Reading
Cronin’s Workshop (p.10) prompted me to review the other features
and columns in this issue. You see, by tracing the history of the
7x24Exchange as it celebrates the 20th anniversary of its founding
Dennis also traced the history of the uptime industry. Dennis
correctly points out that he and others still face many of the
problems that caused members of New York’s financial community to
convene the Uninterruptible Uptime Users Group. Dennis writes, “We
still discuss today many of the topics from these early meetings.
Session titles included Calculating Ride Through After Loss of AC,
Networking Three Telecom Sites, and the Effects of
Harmonics.”
Sure enough, my review of the
articles we’re publishing this issue confirm Dennis’s
observation.
We have articles on reducing
cooling costs, airflow management, automatic transfer switches, and
managing infrastructure. The web is filled with Tweets and blogs that
reflect the same preoccupations with energy and reliability that the
UUUG newsletter reflected 20 years ago. Dennis does consign the issue
of harmonics to the dustbin of history, but has anything else
changed?
The answer is certainly yes. First
the world has changed. Broadly, the nation is concerned with energy
supply and cost in a more serious way than it was in 1990. Back then
the nation had already managed to forget the oil shocks of the 1970s.
Now, oil is not our only concern. Rolling blackouts in California and
a huge blackout on the east coast shook the nation’s confidence in
the electrical grid. In addition, concerns about global warming have
caused many worldwide to rethink the proper uses of
energy.
These changes have broad societal
consequences that affect anyone running an energy-intensive
operation.
The data centers have changed. The
power and cooling demands of modern data centers have grown
exponentially. Scaling up facilities to meet the demands of Moore’s
Law has made them infinitely more complex to maintain and run.
The demands for uptime have increased as a
result of a harsher regulatory environment, making the facilities
even more-complex, and solutions such as virtualization mean that
data centers require a greater level of sophistication to run than
ever before. Clouds may mean fewer but more complex data centers. It
has been a long time since I heard anyone discussing the cloud as a
form of distributed computing, rather terms like private cloud have
emerged. Isn’t that oxymoronic in some way. “Hey, hey, get off of
my cloud,” sang Mick Jagger in the 1960s, but the cloud was
supposed to be open to anyone who could join.
The
UUUG newsletters suggest that many of the people who attended its
first meetings are still active. However, UUUG is no longer the only
game in town. Worthy organizations such as the Green Grid,
DataCenterDynamics, the Uptime Institute, CFRT, and AFCOM share the
stage. And they are necessary to help us understand the terms and
concepts that have developed to help the industry cope with the
complexity of data centers. In fact, some of these organizations
exist primarily because of the usefulness of their
metrics.
Where would we be without metrics and
concepts such as LEED, PUE, Tiers, and EUE? Still in the world of ROI
before everything got so complex, I think.
