 Welcome to The Monthly 451. I'm Martin McCarthy, and I have the pleasure of serving as CEO of The 451 Group, parent company of 451 Research, Uptime Institute and Yankee Group.This is an exciting time of year at The 451 Group! We just concluded our HCTS-Europe Summit – our most successful, to date – and are gearing up for Uptime Institute Symposium in Santa Clara on May 13-16. We have put together a strong agenda for Symposium, with informative sessions that will provide prescriptive, actionable guidance to IT executives; datacenter managers and operators; and datacenter planners, designers and engineers who are navigating profound business and technical challenges. In addition to the great content, Symposium provides attendees an opportunity to network with peers, allowing them to share information, insights and strategies. If you haven’t already registered, I would like to extend my personal invitation – along with a $250 discount. Please use code MONTHLY451VIP when registering. |
| Martin McCarthy Chief Executive Officer |
Top Ten Reasons to Attend Symposium 2013
1. Make better decisions about cloud and colo providers.
The vast majority of enterprise datacenter operators today also deploy some portion of their IT operations in a third-party facility, with either a cloud or colocation provider. The sessions at Uptime Institute Symposium will help you become a smarter customer of third-party datacenter services, and will give you the tools to perform due diligence and to make smart investments.
Symposium features an entire track on this topic, staffed by industry luminaries, senior-level end-user executives and Uptime Institute experts. If your organization relies on third-party datacenter services, you cannot afford to miss these sessions.
If your organization provides colo and cloud services, you need to attend to understand how your value and performance will be evaluated going forward.
2. You will not find a better discussion of DCIM anywhere.
Andy Lawrence and his team from 451 Research’s Datacenter Technologies practice are the industry’s foremost experts on Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) Software. Our experts will provide you with the latest DCIM adoption statistics, pricing information, buying advice and projections for future technology development. We are hosting a panel of senior end-user execs to discuss the pain points and benefits of DCIM implementation (so be sure to stick around for Thursday!). And we are partnered with the leading DCIM vendors as underwriters, who will be presenting their latest technologies, touting new customers and projecting their product roadmaps at Symposium.
3. Giant cowboy hats and cowboy boot beer mugs.
Server Roundup is back! Uptime Institute’s second annual contest to remove obsolete server hardware and improve datacenter energy efficiency has been a huge success. We’ve doubled the number of servers removed over past year, as well as the number of participants and winners. This year we will feature a keynote panel with all of the winners and finalists, as well as our Server Roundup underwriter at Symposium, Samsung. The 2013 Server Roundup awards presentation promises to be more fun than your average technology conference snooze-fest – these networking receptions just get a little livelier when everybody is wearing a ten-gallon hat and drinking out of a boot. Close deals! Make new friends! Annoy your family with a giant foam hat! Yeehaw.
But in all seriousness, you will learn something from our Server Roundup winners and finalists that will more than pay for your travel costs to this event.
4. Would you fail the Crisis of Facilities Management Pop Quiz?
Building a datacenter is one of the most expensive investments a company can make. And yet, staffing and operational standards are often given short shrift when compared with the planning and diligence dedicated to the site’s design and engineering. Uptime Institute Symposium features an entire track dedicated to the datacenter operations professional, with expert presentations on how to manage your organization’s most vital asset. Uptime Institute will draw from field analysis of the successes and failures of its clients and members to provide guidance and real-world experience on the core elements of a successful and enduring facilities management program.
Are you confident in your facilities team’s capability to manage a technologically advanced and highly efficient design to your 24x7 uptime requirements? Can you easily replace any member of that team? Are you protected against poor operations practices migrating from older sites to higher-criticality datacenters? Do you have sites that operate in isolation without adhering to global corporate standards? Do you even have global corporate standards? Attend Uptime Institute Symposium to help get the right answers to these questions.
5. The only datacenter industry event with a global perspective.
Uptime Institute has awarded Tier Certifications in 38 different countries. Our Accredited Tier Designers (ATD) and Accredited Tier Specialists (ATS) alumni represent 60 different countries. Uptime Institute Networks are currently growing in Brazil, Asia-Pacific, and EMEA as well as the established North American Networks. We have offices in London, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Dubai, Taipei and Singapore. Our experts are delivering datacenter consulting services to the largest IT organizations around the world. We are hosting speakers from Moscow, Western Europe and Brazil.
6. The datacenter industry’s most elite networking event.
Symposium is a worthwhile investment in your professional development and your company’s success. Datacenter managers from Fortune 500 companies, large financial firms, and the colocation space will be presenting on the top issues facing their organizations today. We are hosting a meeting for all ATD alumni, representing the industry’s leading datacenter designers and engineers. Uptime Institute Network Members from four continents will spend three days learning and sharing experiences. And the most senior executives from the biggest vendors will be on hand to present and answer your questions. You owe it to yourself – make Symposium a priority.
7.The killer keynotes.
The datacenter conference circuit can seem a lot like the movie Groundhog Day. You see the same people, talking about the same stuff, year after year. Not at Symposium.
The invited keynote lineup for 2013 includes Twitter’s Anoop Mavath, discussing Twitter’s datacenter strategy for the first time. Find out how Twitter has deployed datacenter infrastructure to keep pace with the constraints and changing demands of managing one of the most dynamic workloads on the Web.
The last time we saw Christian Belady, he was a mad scientist putting servers in tents, developing metrics that would take over the industry, and challenging our assumptions. Recently, Microsoft’s General Manager of Data Center Services has had kept his head down, busy executing the deployment of Microsoft’s massive global cloud footprint. At Symposium, Christian will share what he’s learned, including the latest trends that may impact your datacenters: cloud-optimized servers, fail-in-place and self-healing IT, and a shift to opex-driven accounting.
Finally, Alexander Martynyuk will provide an overview of how Russia is building its national cloud computing platform. Rostelecom, Russia’s largest national telecommunications operator, launched a project in 2011 to develop a nationwide cloud computing platform. The success of any datacenter buildout is defined by how efficient the collaboration is between various project teams. Martynyuk, Rostelecom’s Senior Project Director, will discuss how his organization is meeting priorities, deadlines and budget on this complex project.
8. Stop guessing – use data.
The sessions at Uptime Institute Symposium are largely based on quantitative peer data, collected from the largest and most critical datacenter operations around the globe. From the opening session, featuring the results of the 2013 Industry Survey, to the annual datacenter density study, and the Hurricane Sandy 'lessons learned' report, you will have access to the most up-to-date and accurate industry data available.
9. 2013 Green Enterprise IT Award Winners.
The 2013 Green Enterprise IT (GEIT) Awards recognize pioneering advancements that significantly improve energy productivity and resource use in IT. The 2013 class of honorees includes 28 organizations associated with 19 case studies and spans eight countries.
“This year's entries included an impressive mix, from unique innovations to excellent project executions, and, as always, the rigorous process that we go through at the GEIT Awards has allowed us to pick the very best from an outstanding collection of entries,” said Martin Bradley, GEIT Awards Judge and Head of European Data Centre Engineering and Operations at Morgan Stanley. The GEIT Award winners' case-study presentations are scheduled throughout the event.
10. Unmatched experience and expertise.
Join Uptime Institute Founder Ken Brill, Chief Technology Officer Vince Renaud, Executive Director Emeritus Pitt Turner, and Managing Principal of Research and Education Hank Seader for perspective and guidance based on decades of experience in the datacenter industry.
Register to attend Uptime Institute Symposium 2013: The Global Digital Infrastructure Evolution.
Second Annual Uptime Institute Server Roundup at Symposium
The annual Uptime Institute Server Roundup contest was introduced in October 2011 to raise awareness about the removal and recycling of comatose and obsolete IT equipment in an effort to reduce datacenter energy use. Winners and Finalists of the Uptime Institute Server Roundup will participate at Uptime Institute Symposium in a panel discussion on the challenges and rewards of a disciplined server decommissioning program, Wednesday May 15.
According to industry estimates, around 20% of servers in datacenters today are obsolete, outdated or unused. Decommissioning one rack unit (1U) of servers can result in a savings of $500 per year in energy costs, an additional $500 in operating system licenses and $1,500 in hardware maintenance costs.
This year’s Server Roundup Winners and Finalists
- WINNER: AOL won back-to-back years for overall tally of servers removed. The global Web services company decommissioned 8,253 servers in calendar year 2012. This resulted in (gross) total savings of almost $3m from reduced utility costs, maintenance and recovery of asset resale/scrap. Environmental benefits were seen in the reduction of more than 16,000 tons of carbon emissions, according to AOL.
- WINNER: Barclays, a global financial organization, removed 5,515 obsolete servers in 2012, with power savings of around three megawatts, and $3.4m in annualized savings for power, and a further $800,000 in savings in hardware maintenance.
- FINALIST: TD Bank removed 513 servers in 2012. The team from this Canadian financial firm removed 2,941 units in the five years they've been working to remove obsolete machines from the raised floor. Although the TD Bank annual server count does not approach those impressive numbers put up by AOL, the organization makes up for it in the volume of waste that it diverts from local and municipal waste sites. All of the equipment that was sent through the E-Waste recycler is salvaged within a 110-mile radius from TD Bank’s primary datacenters. Nothing is shipped overseas for processing.
- FINALIST: McKesson pulled 586 servers in 2012, reducing datacenter power usage by 931.7 kW and saving $734,550.
- FINALIST: Sun Life Financial removed 387 servers in 2012, which resulted in 32 kW of power savings across three datacenters and financial savings of $8,800 per month.
Last year's winners, AOL and NBC Universal, removed over 11,000 underutilized or comatose servers. AOL removed nearly 10,000 and saved over $5m. NBC Universal's infrastructure team culled 1,090 machines, representing approximately 29% of the total enterprise IT footprint.
Since the contest's launch two years ago, Server Roundup participants at Uptime Institute’s Symposium event have decommissioned and recycled over 30,000 units of underutilized or obsolete server hardware.
Green Enterprise IT (GEIT) Awards
Uptime Institute grants Green Enterprise IT (GEIT) Awards to projects, ideas, and products that significantly improve energy productivity and resource use in IT. The Awards are open to applicants in all countries and are carefully judged by a committee of independent experts in a double-blind review process and criteria. Award winners are honored at the annual Uptime Institute Symposium.
This year’s GEIT Awards Winners
- Audacious Idea: TeraCool LLC
- Facility Design Implementation: National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), The RMH Group and H+L Architecture
- Facility Design Innovation: TD Bank Group
- Facility Product Deployment: University of Leeds, Iceotope and 3M Company
- Facility Retrofit: Interxion
- Green Digital Infrastructure Strategy: Cisco Systems
- IT Product Deployment: Arc Productions and TSO Logic
- IT Retrofit: Avnet, Inc.
2013 GEIT Awards Finalists: Microsoft (Audacious Idea); Melbourne Water and Norman Disney & Young (Facility Design Implementation); TELUS Corporation and Skanska (Facility Design Innovation); Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and SynapSense Corporation (Facility Product Deployment); Schuberg Philis and De Vlieg Techniek (Facility Retrofit); Avnet, Inc. (Green Digital Infrastructure Strategy); NTT DATA and Intel Corporation (IT Product Deployment); and Stanford University (IT Retrofit).
The GEIT Award winners' case-study presentations are scheduled throughout Symposium.
This year’s HCTS-Europe event was a resounding success! Attendance at HCTS-Europe has grown every year since its inception, and this year proved no different, as we enjoyed record-setting numbers. The value and appeal of 451 Events, such as HCTS-Europe, HCTS-North America, and Uptime Institute Symposium, are rooted in content-rich agendas, which provide attendees with the analyst insights, end-user perspectives, market intelligence, and peer interaction necessary to help them define and implement their digital infrastructure strategies.
As attendance has grown, so has the geographic reach. This year, more than 20 countries were represented at HCTS-Europe. Senior-level managers made up approximately 65% of total attendance, representing a mix of organizations, including enterprise end users; service providers; datacenter owners and operators; and investment and banking firms
New Dual-Track Agenda
This year, we rolled out a dual-track agenda that addressed the many issues around a dynamic and expanding datacenter ecosystem – from facilities to the hardware and software stacks to cloud-based services – and the profound implications for the way enterprises plan, build and manage their IT environments. The sessions included unique content, expertise, and end-user insight from highly-regarded 451 Research analysts, datacenter experts from Uptime Institute, and distinguished panelists. If you would like to see the HCTS-Europe presentations, they are available at http://eu.hostingtransformation.com/agenda.
We hope to see you at next year’s HCTS-Europe, and at other upcoming 451 Events, such as Uptime Institute Symposium 2013 and HCTS-North America 2013.
