GDS

Late last year we instituted a project titled Bring Out Your Dead (inspired by the Monte Python's Holy Grail Film).  It was an effort to hunt down and remove orphaned and unused hardware at the company. The challenge I gave to Serena Devito on my staff was to do this as a low-cost, no-cost effort.  We weren't out to spend millions on replacing equipment, we just wanted to find comatose devices and get rid of them.  We knew that even with all our datacenter consolidation efforts over the last two years, there was still a lot of waste going on.  The reorganizations, acquisitions, reductions in force and other business activities left quite a bit of equipment in limbo.  So, we partnered with our lab and datacenter managers to get rid of them.  What we found surpassed even our expectations.  We pulled 440+ pallets of equipment from four of our major campuses in just three months.  6,199 devices in all with 4,100 of them being servers!  The icing on the cake was that 64% of the equipment we pulled was still powered on!  It was just sitting there burning energy.  The picture below shows 50% of the equipment that was removed.  It filled one of our warehouses in Hayward, CA!

I don't think I could smile any wider than I am right now.  On Wednesday July 16th, my team received Sun's Innovation Award at the Marriot in downtown San Jose, CA. The Innovation Award is one of the highest recognitions you can receive at Sun. It is presented by our CEO, Jonathan Schwartz and CTO, Greg Papadopolous at Sun's annual leadership summit for all global VPs, CTOs and Distinguished Engineers. To make this award even sweeter, it is the first time in Sun's history that the Workplace Resources group (Real Estate) has received this award.

In almost every customer briefing that I have (over 70 in the last 4 months), I find one missing piece that can costs these companies 10's of millions of dollars every year. It's the alignment between Facilities and IT. My primary job at Sun is to bridge the gap between the Facilities organization, who manages the real estate portfolio and executes projects in the datacenters (compression, expansion, retrofit), and the IT & Engineering organizations that actual occupy and use the space. I've only found a few companies that actually have a team like mine (GDS). I don't think it is clear to most that not having that role, seriously limits the capabilities of both sides. Facilities is worried about cost to operate the business Real Estate portfolio. This is everything from the type and amount of toliet paper in the bathrooms to the utility bills for these high density cabinets in the datacenters. They are driven by cost reduction and usually don't have the luxury of innovating or driving next generation solutions. IT on the other hand has to constantly deliver performance in the datacenter.