Datacenter effectiveness

I'm attending the Uptime Symposium 2010 in New York this week and have been gathering a few thoughts about the event for you. I couldn't listen in on all of the sessions so, this is just a tiny segment of what was really said. (Note: Uptime Institute is another business unit of The 451 Group)

• I spoke with Pitt Turner, Executive Director of the Uptime Institute, and Ken Brill, Founder of the Institute, about the concept of datacenter effectiveness. (This is one of the main themes of Uptime Symposium 2010). There comments about making the IT infrastructure really fit the needs of the organization being a challenging balancing act appeared to be right on the mark to me. Ken likes to say that there is gold lying on the datacenter floor and that people need to just bend over and pick it up.
• Amit Chatterjee, CEO of Hara Software, presented a very insightful view of likely changes in the "post carbon economy." His view is that those organizations who focus on this and make better use of their energy dollars/euros/etc. are likely to be the leaders in the industry years from now.
• Neil Rasmussen, Chief Innovation Officer (new title to me) of APC by Schneider Electric, brought a very pragmatical approach to analyzing and allocating energy costs to specific workloads and users.
• Amy Spellman, President of Optimal Innovations, spoke about an effort to actually model whether cloud computing (in the form of Amazon's EC2) would actually save an organization money. It appears that in some circumstances there would be measurable savings. She cautions that a careful analysis of the characteristics of an organization's workloads would be needed to determine if there are any savings at the end of the rainbow.
• Doug Outhout, HP's VP of Green IT and Business Development, presented some very attractive views of what happens when one consolidates processing, storage, networking and management into a single rack.

Since I was only able to be in one room at a time, I'm going to have to listen the the recordings of other sessions to really capture all of the concepts that were presented.