PUE, DCiE, and other stuff that doesn't matter much...

The Gartner conference was one of their best attended events in 2011 proving yet again that the space is hot, appears to have a bright future, and like the other hot sectors before it, is trying to mature through the development of standardized measurements that will be embraced by vendors, users, and analysts and give owner-operators bragging rights and a new area to compete in. PUE, DCiE and other yardsticks are competing for the 'best' yardstick for efficiency.

Sorry to pee in your Wheaties folks - we already have one. Cash.

I have done enough deals to know that PUE matters before financial analysts get involved. Once they do it comes down to costs. Total costs. Lowest cost wins. Not every time, but show me a CFO who authorizes paying more for something than its worth as a rule.

I will also put a caveat in to say that this is more true of multi tenant facilities than single tenant facilities. Single tenant/purpose built data centers can do what they want so long as it makes financial sense and delivers on the business objectives for the company and THAT company only. Multi tenant facilities must be far more INCLUSIVE of a wider array of requirements to service the greatest number of clients and their desires.

Both Single and multi tenant data centers will have a mix of manufacturers, densities, layouts, loads and preferences. The multi tenant facility needs to factor in broad compliance, placement of densities, weight, and other highly variable nuances. Like Rick on Pawn Stars says - 'You never know what is going to walk through that door.'

Gartner Data Center Conference brain dump...

I just got back from 3 1/2 days in Las Vegas at the Gartner Data Center Conference, and will be writing about many of the things they presented, only in a lot more detail. In fact that was the #1 piece of feedback I heard was that the presentations are more sizzle than steak, and that they have to do a WHOLE lot more in providing the details about what they present.

Monday's keynote was pretty good and was given by Dave Cappuccio. It covered many stats and numbers that were fun to listen to, and I thought it was a decent way to ease into a conference. Some of the interesting nuggets I heard:

30,000,000,000 (billion) pieces of content were added to Facebook in the past month
Worldwide IP traffic will quadruple by 2015 - care to guess why?

Data Centers consume 100 times more electricity than the offices they support
The percentage of a college student's texting to phone call ratio is 98.4% to 1.6%
Within 4 years the bandwidth I/O per rack will increase 25x

Needless to say this is all pointing to growth - whether a company is prepared for it or not. There are some other topics I will be jumping into over the next few weeks as Gartner left a lot to be desired and discussed and in some cases were pretty off. So Stay tuned and lets see what I come up with once I shake the red eye jet lag...