Uptime Institute Seminar

I'm on my way to the Uptime Institute's How to Plan, Justify, and Manage a Major Data Center Project seminar in Atlanta, GA. I hope to meet some of the attendees as well as members of the Institute's staff.

Who is the Uptime Institue?

Here's how the Institute describes itself.

The Uptime Institute provides education, publications, consulting, certifications, conferences and seminars, independent research, and thought leadership for the enterprise data center industry and for data center professionals.

Founded in 1993, the Institute pioneered the creation and facilitation of end-user knowledge communities to improve reliability and uninterruptible availability—uptime—in data center facilities and Information Technology organizations. Today, the 100-plus members of the Institute’s global Site Uptime Networks® are mostly Fortune 100-sized companies having multiple data centers averaging 50,000 square feet of computer room area and consuming six megawatts of utility power. Members learn from each other and from the Institute via closed members-only conferences, site tours, benchmarking programs, best-practice sharing, abnormal incident collection, FLASH Reports, and shared metrics.

Here's how the Uptime Institute describes this seminar

This interactive seminar and practical tutorial illustrates the most successful approaches used to get a new data center project off to an optimal start. This includes knowing how to develop the ‘right’ requirements, getting the necessary sponsors, and having the “right” schedule and budget. As with many once-in-a-career projects, the most serious pitfalls occur in the very beginning before management knows enough to clearly define the project’s life-cycle objectives. As a result, an alarming number of multimillion-dollar data centers recently built, or currently in design or construction, have insufficient capabilities or flexibilities to achieve a fifteen-year useful life. In fact, most of these data centers will become functionally obsolete within the next five years.

What I hope to learn

I'm hoping to meet some of the key decision makers and learn what changes virtualization technology is or is not imposing on them. I also hope to meet some of the Institute's staff while there. I'll let you know what I learn over the coming days.