Gartner Conference & Data Center Pulse

Hello,


I got a chance to speak on a Keynote panel at the Gartner Data Center conference last week in Vegas and was able to talk up Data Center Pulse as part of the discussion. The panel was about IT & Facilities working together and "The Future of the Data Center". I really enjoyed the conversation and got great feedback from the crowd. We had over 2000 in attendance and at least a dozen came up to me after the show to ask questions. I also got a few follow up emails from folks who were there, but couldn't stick around to talk.

This is a fascinating time for those of us interested in Data Centers and I'm pretty sure my enthusiasm and passion for all things data center came through in the discussion.

Key points from my discussion:

- The data center needs to be treated as a system. The IT infrastructure and the building infrastructure are tied together now more than they ever have been. You can't work on the shell without considering the impact to the IT gear and vice versa.
-Treating the data center as a system means that your IT and Facility staff need to be in lockstep with eachother.
- Filling the gap between traditional facilities roles and IT operations staff with a person who understands IT enviroments and can translate the IT system requirements into appropriate facility design and management is a real opportunity for most companies.
- PUE is a decent rating to use until we have something better. However, if you're being asked by your execs to provide a "PUE" for your data center be careful to couch in appropriately so you don't over promise. PUE is a moving target. If you say that my PUE is 1.6 today and then you do a server consolidation only to find out your PUE is now 1.8 you might find it hard to explain to management how you could be less efficient after having done a consolidation.
- Work with your local power company on ways to get rebates and incentives for projects that will reduce your power draw (i.e., virtualization or air containment). In some cases you can actually get the project cost covered by the power company.
- Doing the right thing from an energy or environment perspective doesn't always have to mean throwing away money. In our current DC project we actually saved 500K in building costs by going with a more efficient air management/containment strategy.
- We often take 3 - 5 years to implement "proven" technologies in our data centers due to our generally risk averse nature. However, our data centers are such huge consumers of power and have such a large impact on our environment I believe it's our obligation as owner/operaters to stay in front of what's available to help us minimize that negative impact. As a community we need to find ways to reduce that time window between a new solution being "proven" and actually being "adopted" by Data Center folks.
- Probably the most controversial point made was that there really was very little need anymore for new data centers to be built to Tier III or higher. With the broad availability of mature virtualization and data synchronization solutions (among other technologies) the ability to protect your production applications by moving them from site to site quickly to avoid disasters means that having high cost Tier III or Tier IV space will soon be a thing of the past.

Thanks for dropping in. Until next time....