Last week, I was dismayed when I read an article from a cloud vendor that I considered to be extremely disrespectful of CIOs.  In short, the article implied that all CIOs are simply anachronistic remnants of the past in every organization because not all CIOs are rushing out and simply throwing every aspect of the IT organization to the cloud and heading home.  In these organizations, the author implies, the CIO and the IT department in general are apparently universally reviled by their business counterparts because of IT’s lack of understanding of the business and unwillingness to simply take orders from every individual business unit.

It’s unfortunate that vendors continue to work in this way, although it’s understandable. For years, vendors have attempted to do end runs around IT, but the cost of entry was generally quite high and, somewhere along the line, IT had to be brought into the mix as a part of the organizational approval process.

Organizational needs

Recently, I was told, “These days, services can be bought with a credit card, so why involve IT?”  There are a number of reasons that simply cutting IT from critical service acquisition discussions is not good thinking in the long term.  Sure, in the short term, it might look like a business unit can get what it wants for a song, but there are long-term implications that must be considered.

Enterprise architecture

Most organizations want to maintain some semblance of order to their technology operations.  But this is not order just for order’s sake.  Rather, it is through a defined enterprise architecture that organizations can rely upon to do business.  Business workflows are defined based on the systems at hand, for example.  A carefully crafted enterprise architecture will always have the ability to be extended.  After all, a business is an evolving entity and it’s important that the technology environment be able to evolve along with the business.  The enterprise architecture should have the ability to leverage cloud services in a consistent way so that these services can in turn be leveraged by business units when it’s appropriate and when there is broad agreement through an organization’s governance structures that a business unit can go forward with a cloud service or other technology acquisition.  This governance process will necessarily include a discussion of what IT can and cannot do.

At some point, there may arise such a compelling service that the enterprise architecture needs to be rethought in order to accommodate the initiative, but such a change should not be forced on the organization through the misguided actions of a lone business unit.

Data islands

Data is king and it is continuing to rise in importance.  I’ve written before about how important it is for organization’s to carefully manage their data assets in order to ensure a single version of the truth and to prevent miniature data islands from appearing in an organization’s data portfolio.

As more and more services are acquired, it becomes increasingly important that they fall within a reasonable information management structure that ensures that the overall quality and consistency of the information remains high and that the introduction of a new service does not negatively impact other business units.  For example, does the new service disrupt a process upon which another unit depends?

Risk management

To be blunt, I don’t believe that individual business units are equipped to answer the big technology risk questions that come up in vendor discussions and I don’t believe that many vendors—particularly many newer “cloud” vendors—are holistic enough to look out for a customer’s best interests—the entire customer, not just their contact—in the potential transaction.  Further, for the capable vendors, as much as a vendor may wish they did, they do not have deep insight into a company’s operations and may not have enough information in order to make an accurate risk assessment.

This may seem like a pretty negative statement, but based on a number of stories I’ve seen, it’s more than apparent that some cloud providers do end runs around IT in order to avoid reality.  Many companies will insist on IT involvement and that’s a good thing.  The CIO and the IT department have been and remain extremely well-positioned to work with business counterparts to evaluate new technology services.  As a part of the evaluation, there are a number of risk factors that must be considered, from the obvious potential for security issues to some of the items described in this article—ability to integrate with existing business processes and ability to avoid the introduction of data islands.

The technology portfolio

I believe that an organization’s technology assets should be deployed in a way that is similar to an organization’s financial assets. In this regard, you won’t see a business unit rushing out to spend money that has not been authorized.  In most organizations, there is some kind of a budgeting process that occurs to ensure that financial resources are applied to items that are critical for the companies operations and at those agreed upon initiatives that are necessary to meet strategic goals.  While budget managers may have some discretionary funds, it’s not common to see vast piles of money sitting in budgets with no defined purpose.

So, why would another tangible, scarce resource—an organization’s IT assets—be treated differently?  IT is a recognized driver of growth and efficiency, but only when it’s applied in a way that is consistent with an organization’s goals.  It’s all too common to see poor portfolio management lead an organization into attempting to do too much IT with too few resources.  When there is a clear governance-based technology prioritization process, the outcomes should necessarily apply to the whole organization—the entire business—and not just those that decide to agree.

Cloud has a place and it’s growing

I hope that the material in this article is not construed as “anti-cloud” or something else that it’s not.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I happen to believe that businesses must engage in strategic outsourcing—and, let’s facing it, this is a form of outsourcing—in order to enjoy the fullest benefits of their efforts.

The CIO is key

This does not mean that organizations should immediately pursue an “all cloud” agenda.  Note that the preceding paragraph uses the phrase “strategic outsourcing.”  This was an intentional choice of words.

Instead, I encourage CIOs to look inwardly at the services that they are providing with a careful focus on the 70% of the work that is ongoing maintenance.  Is there a provider that can handle some of these items in a way that maintains high standards while reducing your overhead?  For those services, consider outsourcing, but look at things on a service-by-service basis.

Personally, in my most recent CIO role, I outsourced management of our printer fleet and moved one of the organization’s mission-critical applications to a cloud provider.  Neither of these decisions was a slam-dunk, particularly moving a mission-critical app.  For that service, I carefully weighed all options before making the call.  At the end of the day, the cloud provider could support it better and cheaper that we could internally.  That left my IT staff with a focus on supporting the application rather than the servers that ran it.  However, the staff still spent considerable time fully integrating the service into the environment so that it was made a seamless part of our workflows and appeared to end user in a way that was consistent with other provided services.

Although I want cloud vendors to treat CIOs and IT departments with respect, I also realize that cloud services are the way of the future in many ways, so if you’ve so far eschewed these vendors, start giving them a look.

Cloud vendors can do better

And cloud vendors… now is the time to change your ways, too.  Some of you do it right and engage the whole customer, but too many of you still use the line, “And you don’t even need to engage your internal IT!” as a part of your sales pitch.  In 100% of the cases I’ve lived through so far, that line has been patently false.  If you do happen to engage a business unit directly, encourage them to work with their internal IT department to ensure that your service can be supported and integrated into the environment.

Yes, I understand that there are a few truly backward IT departments out there that are simply command and control environments that have forgotten their role in the organization.  However, in most cases, even that IT department that you look at as doing “too much IT and too little business” is yearning for ways to do better.  Your end runs don’t help the situation and, frankly, they make it worse.

Consider your client’s CIO as a strategic partner in your sales effort and explain how your service can benefit the whole organization, which includes the IT department.

When you think of EMC, you probably think of a massive storage company that builds enterprise-grade storage arrays chock full of all kinds of storage features, such as thin provisioning, inline deduplication, seven hundred and thirty different connectivity ports of varying type for every need, and any kind of replication that you might desire.

We write a lot about the changing storage needs of modern organizations as it pertains to changing ways of doing business.  It’s a sure thing that newer technologies, such as virtualization, have had a major impact on how storage systems are designed, sized, procured and configured.

But there’s another whole side to EMC that is often overlooked.  EMC is also active in the lower end of the storage market where the “capacity beats all” crowd often lives.  Sometimes, an organization just needs a ton of disk space at a reasonable cost and doesn’t need all of the bells and whistles that accompany the high end devices generally sold by EMC.

Enter Iomega.  In June of 2008, EMC made a big splash in the SMB and lower end of the storage market by acquiring EMC.  With a number of products in a portfolio with prices ranging from $299 to $13,000, the Iomega portfolio is often a great fit for organizations that:

• Don’t need the high-end features found in EMC’s traditional portfolio.
• Value capacity over performance.  This shouldn’t be construed as meaning that Iomega products are terrible performers, but rather that EMC’s higher end products generally scale well beyond what can be had with an Iomega product.
• Require mass storage for archiving or other non-performant needs.

In order to get a good feel for where Iomega fits in EMC’s overall product mix, let’s consider the smallest array that the company sells under the EMC badge—the VNXe 3100.  The 3100 carries an initial price tag of anywhere between $9,300 and $30,000 and carries a number of features, including:

• iSCSI or NAS connectivity.
• Snapshots.
• Multipath.
• Thin provisioning.
• Compression.
• File level deduplication.
• Scalability from as few as 6 to as many as 96 drives.
• No single points of failure in the array.

It’s clear that the VNXe 3100 is a capable array, but don’t count the latest high-end device from Iomega out!  At EMC World, the company announced their new flagship array. Dubbed the PX12-450r, it carries a starting price of $7,499 and sports a number of features found in the VNXe, but also has some surprises of its own.  Here are a few items available in the PX12-450r:

• E3-1265Lv2 Quad Core 2.5GHz Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processor.  The Ivy Bridge processors will eventually make their way into EMC’s other products, too.  The processor upgrade will help boost the product’s iSCSI capability, too.
• 8 GB of RAM.
• Support for 4 TB drives.  This addresses all kinds of capacity needs!
• 10 GbE Ethernet, making throughput issues a thing of the past for iSCSI environments.
• In the box antivirus from McAfee.
• In the box backup and dedupe from Avamar.
• In the box encryption using LifeLine.
• Will support solid state drives.

The PX12-450r is Iomega’s flagship system, but there is clear differentiation between it and the lowest of the low end VNXe’s.  For example, whereas the VNXe and other products from EMC are focused on robust availability and scalability, Iomega is focused squarely on the SMB space.  For example, the 450r doesn’t support high availability mechanisms.  Further, the 450r scales only to the number of drives supported by the chassis; you can’t scale beyond a single chassis in an integrated way.  You would need to treat multiple chassis as separate units.

The inclusion of some enterprise grade features, such as dedupe and encryption, is great in a product in this class.  However, if you just need massive storage and none of the enterprise-grade features, Iomega has you covered there, too.  The PX12-350r supports up to 36 TB in a 2U chassis and costs around $11,500 from Iomega, but I’ve seen it for as little as $9,600 elsewhere.  At an cost of just $267 per TB, the 350r is a value beast!

For some organizations, 36 TB is too much.  For the smallest of the small, Iomega sells the StorCenter ix2, a two bay mirroring-capable array that supports iSCSI and a number of other network protocols, including NFS, CIFS, Bonjour and more.  The ix2 supports drives of up to 3 TB in size, so it can meet the capacity needs for many SMBs.  With a 6 TB unit costing only $670 from Iomega, the price is within reach for just about any business, too.

For the in-between SMB, check out Iomega’s complete line here.

But Big Data can be tamed. We’ve got living proof. Thanks to new approaches for processing, storing and analyzing massive volumes of multi-structured data – such as Hadoop and MPP analytic databases — enterprises of all types are uncovering new and valuable insights from Big Data everyday.

Leading the way are Web giants like Facebook, LinkedIn and Amazon. Following close behind are early adopters in financial services, healthcare and media. And now it’s your turn. From marketing campaign analysis and social graph analysis to network monitoring, fraud detection and risk modeling, there’s unquestionably a Big Data use case out there with your company’s name on it.

We here at Wikibon are excited to present this compelling Big Data infographic, which we hope will help you better understand how your peers are applying Big Data today and inspire you tame the Big Data beast yourself. Check out videos, market forecasts and deep research at on our curated page about Big Data.

EMBED THE IMAGE ON YOUR SITE

<a href=”http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Big_Data”><img src=”http://wikibon.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/big-data.v.1.0.png” alt=”Taming Big Data | A Big Data Infographic” width=”610″ border=”0″ /></a><br />Via: <a href=”http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Big_Data”>Wikibon Big Data</a>

Download the PDF Version

As EMC looks forward, the company must be cognizant of the fact that past success with storage and virtualization administrators is no guarantee that new challenges and competitive threats won’t disrupt its market position. To this end, the theme of EMC world is the transformation of three vectors: Technology, business and personal. Specifically, on the last point, EMC is looking to help create the next generation of IT jobs, specifically cloud architects and data scientists as part of the cloud and big data megatrends. A crowd of over 13,000 is expected to descend on Las Vegas next week for EMC World and Greenplum’s Data Science Summit. While EMC promises to roll out tons of new products as part of “Megalaunch II”, the theme of the show is “Transform: IT+Business+Yourself” which speaks to the changing IT workforce.

SiliconAngle is bringing theCUBE to cover these big trends as part of the 2012 Summer Tour and Wikibon will be co-hosting and providing research support for the event. Watch full coverage of EMC World and the Data Science Summit: Monday May 21 – Wednesday May 23, 10am-4pm PT daily on SiliconANGLE.tv. Look to SiliconAngle.com and Wikibon.org for the latest news and analysis from the shows.

Some highlights for the live HD video broadcast:

• A full slate of EMC’s business and technical leadership including Pat Gelsinger, David Goulden, Jeremy Burton, Brian Gallagher, Rich Napolitano, Sanjay Mirchandani
• An exclusive preview (Tuesday) of the Data Science Summit with data scientists and EMC President Bill Cook
• Updates on Flash including the latest on VFCache and the XtremIO acquistion
• Deep dives into the converged infrastructure market including VCE/Vblock, VSPEX and more
• Latest on the backup market including EMC President BJ Jenkins
• Focus on service providers including EMC’s Chuck Hollis
• Real cloud solutions including Brocade and Rackspace
• Virtualizing mission critical environments with CIOs and EMC’s Chad Sakac
• Much more with IT practitioners and the partner ecosystem

Watch “The ESPN of Tech” where SiliconANGLE and Wikibon help extract the signal from the noise and share with you the greatest minds and best content. Did you miss Reggie Jackson at SAP Sapphire 2012? We’ve got more surprises at EMC World and beyond.

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Stephan Ritter of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany and his colleagues built the first quantum link between two atoms in labs on opposite sides of the street.  This took many lasers, optical elements, and equipment.  Each atom was placed between an “optical cavity” formed by two highly reflective mirrors 0.5 mm apart.  Applying an external laser to the first atom caused a photon emitted by that atom to escape from its optical cavity and travel through a 60-meter-long optical fiber to the cavity of the atom across the street.  Absorption of this photon by the second atom caused the quantum information to transfer from the first atom to the second.  In order to entangle two atoms, the researchers had to start in just the right state with the first atom.  It is believed that this could be extended to a third atom, allowing more than two nodes.

What does it mean for atoms to be entangled?  Atoms have certain energy states that they belong in based on how their insides are working.  An atom can be in two energy states at the same time, but will switch to one or the other when measured.  When atoms are entangled, they share the same energy states.  That means when researchers in the first lab measure their atom’s energy state, they are essentially measuring the energy state of the atom in the lab across the street.  To communicate, the two labs could entangle and measure their atoms repeatedly to create a shared random key through which they could send messages.  In theory, they could add a third atom to communicate with.

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Couldn’t anyone measure the energy state of the atom and determine the key?  Simply put, no.  The beauty of measuring energy states is that every time the atom is measured, its energy state is altered.  Anyone trying to measure the atom would easily be detected because all three atoms would no longer be in the same energy state.

This experiment gives hope to the formation of a complete quantum network that is totally unhackable.  The next step is incorporating a third atom, and then many more.  Hackers beware, you’re about to lose your ability to intercept information.

SiliconANGLE is proud to present live HD video coverage from some of the biggest technology events. As we enter the busy season for conferences, SiliconANGLE.tv is your exclusive source for in-depth interviews and real-time analysis of these upcoming shows. The SiliconANGLE team, along with hosting and analysis support from Wikibon, will dig deep with CEO’s, CIO’s, thought leaders, VC’s, data scientists and startups to help illuminate the latest technologies and business trends. Watch live – all shows on SiliconAngle.tv – and join the social conversation; hashtag #theCUBE on Twitter for questions and see photos on SiliconAngle’s Google+. Be sure to check SiliconAngle.com and Wikibon.org for breaking news and analysis of these events and more.

SAP Sapphire NOW

SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference combine to form a premier business technology and the largest SAP user conferences, with presentations on business analytics, mobility, and customer success stories first-hand.

Our coverage of SAPPHIRE NOW in 2011 featured over a dozen video interviews and dozens of individual news and analysis from The Wikibon Project and SiliconANGLE

SAP Sapphire NOW

• May 14 through May 16
• Orange County Convention Center, Orlando, FL

EMC World 2012

For “IT professionals chartered with the responsibility of designing, building and operating advanced IT environments” EMC World promises the chance to learn how the cloud and Big Data can transform information technology and your business.

Last year at EMC World 2011, Wikibon and SiliconANGLE featured over a dozen of video interviews with senior executives including Pat Gelsinger, Howard Elias, and Jim Bampos, our third year in a row of coverage (2009, 2010).

EMC World 2012

• May 21 through May 25
• The Venetian, Las Vegas, NV

Data Science Summit

In addition to the EMC World conference, the Wikibon / SiliconANGLE team will be doing coverage of the “Data Science Summit”. With interviews of key executives, data scientists, and customers SiliconAngle’s broadcast will run in tandem with EMC World.

GreenPlum: Data Science Summit

• May 22 and May 23
• The Venetian, Las Vegas, NV

HBase Conference

HBaseCon 2012, will be the first industry conference for Apache HBase users, contributors, administrators and application developers. Our team will be on the ground covering the event and keeping our readers and viewers up to date on all things Apache Hadoop.

HBase Conference

• May 22
• Intercontinental, San Francisco, CA

HP Discover 2012

HP’s biggest technology event of the year focusing on enterprise business and broad coverage of storage, servers, networks, security, services, cloud, big data, and virtualization.

Our 2011 coverage featured dozens of video interviews, news, analysis, and a visual look at the transformation of HP.

HP Discover 2012

• June 4 through June 6
• The Venetian, Las Vegas, NV

IBM Edge

The IBM Edge2012 storage event brings together IBM technologies, IT training, leading industry experts, and client success stories and best practices, emphasizing “real time data intelligence for a smarter planet”.

Our #TheCube coverage on SiliconANGLE.tv will feature two days of news, analysis, and video interviews with key executives and technology professionals.

IBM Edge

• June 4 through June 5 (Conference through June 8th)
• Orlando, FL

Forecast 2012

Forecast 2012 plans to “Shape the Future of Cloud Computing”, with a one-day conference of presentations, technical workgroup discussions, and networking opportunities, concurrent with the 10th International Cloud Expo.

Forecast 2012 provides a unique opportunity for Alliance members (and interested non-members) to meet face to face, and is designed for IT leaders to continue their work shaping the future of cloud computing.

Forecast 2012 (Part of the Cloud Expo 2012)

• Tuesday June 12 (Conference from June 11 through June 14)
• Javits Center, New York, NY

Dell Storage Forum 2012

Dell Storage Forum 2012 is dubbed as the “premier storage event for Dell Storage customers and channel partners” with a mission of redefining the ability of the modern data center and data storage.

Our coverage of the 2011 Dell Storage Forum featured 3 days of video coverage with dozens of live interviews, news commentary, and analysis from the event.

Dell Storage Forum 2012

• June 11 through June 13
• Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston, MA

Hadoop Summit 2012

The 5th annual Hadoop Summit will feature many of the leading thought leaders from the Apache Hadoop community who will showcase successful Hadoop use cases, share development, and administration tips and tricks and educate organizations about how to leverage Apache Hadoop.

Hadoop Summit 2012

• June 13 through June 14
• San Jose Convention Center, San Jose, CA

What is #theCube?
Check out the video below to learn more about SiliconANGLE’s #TheCube which brings the best in enterprise news, analysis and research.

At last year’s show, much of the focus was on HANA, SAP’s in-memory database, which promises end-users support for lightening fast analytics against large volumes of data. As I wrote then, SAP is betting the house on HANA, with plans to migrate its entire software and application portfolio onto the new database, as well as rolling out new, HANA-optimized analytic applications. SAP also declared last year that it intended to reach #2 in the database market by 2015.

But, at SAPPHIRE 2011, there were only a few customer examples of HANA in action. The message was much more about vision and future success than here-and-now proof-points. For SAPPHIRE 2012 to be a success for SAP, that must change. Next week, from a HANA perspective the pressure is on SAP to:

1. Highlight as many real-world HANA customers as possible; Vision is no longer enough. By this point, SAP should have a small but growing user base and its critical the company put them on prominent display.
2. Provide further proof-points around HANA adoption, such as its current database market share and examples of customers that have actually replaced archrival Oracle with HANA.
3. Show that it has minimized the barriers to ISVs and outside developers to build applications on top of HANA; It will be interesting to see if SAP puts any developers on the main stage.
4. Rollout some new HANA-optimized analytic applications that provide SAP real differentiation from the likes of Oracle and IBM.

Mobile

Then there’s mobile. At last year’s SAPPHIRE, Co-CEO Jim Hageman Snabe said one of SAP’s goals is to provide end-users access to its applications on whatever device they choose – desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone. With Sybase in the SAP fold, the company now has a top-notch mobile development platform in Sybase Unwired to allow developers to build custom SAP mobile applications for today’s mobile workforce. Not unlike with HANA, SAP needs to show its progress in attracting outside developers to build custom, mobile SAP apps. I’m also interested to see some metrics regarding SAP’s mobile app store (unveiled last year.)

Big Data

What about Big Data? The term ‘Big Data’ was barely mentioned at last year’s SAPPHIRE. Since then pockets within SAP have started using the term but articulating sometimes-contradictory messages. Some inside SAP say Big Data is a meaningless buzzword while others embrace it. Depending on who you’ve talked to over the last year at SAP, HANA is or isn’t SAP’s Big Data solution. And don’t forget Sybase. At SAPPHIRE 2011 the focus, when it came to Sybase, was on its mobile development and management platform, but the company has a solid data warehouse and complex event processing portfolio as well.

I had the opportunity to visit SAP’s Palo Alto office earlier this year, where I heard a solid story around SAP’s strategy to tackle Big Data that integrated Sybase data warehousing, Sybase CEP, HANA and – to a limited extent — Hadoop. The challenge next week is for SAP to communicate this strategy to the thousands in attendance at the Orange County Convention Center as well as they did to me and my colleague John Furrier in that Palo Alto conference room.

Cloud

And let’s not forget cloud and SaaS. As everyone knows, SAP made a big splash earlier this year when it acquired SuccessFactors, which offers SaaS-based human capital management applications. Many took the acquisition as SAP demonstrating to the market its commitment to cloud computing. To further demonstrate that commitment, SAP should put SuccessFactors CEO, Lars Dalgaard, on the main stage to articulate the company’s cloud strategy and vision.

SAP also needs to provide proof-points around adoption of Business ByDesign, its SaaS-based ERP platform for SMBs. You’ll recall BBD got off to a rough start, failing to gain traction with SAP’s SMB customers when it debuted in 2007. SAP has since gotten the platform back on track, having racked up 500 customers by the time of SAPPHIRE 2011 and declaring it would reach 1000 customers by year’s (2011) end. Did SAP hit its BBD adoption numbers and where does adoption stand now? We’ll find out soon enough.

#theCUBE @ SAPPHIRE 2011

If you’re not heading to Orlando for SAPPHIRE 2012, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. SiliconANGLE’s #theCUBE will be broadcasting live from the show floor, kicking off Monday (5/14) afternoon and continuing all day Tuesday (5/15) and Wednesday (5/16). Like last year, we’ve got an all-start line-up of SAP execs, partners and customers joining us live throughout the show, as well as Wikibon analysts and SiliconANGLE journalists providing analysis and commentary. Our crack team of reporters will be real-time blogging the show at SiliconANGLE.com.

You can catch all the action at SiliconANGLE.tv. It’s must watch TV for anyone in the SAP ecosystem. In the mean time, get ready for this year’s SAPPHIRE by revisiting SAPPHIRE 2011. On this SAPPHIRE 2011 page, you’ll find over 25 videos from #theCUBE at last year’s event, including interviews with SAP Co-CEO Jim Hageman Snabe and SAP CIO Oliver Bussman (see below), as well as written coverage and analysis from Wikibon.

SAP has a lot riding on SAPPHIRE 2012 and we’ll be there every step of the way providing the most in-depth, comprehensive and exciting coverage you’ll find anywhere. If you’re heading to Orlando for the show, have a safe trip and we’ll see you there. If not, #theCUBE and SiliconANGLE.tv has you covered.

SAP Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe on theCUBE at SAPPHIRE 2011

SAP CIO Oliver Bussman live on theCUBE at SAPPHIRE 2011

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What makes this data center so special?  Recently, Wikibon wrote an article about green data centers in which it was mentioned that Facebook’s data centers are not very energy efficient.  It was reported that 53.2% of their energy came from burning coal.  To avoid more PR flops, Facebook is working on making their image a little more green.  They built a green data center in Sweden that uses the colder climate of the country to cool its facility.  Now Facebook claims that their data center in North Carolina is one of the most energy effecient in the world.  In a recent article they say it will have a power utilization effectiveness (PuE) measurement of 1.06 to 1.08 for the entire facility, similar to their facility in Oregon.  According to the Uptime Institute, the average PuE for data centers is 1.8.

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The Forest City facility executes several firsts for Facebook.   It is the first data center to utilize Open Compute Project’s outdoor-air cooling designs in an area that would previously been considered outside of the temperature and humidity range for data centers.  This facility is also the first to use the v2 Open Compute Project web servers, which are the first to operate with Intel’s Sandy Bridge processor.  The Open Compute Project is a computing infrastructure that was built from the ground up in order to make it more efficient.  It is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive than other state-of-the-art data centers.  Best of all, it’s open hardware.  Anyone can use the technology or build on it.

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As they continue work on their second building for the Forest City data center, we hope that Facebook and other companies continue to make improvements in energy efficiency.  Every effort to preserve the environment helps.  It is up to consumers to hold companies accountable for the choices companies make.

We live in a metrics-obsessed world.  We find meaning in numbers.  How many of you check the stock market valuations once a day?  How many of you have a dashboard somewhere that shows you the stock market tickers throughout the day?  How many of you work in organizations that have set organizational benchmarks that consist of numbers?

You’re not alone.  As humans, we yearn to find meaning in everything we do, so we assign value to our own activities and the activities in which we participate.  Those quarterly goals are just one instantiation of this fact, but there are certainly countless others that one could point to as evidence of this need.

There is one special metric that gets a lot of attention: Return on Investment (ROI).  In many, many places, ROI analyses are performed on all aspects of the business to ensure that the activity being undertaken provides a positive return for the bottom line.  ROI analyses are most often done using hard numbers; “If we spend X dollars on this activity, we expect a return of X * 2 dollars over a two year period.”  That return may consist of a combination of new sales or reduced expenses, but it’s generally a hard figure.

As IT departments have been forced to be more strategic and focus on activities that are business-facing, more and more CIOs are looking at both existing and new activities and attempting to quantify exactly how much an activity will cost and, if it has expense implications, it may not be done.

But, sometimes, ROI as function of hard dollars simply doesn’t matter.  I saw an absolutely perfect example of bottom-line focused ROI being thrown out the window today in favor of simply doing the right thing.  Although the example I’m about to impact was not an IT project, I think it carries lessons for all of us from CEOs to CIOs to everyone in the organization.  Further, it shows that going above and beyond the call of duty can be incredibly impressive and turn a negative situation into something extremely positive.

I spent part of this week at an event in Houston, Texas and flew home today.  I boarded my Southwest flight right on time, chose my seat and, along with 130 other people, awaited our departure from Houston and our ultimate arrival in St. Louis.  Shortly after the door closed, we were told that the crew was having trouble with the plane’s PA system.  Long story short, it took more than one and a half hours for the maintenance people to correct the issue, so the plan took off very late.

The crew apologized profusely and it was evident that they were just as frustrated as the rest of us.

Of the 130 or so people on the plane, most were destined for either St. Louis or Louisville, which was the plane’s route, so they would get home.  However, 21 people had different connecting flights in St. Louis.  These 21 people were destined for Detroit, Columbus and Charlotte.  By the time our plane departed Houston, it was clear that these 21 people were not going to make it to their connecting flights and, for all 21 people, the connecting flights were the final flights of the evening to their destinations.  The crew informed the passengers that those that had connecting flights would be put up in a hotel and put on the first flights out the next day.

Had this been the end of the story, I don’t think anyone would have been surprised.  After all, this is pretty much how the airline industry works, right?

But, there was a twist.

We landed in St. Louis.  No, that’s not the twist!  130 late people and 21 frustrated people landed.  That’s actually a good thing as opposed to the alternative!

As we were taxiing to the terminal, one of the flight attendants got on the PA system and announced that we had arrived in St. Louis.  Next, he said, “For the 21 of you that were supposed to go to Detroit, Columbus or Charlotte tonight and missed your connecting flight, when you deplane, please proceed to gate 21.  We’ve wrangled together a plane and a crew and we’re taking all of you to your destinations tonight.”

What happened next?  The passengers on the plane—including the people destined for St. Louis—cheered and more than a few people yelled out, “Southwest rocks!”  To a person, everyone on that plane, although we were very late, walked off that plane feeling like a million dollars.

I stopped and chatted for a minute with one of the gate agents when I left the plane and asked him how they did it.  He said, “When we heard what was happening, we just got on the phone and started making calls.  We’ve been on the phone for the past hour and a half trying to put this together so we could take everyone home tonight.”  He wasn’t able to talk for very long because he was busy helping passengers with their questions.

Sure, it’s possible that some manager somewhere crunched some numbers and realized that it would be a nightmare to try to get everyone on their AM flights and would cost the company a ton of money.  It’s possible that some manager somewhere decided that putting 21 people up in a hotel would be too expensive.

Or, with an eye toward Southwest’s brand that includes being an airline that tries to focus on their customers, someone could have simply said, “Yep… we’re going to lose money on this flight.  21 passengers will never cover the costs for the crew and fuel for three stops, but we’re going to do the right thing.”

Hard ROI?  Nah.  This is going to be expensive.  But, just imagine how happy those 21 people are and imagine how impressed the rest of the passengers were when the announcement was made.  A big company actually scrambled to take care of their customers and threw out the rulebook and their efforts to do so.  Frankly, I can’t even fathom seeing such behavior from other airlines.

Again, I’m assuming that the company had altruistic motives here and I want to live in this little dream world for the illustrative benefits it has for my thoughts here.  Southwest tonight found a way to turn a big negative situation into something that will result in a lot of word of mouth and return customers.  From that perspective, the ROI in this venture is probably pretty high!  But, it also demonstrates that, sometimes, crunching the numbers just doesn’t make sense.  If you have the reasonable potential to fix a situation and can do so in a way that doesn’t bankrupt the company, just do it, if it’s the right thing to do.  A brand is not made or broken on ROI figures.  It’s made or broken on the actions of the people responsible working for the organization.

I’ve been writing about how important it is for CIOs and other IT leaders to simplify their entire infrastructure environment in order to reduce the amount of care and feeding that goes into infrastructure in favor of activities that provide a direct bottom line benefit.  This week, I’m attending an event at HP’s Houston offices where a group of people are being pitched on HP’s latest generation of servers powered by Intel’s E5 processor line.

HP is putting to market products that help strapped IT departments do more with less and that will allow CIOs to focus more of their team’s efforts squarely on business problems.

How are they doing this?

With the release of their Gen8 ProLiant server line, a culmination of more than $300 million in R&D spending, HP is boasting some impressive statistics which, if borne out, demonstrate the company’s commitment to IT and data center efficiency.  Here’s a look at the outcomes that HP is touting and how they’re getting to these impressive figures.

• 3x admin productivity improvement.
• 6x performance increase for most demanding workloads
• 70% more compute per watt.  This statistic is vitally important for those running space or power constrained data centers.  This allows these organizations to get more “compute for the buck” without having to do a major data center expansion.
• 66% faster time to resolution.  Through the company’s Insight Online and ability for servers to report inventory and status information to a support site, trouble resolution can be done in a fraction of the time that it used to take.  Considering the high cost of downtime and the associated stress on IT staff that have to correct the situation creating the downtime, this is a substantial improvement with direct customer benefit.  Gen8 servers all include a number of different sensors and intelligence to report when a sensor is out of baseline.

Of course, HP wouldn’t be able to make these claims if it wasn’t for their deep partnership with Intel.  Intel targeted their new E5 processor squarely at the DL380 use case, primarily since the DL380 is the most popular workhorse server on the market.  As a company, Intel made the decision that they were going to develop a processor that would meet and exceed all requirements of the use cases satisfied through the deployment of DL380 servers.

To that end, HP and Intel are seeing a number of gains from the E5 line:

• 80% performance gain
• Trusted security
• Integrated PCI Express on the processor
• 40 lanes of PCI Express Gen 3 on each processor socket (80 for a dual socket system)
• More processing cores
• Tons of bandwidth between processors

What’s really happening here is that HP is considering the full spectrum of servers and service when it comes to how customers benefit from and are affected by the company’s products.   Jim Ganthier, HP Vice President Marketing, Operations and GM, Mainstream Business Enterprise, wants customers to think of HP’s Gen8 products not as individual islands of resources but as “Lego” blocks that come to together to build a better whole.  From this building block approach comes new intelligence and automation benefits across the lifecycle and the data center, empowering administrators and enabling these same administrators to do their jobs more effectively.

Through the aforementioned Insight Online tool – HP’s fully reconceptualized support portal:

• Customers can see exactly what servers are in inventory and what servers have reported problems.
• Current warranty status is included warranty status.
• This service does not carry an additional cost.  It’s included in the server purchase.
  • Helps support more quickly respond to customer issues.
  • Provides better reactive support.
  • Proactive support
    • Periodic environment scans and remediation suggestions

HP has even streamlined the process of handling firmware updates, which they discovered were taking as much as 69% of administrator’s system maintenance time.  Through a tool the company calls Smart Update, updates can now be performed at a data center scale 3X faster than before and with a corresponding 69% reduction in operator time.

All of this technical stuff is really, really cool.  But, from a business sense, it’s even better.  HP is building into their product DNA the idea that simplicity needs to be a feature, not an afterthought.  From the floor to the ceiling of the Gen8 product line, this idea of simplicity and ease of management is evident, from the new tools that I mentioned to the fact that a new 2U Gen8 server can be torn down in minutes with no tools required. These kinds of capabilities make system maintenance a breeze and enable CIOs to spend less time on infrastructure maintenance and more time on service availability and value-add activities.