TechHermit has a post base on Uptime’s latest conference.

Uptime Institute to IT, Microsoft and Google are your enemy
October 31, 2008
At the Uptime conference this last week in Dallas, Ken Brill shocked many of the attendees by throwing out some amazing statements that can only be classified as fear mongering. Perhaps the rhetoric was a first salvo in an inflammatory exchange between industry giants.

The comments in question came up in a meeting of Uptime members assembled for the event. His comments to the audience centered around how Microsoft and Google were a direct threat to everyone in attendance. Perhaps this was a result of the Microsoft Azure release last week and the existence of Google Apps. In addition many of the comments were directed towards the PUE metric. Specifically that Microsoft and Google were highlighting low PUE results of 1.2x which were unrealistic and flawed.

Now I admit to being biased as I have many more conversations with Microsoft and Google Engineers than Uptime Institute Engineers. Oh wait, I’ve talked to Uptime Sales people though.

Microsoft has its Power of Software blog, the Microsoft data center team presenting at conferences and even Microsoft Research giving away data center knowledge for no charge.

Google has its data center site.

Sun has both a Blog and data center site.

HP, Dell, and IBM all have data center offerings as well.

The one guy who doesn’t say anything about its data centers is Amazon, but they have a huge presence with Amazon Web Services. So, don’t expect Ken Brill/Uptime throwing any criticism at Amazon.

Unfortunately, for Ken Brill and Uptime Institute they are making enemies faster than friends.

How long can Uptime Institute survive?

I know most of your out there don’t care, but a few of you do, and this is an interesting study of sharing information vs. charging for information to improve the efficiency of your data center.

Right now market perception is Microsoft and Google are the leaders in data center innovation and all of these companies are battling to be at the top which is good for the whole industry.