Blogs

Your Next Data Center - Can You Say "Cookie Cutter"

Posted Mon, 03/01/2010 - 09:35 by mark.thiele

"Cookie Cutter Data Center", blasphemy I say, "I can build a better data center than anyone else, I'll build it myself"! All of us who have grown up as IT folks harbor that feeling of "we can do it better ourselves".

Death To The Datacenter!

Posted Thu, 02/25/2010 - 21:59 by geekism


Last month, we killed our first eBay data center. Don’t worry, it had it coming...

 

I arrived early at the eBay San Jose campus as the rain continued to drench northern California. I joined a group of lively eBay employees from technology operations, product development and IT on a bus headed to Sacramento. We were on a journey to put our oldest data center to rest. This journey had started over a year and a half earlier, long before I had joined eBay. At that time, an aggressive plan was put into motion. The goal was to consolidate the data center portfolio to decrease costs, increase our availability and take eBay to the next level of Operational agility. It was a lofty goal.

eBay, like many of the rising star Silicon Valley companies, had been in constant react mode to keep up with demand. They had amassed a data center portfolio that spanned three states and in twelve different data center sites. Eight years earlier, the Sacramento data center (SMF) was the first to be brought online as a disaster recovery location and it was supposed to be temporary. It quickly expanded to become much more than that. When the idea of shutting it down was raised, the feeling was it was too big a task, too complex and too costly to execute. It would be like rebuilding the engine of a jumbo jet while you were in flight.

A Session on the DCP Stack with BrightTalk Virtual Events

Posted Tue, 02/23/2010 - 18:56 by mark.thiele

I'm going to be doing a talk on the DCP Stack for Brighttalk virtual events on March 17th. The topic is certainly timely and the goal is to help demonstrate how the Stack can be used to develop a more holistic approach to managing your data center environment.

Please pass the word and join in if you have the chance.

Mark

Warming up to my new Gig at ServiceMesh & a few notes about DCP

Posted Fri, 02/12/2010 - 17:46 by mark.thiele

It’s been two weeks now and I’m still trying to get my head wrapped around my role, with a new company.  The product we offer creates so many opportunities in the infrastructure & cloud space that my head is constantly spinning with thoughts on more ways the tools can be put to use.  In my new role as VP of Data Center Strategy I’ll have several responsibilities, not the least of which is worrying about

Upgrading an existing Data Centre Part 3

Posted Fri, 01/29/2010 - 04:09 by jack.mcardle

Well its been a hard shift. Data Room 7 is nearly finished and ready for handover. It has been one of these projects where the hard bits have been easy and the easy bits have proven to be hard.The upgrade of the main incoming electrical supply which on the face of it was fraught with disaster actually went very well and gave us no issues at all, other than the fact that the day we planned it coincided with the heavy snow falls just prior to Xmas.

The Pulse = Collaboration

Posted Fri, 01/15/2010 - 02:34 by geekism
TGG_DCP

When I joined eBay in September of 2009, I had the pleasure of taking a seat on the Green Grid Advisory Council (AC).  The AC was formed in late 2008 to provide input and guidance on the general direction of the consortiums strategies and drive a greater awareness of the Green Grid with end users.  The AC is made up of executives from AT&T, ADP, eBay, Nationwide Insurance, Strato, The Walt Disney Company, Tokyo Electric Power Company, and Verizon. My first meeting was at the New York Stock Exchange where the GG held a call for action event.  The NYSE hosted the GreenGrid event and later allowed the BoD and the AC to go onto the trading floor.  The GG Board of Directors were also able to ring the closing bell. Too bad the platform wasn't bigger - we all couldn't fit. :-) But, we were able to watch from the trading floor.  In the picture shown here, we were right below the platform. Denis, in the brown jacket to the right of me, runs all of Disney's Data Centers. We happened to run into the guy who does all of the trading for Disney (in the blue jacket). Very cool. I just wish I could have found the eBay trader, but we're not listed on the NYSE.  The NYSE trading floor isn't what you see in movies (chaotic, with people yelling and exchanging paper). It is filled with computers, and thousands of screens with tools providing real time reports that the traders use to make decisions. After the closing bell, we were able to take a few photos (note 4:12:59 on the clock).  Being a uber-geek certainly has it's perks.  :-)

Data Center Monitoring is a Converging Space

Posted Wed, 11/18/2009 - 18:28 by jeremy.rodriguez

Data centers increase in complexity as redundancy and higher power per rack designs are introduced.  Managing the modern data center environment is spawning a new type of business critical application which I often refer to as a “critical facilities application”. 
The modern day BMS is a new type of application that supplies information about the operating data center. The BMS and its architecture match traditional IT systems with application servers and databases.

Data Center Pulse session discusses member experiences in the use of the Data Center Stack

Posted Sun, 11/15/2009 - 16:21 by graeme.hay

Today (Nov 15th), Data Center Pulse hosted a workshop on a number of topics at the 7x24 Exchange conference here in Phoenix AZ. The workshop included a presentation and discussion on the Data Center Stack (stack.datacenterpulse.org) and how it can be applied. This blog talks to some of the presentation and discussion…….


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A Major Geek Moment

Posted Sun, 10/25/2009 - 23:27 by geekism

In February of 2009 I had a very unique event happen.  It was by far, one of the geekiest things I had ever done. I was still working at Sun and we had rebuilt the Data Center POD concepts into Second Life. We had created a Data Center Island that allowed anyone to walk into this virtual world and watch how the data center can be transformed from traditional power and cooling to the new modular, highly efficient configuration with PODs.  They could also interact with the PODs to see how hardware fit and things could move around.  A virtual-physical data center. That was geeky enough, but try this on for size. Greg Papadopolous (Sun's CTO & controller of over $2B in R&D funds) joined me for a live webecast directly from Second Life to Industry Analysts. They had created avatars for both of us that made us look much younger, more dignified (and skinnier) than we really were.

The Chill-Off, Carbon, GHG, Data Center Efficiency, and the DCP Stack, they're all Linked!

Posted Sat, 10/17/2009 - 09:05 by mark.thiele

On Thursday 10/15/09, several members of the DCP board participated in the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) Data Center Efficiency event in Sunnyvale at the NetApp campus.

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