Jun 05
For the last 20 years, power and space have been treated as endless commodities. We procure, rack and stack, run, and decom, growing the data centre infrastructure until the facilities department pulls the ‘out of power’ alarm, or the data centre manager forecasts space at a premium, and reactive measures take hold.
Enterprise data centres (say of 500 assets or more) usually don’t maintain an accurate inventory of what’s running inside and how much energy/power is being consumed. Scattered inventory of applications to host relationships, inaccurate inventory of equipment, and no earthly idea of power consumption is more the rule than the exception.
According to Connection Research, only 3.5% of CIO’s have responsibility and budget for the data centre power bill, 66% have NO visibility or responsibility, and the remainder have some visibility and some accountability (which isn’t saying much since this is a self-assessment scoring, usually biasing results to the favor of the assessed!).
Many ITIL advocates envisage cloud public/private architecture as the 3rd incarnation of ITIL, but seriously if basic inventory and asset management didn’t manifest in the last 10 years of ITIL adoption, I’m not sure it’s going to happen now when the pace of data centre virtualisation/consolidation is accelerating. If people power couldn’t keep pace with physical inventory there’s not a hope in the hell of asset management it will keep up with virtualized infrastructure….
If you look at a non-innovative data centre, you might be looking at over 1000 watts per server, while the present day opportunity to virtualise and consolidate could collapse an entire data centre into a score of high-density racks of x86 infrastructure and an astounding 45-60 kW/rack power draw nearly demanding water cooling, or high-velocity air-cooling techniques only found in containers or psueudo-containers.
All of a sudden, space (and it’s cooling design) and power are crucial considerations as data centre footprints have an opportunity to shrink in the face of steady growth. As this happens, application to virtual asset inventory will become more crucial, and the physical inventory itself may become less relevant as non-virtualised infrastructures diminish. Logical management, metering, and measurement of the virtual infrastructure (still in it’s infancy) articulating power draw per application, and virtual compute/storage run-time consumption will then be the true measure between private and public infrastructure. But then, the graph above underscores the primitive nature of our ways in the midst of accelerating changes to the distributed computing landscape.
Feb 20
One of the more perplexing aspects of spending time in Sydney & Melbourne as of late is the non-stop rivalry between the cities. Coming from Boston (and rival NYC), this originally seemed like old news (big city, smaller city, sports teams, etc.). But digging in, this is more than a sports-team rivalry, something brewing in the fabric of each city culture.
At first, it’s subtle commentary from people on both sides. Nonchalant jabs to the groin, “I detest Melbourne”, “I’d never live in Sydney”. While I really don’t mind either way, it’s amazing when you see both cities are brilliant in comparison to let’s say, MOST port cities in the rest of the world.
So while my taste of both places is fresh and not-yet tainted by experiential bias, here is a collection of naïve first impressions.
Feb 15
In planning this next stage of the career, one of the questions I tabled to all the top business developers I could meet was ‘what do you use to manage your business contacts and networks’?
The responses varied from whiteboards, to weekly planners, to moleskins, to prodigious use of www.linkedin.com, all with their strengths and limits for keeping track of a rapidly expanding network of contacts and relationships.
But the problem I’m grappling with is that your average notebook requires consistency and ‘reviews’, yet ultimately will be mothballed when spaces are used up. For pages turned, you have ‘out of sight, out of mind’ issues, and with sales databases (such as www.salesforce.com) you have powerful relational database schemes, but again the tendency for information to become entered, catalogued, and ultimately forgotten unless searched upon.
Linkedin is incredibly powerful and helps you visualize network connections, search in and out of network, and view the ‘degrees of separation’ between you and key contacts, yet involves it’s own gamut of online eqituette, and ultimately leaves your network wide open to those in your network. Not always what you want or need…
So, as part-experiment, part-need, I’ve started using mind-mapping software (mindjet’s mind manager for mac since the XP version is more costly and my mac is better for this) to build and visualize the network of people, relationships, and contacts currently in the works. It was tough coughing up the funds and departing from the open source equivalent Freemind, but the transition has been worthwhile already. Some interesting results that you won’t find elsewhere:
- Ability to visualize networks and intra-
network relationships - Add tasks with date reminders to contacts
- Single view of all network contacts, due dates, action items
- Dynamically scale, add, delete, link, unlink relationships
- Highlight high-priority contacts and activities
- Keep track of contacts that require follow up weeks/months down the path
- Export data to other standard formats (office, flat files, etc.)
So far so good, and eventually this may cost-justify a 27″ imac to manage the overall network in a large screen view!
Jan 25
One of the shocking realizations of a global move is the cost of moving your animals, versus the cost of moving your belongings. In our case, we fit our ’stuff’ sans cars into a 20′ shipping container.
The container contents wrapped, packed like an intricate puzzle, either scanned or unpacked by customs, then finally unloaded and unpacked at your door. With the exception of cost and overall time to ship (10-12 weeks via ocean freight), just about like any other move, assuming you don’t have to have your golf clubs fumigated for dirt/grass debris at 800 per item!
The cats have to go through a battery of rabies tests and certifications even to qualify for shipment to Aus, and the only way to get them port to port is via certified animal handlers and air-cargo shipments. This would explain the absence of poodles and toy-dogs on your long-haul flights from LAX->SYD. And only after that, they get to enjoy 60 days of quarantine in a government run facility.
All up, your relative weight and space ratios to cost are orders of magnitude higher for cats versus goods. Now if you could just put your cats in a container with some bulk quantities of food and litter, you could ship about 4oo cats and turn a mean profit!
