Green (low carbon) Data Center Blog

Who will replace the departed Oliver Sanche at Apple?

It’s one week since Oliver has left this Earth, and his service is on Dec 3, 2010 in France.

Please take note that the religious ceremony for Olivier will take place on Friday, December 3rd 2010 at 2.30 PM in his home town of Pignan in France ( Eglise de Pignan, 3 rue de l'église, 34570 PIGNAN, FRANCE).

There will be an open casket on friday morning at the " Complexe funeraire Grammont, Avenue Albert Einstein , 34000 Montpellier "

I talked to one of Olivier’s close friend Charles Kalko yesterday who was one of the last to see Olivier in the US.  Charles drove Olivier to the airport for some vacation time in Barcelona with his brother which is where Olivier passed away.  Charles and I are both mad and sad that Olivier is not coming back on a plane.

Every day I am talking to data center people and with going to Gartner I am sure the subject will come up. “Who will Apple hire to fill Olivier’s shoes?”

I am biased on this subject.  I worked at Apple from 1985-1992 in product development, not IT where data centers are at Apple.  On the other hand one of my best friends from those Apple days worked in IT and her boss Pete Solvik went on to be Cisco’s CIO, so I worked with the IT folks often.  Apple IT uses a lot of IBM HW.  In fact, one of the projects I worked on was to design and specify a distribution logistics SW solution for AS/400.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours with Olivier on the eBay data center project and travelling to various data center conferences with him. One of Olivier’s AT&T DC friends had just gone through the interview process at Microsoft to fill Mike Manos’s job ,and suggested Olivier would be a good candidate.  Olivier thought about Microsoft, but wasn’t passionate about going to Redmond.  He liked his job at eBay.  If he was going to make a move he would rather go to Google where he has friends.

One day Olivier said he was going to interview at Apple.  What did I think?  I reminded him Apple was established in 1976.  The company is over 33 years old.  Product development is totally different than support groups like IT, facilities and real estate where data centers are.  There are friends I know who tried to make the point Apple IT needed to run the data centers like a web company not enterprise SW.  But, try talking to IT that has people with over 20 years of time at Apple.  The scary thing is if I was still at Apple I would be there 25 years, and there are friends I know who are there longer.

Olivier and I talked many times before he took the job at Apple.  And when he did take the job he was pumped as he had his dream job to work at Apple.  Did I say Apple was a loyal Mac user.  I remember when I left HP to go to Apple, I was pumped as well.  I took my 5 year Apple award and Photoshop Olivier’s name on the plaque.

Tomorrow is your first day. :-)

Here is in hopes of your success, and making it to 5 years with many Apple memories.

Olivier responded.

Dave,
It was great having you over on Friday. It was the perfect end for this chapter in my life, and a great beginning for the next one... a good way to transition our friendship from eBay to Apple...

…

I look forward to a plaque like this one... but Steve has to sign it!!!
Have a great day tomorrow with your daughter's birthday. Emilie LOVES her iPod touch and got a great cover for it....
Be well,
O.

A couple of days later.  Olivier says.

I was very impressed with your photoshop skills! We will have to compare with the real one once I get it :)

So far it's going great... drinking from a fire-hose ....

Let me know when you are back in the bay area...

O.

There are people Apple could try to recruit from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft.  But how many have the passion for Apple and Mac that Olivier had?

While I am in LV next week I am sure there will be rumors on who will apply for the job.  The data center world is small, and it is hard for people to do things without others finding out.

I have my own ideas on who would be possible candidates, especially since I know who applied for the job before Olivier got it and who was applying after Olivier joined.

But, I am not going to pull a wikileak and post a list of people which would jeopardize their current jobs.  We’ll see who Apple eventually hires.  It will most likely be a none event.  Unless I find a a good reason to blog about who Apple hires and how they will continue the green data center momentum. 

One of the more entertaining surprise to both Olivier and I is how almost all his interview candidates read my post about his joining Apple as they Google searched his name.

Apple Recruits eBay Data Center Executive Olivier Sanche, Can Apple Change Data Centers the way they changed cell phone and media players?

They would many times comment on Olivier’s position on the environment.  Hiring managers typically say they want to hire someone with passion for the job.  With one post Olivier and I made it so almost all candidates were filtered for people who had a passion to change the world with greener data centers.

How cool is that?

Mike Manos says Adieu to Olivier Sanche

Mike Manos writes a post saying Adieu to Olivier after talking to Olivier’s brother and wife in France. I couldn’t agree more with what Mike writes in his post.  Mike and Olivier are special people in the data center industry and I had the pleasure of making sure Olivier and Mike met in person at Data Center Dynamics SF in July 2009 when Olivier was still at eBay and Mike was with Digital Realty Trust.  It would be a bit harder to arrange a meeting with Mike at Nokia and Olivier at Apple, but as Mike says.

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.

Mike does a good job of describing why I also enjoyed hanging out with Olivier.

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.

The last time I saw Olivier in person was at SVLG’s Data Center Energy Efficiency summit where we sat together critiquing the presentations.  A confession, Olivier and I were so busy talking which is why I couldn’t live blog the event.  Spending time with Olivier was always enjoyable and took priority.

Olivier’s energy will be sorely missed by those of us who got to spend time with him.

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

Olivier’s passion is well expressed from his Facebook page.

My daddy is going to "Think Different"...

By Olivier Sanche · View Photos

An event 20 years in the making... I am going to fulfill a long time dream and join Apple next month to lead their Data Center team.

I absolutely LOVED my time at eBay. Some of the smartest, most passionate and amazing people work here; I am leaving far too soon... but I cannot believe that I came all the way here and would pass on this opportunity...

This was by far the hardest decision I ever had to make professionally, but as my next CEO once said: "have the courage to follow your heart and
intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."

Olivier Sanche passes away on Thanksgiving Day

Update - here is a reference to Mike Manos's post saying Adieu to Olivier

I just received the bad news that Olivier Sanche passed away on Thanksgiving Day.  What first comes to mind is Olivier’s great family who I have had the pleasure of meeting many times.

His daughter Emilie is the same age as my daughter (both born in Sept 2001) and was Olivier’s inspiration to green the data center.  I met Emilie 2 years ago and posted on her influence on Olivier’s environmental passion.

Leaving the conference, I ran into Olivier Sanche who I had blogged about at the Google data center event. We were chatting and he was short on time as he needed to meet his family.  Olivier asked if I wanted to meet his daughter, Emilie Sanche.  Why would Olivier want me to meet his daughter? Because I was the one who helped tell the story of how Olivier’s daughter was worried about global warming and the polar bears were going to drown.

A fond memory is also when Charles Kalko and I went over to Olivier’s house with his family for beer and pizza after his last day at eBay to celebrate his new beginning at Apple.

Apple didn’t know how important a data center person they hired until I blogged about his transition.

Apple Recruits eBay Data Center Executive Olivier Sanche, Can Apple Change Data Centers the way they changed cell phone and media players?

I have been lucky to meet eBay’s Sr. Director, Data Center Services & Strategy, Olivier Sanche at a variety of data center events and discuss many different green data center ideas. Last week, Olivier joined me as a panel member at Data Center Dynamics Seattle to discuss Carbon Reporting: Risk or Opportunity.  Olivier took a position different than many that carbon reduction is a must, and should not be compromised.

This is a sad day as Olivier was first on my list today to reach out as I fly to SJ tomorrow. To hear before I even start an e-mail that Olivier passed away on Thanksgiving brings an end to one of the best data center friendships I have made.

Olivier loved being at Apple as he could do things he could get done no where else.  He had vision, passion, and drive to do the right thing, especially for the environment.  One of the sadder parts is Olivier couldn’t talk about what he was doing at Apple, but we had many other data center things we could talk about without touching on any Apple topics.

My trips to SJ are going to be one of my saddest trips for a long time as I know I can no longer visit my dear friend Olivier. But what is even sadder is thinking of Emilie no longer having her awesome Dad.

 

How about Apple obsoleted the Xserve because the future is in the cloud?

I've been reading the news regarding Apple's obsoleting the Xserver.  There is even speculation the replacement is ARM/A4 servers. 

In the server and mobile space, performance-per-watt is very important. This could obviously be linked with the discontinuation of the XServe. Apple sees this as important to marketing:
http://www.apple.com/xserve/performance.html
Measuring in ssj_ops/watt (super-steve-jobs operations per watt). If they can get their PA Semi engineers to design a server chip with enough cores that it can handle similar loads to a Xeon while consuming a fraction of the power and generating far less heat, that's a huge selling point. I doubt they'd be able to cool them passively but say they build a 16-32 1GHz core chip that consumes 250mW per core is < 10 W. Single thread performance would probably suck so they'd have to aim for 2GHz+ but multi-threaded performance would be fine.

News.com has a recent post on the frustration of  Mac IT admins.

IT admins mourn Xserve's death

by Erica Ogg

RIP Xserve.

(Credit: Apple)

Not many MacBook or iPhone users are going to weep over the cancellation of an Apple server.

In fact, they probably didn't know Apple even made them. But when Apple announced it was shutting down production of the Xserve effective January 31, a very specific group of people took notice.

The Apple faithful inside corporate IT departments large and small are feeling jilted by Apple's sudden cold feet in the enterprise computing market. And though the announcement came last last week, the full impact of Apple's decision is still being absorbed.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20022249-260.html#ixzz14pw40YQf

How about this for a simple answer?  Jan 31, 2011 is the last day the Xserver is sold.  January is a typical month for Apple to make announcements.  Apple's Maiden DC will be operational.

Don't you think Apple could sell Cloud Computing at a scale that would blow the Mac User base away?  Could you imagine having a hundred, a thousand, or maybe even ten thousand Xserve HW running Apple compute jobs for one user? 

Take AWS business model and execute it for the Apple market.  Include the iPod and iPhone users to send compute jobs to the Apple Cloud.

MacRumors speculates on Apple’s Data Center

MacRumors speculates on what Apple’s future data center plans are.

Apple's NC Data Center Plot Larger Than Originally Thought

Wednesday October 27, 2010 10:19 AM EST
Written by Eric Slivka

Ongoing investigations over at All Things Digital have revealed that Apple's new data center that is set to open "any day now" in Maiden, North Carolina may be the site of even grander plans than the potential doubling in size discovered late last week. According to that earlier research, Apple's initial proposal to representatives of Catawba County where the project is located included a schematic showing two adjacent data centers that would appear to total on the order of one million square feet, with only one of those buildings having been constructed so far.

Apple's 70-acre parcel across Startown Road from existing data center

New research from All Things Digital indicates, however, that Apple's plans may even extend beyond that planned one million square-foot facility on 183 acres, as the company also owns 70 acres across the street from that site.

The scuttlebutt around Maiden is that the company intends to use it for office space. But that seems unlikely.
A more plausible explanation is that this parcel, too, will be used for data center space.

Ray Ozzie posts on Dawn of a New Day, Continuous Services and Connected Devices

Ray Ozzie has started a new blog and posts on Dawn of a New Day.

Dawn of a New Day

To:           Executive Staff and direct reports
Date:         October 28, 2010
From:         Ray Ozzie
Subject:      Dawn of a New Day

Five years ago, having only recently arrived at the company, I wrote The Internet Services Disruption in order to kick off a major change management process across the company.  In the opening section of that memo, I noted that about every five years our industry experiences what appears to be an inflection point that results in great turbulence and change.

Ray finds information about 25 years on Nov 20 1985.

Imagining A “Post-PC” World

One particular day next month, November 20^th 2010, represents a significant milestone.  Those of us in the PC industry who placed an early bet on a then-nascent PC graphical UI will toast that day as being the 25^thanniversary of the launch of Windows 1.0.

25 years ago I was working at Apple.  Wow look at where Apple is after 25 years and where Microsoft is.  In 1992 I moved from Apple to Microsoft.

From 1985 to 1992 here is Apple vs. Microsoft stock.

But what are the last 5 years like as Ray is infamous for his e-mail waking up Microsoft.

Ray argues for simplicity

Complexity kills. Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT.  Complexity makes products difficult to plan, build, test and use.  Complexity introduces security challenges.  Complexity causes administrator frustration.

And Data Center Services he calls Continuous Services

Continuous services are websites and cloud-based agents that we can rely on for more and more of what we do.  On the back end, they possess attributes enabled by our newfound world of cloud computing: They’re always-available and are capable of unbounded scale.  They’re constantly assimilating & analyzing data from both our real and online worlds.  They’re constantly being refined & improved based on what works, and what doesn’t.  By bringing us all together in new ways, they constantly reshape the social fabric underlying our society, organizations and lives.  From news & entertainment, to transportation, to commerce, to customer service, we and our businesses and governments are being transformed by this new world of services that we rely on to operate flawlessly, 7×24, behind the scenes.

And future are appliance devices.

But there’s one key difference in tomorrow’s devices: they’re relatively simple and fundamentally appliance-likeby design, from birth.  They’re instantly usable, interchangeable, and trivially replaceable without loss.  But being appliance-like doesn’t mean that they’re not also quite capable in terms of storage; rather, it just means that storage has shifted to being more cloud-centric than device-centric.  A world of content – both personal and published – is streamed, cached or synchronized with a world of cloud-based continuous services.

Ray’s vision is centered around always on data center services with a range of simple appliances to connect to the services.

Who wants to go back to a time when editing win.ini or Mac ResEdit?

Ray paints an interesting future where Google, Microsoft, and Apple will compete for Continuous Services and Connected Devices.

Google TV vs. Apple TV, Microsoft couldn’t last for this battle

The latest move by Google and Apple for the TV experience all require big data centers.  Newsweek covers how these companies are remaking the Tube.

Geek TV

Computer makers take over the tube.

Martin Katz / Xinhua-Landov

For the past few years, tech companies have been trying to find a way to bring the Internet and television to-gether, without much success. Sure, there are lots of little boxes you can attach to your TV that let you download content from the Internet, including Vudu, Roku, TiVo, Boxee, and Apple TV, not to mention game consoles from Microsoft and Sony. Each one gives you a little something different. But no single box gives you the whole Internet.

Now Google is out to replace all those crazy little boxes with Google TV. The software program will come built right into some TV sets and it will basically turn your TV into a computer.

In all the news about Google and Apple there is almost no mention of MSN TV.

Because you can’t buy MSN TV anymore.

MSN TV is the rebranded WebTV Microsoft acquired.

MSN TV (formerly WebTV) is the name of both a thin client which uses a television for display (rather than a computer monitor), and the online servicethat supports it.

The product and service was developed by WebTV Networks, Inc., a company purchased by Microsoft Corporation and absorbed into MSN (the Microsoft Network). While most thin clients developed in the mid-1990s were positioned as diskless workstations for corporate intranets, WebTV was positioned as a consumer device for web access.

A good friend from my Apple days worked at WebTV which eventually made him a Microsoft employee.  I hired him to help evangelize Windows XP before he moved on to senior architect position in Windows.  Ironically he now works at Google, not on the TV product.

Going back further in time I worked for a short period in the Microsoft Interactive TV team which was run by Craig Mundie.  Craig is the one who drove the acquisition of WebTV.

Microsoft takes notice

In February 1997, in an investor meeting with Microsoft, Steve Perlman was approached by Microsoft's Senior Vice President for Consumer Platforms Division, Craig Mundie. Despite the fact that the initial WebTV sales had been modest, Mundie expressed that Microsoft was impressed with WebTV and saw significant potential both in WebTV's product offering and in applying the technology to other Microsoft consumer and video product offerings

Things have changed a lot in 14 years that WebTV was launched.  The first servers for WebTV were run from their office in an old BMW dealership.

WebTV's online service running from servers in its tiny office, still based in the former BMW dealership

Apple and Google now have some of the top data center infrastructure in the industry.  What has changed in the 14 years is the requirement to use data centers to power the user experience. 

I wonder if part of what contributed to Microsoft’s inability to keep up the MSN/WebTV platform is the lack of data center capabilities during product development.

It is interesting how not to long ago servers were viewed as support devices – file and print servers.   Now servers do the heavy lifting so the client experience is faster, more efficient and more flexible.

Consumer Reports can't recommend iPhone 4, demonstrates duct tape solution, "don't touch me here"

When I look at the above video, I think an answer could be a "don't touch me here"

Above is a video from Consumer Reports published today that they cannot recommend the iPhone 4.

Lab tests: Why Consumer Reports can't recommend the iPhone 4

Lab test: Apple iPhone 4 design defect confirmed

It's official. Consumer Reports' engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception. When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone's lower left side—an easy thing, especially for lefties—the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you're in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can't recommend the iPhone 4.

We reached this conclusion after testing all three of our iPhone 4s (purchased at three separate retailers in the New York area) in the controlled environment of CU's radio frequency (RF) isolation chamber. In this room, which is impervious to outside radio signals, our test engineers connected the phones to our base-station emulator, a device that simulates carrier cell towers (see video: IPhone 4 Design Defect Confirmed). We also tested several other AT&T phones the same way, including the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre. None of those phones had the signal-loss problems of the iPhone 4.

Consumer Reports does suggest a fix.

If you want an iPhone that works well without a masking-tape fix, we continue to recommend an older model, the 3G S.

ZDnet makes an interesting point now that Consumer Reports has joined the iPhone 4 antenna debate.

It’s one thing for a blogger like me to go on these rants about the shortcomings of the iPhone 4. But when Consumer Reports, which has the power to drive or halt buying decisions with its recommendations, announces that it cannot recommend the iPhone 4 because of the device’s antenna issues, it carries a lot of weight with mainstream consumers.

Hardcore iPhone fans can try as much as they’d like to discredit the Consumer Reports findings - and some are already doing just that - but they’ll have a hard time convincing mainstream consumers that CR is turning this into something more than it is. After all, this isn’t just some thumbs-down from a tech blogger who had a bad experience with the iPhone. This is Consumer Reports - and that matters.

If someone could come up with an iPhone 4 app that triggers "don't touch me" maybe that would help.

Even though all the noise is about dropped calls.  I wonder how the data transmission rate is affected even if you don't drop a call.  Lower signal strength would slow data transfer and put the iPhone 4 in a higher power consuming state for a longer period, resulting in lower battery life.

I don't have any plans to upgrade my iPhone 3GS.

Analyst predicts how music Droid will eat Apple's lunch

Barron's reports on an interview with Charter Equity Research Managing Director Ed Snyder.  Who is Ed Synder?

Snyder is a former telecom engineer, who has been covering the telecom industry since Alexander Graham Bell called for Watson. And I have found him mostly right about things telephony, with wires or without. One of his basic tenets throughout the evolution of wireless phones has been that music is the killer application. The key to Apple's (ticker: AAPL) strategy of linking the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad with one operating system, the iOS family, has been iTunes' central role in managing music, applications and software updates. The easy, seamless ability to transfer music from the iPod via iTunes to the first iPhones was a huge factor in the Apple smartphone's acceptance and continued success. That, in turn, is driving iPad sales.

Ed brings up Music as the killer app for Google.

Now, Snyder suggests that music is the application that could provide Google's (GOOG) open-source Android OS the chance to leap over Apple. The analyst predicts that the next-generation music platform, which is likely to be cloud-based, will be the major battlefield in the smartphone war over the next year or so.

And mentions data centers as a key to Google's strategy.

Snyder says that Google must offer a content-delivery system similar in function to iTunes, but based in a cloud—meaning music is stored in one of Google's famous data-center clusters somewhere and delivered via the Internet and over airwaves to various devices. (ITune libraries sit on the local hard drive of personal computers). He thinks that Google should strike deals with (or, I suppose, buy) one of the many cloud-based streaming-music services already used on wireless devices.

Smartphones, Music, and Data Centers are Google's opportunity to eat Apples' lunch.

How a Droid Could Eat Apple's Lunch

By MARK VEVERKA | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR(S)

Apple's iPhone reigns supreme, but a veteran telecom analyst argues that the momentum belongs to Google's Android system.

APPLE 'S IPHONE IS THE undisputed king of the smartphones, but there is swelling sentiment that Google's Android platform may steal the crown in the end.

Analyst predicts Video is next big thing for Apple's New Data Center

ComputerWorld covers an analyst that says Video is the next big thing for Apple's giant data center in North Carolina.

Apple's next big thing? Video, analyst says

Clues in future iPhones and iPads, massive data center point to video-based subscription services

By Gregg Keizer

April 21, 2010 02:31 PM ET

Computerworld - Apple's next big thing may be a video platform that combines cameras in the next versions of the iPhone and iPad with the giant data center the company's building in North Carolina, an analyst said today.

Will video be the market battle between Apple iVideo vs. Google YouTube.

Gottheil thinks that Apple is ready to make a major move into video, and based his bet on a series of clues in the company's upcoming hardware, as well as the $1 billion data center in North Carolina that's now hiring personnel.

Apple has the creative audience and a business model already for downloading videos. 

In the same way that Apple changed the market with iTunes App Store.  Why not sell videos authored in the iPhone 4G?

$0.99 amateur videos could make Apple way more money than Google ads on YouTube.  YouTube is stuck with a free business model.  Apple doesn't have to be free.

Video is one the tough authoring and distribution problems that Apple could solve.

In the same way that the iPod changed music.

Will Apple change video?

And, will AT&T make more money as people download videos on 3G.  That new 2 GB data plan can look really expensive.

Speaking of AT&T, their account site went down today.

AT&T's account site crumbles under iPhone owner load

Early eligibility offer for iPhone 4 upgrade swamps site

By Gregg Keizer

June 7, 2010 05:35 PM ET

Computerworld - AT&T's account management site went dark Monday after Apple announced that its U.S. partner would waive contract requirements to allow more customers to upgrade to the new iPhone 4 this month.

The site came back online at about 5 p.m. ET.