datacenter

Paul Sun Director of Cloud Computing for ITRI Taiwan Joins the Data Center Pulse Board of Directors
Data Center Pulse expands the board of directors to continue the goal of influencing the datacenter industry through their exclusive, global end user community.

UNION CITY, CA, February 8^th, 2011 - Today, Data Center Pulse added Paul Sun to the Board of Directors as the Asia Pacific Regional Director 

Paul Sun is the Director of

Why is an individual computer server different from a data center, other than scale?

Cloud Computing and Data Centers are killing our planet.  Drive to the hardware store, buy a hammer, chisel and piece of stone and begin writing about it. Put away your computer, turn off your internet connection, un-plug the video game console, iPod and the TV. We must do everything we can to get rid of these giant, energy sucking, pollution generating, and planet killing warehouses of death immediately.  

All kidding aside, it is true that many of our older data centers are in serious need of improvements in their power efficiency.  However, it's also true that data centers contain much of our work effort and play environments. If this work and play was to be distributed in small chunks throughout the business or our households instead of concentrated in data centers they would be considerably more wasteful of our planets resources.

In my 20 plus year career in IT I've always been proud of my ability to bring efficiency to IT, and the business. When Data Center Pulse was founded the driving motivation was to push for the development of power sipping IT equipment designs, combined with more efficient data centers. In parallel we're actively working to persuade owners to implement those new solutions more quickly. We strongly believed that the IT/Data Center industry had a need to focus more attention on effective use of energy. The DCP Leadership team was made up of like minded individuals that each have work history examples of a focus on reducing energy consumption.  So why would I be writing an article about data centers getting a bad rap? It seems like I should be agreeing with those articles, as it seems like I'm contradicting myself.  Well, that couldn't be farther from the truth.

What Should a CEO look for in a CIO

You should use the same decision criteria you would with proper "architecture" principles
- How will this new addition fit with the current team?
- How will their experience fit into corporate culture?
- How will their execution capabilities fit into corporate goals and objectives?
- Will this person be willing to stand up in front of a large crowd of executives and tell them what's needed and provide reasonable options for getting there?

As I've mentioned in previous posts I believe that in order for a CIO to be outstanding they have to be much like a CEO. The IT function is often times a mirror of the larger organization. There are teams or application groups that are focused on lines of business or certain business functions (I.e., Engineering or Marketing). Because IT is like a small version of the enterprise it's critical for the CIO to be able to tie these groups together in a common vision. Only by tying the groups together can the CIO expect to deliver on broader cross functional corporate opportunities.

Building a vision for the entire IT organization that helps everyone understand how they fit into the bigger enterprise puzzle is crucial to team moral and to limiting intergroup competition or infighting. Building a vision isn't easy, but the CIO is more likely to be successful if s/he makes it a team effort. Getting your reports and their reports involved in the effort will help to ensure buy in and it's an automatic way to contribute to the communication of the plan. The vision should demonstrate how each vertical when working together contributes to making a successful enterprise objective. An opposite example might be something like the Marketing group building a great lead candidate DB, but not realizing that they could be pulling information from the call center and or providing information directly to the CRM solution. IT must be in a position to bridge that gap and no individual IT function can do that it takes the entire team. 

Key things to remember here from a CEO's perspective:

• Include the CIO in ALL exec functions
• Expect your CIO to act as an enterprise exec, not an IT exec (must still have a solid IT background)
• Hire a CIO with the same due diligence that the board used to hire you
• Solicit the CIO to help cross boundaries of functions to ensure a common vision for enterprise IT deliverables can be communicated to the rest of IT

Key things to remember from a CIO's perspective:

• You're not a technologist first, but you must be strong enough in technology to deal with the highest level partners and to intelligently argue direction with direct staff
• Lead by example. The CEO's job is to help set and communicate company vision, and to enable his/her team to get their job done, the CIO must do the same. The CEO also has significant customer communication requirements, you're role is no different.
• Don't hesitate to use your team. You don't have to have all the ideas, you just have to show that you can effectively implement them.
• All of our team (VPs to Helpdesk) need to be on the same page. If a customer stops anyone from IT in the hall and asks "what's IT working on", they should all have the same answer.

There's no way to guarantee that you'll hire the right person for the job, but at least you'll have a fighting chance if you treat to objective with the strategic vision it deserves

"Cookie Cutter Data Center", blasphemy I say, "I can build a better data center than anyone else, I'll build it myself"! All of us who have grown up as IT folks harbor that feeling of "we can do it better ourselves".