I just heard from KC Mares that Chris Noland, Cisco Lab Manager passed away last night losing a battle with cancer.

Chris Noland Lab Manager

San Francisco Bay Area
Information Technology and Services
Current

Lab Manager at Cisco Systems

I had the pleasure of meeting Chris 1 1/2 years ago at Cisco to discuss his efforts to educate the Cisco development teams on the energy efficiency of their product designs.

The last time I saw Chris in person was at the Technology Convergence Conference.

Panel Discussion Topic: Data Center Challenges and Solutions in the R&D Lab

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.

Chris was one of the guys who had a passion to green the data center by improving the energy efficiency of the network gear.

It is sad to hear I won't see Chris at another data center event.