In this blog post, I take a look at Greenpeace's Clicking Clean report and compare it with the Top 100 websites. When I read the Clicking Clean report, I could not help but notice "something is missing" which prompted me to look a little further.
Read MoreIn this post, I will take a look at data center power consumption and discuss relative impacts to consider vs. other industries.
Read MoreWhen looking to get multiple resources aligned, find compromises on areas of dispute, and ensure consistent communications I have used the Vested Interest pseudo equation as a starting point to achieve alignment.
Read MorePerforming more activity during your waking hours at first seems like an easy trade-off yet we often are not able to measure the potential benefit of this trade-off vs. the cost.
Read MoreMapping human augmentation by technology. Assembling genetics, biology, wearables, and machine learning for more of what you want from life.
Read MoreWhere do you spend your time in a day?
Read MoreEver wondered how many books you can read in a lifetime?
Read MoreI have had the pleasure to lead a team focused on creating, growing and redefining computer and data center solutions and it is the organization and team aspect that typically does not get enough attention, especially in technology.
It has been my personal focus as a mentor and manager to enable my own direct team and all that work them to be successful to both drive innovations and optimize business solutions.
Today, I want to share perspectives on the research of Dr. Johnathan Koomey. Who worked with me and others in the organization to understand the people who were driving the innovation.
Be it cultural, operational, or otherwise, change starts from the top down, and the tides of change at eBay began moving in 2009, with the addition of Dean Nelson to the executive team.
As the newly appointed Senior Director of Global Data Center Strategy, Architecture, and Operations, Dean’s idea was to optimize the technology of eBay by optimizing the culture of the company first.
Disparate budgets were consolidated, long-term visions were tied together, and innovative new teams were formed to fit the ever-evolving needs of both the business and the industry at-large.
For years, eBay operated on a mentality of “cut costs, mitigate expenses,” particularly when it came to the subject of IT infrastructure.
But in order to accomplish the goals outlined by Dean and his team, the company would need to become a culture of “optimum efficiency”—even if that efficiency meant a modest hit to the bottom line.
Did it happen overnight?—of course not. Cultural change is not easy to invoke at any enterprise organization…
In my work with Dean we focused on key hires and employee development to create many industry record breaking firsts and to advocate an environment of mutual respect to propagate knowledge and enhance careers.
When the organization’s mindset successfully shifted from “cut costs” to “maximize efficiency”, it naturally led to technical changes at eBay.
“How can we improve our technology to take our efficiency to new heights” became the prevailing question, and it facilitated the type of conversation that led to projects like Mercury and Quicksilver.
These two projects (Mercury launched in 2010, Quicksilver in 2013) were different initiatives in terms of execution, but their underlying goal was the same—optimize the infrastructure for more performance and efficiency at an optimal cost.
Project Mercury was a venture into the world of data centers. Specifically, we hoped to develop a new, high-efficiency data center capable of amplifying the impact of on existing, but aging, data center built in 2006. It was a venture and investment that would not have occurred had the company not made a shift in focus to efficiency with a positively reinforced team.
Project Quicksilver explored the implementation of Bloom Energy Fuel Cells as a means of primary data center power, rather than backup power. The result?—we not only created a more environmentally-friendly data center in the highly coal based state of Utah, it also created a data center that would be more readily available thanks to its resilience to grid-based power shortages. Quicksilver symbolized a major leap forward in the evolution of IT infrastructure, a leap forward that looked comprehensively at an entire IT deployment across an organization focused on efficiency and improvements in industry that is in dire need of innovation.
The organizational shift to more wholly focus on efficiency is at the very center of improvements in infrastructure over the last seven years.
The lesson for other business leaders is, true change within a company—infrastructure or otherwise—cannot take place without a focus on organizational dynamics and team environmental change. The prevailing attitudes and focuses of leadership must occur first before the rest of the business can buy-in and take real, innovative action.
References:
Today the Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) metrics were published to drive transparency on data center and server usage. Many internet provided services use large quantities of servers and are continually growing to scale up with demands. It is very important to understand the overall efficiency of technical infrastructure from server design to the associated data centers running the servers.
With DSE we took a look at the quarter to annual impacts of server growth and the associated affects on costs, business enablers, energy consumption, and carbon emissions. The combination of technical metrics with business impacts provides great information to make decisions to optimize both to strive for even better results over time.
With many technical infrastructures utilization can be very low, which means the manufacturing and usage of servers and data centers can represent a waste of resources. The under-utilization of technical resources represents one of the challenges in the industry and a metric like DSE is a key step in pinpointing inefficiencies and either designing better overall solutions or optimizing already created solutions for re-use.
Old processors for electronic recycling
In the end all computers will eventually reach their end of useful life and need to be recycled. It is up to us to make sure what what work was done during the active lifespan of any given computer was found to be as useful as possible.
The Data Center Pulse Stack - a standard way to describe data center offerings
Read MoreIt was my pleasure to receive the Uptime Green Enterprise IT Award for eBay's modular data center deployment in Phoenix.
During my career I have been in a never-ending march towards cleaner technology solutions. For this deployment we worked with Dell to conceptualize the server and modular data center deployments to ensure we could attain extremely high efficiency, optimal costs, and rapid deployment.
It was great to have the efforts recognized by the Green Enterprise IT Awards, hosted by the Uptime Institute.
The annual awards, which recognize outstanding effort in the field of data center energy efficiency, are not ones that are easily received, and we had to meet a number of impressive criteria in order to be declared a winner.
In partnership with Dell, I received the “Modular Data Center Deployment” award for eBay's highly innovative Project Mercury.
One of my favorite photos from the deployment where we were lifting a little under 2,000 servers about three stories high over power lines to the rooftop.
Centered in Phoenix, Arizona, Project Mercury was an exploration into data center density—the building, packed with nearly 2,000 servers, uses “standardized racks of gear on the floor and…high-efficiency data center modules on the roof”. The setup is so unique, so innovative, that as modules are added to the building, its energy-efficiency actually improves.
The honor of being recognized by the Uptime Institute with other industry peers, such as Facebook, is a great validate of our approach on data center modularity and efficiency.
