geekism's blog

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.  :-)

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 Green Team Commits - Let the battle begin!

Posted Thu, 09/24/2009 - 20:49 by geekism

Carbon Killer

 

This week, eBay announced that by 2012 it will reduce its corporate emissions by 15% over its 2008 baseline.

http://news.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=410332

Let me break this down for you. This is not just some corporate marketing gimic or easily attainable goal to get press coverage - it is very real and affects my world directly.  As you saw in the release, eBay is firmly committed to making this happen, but it will not be easy. More than half of eBay's emissions come from our Data Centers. From a carbon perspective, we are in the belly of the beast and will be fighting for every metric ton we remove. An aggresive strategy is underway to reduce both our financial as well as our carbon burdon. The Data Center operations teams in partnership with the Green Team have multi-prong, multi-year projects in play that will ultimately lead to eBay reaching this goal. From an operations standpoint it is all about fine tuning the Data Center "machine", holisitically, to achieve operational excellence.

 

The teams are clear that success is not measured with a single metric. It is a combination of metrics. We also believe operations and sustainability are synonymous with each other. The operations strategy is to deliver Availability, Cost Control and Agility by levearing our talent pool and innovating at every level. But we also view all aspects of operations through a sustainability lens. In our business if any of these components are missing, you're not addressing the entire problem. For example, we can meet our availability numbers but miss our carbon reduction goal because of excessive, inefficient, redundancy. On the other hand, we could drive our sustainability focus and miss our cost reduction goals. It is an eco system and requires the right balance to be successful. 

A Geek In Training

Posted Tue, 09/08/2009 - 05:55 by geekism

Sun Geek

The Sun Will Always Shine

 

I'm sure I will bore most of you with my historical ramblings, but today signifies a big change in my life. It is bitter sweet. I'm leaving the company that I have literally spent almost half of my life with. Sun Microsystems hired me right after I graduated college in 1989. My first day at Sun happened to fall on my 21st birthday.  I was hired to do component level debug for deskside servers in their Milpitas manufacturing plant. It was a whole new world for me. I had moved from a modest town in Colorado to Phoenix, Arizona to attend a trade school for electronics. As I neared graduation, I interviewed with IBM, HP, Sun and others. The Sun interview clicked and before I knew it, I was on my way to the center of innovation - The Silicon Valley - to start working for one of "the" high flying tech companies.  Ironically, I knew zilch about either of them. I was as green as you could get. I had no idea what Sun built, who they sold to, or how they got there. I had never touched Unix and didn't know the difference between a compute server and the server at Denny's.

Online Chatter

Posted Wed, 08/26/2009 - 20:31 by geekism
geekism blog

Today I decided to move my blog from sun.com to Data Center Pulse.  I have been a blogger for about two years now. My blogging has been sporadic due to the hectic schedule that most of us Silicon Valley types have to lead. But, my intent was to provide my perspective on technology, the data center world and of course what I was working on.  At Sun, I was having a blast with the mountain of projects we were juggling and the great innovations that were coming from it.  As you have seen in my different blog entries and the content we have shared,  Sun is a very transparent company.  Sun encourages the sharing of knowledge to advance technology. It is part of the culture and something I respect very much.  It was just that perspective that made me start Data Center Pulse.  I attended a leadership connections conference in Sept/08 and was inspired by Jonathan Schwartz's open source vision. It resonated. It made perfect sense to me. I wanted to apply this mentality to my industry - data center infrastructure.  The very next day, DCP was born. It has grown very quickly and many important focus areas have emerged.  I have received great support from everyone at Sun to keep true to the original intent of DCP -- Influence the data center industry through end users - aka, the data center customers.

1,000 Members Baby!

Posted Thu, 07/02/2009 - 01:25 by geekism

On June 26th, 2009 Data Center Pulse met a major milestone in our push to influence the industry. We broke the 1,000 member mark! This has been a long time coming. We had almost 2 people a day signing up for DCP since we started on September 13, 2008. We had a press release and Data Center Journal picked it up first.  They have always been supportive of our efforts and I'd like to publicly thank them for it.

The Stack

Posted Mon, 06/29/2009 - 02:01 by geekism

I believe the industry needs a common way to define, address, report and regulate our datacenters.  This is not just a mash up of metrics that I can apply to different aspects of my datacenter to report efficiency, it is a framework that allows us all to compare how our datacenters are built, what useful work they do and ultimately what score they achieve against others in the industry.  I believe we can achieve a standard framework to compare all global datacenters regardless of industry, location, function or design.  In the latest Data Center Pulse video episode, I discuss the DCP Stack Framework with Jeremy Rodriguez, the Co-Chair of the DCP Technical Advisory Board who is leading of the stack development.  The goal is to define this stack, gain end user acceptance and start to apply it by January 1, 2010.

Join us in developing the Stack:

http://stack.datacenterpulse.org

stack@datacenterpulse.org

 

Green Recovery!

Posted Mon, 06/15/2009 - 18:01 by geekism

 

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to talk with Andrew S. Winston, the author of Green to Gold.  I met Andrew when he presented at Dave Douglas's 2008 Eco Summit in Santa Clara, CA and we had stayed in contact. Andrew was undertaking a new project and wanted input about Data Centers for one of the sections. 

Green Recovery focuses on how companies can use environmental thinking to survive hard economic times and position themselves for growth and advantage when the downturn ends.  One core focus is on getting lean -- taking action in five key areas of the business that can yield quick payback and high ROI.  Andrew recently put out a free report, Green Cost Cutting, that includes the introduction from the new book and the chapter "Get Lean".  The purpose of releasing the content early is to put out some of the tactical, short-term ideas as soon as possible so companies can employ them quickly. 

Andrew was gracious enough to include quotes from myself and Subodh Bapat. You can pre-order a copy through Amazon. You can download the free excerpt (introduction and the chapter "Get Lean") here. 

 

 

TelcomTV

Posted Mon, 06/15/2009 - 00:36 by geekism

Earlier this year I was interviewed by Laina Raveendran Greene (perfect name for Green IT) from TelecomTV.  They created a new show called Green Planet, Sustainable ICT.   Sun was featured in two different episodes.  I couldn't get their embed video to work, so the links are below. :-) 

Green Planet Episode 2: Energy Efficiency & the Green Data Centre

Green Planet Episode 3: Innovation for Sustainable Efficiency 

 

 

CSIA CleanTech Innovation Award

Posted Fri, 06/12/2009 - 16:36 by geekism

And the winner is...

 

Today I was forwarded an email about Sun winning and Apex award from the Colorado Technology Association (CSIA) for our Broomfield, Colorado Datacenter project.  I love it when you win an award you didn't even know you were in the running for.  :-)  Sun is a founding corporate sponsor of the CSIA organization (through StorageTek). Kristin Russell, the Sun IT Operations VP, is currently on the board of directors.  We recently hosted an Eco Innovation Summit at our Broomfield Campus which I had the privilege to speak at along with Dr. Carl Koval, Faculty Director, Colorado University Energy Initiative and Robert Noun, Executive Director, Communications and External Affairs, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

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