Tuesday at the Uptime Institute 2008 Symposium

Another full day in Orlando beginning with a breakfast with the women participants at the Symposium.  We got together to talk about whether we had different agendas, perceptions,  and contributions to make as presentors at future Symposium events.  Participants from Allstate, Sun, Bank of Montreal, Northwest Airlines, Deloittes, CSRWare, and a few other companies attended.   Among the topics discussed, we thought that this division between facilities and IT in teaming to create data center energy efficiency solutions could be resolved with good Organization Development consultants - after all, this isn't the first time one silo in a company hasn't understood the needs and priorities of another silo - it happens all the time and OD's are called in to rebalance the conversations based on mutual goals. 

I  had the chance to speak with Lynda Haake, program manager for energy efficiency program for the Americas group at IBM as she was staffing a booth. Lynda was working with the System x Intel server product line before she was tagged to manage Project Big Green, the energy efficiency initiative. For people like Linda who feels passionate about the environment, she shared that it is difficult to compute why companies don’t embrace “green” faster.  Customers won’t really change their data center policies until they are either forced to do so by their C level staff or from federal regulation.  As an example,

Raleigh is suffering a drought, and her peers at Raleigh’s Triangle Parkare all taking steps as individuals and as IBM employees to lower their water consumption.  IBM’s Green Solution Showcase in Raleigh invites leading industry figures such as Roger Schmidt, one of the pioneers who along with the Uptime institute helped defined data center energy efficiency, and the utility companies (Raleigh is served by Duke Power and Progress Energy), in their monthly national customer briefings with 20 - 30 or more companies in the audience. 

Attendees at the Uptime are validating her own experience about the IT and facilities people to partner on solutions. IT people keep on adding servers without realizing the implications on capacity. Lynda remarked that the presentations at the Uptime, though technical, were engaging the audience of a caliber similar to her own customers.  “Its really affirming to watch the audience absorb all these new ideas for improved efficiency,” she said.

I also enjoyed taking part on a panel co-moderated with John Koomey of Stanford on sustainability issues and data centers.  Panelists represented perspectives from Yahoo, Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, IBM, the EPA, and APC. Following that I heard a great overview of the SPEC industry association mission and what steps are in place to create standards for servers. SPEC is working with Energy Star to create multiple testing protocols for benchmarking server energy efficiency. 

I realize that one of the reasons this is a great conference is because participants come from different geographic areas, the presentations are both simple and detailed, so that if you are strong in IT but not in Facilities you can still make out the gist of it, and vice versa, and the meal breaks are long enough to have 3-4 solid far-ranging conversations with peers.  Tomorrow is the last day and I look forward to the content as well as the informal "case studies" I am listening to from data center operations managers that I sit next to at speeches, panels, or meals. Have a green day!