Data Center Pulse Blogs

Why in Spite of the Numbers Private Cloud Will be Prominent for Years to Come

Public cloud is the way forward, it's cheaper, has better scale, probably better security than most in house IT solutions and it allows your IT team to focus on business benefit higher up the stack. So, why am I saying Private Cloud will be here for some time to come?

Assessment/Predictions:

1.      Inappropriate Business Risk Evaluation:

a.      When it comes to protecting the company jewels, risks are to be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately, few organizations (biz or IT) have the maturity to effectively measure actual risk value. Considering the business has a very low appetite for risk to their IT systems, IT will be able to play on that risk for years to come, thereby avoiding any changes that involve moving critical IT systems/applications to Public Cloud. Lastly, there will be further missteps with the Public Cloud providers that will give internal IT all the ammunition they need to justify staying in-house.

2.      Market opportunity:

a.      Gartner predicts that the Cloud Market will be nearly $150 billion by 2014. While there are many groups making predictions (UBS, Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc), generally speaking the prognosis is bullish to say the least. Why is the size of the market important? It's important because it drives behavior by the companies trying to maintain or grow their slice of the cloud revenue pie. Does anyone really believe that IBM, HP, Dell, NetApp, Cisco, EMC, VMware, Citrix & others are just going to lie down and let 4-5 "Amazons" be the world's clouds? They can't afford to ignore this change any more than a firefighter can ignore wind direction when fighting a forest fire. The vendors who have traditionally supported enterprise IT will do everything in their power to demonstrate the viability of private cloud. They will make it easier to setup and more efficient to own, all while heavily marketing the risks of going Public.

3.      IT isn't anywhere near being commodity yet:

a.      There has been much discussion about the "commoditization" of IT as a result of cloud. Specifically, that there won't be any need for internally built infrastructure anymore. That the future of IT will be to buy platform services from external providers and that those providers will be the ones worried about how to manage the physical assets. To some degree, this prediction is real, but I strongly believe it misses two things:

                                                    i.     The human equation: As humans still run IT, decisions about the future of IT organizations and IT roles, will be driven by "base" human needs and concerns, not purely by what might appear logical. As a leader, I learned very early that to ignore the human equation is to fail.

                                                   ii.     IT at all levels still has considerable development left in it. Even today we don't have everyone using white box servers, why is that? It's because the vendors are still offering differentiation that appeals to the buyer. I've said this before, but it bears repeating, "IT is like a painter's pallet. The painter may have the same brush, and the same colors, but will still create a new and unique painting every time".

4.      IT Organizations will respond:

a.      As IT organizations come to grips with the change Cloud brings to IT infrastructure, application ownership and organization design, they will start their own internal efforts to protect what they do. What's the best way to protect your job, innovate and improve, demonstrate how being internal and close to the business can still provide "perceived" value, regardless of what Amazon, HP, or Terramark are selling in the Cloud?

5.      10 Years to get 50% of IT into the public cloud:

a.      Over time IT organizations will change their job descriptions and ability to contribute at new levels. These role changes combined with public cloud providers becoming institutionalized will allow that move.  There will also be a slow retirement of traditional IT infrastructure specialists over the next 10 years and the majority of IT talent coming out of college will want to focus on other aspects of IT (I.e., application development, delivery and business representation). The above mentioned changes will naturally increase the percentage of IT work being done in public clouds.

6.      Within the next 10 years several large cloud providers of today will be gone or dying:

a.      This may seem like an obvious prediction, but it's not. My prediction is more related to cloud providers being caught in technology "change" traps that cost them their margins, as opposed to just being unable to execute an effective cloud offering.

I fully realize that there is controversy around this topic, but also believe that discussion and debate are the best ways to learn. Through sharing our concerns in an open forum more of us are likely to accept and internalize new ideas. In a similar vein to a blog I wrote a while back about Amazon I referenced the fact that yelling at us about what the right solution or option is isn't likely to make us change our behavior.  I look forward to your comments and tweets on this subject.

In technology, competition truly is the mother of innovation.

The first round of the Project Quicksilver competition is complete! Through the months of August and September we received 68 requests to participate in eBay's second public Data Center RFP codenamed Project Quicksilver. 61 companies qualified, and 20 submitted design proposals by the October 7th deadline. Today we have selected the 5 finalists based on a comprehensive and balanced scoring system that rated each companies submission based on the design concept, team capabilities, overall operational efficiency, sustainability and cost.

Our congratulations to the finalists (listed in alphabetical order):

1. Advanced Design Consultants, Inc
2. Team: Deerns & Gensler
3. KlingStubbins
4. M+W Group
5. Team: Winterstreet Architects & AHA Consulting Engineers

Each of the finalists will be receiving a design fee for their efforts in reaching the finalists round. They will also have the opportunity to present their designs to the Data Center Pulse end user community in early 2012. DCP members, stay tuned for details on that upcoming event.

Once again, I am very impressed with the excitement, creativity, and thoroughness of the proposals we received. I want to personally thank all 61 of companies that embraced this challenge. Similar to Project Mercury, we received many comments from the participants expressing their apprecition on being able to participate without the constraints and traditional boundaries that are normally placed upon a Data Center design project. We also received a deluge of emails from others who are observing or would like to be incldued in all levels of the project. Throughout the process, participants were able to gain insight into how eBay, the worlds largest on-line marketplace, is addressing their uprecedneted growth and uber-efficiency requirements. The hundreds of design charrettes that have resulted from Project Mercury learnings coupled with the public RFP process through Data Center Pulse is truly breaking the mold on how the industry approaches Data Center design, consutruction, and operation. We want to thank everyone who has contributed their passion and sweat into making this possible.

In the video below, Mike Lewis, Director of Mission Critical Engineering, James Monahan, Partner at CDCDG and I discuss the Public RFP process, scoring and selection of the finalists for Project Quicksilver.

We will be selecting the winner of the Project Quicksilver design in November. Stay tuned to Project Quicksilver updates through the project page. For more information on Quicksilver and Mercury, please email modular@ebay.com.

It can be really frustrating as a job seeker to have an interviewer ask "why have you moved around so much?" Of course you'd like to say what you feel, but that won't go over well, so you come up with some other answer that is "interview correct".

But really, why do many of us move around so much these days? There are some obvious answers; layoffs, bad leadership, termination, poor fit, better opportunity, etc., etc. I happen to believe that there are deeper underlying reasons and that the above are but the symptoms. Loyalty (or lack thereof) being the primary reason!

Call me old fashioned, naïve, idealistic or all of the above, but I'm a huge fan of loyalty. People will help you move your belongings over an entire weekend for nothing more than a cold beer and a few slices of pizza. Is it good will, no, it's loyalty.

I love this quote on loyalty by Charles Jones

               "Loyalty is something you give regardless of what you get back, and in giving loyalty, you're getting more loyalty; and out of loyalty flow other great qualities."

How is Loyalty Destroyed by the Average Company?

Loyalty is destroyed because we are too busy thinking about making the numbers this quarter. Unfortunately, missing the numbers is really the answer, but I'll provide some detail to help explain why.

The above quote by Charles Jones really says it all, the problem lies in how we as leaders "think" we're doing something, when in reality we are only "saying" it. That's correct, most often with loyalty, customer service, and other behavior oriented qualities most of us talk about it, but don't actually live it. Loyalty isn't something you talk about, it's something you do. It doesn't matter whether the situation is hard or even if your job is on the line, you're either loyal or you're not. Unfortunately, if you're not, the people that work with you figure that out quickly.

Even when we think we're being loyal, we compromise ourselves by not being prepared. We are driven by the quarterly number and all else can be sacrificed if it helps meet that number. Using quarters to drive our businesses, instead of real drivers associated with who and what makes you successful in the long term is where we're failing.

That's Right, People Make our Companies Successful

So, if people make us successful, why are people always the first to get Sh!# on? If you thought you were going to be a little short of funds next month would you dump one of your kids or maybe stop payment on your child support? No, any sane mother or father wouldn't do that, so why do we think it's OK in a company.

I realize we're not a welfare state, and I'm not advocating that we become one. I don't believe in letting people keep their jobs whether they perform or not, quite the contrary. What I do suggest is that if you really want to get the benefit your people have to offer, then you need to give something in return. I worked at HP towards the end of the Bill & Dave period when employees are talked about and treated like family and layoffs were virtually unheard of. Unfortunately, many of our leaders at the time misinterpreted the "we are a family" motto into believing "we never hurt anyone". The simple problem was a failure to recognize that even your own mother and father can bring the hammer down, but it doesn't stop them from loving you. In fact, by bringing the hammer down but still providing you with food to eat and a place to live they are demonstrating loyalty to you and your future. I really believe that Bill & Dave were the "parent" type of leaders.

What Can We Do to Fix Our Companies?

We need to invest in our people and by "investing" I mean more than just pay them fairly or occasionally provide them some training. As leaders we need to help our teams see the company's future and correspondingly their future as well. If your team knows they will be a part of the future and they'll be given the tools to succeed in that future, they will pay you back in ways that can't be measured by the simple difference between "internal" salary and the "outsourced" equivalent.

Teach your leadership team to demonstrate loyalty, even when it hurts. By doing this you'll not only gain the trust of your teams, but you'll be forced to think ahead about where the business is going and how market changes might affect your employees. Thinking ahead seems to be one of the toughest choices for most enterprises. Don't get me wrong, I know that most companies create a business plan, but generally speaking it's focused on how big we're going to grow and which products and markets will get us to that growth. Little attention if any is placed on how we'll manage our people forward.  If you don't want to take my word for all this, all you have to do is look at Google. They pay better salaries for coders than most companies do, and the majority of their employees live and work in some of the most expensive markets in the world.

So, give loyalty another try. The ROI for loyalty might not be easy to put together for the CFO, but there are hundreds of examples in the world of leaders who have grown incredible companies with outstanding long term employees, through loyalty.

The word du jour at least in the data center space is "Modularity". The only word used more often and loosely in the IT space is "Cloud".  Even though the two words "Modularity" and "Cloud" are hyped, it doesn't mean there aren't real opportunities in both areas of technology. The trick is in understanding how the terms should be used, and where and how they should be applied.

Definition of Modularity:

-        Designed with standardized units or dimensions, as for easy assembly and repair or flexible arrangement and use: modular furniture; (borrowed from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/modularity)

Interestingly most people ascribe the definition above to the building of modular data centers. Sadly, this definition doesn't do a modern data center any justice, nor does it buy the data center owner what they really need.

In simple terms many of us assume a modular data center is one that can be built incrementally with standardized blocks of capacity.  Building data centers is a CapEx intensive endeavor, so anything you can do to reduce your exposure is a good thing. However, if the only thing you consider when building your data center is whether you have enough "space", then you're missing several critical areas of opportunity and cost management.

Data Centers are first and foremost warehouses, highly technical and very expensive warehouses, but warehouses all the same. In a typical warehouse for furniture you might not have anything more critical from a functional design characteristic than how big the doors are and how high the ceiling is. Once you've got those critical considerations accommodated then it's just a bunch of common use space. What if the warehouse were a multipurpose facility that had different security and temperature requirements? Now try to build more space on this facility with a single variety building block. You'll start to see that since your capacity for refrigerated space was very small, but your high security area was large you end up with a mismatch of need, which equals wasted space and wasted cash.

With today's "modular" data centers you're buying chunks of data center capacity that are all built to a specific standard

               Example: Tier III and 5kW per cabinet (or 300 Watts per square foot)

A standard building block of capacity is great if you always need that exact standard. What happens when you need a portion of space that can efficiently handle 25kW per cabinet or maybe you need 50 cabinets of Tier IV. Now you're beginning to see where the efficiency assumptions in many of today's modular data centers begin to let you down. But the issue is really more complex than my simple analogy above, creating a modular data center means that you have direct management of the expansion or contraction of any of the primary service capabilities of your facility. These service capabilities include, power density, cooling, space, and physical durability among others. How could you possibly future proof your facility for a 15 - 20 year lifespan if the day it's built it has the same capabilities it will have when it's retired. Do you really want to own another large data center that's "full", but has lots of empty cabinet and floor space?

So when you're shopping for data center space, do your homework and make sure you give the often used but rarely supported modularity message a real test before you buy.