   On to tomorrow!

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Sights and Sounds of Datacentre 2012: Christian Belady

This morning I sat in on Christian Belady’s presentation at DataCentre2012. I will post small blips about things that interest me as the conference continues.

Both Christian and Laurent Verneray of Schneider each identified 5 megatrends. Interestingly while there were common themes between them at a high level, they attacked the trends from different altitudes of the data centre problem space. Both discussed the coming pressure on water as a resource.

He then went on to talk about the Microsoft Data Center strategy. Its probably worth a specific post from me on my observations on their evolution.

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!  

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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/

 

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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?

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Preparing for the Cloud: A Data Center and Operations Survival Guide

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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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

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Reflections on Uptime Symposium 2010 in New York

This week I had the honor to be a keynote Speaker at the Uptime Institute’s Symposium event in New York City.   I also participated in some industry panels which is always tons of fun. However, as a keynote at the first Symposium a few years back it was an interesting experience to come back and see how it has changed and evolved over the intervening years.  This year my talk was about the coming energy regulation and its impact on data centers, and more specifically what data center managers and mission critical facilities professionals could and should be doing to get their companies ready for what I call CO2K.   I know I will get a lot of pushback on the CO2K title, but I think my analogy makes sense.  First companies are generally not aware of the impact that their data centers and energy consumption have, Second most companies are dramatically unprepared and do not have the appropriate tools in place to collect the information, which will of course lead to the third item, lots of reactionary spending to get this technology and software in place.  While Y2K was generally a flop and a lot of noise, if legislation is passed (and lets be clear about the very direct statements the Obama administration has made on this topic) this work will lead to a significant change in reporting and management responsibilities for our industry.

Think we are ready for this legislation?

Brings me back to my first reflection on Symposium this year.   I was joking with Pitt Turner just before I went on stage that I was NOT going to ask the standard three questions I ask before every data center audience.   Lets face it, I thought, that “Shtick” had gotten old, and I have been asking those same three questions for at least that last three years at every conference I have spoken at (which is a lot).  However as I got on stage, talking about the the topic of regulation I had to ask, it was like a hidden burning desire I could not quench.  So there I went, “How many people are measuring for energy consumption and efficiency today?”  “Raise you hand if in your organization, the CIO sees the power bill?”  and then finally “How many people in here today have the appropriate tooling in place to collect and reporting energy usage in their data centers?”  It had to come out.   I saw Pitt shaking his head.  What was more surprising, was the amount of people who had raised their hands on those questions. Why?  About 10% of the audience had raised their hands.  Don’t get me wrong, 10% is about the highest I have seen that number at any event.  But those of you who are uninitiated into the UI Symposium lore, you need to understand something important, Symposium represents the hardest of the hard core data center people.   This is where all of us propeller heads geek it out in mechanical and electrical splendor, we dance and raise the “floor” (data center humor).  This amazing collection of the best of the best had only had a 10% penetration on the monitoring in their environments.   When this regulation comes, its going to hurt.  I think I will do a post at a later time on my talk at Symposium and what you as a professional can do to start raising awareness.  But for now, that was my first big startle point.

My second key observation this year was the amount of people.  Symposium is truly an international event and their were over 900 attendees for the talks, and if memory serves, about 1300 for the exhibition hall.  I had heard that 20 out of the worlds 30 time-zones had representatives at the conference.  It was especially good for one of the key recurring benefits of this event: Networking.   The networking opportunities were first rate and by the looks of the impromptu meetings and hallways conversations this continued to be an a key driver for the events success.  As fun as making new friends is, it was also refreshing to spend some time and quick catch ups with old friends like Dan Costello and Sean Farney from Microsoft, Andrew Fanara, Dr. Bob Sullivan, and a host of others.

My third observation and perhaps the one I was most pleased with with the diversity of thought in the presentations.  Its a fair to say that I have been critical of Uptime for some time by a seemingly droningly dogmatic recurring set of themes and particular bend of thinking.   While those topics were covered, so too were a myriad of what I will call counter-culture topics.  Sure there were still  a couple of the salesy presentations you find at all of these kinds of events, but the diversity of thought and approach this time around was striking.   Many of them addressed larger business issues, the impact, myths, approach to cloud computing, virtualization, and decidedly non-facilities related material affecting our worlds.   This might have something to do with the purchase by the 451 Group and its related Data Center think tank organization Tier 1, but it was amazingly refreshing and they knocked the ball out of the park.

My fourth observation was that the amount of time associated with the presentations was too short.   While I have been known to completely abuse any allotted timeslots in my own talks due to my desire to hear myself talk, I found that many presentations had to end due to time just as things were getting interesting.  Many of the hallways conversations were continuations of those presentations and it would have been better to keep the groups in the presentation halls.  

 

My fifth observation revolved around the quantity, penetration and maturation of container and containment products, presentations and services.   When we first went public with the approach when I was at Microsoft the topic was so avant-garde and against the grain of common practices it got quite a reception (mostly negative).  This was followed by quite a few posts (like Stirring Anthills) which got lots of press attention and resulting industry experts stating that containers and containment were never going to work for most people.   If the presentations, products, and services represented at Uptime were any indication of industry adoption and embrace I guess I would have to make a childish gesture with thumb to my nose, wiggle my fingers and say…. Nah Nah .  🙂

 

I have to say the event this year was great and I enjoyed my time thoroughly.  A great time and a great job by all. 

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CIO Magazine Data Center Roundtable

On Wednesday January 13th, I will be co-hosting a Roundtable Dinner with Chicago area CIOs on the topic of data centers and the data center industry at large.   The event is sponsored by CIO Magazine and is likely to be a wide ranging conversation given the mix of executives slated to come.  The group will be made up of technology leadership from a diverse set of industries including Universities, Manufacturing, Financial Institutions, and Hospitality.  

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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