In June of 2006 we presented our proposal to Jonathan Schwartz's staff for the largest, most complex and aggressive datacenter consolidation in Sun's history.  We had just completed a years worth of great datacenter projects in Czech Republic, China, UK, and Norway and we were raring to go. The proposal said that in just 12 months we would consolidate 202,000 square feet of datacenter space from of our Newark & Sunnyvale, CA campuses into less than 80,000 square feet of new datacenter space in our Santa Clara, CA campus. At the end of that meeting we received the approval for the project and Jonathan asked one final question, "Where's the book that I can hand out to customers?".  Needless to say, we had our hands full with the California consolidation and the new acquisition of StorageTek.

I am happy to say that today we finally finished that task. You can download the blueprint here:

Energy Efficient Datacenters: The Role of Modularity in Datacenter Design.

In August, 2007 we finished the California consolidation project on schedule, under budget and with the ability to almost triple our densities as our load increased all while maintaining a brutally efficient PUE. We had also completed an Eco Launch that highlighted some of our successes in the form of Solution Briefs and a Datacenter Tour Video. We were also well underway with the next largest consolidation, Louisville, CO (StorageTek) to Broomfield, CO. In addition, we received a deluge of requests for tours of the new Santa Clara datacenter. Our customers, industry and partners wanted to see what we had done first hand.

We started on the blueprint in January 2008 in addition to the 40+ active projects we had globally. We knew this was important and we wanted to fulfill the commitment we had made to Jonathan, albeit later than he had likely expected. In the end, I am really glad we waited. The Blueprint is full of examples of what we did right, what we did wrong and what we believe the future holds for datacenter design. Remember, we are the company that solves our customers technical problems with our technology innovations, but, we are also generating more heat in the datacenter with those solutions. This blueprint is a guide to help our customers understand our approach and lessons learned along the way. The datacenter is a complete eco system that requires a dynamic balance between the IT load and support load to enable flexibility and ensure efficiencies for both economic and ecological gains. In my job my team is blessed to work with the product groups who are building the next generation equipment.  These are the products that will be rolling into our customers datacenter 1-3 years from now.  In other words, it's like having a crystal ball.  We have tomorrows technology in our datacenters today including the power, cooling and connectivity challenges that come along with them.

To date, we have had over 2,200 people walk through Santa Clara. The Datacenter Tour and Solution briefs have been downloaded over 12,000 times from the sun.com website.  We also distribute this content on memory sticks to the thousands of people on the tours and different conferences we speak at.

This blueprint is the first of nine chapters that will be released over the next 12 months. I encourage you to give your opinions and suggestions or raise your questions and concerns through this blog entry, email or the blueprint wiki site.

Stay tuned. This is just getting fun... :-)

 

So how efficient is your datacenter?

Last month I received some pretty cool news.  The Chill-Off we have been hosting for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) in their datacenter demonstration project, was completed.  This was a head to head test against APC In-Row, Liebert XDV, Spraycool, Rittal Liquid Racks and IBM Rear Door Heat Exchanger. Sun was the host that provided the datacenter, plant, compute equipment, and support.  Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBNL) was the group conducting the test on behalf of the California Energy Commission (CEC)  The results from this test will be published in a report in June of this year and we will be hosting the event.

But one piece of information came out of this that I could not wait to share.  As part of the chill-off, LBNL did a baseline of our plant in Santa Clara.  Mike Ryan on my staff then captured the usage data for the remaining portions of the datacenter.  This gave us our PUE or DCiE (pick you favorite) number.

 

Surprise, Surprise!

I knew that our datacenter would be efficient because of the way we had designed it, but I did not have any data to back it up yet.  We had been telling our customers, and others that toured the center, that we are pretty sure we would be under the industry targeted PUE of 2 (Created by Christian Belady from the Green Grid).  That was a conservative number.  But when I got the data back, even I was surprised at how efficient it was.

 

We achieved a PUE of 1.28!

 

That was 36% more efficient than the Uptime Institute target (2) and almost 50% more efficient than the standard PUE (2.5)!

For those of you who may not be familiar with PUE, it is Power Usage Effectiveness.  The Green Grid's measurement of efficiencies in the datacenter.  In other words, how much power do you use to run your equipment.  For a PUE of 2, you have 1 watt for the equipment and 1 watt for the other equipment (chillers, ups, transformers, etc.) to run it.  That means if you have a 1MWatt datacenter, you would only have 500kW of power for compute equipment.

This means that with a PUE of 1.28 our datacenter can run 798kW of equipment load and only require 225kW of support load for a total load of 1,023kW.  In a datacenter with a PUE of 2 to run 798kW of equipment load, it would require 798kW of support load for a total of 1,596kW.  

Bottom line we use 573kW less support power to operate the same equipment.  This equates to a power bill that is $400k less per year (using industry average of $0.08/kWh).

I don't know about you, but this solidifies the statement we have been saying all along.  Economics drive the decisions in datacenters.  But if you can achieve efficiencies into your datacenters, you will achieve both economic and ecological results.  This PUE of 1.28 not only reduces our overall operating expense every year, it also lowers our carbon emissions substantially!  We're only using the power we have to.  No Eco hype, this is Eco reality.

Keep in mind that this PUE of 1.28 was achieved in our highest density datacenter globally.  It is also built on slab.  No raised floors to be seen.  The other aspect is that the datacenter is only 60% full (physically). We moved all of the equipment from Newark, CA but are continuing to add more equipment from our other campuses.   It is also a heterogeneous datacenter.  We have a mixture of all types of equipment from many vendors. Our plant is designed to 9MW (phase I) and we're drawing 3.5MW so far.  So, we can achieve extreme efficiencies with a mixture of equipment, even when we're not running at max capacity.  (Note: the remaining 13 datacenter rooms that make up the remaining load were not measured in the chill-off, but are all fed by the same efficient plant).

In support of our Eco Strategy, "Innovate, Act & Share", I want to have full disclosure as I share. I want everyone to understand that this room is a Tier I datacenter.  We don't have as much redundancy as higher Tier level datacenters, but the design approach is the same.  Our Variable Primary Loop chiller plant design is the same we would use in our Tier III sites.  We have removed an entire set of pumps and reduced the pipe distances because everything is dynamic from the plant to the rack. We only use the energy we have to. For all Tier level datacenters we would also be choosing very efficient transformers, ups and other components.  So, no matter what tier level you are trying to build, you can achieve these efficiencies if you embrace next generation designs.  But, regrettably, many design and construction firms out there are hesitant to do this.  You need to be specific on what you want and squelch the nay-sayers.

Here is the chart that shows the details.  PDF version is here.

So, the question is.  I've shown you mine.  Can you show me yours?

Better yet, would you like Sun to help design your datacenter to achieve the same efficiencies?  Let us drive the next generations physical and technical solutions for you.  Sun's Eco Virtualization practice can do just that.  Email me at dean.nelson@sun.com and I'll tell you how.

 

Looks like we made the top 50 list for Fastcompany.com's Worlds Most Innovative Companies.  I would agree, we did take this as a challenge.  :-)

Here's what they had to say...

 

#45 SUN MICROSYSTEMS

Data centers account for some 3% of world energy use, and Sun has taken that as a dare. Last year, its mad-scientist approach to energy efficiency -- and $2 billion R&D budget--caused ripples across the industry as the company released the UltraSPARC T2, the world's most efficient processor; Project Blackbox, the first modular data center; and a new Silicon Valley data center that increases computer power by 456% while cutting energy costs by more than 60%. With four straight profitable quarters for the first time since 2001 and 6% revenue growth, the forecast is sunny. 

Wow, the last half of 2007 was quite a whirlwind for our internal datacenter activities. I have not had a chance to post a blog because of the volume of work that has been going on just in the last few months. I guess our message is viable and is being heard loud and clear. Sun's POD architecture not only simplifies the approach to datacenter design, it saves you money.

Check out these stats since 07/2007

1. Over 1,000 people from over 200 companies have toured the Santa Clara and Bangalore datacenter in just two quarters.
   
2. The Datacenter tour video has been watched over 4,000 times.
   
3. Our highest density datacenter is in Santa Clara and operating at the highest efficiency in our global portfolio of 1.3M square feet.
   
4. We spun up Sun's next generation hardware, ahead of schedule, with 4 times the load per footprint with no issues.
   
5. From my calculations, there is over $4B in datacenter construction activity happening right now with just the top 25% of the customers who have walked through Santa Clara.
   

The Santa Clara & India datacenters that we built have generated huge interest in the industry. Why? Because, everyone has the same problem. They're either out of power, cooling, space or a combination of the three -and- they are perplexed with how to future proof their datacenter investments. When you are looking at spending $50, $100, $500M or more on datacenter construction, you want to feel comfortable with the solution. My team is managing about $250M of internal datacenter activity right now and we can honestly say that our investments have payed off. Time to market, efficiencies, financial returns, are all contributing to Sun's pace. We're back and our technical infrastructure is a competitive weapon.

We finished the 72,000 square feet of datacenter space in July 2007. Since then we have been wrapping up the loose ends and consolidating more and more equipment. We reaching 70% of our power and cooling capacity (9MW phase I) and considering launching our phase II power and cooling (expand to 16MW) earlier than expected. All in all, the site has been a great success for our internal engineering and services customers, finance, marketing and the eco strategy. And, it's just getting started. We have an even bigger project underway right now in Colorado. We also have 30+ more projects world wide.

If you're ever interested in seeing it, feel free to contact me at dean.nelson@sun.com. Our eco strategy is innovate, act & share. We would love to share more.

Sean Connellan
March 8, 1945 - October 17, 2007

On October 17, 2007 Sean Connellan passed away after bravely battling cancer for almost two years. Sean was the Senior Vice President of Workplace Resources at Sun Microsystems, my boss, my mentor, and my friend. I knew Sean for only 25 months, and worked directly for him for 12 months, but it felt like I knew him much longer. I was blessed to have spent such valuable & precious time with him, and absorb so much. He was a tough, old school leader that really cared about his job, his people and the mark that he left. His character and values resonated with me.

I attended Sean's wake and funeral 10/19-20 in Rochester, New York. I live in Northern California, but made sure to be there to see Sean off to his next journey. I wasn't sure how this was going to go, and if I was going to hold my composure through this. It was hard to believe that he was gone. Just two weeks before, I had called him for our regular on one one and he shared with me that he had 90 days to live. I was floored. I didn't know how to feel, how to respond, what to do. I felt helpless. Like the true professional that he was, he wanted his house clean and to leave on his terms. Over the next few weeks I tried to grapple with the enormity of this. I must have started and modified a letter to him fifty times. It was very difficult to put into words what someone like that meant to you. I finally finished the letter on Monday, October 16, 2007, printed it and planned to overnight it to him in the morning. As I was drivig to work, I got the call that Sean had passed away at 1am Eastern Time. Almost exactly when I had finished the letter. I was saddened that he would not get to read this letter, but I knew that he already knew. I had been very open with him over the time I worked for him, and told him how much I valued his insight and straight forward honesty. He took it upon himself to mentor me. I decided to bring the letter to share with his family at the funeral.

At the wake on Friday, I met a number of Sean's family members from Ireland and around the US. Although I had never met Sean's wife, son and daughter, I had heard about them over the two years that I knew him. And, as expected they were just as accommodating, caring and rock solid as Sean. It was difficult to get the words out, but they helped me through it. As I talked with different friends and family at the funeral home, I realized something. Sean was blessed at the end of his life to have time. He had said to his kids not to be sad, because he could have been hit by a bus or had a heart attack and not had the chance to say goodbye. He spent the last two weeks of his life surrounded by his family and friends. He received many letters from people throughout his life, telling him what he meant to them. Two of these letters made him extremly proud. Our CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, and CFO, Mike Lehman, took the time to write to Sean. Sean beamed with pride when those letters were read. It meant so much to him to achieve operational excellence. His work mantra was to leave the job better than it was when he came, make a difference in who he worked with, leave his mark, hope he'd be missed, and make a little money along the way. And boy, did he accomplish that.

A number of my colleagues and management also attended Sean's funeral. This included Bill MacGowan, the Executive Vice President of Sun's People and Places division. He was Sean's boss. Bill shared how Sean had turned Workplace Resources around. In less than two years, it became one of the highest performing business units at Sun. The Recommend Sun Index (RSI) had risen from the lowest in the company to the highest. This was all due to Sean's leadership. He built an incredible team that, as he put it, gets along, likes each other and exemplifies the characteristics of operational excellence. This team was able to execute projects in excess of $250M to consolidate real estate including people space, lab space and datacenter space in 12 months. These efforts helped Sun beat their FY07 4% operating margin target. They achieved 8.4%.

My personal experience with Sean was very similar. He was a true mentor that was not shy about telling me what I did wrong and what I did right. He was tough, very tough...a curmudgeon at times, but always fair and supportive. His approach to leadership was to build loyalty to the cause and to the team. He treated everyone in his team as family and drove them for excellence. He expected you to deliver and held you to your promises. If you could not do that, then he said you should find a job that drives you to do it. He wanted everyone to have a real job, and feel good about their work and their contributions to the the company. These basic principals have been lost to many companies. Hand shakes have become a thing of the past. Everyone worries about covering their butts and looking out for number one. Leaders such as Sean have taught me a number of things throughout my career. The relationships you build are what last. So, treat others as you would want to be treated. Never look or talk down to someone, because you never know where they will come back into your life. Remember where you came from and strive for humility. Never take yourself too seriously, and always put family first.

As I end this trip to the east coast, I reflect on a few things. What will people say at my funeral? What difference will I have made? What mark will I have left? Will the people who have worked for me compliment or curse me? I have and will continue to strive for excellence in business and in life. I hope to live up to the example that Sean has set.

May the roads rise with you,
May the wind always be at your back,
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
And rains fall soft upon your fields,
And until we meet again,
May God keep you in the hollow of His hand.

Thank you for your insight and mentoring. You will be missed Sean.

Man, what a month.

Earlier this month, I did an interview with Contrarian Minds editor, Al Riske. He captured my ramblings and then published the following report titled, "Not Rocket Science". It was an honor to be on the same website as people like Scott McNealy, Jonathan Schwartz, Greg Papadopoulos, Radia Permlan and James Gosling to name a few. Talk about some brain power. :-)

Instead of complicating things, my team and I have really tried to simply them when it comes to datacenter design philosophies that support the equipment of today and tomorrow. Take a look here:

Not Rocket Science...

I won't be building a rocket any time soon. Then again that may be kinda fun...

How many of you have heard that very soon, we MUST have liquid directly to racks to cool them? To me, I attribute this to the same hysteria of, "the sky is falling".

How many skyscrapers will you be building?

Today, the average in the industry for rack heat loads is between 4-6kw. For datacenters, the racks that have loads >15kw are the minority. This is analogous to having a small number of sky scrapers in a city, with a huge amount of smaller buildings surrounding it. While, there are many new boxes coming out that are increasing the load per rack, the average load will still only increase in 2-4kw increments over time. Skyscrapers aren't buit overnight. There will not be a rapid replacement to drive racks to an average of 20kw unless you are running a computation hungry facility that uses uniform equipment that is >90% optimized. The standard replacement of equipment in asset life cycles will drive the average load per footprint up, but the majority of companies will not have the average load per rack at these levels. The ramp is getting steeper, but It will take time, and money, to happen.

Future rack trends

With that said, there will, and are configurations that are requiring cooling for >30kw per footprint. You can use traditional localized cooling for racks up to 30kw in a mixed environment. But when you pass this point, you can no longer force enough air for this equipment to be cooled. The economics also start to hurt. Fans and chiller plants forcing air to extract heat, account for 33% of the datacenter operational costs. Liquid cooling really is the next step. But, I believe the liquid will be refrigerant, not water. Refrigerant is more efficient across coils, giving even cooling distribution to components. It is also much less risk in a datacenter since it changes to a gas if there is a leak. In conjunction with the cooling, power capacities will also need to increase. I believe it will be 480V direct, rather than 208V. This is the coming trend for racks in datacenters. My projection is 2 years for racks like this to be readily available from numerous vendors, but >7 years for the average load per rack getting to these levels.

My opinion is that companies do not need to consider liquid cool racks until the average load breaks 15kw. With tightly coupled air cooling and containment, you can achieve very efficient solutions for these skyscrapers, as well as the other racks in the datacenter. Here is a picture of our highest density datacenter that is currently cooling loads with an average of 12kw/cabinet. This design can scale to an average of 18kw per rack. Keep in mind, that we can roll in 30kw racks to this solution. The key here is the average is 18kw. So you can have a wide range of rack loads in the same datacenter and still achieve cooling efficiencies. This 2,132 square foot room will have 720kw of equipment load. And...it is on a SLAB! It is the highest density, and highest efficiency datacenter in our portfolio of 1.3M square feet.

So, don't believe the hype or doomsday projections. The sky is not falling. This is a very predictable curve that doesn't require you to take drastic action to solve your datacenter cooling loads. You just need to keep it simple. Our Santa Clara Datacenter design has covered the current equipment loads and scale for the next gen equipment, today.

View My Stats

Today, my bosses boss, Bill MacGowan, was featured in the Executive Boardroom publication sponsored by Jonathan Schwartz. He very clearly articulated the business reasons why alignment is so critical to operations. Bottom line, it's very expensive not to.

http://www.sun.com/emrkt/boardroom/newsletter/0907leadingvision.html?cid=920966

His recommendation:

Companies need to create an independent, centralized group that has the authority and corporate-level financing to create and execute a datacenter and lab space strategy.

Bill runs people and places (P&P) in Sun. This includes HR and Workplace Resources (WR), the BU that I am in. Sean Connellan, who I work for, is the Sr Vice President that runs WR. I run the independent group that executes this strategy for Sun. It's call GDS.

In almost every customer briefing that I have (over 70 in the last 4 months), I find one missing piece that can costs these companies 10's of millions of dollars every year. It's the alignment between Facilities and IT. My primary job at Sun is to bridge the gap between the Facilities organization, who manages the real estate portfolio and executes projects in the datacenters (compression, expansion, retrofit), and the IT & Engineering organizations that actual occupy and use the space.

I've only found a few companies that actually have a team like mine (GDS). I don't think it is clear to most that not having that role, seriously limits the capabilities of both sides. Facilities is worried about cost to operate the business Real Estate portfolio. This is everything from the type and amount of toliet paper in the bathrooms to the utility bills for these high density cabinets in the datacenters. They are driven by cost reduction and usually don't have the luxury of innovating or driving next generation solutions. IT on the other hand has to constantly deliver performance in the datacenter. They too are also worried about costs, but uptime and performance of their datacenter equipment is the most critical aspect of thier business. They will purchase more hardware to fulfill a business need and expect that it will be able to run in their datacenter. The challenge is, this is not normally discussed with facilities until orders are placed or, worse yet, when the equipment arrives. Then it becomes a reactionary exercise to bandaid the problem to fulfill the need. It can be ver costly and inefficient, let alone the time it takes to get it done.

My team is responsibile to bridge this gap and I like to think we do it pretty well. By being able to speak the language of IT & Engineering and understand the technology and business drivers they have, we can distill the requirements and implement the right solution in the facilities side. On the other side of the coin, we can understand how to squeeze every last ounce of efficiencies out of the datacenters by deploying innovative, future proof designs. These designs usually add about 10-15% to project costs, but literally can save 100% of the cost in the future. Most centers that grow to double their capacity would require facilities to do major retrofit, or bandaid work or worst yet, build another datacenter.

Bottom line, Workplace Resources (WR) has been a key enabler for Sun to beat it's 4% operating margin target for FY07 by 4.4%. We were able to achieve 8.4% operating margin without sacrificing the performance of the IT & Engineering datacenters. The customers are better off after the consolidations than they were when we started. They are not only able to handle today's high density, but they can quickly scale for future equipment loads. If we had not been there to translate/bridge, we would have had a short term cost reduction, but had even more capital outlay in the future. This is in the 10's of millions of dollars every year. It feels great to know that an operations business can be the enabler for significant savings -and- provide flexibility for our customers to seize those business opportunities when they arise.

It sounds like I'm trying to justify my teams existance, but it is the reality of the business. Any company that has a large technical infrastructure, can't afford not to have someone to bridge this gap. It's all about costs, and this is a small but very effective investment.

This strategy is detailed further in the Alignment solution brief that we publised for the launch on 08/21. Please feel free to comment if you agree, disagree or even want further discussion/information about this.

http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/environment/docs/aligning_business_organizations.pdf

This week I traveled to Atlanta to attend a customer briefing with AT&T, hosted by Ron Schmidt, Sun Client Solutions Manager for AT&T. I presented Sun's Eco story and the POD concept along with David Garrison, Arcitect in the Communications area & Thomas Malak, a specialist in the systems group. There was a quite a bit of discussion around densities per rack and datacenter design. AT&T is a large Sun Customer and is benefiting greatly from the T2000 efficiencies and performance. They're facing the same creeping density issues that most customers face, especially in their hosting business. We discussed numerous opportunitesw with AT&T executives and techical staff throughout the day and over dinner. To top it off, Sun announced that we have become and even larger customer of AT&T. They are now providing Sun global services and running our new MPLS network.

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/prnewswire/AQTU06818092007-1.htm

With the merger of cingular & AT&T, there are huge opportunities to create effficiencies. AT&T is very interested in how to green their datacenters, but not just from a ecology perspective. ECO is ecology and economics. It just makes good business sense. When you get efficient, you save money and you naturally become "greener". I look forward to working with AT&T on the opportunities in their datacenter portfolio. We jointly share the same challenges and benefits from deploying energy efficient datacenter design strategies.

I've been getting plenty of mileage out of the video that was created around the datacenter we developed in Santa Clara. The customers love recieving a copy of it and the solution briefs on the memory sticks.

Recently I was forwarded a posting about the video and the multimedia behind it. It was nice to see that our SunBTV group producer was given high praise for the design work. Way to go Jeffrey.Severtson-AT-Sun-DOT-COM and team from SunBTV. It was a great experience putting this together.

http://blog.sun.com/MartinHardee/date/20070831

We've already got the next webcam up for the building of our high density benchmark datacenter currently under construction in Menlo Park, CA. This was a great feature for the mechanical service yard construction in the Santa Clara video. We're also going to be doing the same capture of the massive datacenter construction in our Colorado project. It's even bigger than Santa Clara. We continue to capitalize on the energy efficiency opportunities in these consolidations. Prepare for launch 2 in July/2008.

I'm the Director of Global Lab & Datacenter Design Servers (GDS), an internal group in Sun. We're responsible for standardizing the global technical infrastructure portfolio for Sun. That's currently 1.3 million square feet in 1588 rooms world-wide. It's quite a fun job.

GDS resides in the Workplace Resources (WR) Business Unit is Sun. WR is the internal group that manages all the real estate for Sun and is under the People & Places umbrella. My team (GDS) bridges the gap between IT, Engineering and Facilites (WR). These groups speak different languages and have different and many times, competing priorities. With datacenter densities and costs increasing at such a rapid pace, it's amazing that not many companies have a team like this. Someone who can talk "IT" and "Facilities" in the same breath. Someone who can balance the needs of both without sacrificing quality or functionality or overspending. Without this function, IT, Facilities & Engineering operate in a silo, making decisions that can and most often adversly affect the other. Bottom line, the corporation spends much more than it has to -or- loses more than it should because of uninformed decisions.

On 08/21/07 Sun had an ECO Launch that shared our own efforts internally with our customers and the industry. It was a great event in which I was honored to cut the ribbon to launch our new 72,000 square foot datacenter in Santa Clara, CA. I cut it on behalf of the hundreds of people who worked night and day for 12 months to make this possible. Bob Worrall (Sun CIO), Dave Douglas (VP of Eco responsibility), and John Fowler (EVP of Systems) were there as the keynote speakers. It was a kick!

With the launch, we created a summary video to help customers understand our approach and how they can apply it to their own designs.

http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/environment/media/datacenter_tour.xml

We also wrote six solution briefs to go into a bit more detail on each topic.

Alignment (Dean.Nelson@Sun.COM)
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/environment/docs/aligning_business_organizations.pdf

Hardware Replacement (Dean.Nelson@Sun.COM)
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/environment/docs/creating_energy_efficient_dchw_consolidation.pdf

Power (Mike Ryan - M.Ryan@Sun.COM)
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/environment/docs/powering_energy_efficientdc.pdf

Cabling (Serena.Devito@Sun.COM)
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/environment/docs/connecting_energy_efficientdc.pdf

Cooling (Mike Ryan - M.Ryan@Sun.COM)
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/environment/docs/cooling_energy_effiicientdc.pdf

Metering/Monitoring (Mark.Monroe@Sun.COM)
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/environment/docs/accurately_measure_dcpower.pdf

I have a small but very effective core team of six that manage projects around the world (in the Americas, EMEA & APAC). All were able to attend and provide customer and media tours. All in all, it was an incredible day that showcased our work and Sun's leadership in eco computing and energy efficiency. It's part of our DNA.

Well, it's been a long time coming. I finally have take the jump into the blogsphere! Being a geek for so many years, it's amazing I haven't taken the three and a half minutes to register and get started.

So, officially I can now say, "Hello World".