Green (low carbon) Data Center Blog

Davos WEF, what are we missing?

I don't know anyone in the data center crowd who makes the list of people who attend the World Economic Forum in Davos.  10 years ago I went with my team for a technical presentation at a computer conference in Davos.  It was surrealistic in that a month later the place would have some of the top world power players in one place for WEF.  Yet here we were wandering around in the small town of Davos, Switzerland.

What is WEF?

The World Economic Forum encourages businesses, governments and civil society to commit together to improving the state of the world. Our Strategic and Industry Partners are instrumental in helping stakeholders meet key challenges such as building sustained economic growth, mitigating global risks, promoting health for all, improving social welfare and fostering

Sounds really important and prestigious.  What does it take to go?  Well as the NYTimes reports, one is a lot of money.

A Hefty Price for Entry to Davos

BY ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg NewsThe town of Davos, Switzerland, an expensive place to go.

What’s the price tag to be a Davos Man?

Chief executives, government leaders and academics around the world are headed to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting this week — a heady power gathering that mixes business, politics and Champagne in the Swiss Alps. It is an event that draws a wide range of decision makers, from Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase to Prime MinisterGeorge A. Papandreou of Greece to U2’s Bono, ostensibly to contemplate how to solve the world’s problems.

How much money?

And if you want to take an entourage, say, five people? Now you’re talking about the “Strategic Partner” level. The price tag: $527,000. (That’s just the annual membership entitling you to as many as five invitations. Each invitation is still $19,000 each, so if five people come, that’s $95,000, making the total $622,000.) This year, all “Strategic Partners” are required to invite at least one woman along as part of an effort to diversify the attendee list.

Why would you go?  Networking.

Of course, much of the week is really about one thing: networking. As the “Black Swan” author Nassim N. Taleb described it to Tom Keene of Bloomberg Television, the event is “chasing successful people who want to be seen with other successful people. That’s the game.”

But is this really good networking or a bunch of egos?

DAVID ROTHKOPF

Visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; author of "Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making"

To truly understand the enduring (if fading) appeal of the World Economic Forum, you have to go back to high school. One thing we learn in high school is that human beings, like wolves and fish and most other lower life forms, travel in packs. We also learn that there is a pecking order to those packs. And in every high school there is a group of cool kids who enhance their status simply by hanging out with one another. In my school, we hung out each morning along a certain wall in the front hall. (Yes, I was a cool kid in high school. Of a sort. The nerdy, artsy sort with an Isro.)

And if you think Davos is about anything other than status-seeking-behavior, then you have read too many of the press releases of the overly-earnest Swiss gnomes who put the meeting together. They describe themselves as being "committed to improving the state of the world." They do have a variety of bloviatapaloozas during the course of the event at which the improvement of the globe is debated. But, of course, most of the people there share a common background -- the emerging world, women and poor people are hugely under-represented. So you have to conclude that what they really mean is that they are committed to improving the state of those aspects of the world that are important to CEOs and politicians and the journalists who share the appetizers with them at the receptions in the Belvedere Hotel -- where the real work gets done in the small Alpine village that for a few days each year is the center of the trans-Atlantic establishment.

But watch the people at Davos and you see what's really up. It's not deal-making. That almost never happens there. It's networking, which is the professional way of saying: connecting with the kids who have it going on. The appeal, however, of the entire endeavor is fading for several reasons, all associated with the inadequacy of Davos as a networking forum. First, it's pretty uncool to hop on the corporate jet just to schmooze on a piste. Second, the cool kids of the 21st Century -- such as the Chinese -- are in short-supply (although the organizers are working like crazy to fix that). Finally, the event has grown so big, even the cool kids can't find each other in the mix. As Steve Case, founder of AOL, once told me while standing at the bar in the middle of the hubbub of the main conference center: "You always feel like you are in the wrong place in Davos, like there is some better meeting going on somewhere in one of the hotels that you really ought to be at. Like the real Davos is happening in secret somewhere."

Now doesn't that pretty much capture the way you felt in high school? Or is it just me? (I realize in retrospect that the haircut wasn't such a great idea.)

There are over a 1,000 private jets for the event.  A record, and maybe the prestige is fading as things aren't working.

But all this spending may soon be going out of vogue. As one attendee, the author David Rothkopf, recently wrote on his blog, “The entire endeavor is fading for several reasons, all associated with the inadequacy of Davos as a networking forum.”

He explained, “As Steve Case, founder of AOL, once told me while standing at the bar in the middle of the hubbub of the main conference center: ‘You always feel like you are in the wrong place in Davos, like there is some better meeting going on somewhere in one of the hotels that you really ought to be at. Like the real Davos is happening in secret somewhere.’”

Could you imagine the carbon footprint of this event?  WEF is a big business. $185 million in annual revenue.

All these embedded costs have helped make the World Economic Forum a big business — perhaps the biggest conference organizer in the world. According to its annual report, it brings in about $185 million in revenue and spends nearly all of it, with almost half of its costs going toward events and the other half on personnel.

Would you go to the WEF Davos event if you were invited?  Could you justify the expense report?

As I told one technical friend who was contemplating the logic of buying a Porsche Turbo.  You are looking at this all wrong.  It is not about the cost benefit analysis - insurance, maintenance.  There is a very simple question you need to ask.  Does your ego fit the car?  Is it too small?  Or maybe too big.  If your ego comfortably fits in the car you can justify the costs.

WEF works if it fits your ego.

Olivier Sanche Memorial Service Jan 28, 2011 in Los Gatos, CA

It’s been almost 2 months since Olivier Sanche voice went silent and we’ll never hear him again, speaking with passion on data centers and the environment. 

A Memorial Service will be held on Jan 28, 2011 at 4p in Los Gatos, CA.

Here are details.

Dear all,

Some of you might not be aware of this terrible news so it is with great sorrow that I must inform you that Olivier passed away on November 26, 2010 in Europe from a sudden heart attack.

The funeral took place on December 3rd in Pignan ( his hometown), France.
There will be a memorial in his honor on Friday, January 28, 2011 at St. Mary's Catholic Church, 219 Bean Avenue in Los Gatos ( California) at 4PM.
Here is the link for directions.

The memorial will be held after school hours so there should be some parking available in the church's parking lot, otherwise the town of Los Gatos has several free public parking lots (along University Street ) as well as street parking.

Sincerely,
Karine Sanche

Please feel free to send me stories you have about Olivier as I’ll be helping to pull together a perspective on his awesome past. 

-Dave Ohara

[email protected]

Happy New Year!!! Welcome 2011

Hope you enjoy a day of F3 – Friends, Family, and Football.

Here is a shot out the front door at 7a. (taken with an iPhone 3GS)

Google changes its home page.

My home is almost done, and we can move out of our 850 sq ft cozy beach house.

Happy New Year!

Thanks for continuing to visit www.greenm3.com.

I have much more to discuss on this blog in 2011.

“Good Enough” Photography ends Kodachrome film, Cloud Computing is bringing an end to an Era of overprovision

I’ve known Jay Fry for years and first met Jay when he was with Cassatt.  Jay writes a good perspective on “good enough” being the new normal.

Making 'good enough' the new normal

Posted by Jay Fry at 9:52 AM

In looking back on some of the more insightful observations that I’ve heard concerning cloud computing in 2010, one kept coming up over and over again. In fact, it was re-iterated by several analysts onstage at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas earlier this month.
The thought went something like this:
IT is being weighed down by more and more complexity as time goes on. The systems are complex, the management of those systems is complex, and the underlying processes are, well, also complex.
The cloud seems to offer two ways out of this problem. First, going with a cloud-based solution allows you to start over, often leaving a lot of the complexity behind. But that’s been the same solution offered by any greenfield effort – it always seems deceptively easier to start over than to evolve what you already have. Note that I said “seems easier.” The real-world issues that got you into the complexity problem in the first place quickly return to haunt any such project. Especially in a large organization.
Cloud and the 80-20 rule

But I’m more interested in highlighting the second way that cloud can help. That way is more about the approach to architecture that is embodied in a lot of the cloud computing efforts. Instead of building the most thorough, full-featured systems, cloud-based systems are often using “good enough” as their design point.
This is the IT operations equivalent of the 80-20 rule. It’s the idea that not every system has to have full redundancy, fail-over, or other requirements. It doesn't need to be perfect or have every possible feature. You don't need to know every gory detail from a management standpoint. In most cases, going to those extremes means what you're delivering will be over-engineered and not worth the extra time, effort, and money. That kind of bad ROI is a problem.
“IT has gotten away from “good enough” computing,” said Gartner’s Donna Scott in one of her sessions at the Data Center Conference. “There is a lot an IT dept can learn from cloud, and that’s one of them.”

MSNBC/NYtimes has an article about the last roll of Kodachrome film, for some the best film for photography.

Demanding to shoot
Demanding both to shoot and process, Kodachrome rewarded generations of skilled users with a richness of color and a unique treatment of light that many photographers described as incomparable even as they shifted to digital cameras. “Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day,” Paul Simon sang in his 1973 hit “Kodachrome,” which carried the plea “Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.”

All 25 Kodak labs are shut down.

At the peak, there were about 25 labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome, but the last Kodak-run facility in the United States closed several years ago, then the one in Japan and then the one in Switzerland. Since then, all that was left has been Dwayne’s Photo. Last year, Kodak stopped producing the chemicals needed to develop the film, providing the business with enough to continue processing through the end of 2010. And last week, right on schedule, the lab opened up the last canister of blue dye.

Steve Hebert for The New York Times

Lanie George pulls off infrared goggles after leaving the darkroom processing Kodachrome film at Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kan., on Dec. 28, 2010. The lab is the last one processing the 75-year-old film and will process the final roll on Dec. 30.

Here is a CBS video about the end of Kodachrome.

eBay VP of IT Operations, Mazen Rawashdeh keynote at Gartner DC LV

I ran into Mazen before he presented his keynote at Gartner DC LV, and we caught up as we hadn’t chatted for a while.  I sat up front and created a video of Mazen discussing the process change that eBay made to improve the performance per watt for eBay systems.  Sitting with the eBay team we were also able to catch up a bit discussing Olivier Sanche passing away.

Mazen does a if good job of explaining what eBay did to change the behaviors in IT to be greener in the data center and reduce watts per transaction by 70%.

I apologize for the video quality as the camera was out of focus in manual focus mode. Here are better pictures with the camera in focus.  My Canon 7D rocks, and sometimes it feels like I am carrying rocks in my backpack as it is no light camera.

 

48 hours at a Data Center Conference, Example Gartner DC LV 2010

I learn a lot going to data center conferences, but I go to almost no sessions.  My calendar is booked with numerous meetings, but I leave time to network and find new connections.

This is my 2nd Gartner DC Conference in LV and it was well worth my time, but I kind of have a unique way of leveraging the conference.

Given my blog I attend the conference as media with a press badge.  Weeks before attending I start to get e-mails and phone calls from public relations company to meet with vendors who have executives at the conference.  I choose carefully who I will set up an appointment with.  Some of the companies on the list were HP, Dell, SGI, Nimbula, Equinix, and APC.

The Gartner keynotes start on Monday morning at 8a.  I arrive in LV at about noon and start my meetings, and within 48 hours I am on a plane leaving LV.

While I am at the Gartner conference I don’t speak to a single Gartner employee.  And, I actually don’t listen to any of their presentations.  There are many who find the sessions educational, but I don’t learn enough new content to make it worth the time.  Spend 1/2 hour with a senior HP executive or 45 minutes listening to Gartner explain its surveys of a group who are not the innovators.  I spend so much of my time talking to innovators, listening to how the masses think is convenient for tracking the market, but not for being more competitive than the rest.

All my interviews are with what people see as what the future data center will look like which many time are greener data centers too.

As soon as I get close to the conference I start saying hi to people who I have seen at other conferences.  My first stop after registering is going to the press room.  The press room is one of the sparsest media rooms - no food, water, coffee.  Some mints.  Rich Miller and Kevin Normandeau from DataCenterKnowledge are the first media guys I see and we catch up a bit.  Two months ago, we were all at AFCOM LV, so it has only been a short period since we chatted. Also, I see Matt Stansberry from SearchDataCenter who I hadn’t seen for a while.

Matt and I discuss Oregon Duck Football as he lives in Eugene, OR and his wife is completing her post graduate degree at UO.  I tell Matt that I educate many people it is he who broke the story on Facebook’s choice for coal power.

Maybe Facebook should have bought a Bloom Box to diffuse Greenpeace’s campaign against a coal powered data center

Thanks to Matt Stansberry’s reporting on SearchDataCenter, attention was drawn to Facebook’s Prineville Data Center being coal powered.

Tiered energy rates bring higher prices for new customers
By 2012, BPA will charge tiered rates for power. Customers that signed 20-year contracts in 2008 will pay tier-one (i.e., inexpensive) pricing for their current electricity demand. These customers use most of the power produced by the dams.

By 2012, Oregon's Bonneville Power Administration will charge tiered rates for power.

To meet new customer demand or increased demand from existing customers, BPA also purchases power from other sources. In 2012 this electricity will be classified as tier two, and it will be charged at a much higher rate than the BPA's current hydropower.

Which brings us back to Facebook: The company's new data center is being built in Prineville, Ore., a small town on Oregon's high desert. Pacific Power, a utility owned by PacifiCorp, will provide the electricity. While Pacific Power gets some hydropower from BPA, its primary power-generation fuel is coal, according to Jason Carr, the manager of the Prineville office of economic development for Central Oregon.

With the price of hydropower increasing in the Northwest, Facebook opted to bet on the incremental price increases associated with coal rather than face tier-two pricing from BPA.

I’ll see Matt and Rich many times at the conference as we interview many times the same executives.  I’ll ask what they are finding interesting.

Besides interviewing there are attendees who come to do business and we’ll meet to discuss what is going on in the industry and where there are new opportunities.  Who is doing some of the best work and who is starting up new projects.  I’ll start looking for new connections and interesting people to have discussions with at the conference.

When the exhibit area opens, I’ll look for people I know, and watch which vendors are getting lots of traffic.  I rarely spend much time at an exhibit unless I know people at the company.  Most of the time I talk to a booth person, I find I can learn more by surfing their website.  One booth I went to was Splunk which is one of the fastest growing IT management tools.  I ended up spending over 1/2 hr at the Splunk booth as the guy I was talking to just happened to work for a good friend of mine at Microsoft and I knew there was a guy who had interesting insight.  Within 24 hrs, I was able to have a telephone conversation with Splunk’s CTO to discuss an innovative use of Splunk which I hope to write more about in the future as we prove a scenario to green the data center using Splunk.

Throughout the 48 hours I talk to business friends in site selection, engineering services, construction, facility operations, containers, server hardware, cloud SW, networking, and management tools.  Looking for how the pieces fit together in interesting ways.  Making introductions, and discussing new ideas.

There were a couple of good “ah ha” moments when I figured out some new things.  One example is the big whales aren’t at Gartner.

In the end I talked to some amazing data center executives, found some new technologies sooner as they were brought to my attention, reinforced established connections, made new connections, and had a good time discussing new ideas.

BTW, I don’t expect the Gartner folks to talk to me as I am not going to pay for their advice as I am not a client.  But I will help talk about what goes on Gartner DC LV.  Everybody gets a different experience than others.   The above is my 48 hrs at Gartner DC LV 2010.

Whale Hunting at Gartner DC LV 2010

I had dinner with a couple of senior data center executives who engineer and build datacenters for some of the top players in the industry.  These guys are part of the data center industry that build the big data centers for the top players where the business must have large capacity and the best designs.

Part of the conversation was comparing data center conferences to go to.  We were all at Gartner DC LV 2010.

Other conferences we agreed were good are DataCenterDynamics, 7X24 Exchange, and Uptime Symposium, SVLG DCEE.  All of these conferences have more of a data center facilities focus whereas Gartner has little facilities discussion. 

Gartner is different with a focus on data center operations from an IT perspective, not a facilities.

But, then I made the point that the big boys in data centers in general don't go to Gartner.  The exception is the executives who attend for presentations and meet with clients.  And, those who sell to the rest of the attendees

For example, Google sent two people who didn't look like they were from the data center group.  Microsoft sent over a dozen, but again not from the data center group.  No Facebook or Yahoo.  No Twitter, Zynga,   No AT&T. No Apple.  A couple from Verizon Wireless, but again no data center group.

Who does intend in mass with 5 or more people? 

Canada Dept of Defense

Delta Airlines

DePaul University

DirectTV

FAA

GSA

Kaiser Permante

Medtronic

McKesson

NASA

PG&E

Royal Bank of Canada

Sandia National Labs

Southern CA Edison

Social Security Adminstration

State Farm

US Dept of Defense

US Dept of Vet affairs

US Marine Corps

Lots of big fish.  But not the whales of data center.

So is Gartner DC LV conference really the data center industry?  Or those who look for Gartner for advice on data centers?

I run into many people I know in the industry at Gartner DC, but now that I think about it is the suppliers of the data center industry I run into at the event, not the end users I know who are the most innovative and biggest. 

The end users I run into at DataCenterDynamics, Uptime, and 7X24 Exchange.

If you are hunting for the big whales in the data center industry Gartner is not the place to look, but there are still plenty of big fish.  On the other hand, getting access to the right people is part of the challenge which is why the exhibit area is used so much.

Dave Barry's Guest Keynote Video at #gartnerdc LV 2010, making fun of the Cloud and IT

Dave Barry gave an entertaining presentation of his comedy act Wit and Wisdom.

Guest Keynote Speaker

Dave Barry

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author and Humorist

Dave Barry is a humor columnist. For 25 years he was a syndicated columnist whose work appeared in more than 500 newspapers in the United States and abroad. In 1988 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

Many people are still trying to figure out how this happened. Dave has also written a total of 30 books, although virtually none of them contain useful information. Two of his books were used as the basis for the CBS TV sitcom "Dave's World," in which Harry Anderson played a much taller version of Dave. Dave plays lead guitar in a literary rock band called the Rock Bottom Remainders, whose other members include Stephen King, Amy Tan, Ridley Pearson and Mitch Albom.

At dinner I was talking to some friends who missed Dave's presentation. To share the experience here is a YouTube video of Dave's discussing of Cloud Computing and IT.

Dave Barry Wit and Wisdom of Cloud

Enjoy and have a good laugh.   I did which made it hard to keep the camera steady.

So you think Green IT is not an important topic? Gartner Green Data Center Roundtable full

Next week I am heading off to Gartner Data Center Conference in LV, Dec 6 - 9, 2010.  My calendar is pretty full; meeting with friends who will be there, meeting people in person I've met virtually, and interviewing many vendors on their green data center solutions.

It will be interesting going to see how the messaging has changed.  Also some of my past clients are presenting and it will be cool to see how well their presentations are accepted.

Green IT and Green Data Centers are viewed by some as not important as it was last year.  But, there SearchCIO throws this article up.

Consolidation, compliance pushing demand for a green data center

By Laura Smith, Features Writer

01 Dec 2010 | SearchCIO.com

John Phelps was not surprised when the Gartner Data Center Conferenceroundtable he's hosting -- its subject is the green data center -- was the first to fill up with reservations. He's been speaking about green IT for a few years now, and says the topic has just "gelled" for CIOs this year.

The Green Data Center is maturing as people figure out there is a regulatory aspect they need to think about along with energy efficiency.

In the past, conference audiences were a mix of a few IT managers looking at the green data center for its environmental benefits, and more people looking to the concept to save money, said Phelps, a research vice president at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. "Now we have both: the first group looking to save money, and the others realizing that with the possibility of regulations, 'I might bypass problems if I pay attention to the green issue too,'" he said.

Indeed, green IT has gone from a whisper to a shout. Understanding best practices in energy-efficient IT is critical to their profession, said two-thirds of IT managers responding to a recent survey by CDW LLC. The percentage of organizations that cite energy efficiency as a key consideration when they buy new IT equipment jumped from 26% in 2009 to 39% in 2010, according to CDW's third annual Energy Efficient IT Report. The Vernon Hills, Ill.-based IT solutions provider, which surveyed 756 IT professionals in the public and private sectors for the report, also found that 79% of organizations are consolidating data centers or have a strategy to do so, with many citing energy reduction as a top driver.

I'll have a busy couple of days at Gartner DC as it is one of the few data center conferences that has higher level executives who the data center managers work for.

The Greenest Data Center Dynamics London Conference

I was fortunate to sit on a panel with Stephen Worn.  Stephen came to St Louis straight from London to present on the convergence of renewable energy and data centers.

Here is Missouri Senator Kit Bond with Stephen discussing Green/renewable energy data centers.

DataCenterJournal reports on DCD London.

Color London Green

THURSDAY, 11 NOVEMBER 2010 05:52

WRITTEN BY RAKESH DOGRA

For any entity or individual wanting to explore the realm of the green data center, London was a center of information.
DatacenterDynamics 2010 was held earlier this month at the Lancaster Hotel in London and featured experts like Derek Webster, head of data center development with Yahoo; Raimo Peres, vice president of Deutsche Bank; and many other luminaries. The conference considered areas like energy efficiency, cloud computing and virtualization, capacity planning, technologies like free cooling and UPS design innovation, and so on. One of the major focus areas was the Carbon Reduction Commitment. The U.K. government recently stated that it does not intend to reallocate the collections made from the carbon reduction tax. This issue was debated extensively at the DatacenterDynamics event.
The emphasis on green IT was apparent in many of the addresses given by various industry leaders. For example, George Adams, Engineering Director with SPIE Matthew Hall, spoke about Project Merlin, which produced a low PUE design. Two senior-level ABB executives discussed the Carbon Reduction Commitment.

Note this news on the Carbon Reduction Commitment tax.

About 81% of the respondents to a survey conducted by DatacenterDynamics stated that they were concerned about the ambiguity surrounding the Carbon Reduction Commitment tax. In the same survey, almost half the respondents also felt that this tax could drive data center investment out of the U.K.

I wish I could be at DCD London, but Stephen did come to St. Louis and we had a good catching up over awesome steaks and wine at Annie Gunn's.

Annie Gunn's is known for its' heartwarming, nurturing, robust dishes that encourages us through another gloomy St. Louis winter.