Notes from the Floor at VMworld 2010
Posted on Wed, Sep 08, 2010 @ 10:34 AM
I admit that I sometimes complain about manning the booth at big technology conferences. I was at VMworld last week. My feet hurt. My hips got sore. I guess I’m lucky that I don’t have to wear high-heeled shoes like some of the other booth bunnies (or worse, like silver body stockings!) I get to be a plain old geeky booth bunny, albeit sans pocket protector.
But I meet some great people.
Yesterday, it was Andreas Antonopoulos, the senior vice president and founding partner at Nemertes Research. I introduced Viridity Software with my usual harangue about energy in the data center, about how few organizations really plan effectively for energy, about the limited strategies available to data center managers in terms of managing power.
He had perfect, simple analogy. He said that the data center is like a black box. You supply the data and the energy; it gives you back knowledge. Exactly. Every business can tell you about the data side of that equation. The distillers at Jack Daniel’s will definitely know the price of corn. (You didn’t think I’d know that Jack Daniel’s is a corn-based whiskey, did you?) And the developers of the Borgata Casino in Atlantic City can keep you abreast of the fluctuations in tourism at the Jersey shore.
But ask the data center managers at these organizations to tell you about the details electricity consumption and costs, and they probably can’t. Even though energy is a primary input into that black box. It accounts for half of the data center business expense.
An interesting dichotomy.