This is a video that has 5 stars. It is entertaining, funny and educational.
Here is Huffington post article about the video.
Dan Barber: How I Fell in Love With a Fish
Chef Dan Barber squares off with a dilemma facing many chefs today: how to keep fish on the menu. With impeccable research and deadpan humor, he chronicles his pursuit of a sustainable fish he could love, and the foodie's honeymoon he's enjoyed since discovering an outrageously delicious fish raised using a revolutionary farming method in Spain.
Here is a picture of the fish farm.
Which is different than a typical fish farm.
One of the best lines that gives you the method, the secret to success in the sustainable farm is the biologist isn't an expert in fish, but is an expert in relationships. If you go to time mark 8:10 you can listen to this.
Dan asks How did he become an expert on fish?
Fish?? I don't know anything about fish. I am an expert on relationships.
Why is this so important? Because the people who are doing the most innovative data center work understand the relationships of the site to the building to the IT equipment to the software and the services provided. This is what good system engineers know in mature industries. This is beyond the data center building with its power and cooling systems. The enlightened are looking at the energy supply chain with a focus on cost, carbon impact, and changes in the supply chain in the future. What is the future of services and applications that need to run on servers, storage, and networks. This is one damn hard problem to address as the silos in data center are powerful and entrenched in a companies organization and the rest of the industry.
I just came back from Missouri and got a chance to talk in more detail to the Civil Engineering company, Allstate Consulting who is working on site analysis of the Ewing Industrial Park. Over the past 9 months there are a variety of people who are being exposed to data centers who had no previous data center experience. Yet, there are many instances of where potential site users are surprised on the engineering analysis and drawings prepared.
Having a pizza at Shakespare's Pizza in Columbia, MO, with Chad Sayre, VP of Design Services at Allstate Consulting.
Chad W. Sayre, PE, Vice-President
Mr. Sayre obtained a Master of Science and a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from University of Missouri-Columbia. Since 1994, Mr. Sayre has been a Project Engineer for Allstate Consultants. In 2000, he became Principal/Vice President and Chief of Design Services for the firm. He is responsible for municipal and land development engineering projects including forensic, water, wastewater, land planning, environmental compliance permitting, highway design, hydraulics, and stormwater projects. He is closely involved with construction administration, inspection, specification preparation of public and private projects and has a considerable amount of experience in expert testimony.
He was telling the story of how he attended DataCenterDynamics conference and was in the bar (which is common networking method at all DataCenterDynamics event), and was telling a big data center customer, "A year ago, I didn't know shit about data centers."
But, I'll tell you what Chad does know is the methane gas production issues from the adjacent land fill. How the topography of the site can be used to create isolation areas to protect the site and change building design. How easy it is to dig trenches to connect to additional fiber. How BioMass can be used to generate renewable energy. How construction techniques that have been applied to multiple other industries can be used in manner similar to what Microsoft has proposed.
These facilities will not be pretty and might actually resemble the barns I spent so much time around during my childhood in rural Illinois. That, combined with the fact that these facilities will be substantially lower cost per megawatt to build and substantially lower cost to run, makes it very easy to become excited about what we’re doing here.
William Gibson said it best: “The future is here, it’s just not widely distributed yet.”
When you look for who knows how to build sustainable, green, low carbon data centers, look for those who understand relationships. I am tired of hearing people tout their latest hardware as the answer to the problem, but they can't explain how this new equipment effects the rest of the system.
It would be pretty damn funny, but almost impossible to create a video like Dan Barber did for "How I fell in love with a Data Center"
Actually, I do know lots of people who fell in love with their data centers. But many times it is more like this image, high density, low PUE, with little discussed on the carbon impact or waste.
Wouldn't it be cool if data centers could help the environment?