What is the impact of a water drought on your data center operations?

Water is getting more attention as a critical resource for a data center.  Compass Data Center's Chris Crosby has a post on Water.

Water, Water, Everywhere…

 

 

As Coleridge made clear, water is essential for survival. Since data centers hadn’t been invented when he published The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1798 he didn’t mention them. But if they had, he certainly would have included them in his epic poem since water is too often a common requirement for their operation. This water dependency is an area of consideration that businesses should factor into their plans for upcoming data centers.

A high percentage of today’s data centers use water-based cooling methods to keep them from becoming the equivalent of a Hopi sweatbox in the desert. Although evaporative cooling, whether through traditional towers or “advanced” swamp coolers, remain highly effective cooling methods, when you’re planning a new data center you may want to consider the impact of the weather and water availability on your decision.

Chris mentions the drought in Eastern Washington in 2001.

The other element that water can have a substantial impact on is your data center’s power. Specifically if your new site will be serviced by a utility using hydro-electric power. I was recently reading an article that stated, “Quincy, WA—Big Data Centers Leverage Abundant, Inexpensive Renewable Energy”. Fair enough. But Quincy is located in Eastern Washington, an area that is largely desert-like and relies exclusively on the power produced by the Wanapum and Priest Rapids dams. What would happen if this area fell into a period of pro-longed and severe drought?

We actually have a pretty good idea of what would happen since the area experienced a severe drought in 2001 and a slightly lesser one in 2005. In both instances, water restrictions forced the lay-offs of thousands of nearby aluminum factory workers as the water available wasn’t enough to generate the power to run the factories’ smelters. In both cases, electrical prices also rose substantially as power had to be imported from California. 

What is interesting is the price of power was so high that Alcoa figured out it could make more money selling power than selling Aluminum.

ALCOA:
"Why Sell Aluminum When We Can Make a Bigger Profit Selling Electricity?"

Jun 25, 2001

Alcoa Aluminum's main smelter in Washington state has been shut down, as have the smelting operations of four other aluminum companies on the Northwest Coast.

They weren't shut down because of a lack of buyers for aluminum –nor for a lack of workers. The big aluminum producers shut down simply because they could make more money by reselling electricity than they could by producing and selling aluminum.

Alcoa, for example, had longterm contracts to buy electric power from the federal government's Bonneville Power Administration at a rate of $22 a megawatthour. But deregulation of the electric power industry opened the road to enormous price increases. By last winter, electric power was selling on the open market at rates running between $250 and $500 a megawatthour. Shutting down aluminum production to resell electricity let Alcoa pocket the difference.

The result was an enormous increase in Alcoa's profits. Its profits in the first quarter of this year 120 million dollars - were over ten times as high as what they had been in the same period a year ago, before they started selling electric power.

One of the best ideas I heard at Uptime Symposium, Don't print your marketing material

Yesterday, I went to Hyatt Hotel next to the Uptime Symposium.  I said I wasn't going to the Uptime Sympsium and I didn't.  I walked in the hotel bar at 11a and I didn't leave the hotel bar until 11p.  I spent 12 hrs in the bar.  Well the bar, the patio, the bathroom, and the restaurant.

I think I saw all the people I wanted to see without taking one step into the conference or exhibit area.  Now, it was not my plan to be there for 12 hrs.  It was just once I stepped in I kept on running into people I know.  I am so glad the the 451 Group's media group changed their media pass requirements and I didn't have a badge.  If I was sitting in presentations or in the exhibit hall then i would miss the people who I saw in the bar, and i would need to commit more than 12 hrs.

Hanging in the hotel bar is a typical way to network, but yesterday was an extreme and I hope I don't make this a regular habit.  Although I must admit it was time efficient and cost effective.

One of the guys I spent the most amount time catching up with is Chris Crosby at Compass Data Centers. I like Chris because he is one of the few who have a computer science degree and we can talk about some really cool ideas.  

One of the best ideas I think Chris is doing is one of the greenest environmentally sensitive things a start-up can do.  Don't print your marketing material.  Create documents and videos to explain your company, solution, and technology.

Here is the brilliant part of what Chris is doing and why I think it is one of the best ideas.  The typical old school way is I need to give the potential customer material.  i don't know about you, but how many people are walking around with bags of marketing material?  Compared to 20 years ago the amount of paper is hopefully less than 10%.  I never grab marketing material anymore.  How many of you think your printed marketing material gets share?

So besides saving the environment why is this so good?  Because, Chris has taken it to the next level.  When you have a potential customer you can create a custom folder on a file sharing site and send the customer the link.  This link with GBs of information can be shared with cowokers.  OK, but why is this so much better.

Because Chris has added Google Analytics so now he can measure effectiveness of his material and information he has given to potential clients.  He can see how long people stay on his site. Where they enter from.  IP addresses, Company names from domains.  Countries, Cities that look at the content.  Let's see you do that with your printed material.

This idea would never make it into an Uptime Symposium session, but it did make it into a conversation in the hotel bar.  

There are many other things Chris and I talked about and we'll both be blogging about more ideas discussed in the hotel bar.

Compass Data Centers is ready to play Moneyball, changing the way the game is played

Watching the data center industry is sometimes like a Kobayashi Maru scenario, a no-win scenario.  So much of what goes on is the same as what was done last year, the year before that, and the year before that.  The rules are written to keep things relatively the same with small changes allowing the established players to keep on winning.  Name a start-up like Instagram in the data center industry.

One of the most disruptive forces in the industry is Amazon Web Services, but so far it has mostly allowed the established players to modify their offerings to include private clouds.  Companies like Zynga start in AWS, and move to wholesale space when they are ready to reduce costs  which supports the normal growth of the data center industry.

James T. Kirk beat the no-win scenario by redefining the game.

James T. Kirk took the test three times while at Starfleet Academy. Prior to his third attempt, Kirk surreptitiously reprogrammed the simulator so that it was possible to rescue the freighter. This fact finally comes out in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, as Kirk, Saavik and others appear marooned, near death. Saavik's response is, "Then you never faced that situation...faced death." Kirk replies, "I don't believe in the no-win scenario." Despite having cheated, Kirk had been awarded a commendation for "original thinking."

Which brings me to part of the conversation with Compass Data Center's Chris Crosby.  Chris commented.

Professionally, I’m already enjoying the freedom of thinking clearly about building a brand again. I get to figure out my own personalized approach based upon all of my experiences and the input of incredibly bright friends and colleagues. It’s freeing and fun. It’s almost like a disease when you want to have everincreasing responsibilities.

...

I had a whole summer off where I fielded a lot of phone calls and gained a lot of perspective. It was healthy for me. I got disassociated from the personalities of the business and now have a clear refreshed perspective on the business potential.

One way to describe what Chris is trying to do and where we connect on ideas is there are a lot of things that occur that don't make sense.  It is like the scene in Moneyball where the scout makes a comment about a players girlfriend.

"Ugly girlfriend means bad eyesight," warned the scout.

Says Pitt, "We put a version of that line in the script, 'Ugly girlfriend means no confidence.' But what he really said was 'bad eyesight.'"

What is needed is a different way to play the game.  Play the game to win with much less money.

Slate has an article that goes into a lot more detail of Michael Lewis and Billy Beane.

But “Moneyball” is also a phenomenon, which after changing baseball is now sweeping almost all ballgames, from British soccer to Australian rules football. And it’s a phenomenon that reaches beyond sport. With hindsight, what Lewis captures in his book—the triumph of the highly educated over the lesser educated—is exactly what happened in the American economy.

Changing.  Being innovative is hard.  And just as the established scouts protested...

Innovation hurts. After Beane began using numbers to find players, the A’s’ scouts lost their lifelong purpose. In the movie, one of them protests to Pitt: “You are discarding what scouts have done for 150 years.” That was exactly right. Similar fates had been befalling all sorts of lesser-educated American men for years, though the process is more noticeable now than it was in 2003 when Moneyball first appeared. The book, Lewis agrees, is partly “about the intellectualisation of a previously not intellectual job. This has happened in other spheres of American life. I think the reason I saw the story so quickly is, this is exactly what happened on Wall Street while I was there. You had the equivalent of the old school…”

The executives were even more shocked.

But the former ballplayers who then ran baseball were even more aghast. The notion that numbers could trump gut outraged them. Unfortunately for them, a year after the book appeared, the Boston Red Sox, with the 30-year-old Yale graduate Theo Epstein as general manager, won the world series of 2004 using Moneyball methods. In 2007 the Red Sox won again. Other teams began hiring Epsteins and Beanes rather than clubbable ex-players. Last season only three of 30 GMs in the major leagues had played professional baseball, none of them very successfully. Beane has ended up restricting job opportunities in baseball for people from backgrounds like Beane’s.

So, what is the secret that Chris Crosby is working on, looking at the numbers.  He'll be writing about it on his own blog posts, then we'll discuss it publicly. But, I don't plan on writing a book on the story and turning it into a movie.  :-)  It is much more fun thinking of ways to help Chris in his vision.

However, the people who make this objection don’t seem to grasp the basic principles of imitation and catch-up. Once all teams are playing Moneyball, then playing Moneyball no longer gives you an edge. Indeed, the richer clubs have the means to play it smarter. The New York Yankees recently hired 21 statisticians, Beane marvels.

There are some interesting people working on the Compass Data Center system.  People who don't like to the no-win situation in data centers, and get it how MoneyBall ideas can change the game.

Why Compass Data Centers is a new category on GreenM3

Chris Crosby and I have been keeping in touch over the last 6 months as he comes out of stealth mode.  We talked briefly on Tuesday, the company press release went live yesterday, but I was on the road all day yesterday with flights and meetings. Today, I was able to catch up and discuss Compass Data Centers.  We had an hour and talked about so many different things, I can't write about all the ideas in one post, and I know we are going to be talking a lot more.

So, let's just create a category for Compass Data Centers.

The official press release is here.

Compass Datacenters Enters Data Center Market Offering New Direction For The Industry

For Immediate Release

Founded by Former Digital Realty Senior Executive Chris Crosby, Innovative Data Center Provider Poised to Dramatically Expand the Scope of Industry

Dallas – April 18, 2012 – Compass Datacenters, a new data center provider formed by Chris Crosby, the industry visionary who helped build Digital Realty, today unveiled its business strategy which makes dedicated modular data centers a reality for the 98 percent of the market not served by current wholesale data center providers.

DatacenterKnowledge discusses Compass bringing the wholesale market to new markets.

Compass, a new company based in Dallas, is planning to bring turn-key data centers to second-tier markets where demand is growing, but hasn’t yet reached the scale of historic data center strongholds like Silicon Valley or northern Virginia. The company says it is optimizing its data center design to fit the demand profile of smaller markets, while deploying its development capital in an efficient manner.

DatacenterDynamics discusses Compass going after underserved market.

“The bulk of current investment in the U.S. is concentrated in only six markets with data center products that meet the needs of a very narrow set of customers,” Crosby, now CEO of Compass, said.

”That approach ignores 98 percent of the potential overall market, which means there is a huge untapped market for an innovative company that can pioneer a solution aimed at that large segment of underserved customers.”

But, some of the best reasons why I enjoy chatting with Chris is captured in Andrew Lane's post on Mission Critical.

AJL: Chris, given your professional success to date, what’s left on your bucket list?

CC: Professionally, I’m already enjoying the freedom of thinking clearly about building a brand again. I get to figure out my own personalized approach based upon all of my experiences and the input of incredibly bright friends and colleagues. It’s freeing and fun. It’s almost like a disease when you want to have everincreasing responsibilities.

Personally, things have been great with this last summer off. I’ve had time to reflect on the fact I’ve had one blessing after the next in this life. I’ve gotten to see a lot of more of my wife and two kids. I’ve been coaching my kids’ sports teams. I’ve had date nights with my wife. Generally, it has been a much better balance for me, which is what I focused on accomplishing near term.

...

AJL: Our very own “Data Center Genie” (picture Bill Mazzetti?) Arrives in a puff out of a generator and grants you three wishes for the data center industry. What do you wish?

CC: One, humility. We need to realize that our industry behaves like a child in its early teens. You know the times that you think you know everything but you really don’t? Don’t get me wrong; this is obviously a great industry to be in, but think about how many new ideas that have already been done in other industries are being re-created here. We tout all these “new technologies” like we created them and own them. Modularity. Airside economizers is free cold air. Hot- and cold-aisle separation has been done in fab space for years.

Two, recognition. This is an industry that is going to require a different breed of athlete with different skill sets, such as process engineering. We need to promote its growth and success early to professionals as a career in order to keep growing at the rate we can.

Three, transparency. We need to start opening up to customers and facilitating allegiances and alliances. We need to help educate each other.

...

AJL: What do you see going on that you like?

CC: Everything about the space. Lots of capital in love with the fact that it is a high-cash flow, asset-based business. It is becoming mainstream. There is a tremendous energy and vibrancy to it, and it’s great to be a part of it and know why it’s going on. There aren’t too many careers where you get to be a part of something that is completely new.

Here I am getting a chance to go around again. I had a whole summer off where I fielded a lot of phone calls and gained a lot of perspective. It was healthy for me. I got disassociated from the personalities of the business and now have a clear refreshed perspective on the business potential. The result of this will be Compass Data Centers, essentially bringing rapidly deployable, highly customizable wholesale solutions to emerging markets. One thing I have learned is that I’m much more valuable and much happier at the growth stage. I’m not so good nor do I want to be managing the $1B to $3B in revenues stage.

One of the things few people discuss are really big crazy ideas. It can be too hard for some people to think out of the box.  It is so easy to talk about big ideas with Chris is he has  a Computer Science degree.  I spent 26 years surrounded with computer science type of people at HP, Apple, and Microsoft.  Being a good engineer, it has been great being immersed in the data center industry.  But, some of the concepts are easier to discuss if you spend time developing code.

There will be many more posts coming on Compass Data Centers.  Chris has figured out many of the same things I have, and now that he is going to execute them, blog them, we can start discussing them.