The Delegates of the Uptime Institute Symposium 2012 uniformly agreed that the most important themes this year were: the modular data center and DCIM. Dean Nelson of eBay, vice president Global Foundation Services, in his Keynote “Breaking New Ground on Efficiency – eBay’s Modular Data Center Deployment” was talking about the economics of the modular data center and walked the audience though eBay case study.

DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management), the second main topic of Uptime Institute Symposium 2012, was further discussed at the following keynotes and special sessions which covered all angles and aspects of its selection and implementation.

Symposium Delegates and Exposition-registered visitors had an opportunity to actually walk through the leading modular data center designs and make side-by-side comparisons, enabling a better understanding of the respective pros and cons for more effective decision-making. Guided, in-depth tours and expert briefings on the modular data center units were offered from data center providers Active Power, Digital Realty, IO, and Schneider Electric. These continued at the Exhibition Hall along with the presence of companies that offer services for data center sector.

Data Centers are not the same – insisted Keneth G. Brill, Founder of Uptime Institute – and when we talked about DC we should focus on their missions. Regarding Keneth G. Brill there is 3 types of computing: Scientific Computing, Business Computing and Consumer Computing. Each of type has a different OpEx, CapEx and reliability requirements. Historically, the first one was scientific computing and was related to tracking the weapons and breaking communication codes. In the 1960’s another trend had grown up called business computing. Today we noticed the third trend – Consumer computing. All three trends exist separately and each has a different criteria.

In today’s talks about energy requirements and use there is one magic word that the experts repeated in the theme – “efficiency”.

The year 2006 was a milestone moment when the DCIM industry started to worry about energy efficiency. Since then, progress has been made in reducing electricity consumption. “What we have learned?” – asked and answered Jonathan Koomey, Professor at Stanford University. He opined, that although data centers are very technical complicated machines, the problem of electricity consumption is more related to people and institutions than technology.

Lidia Thompson