This past October I was fortunate to attend two conferences, the 2018 Critical Facilities Summit in Nashville on October 14-16, and the 2018 Fall 7x24 Conference in Phoenix, held October 21-24. Both conferences were filled with great presentations that were thought provoking and worthy of further study.

At the Critical Facilities Summit, I attended “Regulatory and Compliance Impacts on the Data Center” presented by Jeff Gilmer, senior partner, Excipio Consulting. Jeff stated that compliance needs buy-in from two sides: operations, who have the access; and IT, who controls where the data is going. Not only do both sides need to be on board but a risk assessment needs to be performed to see where compliance is lacking. Look for more on this topic in coming months.

At the Fall 2018 7x24 Conference in Phoenix, held October 21-24, Dave Schirmacher, president, Reset Advisors, LLC; and president, 7x24 Exchange International, presented the keynote on Tuesday, October 23, titled “Unleashing the Metrics of Cost and Performance,” which was the debut of a new data center metric, the data center unit cost (DCUC^TM) metric, which is designed to measure overall data center expense as a unit of measure, including IT and facility CAPEX, IT and facility OPEX, and energy expense. The goal, according to Schirmacher, is to reconcile fixed expenses (CAPEX) with continuing expenses (OPEX).

The core objectives of the DCUC include, according to Schirmacher, defining a unit of measure that accurately captures the TCO of an existing or new enterprise data center facility; create a metric that is easy to understand and communicate; establish equivalent internal and market comparables; and support of forward looking analysis.

Look for more on this metric in the coming year in Mission Critical Magazine.

The 2019 Critical Facilities Summit will be held September 23-25, 2019 in Dallas.

The 2019 7x24 Spring Conference will be held June 2-5, 2019 at the Boca Raton Resort & Club in Boca Raton, FL.

Caroline Fritz

Editor