Efficiency

It seems like forever since I have had a chance to blog! Needless to say, we've been absolutely swamped with business growth and pushing innovation as far as we can take it!

One year ago this month we tried an innovative modular RFP process which opened up the design of the new eBay Phoenix Data Center to the industry. As I write this blog, we are knee deep in the commissioning of this ground breaking design dubbed Project Mercury. The challenge we put out through Data Center Pulse has yielded one of our most innovative designs to date. The goal was to unleash the creative minds in the design and consulting arena by outlining the business and technical challenges then letting them tackle the "how". I am proud to announce that the process works. It works very well! The collaborative, partnership nature of this project has made it one of the best I have ever worked on. Barriers were shattered, competitors became partners, and the impossible became possible while the project rapidly evolved and our design requirements were exceeded. But I digress! This blog entry is not to announce the details of Project Mercury (more on that in Oct/Nov as we open it up). This blog is a heads up to the industry that eBay will be kicking off round two of the Modular RFP process! But this time, we're taking it to the next level - Salt Lake City, Phase II!

The process will begin August 19, 2011! Let the design competition begin! Stay tuned to the Data Center Pulse YouTube channel and the modular RFP page for more information. For more information, please email modular@ebay.com.

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.

On Thursday 10/15/09, several members of the DCP board participated in the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) Data Center Efficiency event in Sunnyvale at the NetApp campus.

This week, eBay announced that by 2012 it will reduce its corporate emissions by 15% over its 2008 baseline.

http://news.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=410332

Let me break this down for you. This is not just some corporate marketing gimic or easily attainable goal to get press coverage - it is very real and affects my world directly.  As you saw in the release, eBay is firmly committed to making this happen, but it will not be easy. More than half of eBay's emissions come from our Data Centers. From a carbon perspective, we are in the belly of the beast and will be fighting for every metric ton we remove. An aggresive strategy is underway to reduce both our financial as well as our carbon burdon. The Data Center operations teams in partnership with the Green Team have multi-prong, multi-year projects in play that will ultimately lead to eBay reaching this goal. From an operations standpoint it is all about fine tuning the Data Center "machine", holisitically, to achieve operational excellence.

The teams are clear that success is not measured with a single metric. It is a combination of metrics. We also believe operations and sustainability are synonymous with each other. The operations strategy is to deliver Availability, Cost Control and Agility by levearing our talent pool and innovating at every level. But we also view all aspects of operations through a sustainability lens. In our business if any of these components are missing, you're not addressing the entire problem. For example, we can meet our availability numbers but miss our carbon reduction goal because of excessive, inefficient, redundancy. On the other hand, we could drive our sustainability focus and miss our cost reduction goals. It is an eco system and requires the right balance to be successful.