Keynote Speaker: Mike Abrashoff

Organizations perform at their best when people feel safe and confident about their ability to navigate troubled times. In Navy terms, combat readiness is a matter of life and death - every crewmember’s contribution matters. Mike Abrashoff tells the inspiring story of how the U.S.S Benfold was transformed into the best ship in the Navy by empowering the crew to take ownership and improve every aspect of the way things were done. As Abrashoff shares the methods he used to create successful change within the confines of strict military regulations, audiences come away with dozens of practical and actionable ideas to make a difference in their own organizations. This first-hand account of the journey to organizational excellence is as invaluable as it will be memorable.

Moderator: Rich Miller, Founder and CEO of Data Center Knowledge

Panelist: Tim Crawford, CIO for All Covered
Panelist: Oliver Deschryver, Distinguished Architect at Yahoo!
Panelist: Indu Kodukula, EVP Products, CTO at SunGard
Panelist: Allan Leinwand, CTO at Zynga

In the past, the rate of data center growth was dictated by the demand of a single company. Today, that demand is driven by millions of users around the globe. Overnight sensations can drive a spike in demand seemingly overnight. Companies need a way to immediately accommodate demand. In a traditional model, the response to bring capacity online could take weeks, months or years. In a cloud-based world, it can happen in minutes.

Moderator: Mark Thiele, VP of Data Center Strategy at ServiceMesh

Panelist: Chris Noland, Lab Manager at Cisco Systems Inc.
Panelist: Mark Honer, Senior Manager, Customer Service Labs Juniper Networks
Panelist: Val Sokolov, Senior Manager for Engineering lab services at Brocade

Unlike enterprise and production data centers, today's R&D electronics lab is a dynamic and constantly changing work environment with variable demands for power, space and cooling.  IT engineers expect as much autonomy and flexibility as possible in the way that they access their IT resources and then develop and test their IT solutions.  So, how realistic is it to believe that our new data center standards and "best practices" can be implemented in the IT lab as well?  Hear leading laboratory operators describe their challenges and barriers to success and explain how they have modified well established data center solutions to fit the needs of their unique R&D environments.

Sponsor Lunch Session from Schneider Electric

Session Topic: IP Convergence Delivers Security, Video, Intercom and Connectivity to the Enterprise Environment

IP Convergence with Schneider Electric’s security solution offers rich, complete security management as part of a holistic, integrated IT building control approach.  And it reduces costs – both capital (CAPEX) and Operations (OPEX) – while simplifying information collection and sharing. 

Security Management Systems have changed dramatically in the past 10 years as innovation in technology and communications offer more concerns for employees and for managing risk.  Integration of intercom, access control, asset protection, and video surveillance brings new solutions to the enterprise facility manager.

Moderator: Brian Donathan, Principal at TELADATA

Panelist: KC Mares, President & CEO, MegaWatt Consulting
Panelist: Eric Jacobs, VP & General Manager at Quality Technology Services
Panelist: Richard Rothschild Senior Director of IT & Facilities at TiVo

Many users today have sufficient capital to BOO (Build, Own, and Operate) their mission critical datacenter facilities. This moderated panel will present both sides to demonstrate the competing advantages of owning versus leasing, and some hybrid structures. In many cases, a large entity knows they have long-term needs and believes that ownership of strategic real estate for mission critical facilities is an excellent use of capital. In many other cases, it is better to let others fund the capital and have the user be a tenant and others can provide the on-site management.

Since most users wrestle with these pros and cons year after year, this panel will help provide you with guidelines so you’ll be better prepared to make these decisions after you’ve heard this presentation. The panel includes a moderator who is in the Project Management business and is neutral, a COLO developer, who can best explain why you should rent, and a user who will explain when they want to own and when they want to lease.

Speaker: Christina Page, Director, Climate and Energy Strategy at Yahoo!

Speaker: Alex Victor, Data Center Manager at Robert Half International

Speaker: Kelly Shea, Global Sustainability Program Manager at Symantec
Speaker: Jose Igelesias, Vice President, Education and Enablement Services at Symantec

This presentation is a Symantec Case study discussing data centers/lab energy and greenhouse gas emission increases and associated regulations. Why is Symantec being regulated on energy/greenhouse gas emissions? What is Symantec doing to combat increasing emissions in their datacenters/labs? What are their challenges and  successes?

1:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Sponsor Lunch Session from CAPS

Session Topic: Data Center Cooling Efficiency, Optimization and Trade-offs

Speaker: Greg A. Stover, Senior VP at NER Data Corporation and "Cooling Efficiency Enthusiast"

Learn how to lower Cooling costs 30-80% while increasing sustainability. Gain insight on advantages and the trade-offs of the many technologies, where combinations of technologies may be best, and learn how cooling solutions play into the upcoming Title 24 Code changes.

From Best Practices, Containment (Hot vs. Cold, Passive vs. Managed, Chimney’s and IT Rows), Demand Based Cooling (Managed Distribution), new High Efficiency In Row Cooling (close coupled) technologies  (CMS designs = 40% - 60% more efficient), new High Efficiency CRAC/H’s (CMS designs = 40-50% more efficient) and Chill-off winner Rear door Heat Exchangers.

Moderated by: Mark Bramfitt, Utilities and IT Industry Consultant

Panelist: Lee Cooper, Manager, Electronics and IT Efficiency Products at PG&E
Panelist: Mary Medeiros McEnroe, Acting Public Benefit Program Manager at Silicon Valley Power
Panelist: Derek Schwartz, Founder at The Green Data Center Alliance

Utility energy efficiency programs for data centers and IT are robust in California, and are now being scrutinized by regulators to determine effectiveness. What challenges are the utilities facing in the evaluation process? What changes to the programs are likely, and how will that affect the adoption of programs by utilities who have yet to address this market?  Panelists will share their on-the-ground perspective from California and New York. Companies hoping to tap utility program support for their services and technologies shouldn't miss this session.

This is an industry presentation related to all practices of electronics equipment recovery solutions ranging from Data Center equipment to "desktop" equipment from standard operations. This session will focus on  reviewing equitable solutions for recovery, but also with a strong focus on environmental integrity and financial accountability.

3:30 p.m. - 4:10 p.m.
Session Topic: Fenwick and West LLP Data Center Case Study: The Idiot’s Guide to Real Uber-Efficient Data Centers

Speaker: Julie O' Loughlin, Senior Director of Facilities at Fenwick & West
Speaker: Jason Dubose, Advance Design Consultants
Speaker: Kevin Moore, Fenwick & West LLP

You’ve heard from large corporations with mega data centers on their data center design approach and challenges.  Gain insight from a small data center end user perspective and hear how Fenwick & West’s Data Center was developed as a clean sheet design with the idea to be a cost-effective uber-efficient Data Center that maximizes simplicity, redundancy, and reliability. The HVAC system exceeds ASHRAE 90.1 energy standards by over 50% by utilizing evaporative cooling as its primary cooling source. The data center also takes advantage of an intelligent LED lighting system which contributes to a 70% energy reduction while providing zero maintenance for 15 years. This data center qualifies as a LEED-CI Platinum project.

This presentation will discuss reasons to add IPv6 to your environment, give an overview of the process, and provide some basic recommendations on ways to deploy needed IPv6 capabilities quickly.

Speaker: Brian Mata, Senior Audiovisual Consultant at Teladata

"Convergence” has been a buzzword that for years now has used to describe the incorporation of IT technologies into Audio/Visual systems. Today more than ever, AV systems are increasing in complexity and sophistication. The advent and refinement of future technologies is further changing the landscape. This seminar will highlight some common (but not always obvious) trends, and explore how they impact facilities design today. We will also look into the near future and examine what new technologies might shape a slightly different tomorrow. What should we be doing today to prepare for them, and which current practices may become old habits? What do we want, and what do we need? How will our choices impact the end-user experience, construction, budgeting, and planning, ongoing maintenance costs, efficiency, aesthetics, network bandwidth and security?
This course aims to provide a high-level overview of potential benefits, pitfalls, and design considerations posed by technology choices including (but not limited to):

• High-Definition Videoconferencing
• Digital Signage
• IP Control Systems
• Resource Monitoring and Management
• Cloud-Based AV
• IP Content Distribution
• Digital Video

Sponsor Lunch Session from Raritan

Presentation Topic: eBay Case Study - Bridging the IT/Facilities Gap: Global Benefits of Visualization, Optimization and Power Metering

IT and facilities teams now have access to solutions that provide the granularity, precision and control to make a dramatic impact on all aspects of datacenter design, capacity planning and operations. Engineers, planning groups, facilities staff, operations managers and IT technicians can now work together with consistent, accurate and pliable data enabling them to make precise design, disaster recovery, and capacity planning decisions.  Learn how Raritan’s PX family of intelligent PDUs (single phase through 400-volt) and their award winning Power IQ and dc Track software solutions can be gracefully folded into your existing  environment and provide a  best in class visualization, real-time monitoring and management  of your datacenter environment. 

Speaker: Tim Cox, IT Program Manager at Cisco Systems

Cisco has and is aggressively expanding its Data Center footprint by building 7 Data Centers within a 3 to 4 year period.  In the early stages of the program it became apparent existing tools and processes would not scale to enable success.  See how Cisco has addressed tasks that took 3 to 4 resources multiple weeks to execute and turned them into 30 second operations executed by a single individual.  Learn how Cisco ensures continued equipment placements will not introduce operational risks by providing unprecedented real time visibility into the power distribution chains and the components that make up the chain.  Witness live demonstrations of the internally built web applications as they execute complex placement scenarios spanning diverse capacities; power, space, weight, ports, … placements that take just minutes to executed.  See how DCRM can design a facility and provide understanding of its capacities before breaking ground.  Manage capacities across many data centers, or narrow the focus to a specific facility.  Tie capacity utilization back to the clients consuming them.  See how capacity demand is mapped to supply to provide views for today and into the future.

Databases are at the heart of the information economy and require careful handling and management. Applications interact with databases in myriad ways and often require upgrades, tuning, or new development. These frequent, repeated demands put pressure on production databases and result in complex, redundant, and expensive infrastructure so that business can have access to their most critical data. Oracle estimates the average customer creates seven copies of each production database for development, testing, QA, staging, operational reporting, pilots, and training. Worse, application development and program timelines are often compromised by process or infrastructure delays – this slows the ability of IT to add value to the business. This session will provide solutions that address the data anchor problem with an innovative software approach called database virtualization.

Moderator: Deborah Grove, CEO at Grove Associates

Panelist: Joyce Dickerson, Director, Sustainable IT at Stanford University
Panelist: Ralph Renne, CFM Director of Site Operations Workplace Resources at NetApp
Panelist: John Rodgers, Director, IT Infrastructure Program – Data Center Strategy Kaiser Permanente

What does it take to have your project successful and make all participants confident that while they may not have gotten everything they wanted, at the very least, their recommendations were considered as part of the process?  In this panel discussion, we’ll enumerate best practices for bringing together the real estate, IT, and finance teams that will make your data center consolidation or build out initiative an authentic team effort. Smoothing out the edges as part of our collaboration process, we’ll provide specific examples.

Sponsor Lunch Session from TELADATA

Complimentary One-On-One Session with TELADATA expert to discuss topics on:

• Data Center Assessment
• Co-location Assessment
• Monitoring
• Audio Visual
• Other

Gain insight on how monitoring tools implemented at Equinix facility improved collaboration between IT and Facilities professionals. Learn how Equinix was able to collect real time information on power, temperature, IT Load and energy utilization. This case study will walk you through Equinix’s process of selecting the right monitoring solution that met their business goals, indentifying what information to gather, analyzing the information collected, and the benefits of implementing the monitoring solution.

In a typical datacenter, almost 40% of the total power consumption is spent on datacenter cooling. In addition, cooling system efficiency is a first order factor in determining the useful lifespan of the data center.  Large Internet Portal and Enterprise Datacenters Operators are looking at every possible way to maximize data center efficiency, reduce the cooling costs and extend the lifespan of their facilities. One of the emerging trends in the industry is to move datacenter operations to higher ambient temperatures with some Operators wanting to supply cooling air at temperatures as high as 40C and at the same time improve data center cooling system efficiency.  This study will show that one could reduce the total cost of ownership at the datacenter level by managing for environmental conditions that optimize the datacenter cooling budget and server power increase while ensuring no performance loss at increased ambient conditions.

A key component of the study will be use of real-time monitoring of thermal conditions inside of servers and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis for optimizing data center cooling efficiency as a function of daily operations.  The study will describe a mechanism of embedding new sensors in servers with no additional BOM costs so that critical thermal information is available to the data center building management and CFD software without the need for external sensors. This allows the measurement and reporting of servers’ total airflow and internal operating temperature which can be used to make critical cooling and power decisions and as real-time input to a CFD model for accurate predictive analysis and optimization of future change scenarios.  The combination of server-level monitoring and CFD modeling offer a complete view of present and predicted future environmental conditions that enable holistic management of data center efficiency to reduce power consumption and extend data center lifespan.

The nation’s data center energy consumption, estimated at 60 billion kWh, can be expected to cost approximately $4.5 billion and generate approximately 36 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.  Data center HVAC and power systems account for 40-50% of typical energy consumption.  This session will draw heavily from “real world” findings gained through the presenter’s direct involvement in a number of projects that have dramatically reduced facility energy consumption.

The presentation will review various ways data centers may acquire renewable energy.  In particular, one case history being used for this presentation is the presenter’s leadership of a groundbreaking renewable energy data center project in Nevada called Star Peak Energy Center.  This 10,000-acre development is viewed as a bold renewable energy prototype blending geothermal, solar, and wind energy resources designed to provide on-site power at a lower cost than could be purchased from the local utility.  Using experience from Star Peak as well as other projects, the presentation will detail how to reduce energy demand of the data center, determine availability of local renewable energy sources, strategies for integrating renewable energy into data center operations, and potential benefits from carbon neutral and grid-independent power sources.   

4:30 p.m. - 5:10 p.m. (Option 1)
Roundtable Topic: East Meets West

Moderated By: Derek Schwartz, GDCA

Panelist: Doug Alger, IT Architect at Cisco
Panelist: David Shroyer, Control Engineer at NetApp
Panelist: Mukesh Khattar, Energy Director at Oracle
Panelist: Gary Cudmore, Principal at EDI
Panelist: William Tschudi, Principal Investigator at LBNL

The largest companies in the US are well on their way with innovative strategies to reduce energy consumption in data centers.  The East Coast is led by major financial institutions and the West by IT firms.

The difference in approach for strategies is as different as their business models.  What types of initiatives have they completed and what are they doing next?  Where are their similarities and why can one coast design, build, or retrofit in a way the other cannot?

In this session the GDCA will host a discussion with industry leading experts from financial firms based in NY and technology firms based in Silicon Valley. 

4:30 p.m. - 5:10 p.m. (Option 2)
Critical Facilities Round Table Topic: How to Keep up with Infrastructure Innovations that are Rapidly Changing our Data Centers

Select One of the Roundtable sessions below to explore the challenges of integrating constantly changing IT and facilities infrastructure into the modern data center.

Option 1: Energy Efficiency Roundtable
Room: Ballroom G

Topic: Forsythe Data Center Environmental Monitoring and PUE Measurement Challenges
Speaker: Phil Reese, Faculty and Research Strategist at Stanford University
CFRT Lead: Bill Dunckel, PG&E

PUE has become an accepted metric for Data Centers. It is important, but there is more to it than meets the eye. Take a deep dive into the PUE of a facility with Phil Reese, Faculty and Research Strategist at Stanford University and gain insight on Environmental Monitoring Systems and PUE Measurement findings and surprising outcomes.

Option 2: Technology Group Roundtable
Room: 206

Topic: Data Center Networking Best Practices: Why IPv6 Matters
Speaker: Richard Donaldson, CEO at Cool(IQ)
CFRT Lead: Eric Stromberg, V.P. Search Engineering Services at Yahoo!

Many of you have been plagued with how to get your datacenter infrastructure "on-net".  What controllers do I use?  How do I get my infrastructure online?  How do I choose a vendor?  How does IPv6 impact me?

IPv6 is the addressing scheme that will be coming to a network near you if it hasn't already. How does the IPv4 run out and IPv6 address scheme impact your datacenter?

In this round table, we will focus on why networking best practices matter to your facilities and how to ensure vendor selections take into account these potential obstacles.  Using real world "new build" and "retrofit" case studies, this round table should provide an open forum for discussing: "Why IPv6 Matters"

Option 3: High Performance Data Center Roundtable
Room: 207

Topic: Strategic Modularity: Case studies in flexible infrastructure and power densities
Speaker: Sam MacCrane, Chil-Pak Product Manager
CFRT Lead: Magnus Herrlin, President of ANCIS Incorporated

Explore trends and innovation in modularity with a special emphasis on power, cooling and IT developments. This Roundtable will use a few modular cooling case studies to highlight the strategic flexibility and opportunities that are opening up to end users due to the continuing development of modular solutions for the mission critical space. What’s outside your white space?