Mission Critical Insights II from 7×24 Exchange Fall Conference

Interview with Larry Beasley

Part 2 of insights from the 7×24 Exchange Fall Conference comes from Larry Beasley, an experienced executive COO, business advisor and coach at Wayne O’Neill & Associates.  Larry shares his observations from  “Vision: From Idea to Impact, “at the 7X24 Exchange Fall Conference, with featured speakers from Google, Microsoft, Digital Realty Trust, RagingWire Enterprise Solutions and others.  This conference was designed for anyone involved with 7×24 infrastructures, IT, data center, disaster recovery and network/telecommunication managers; computer technologists; facility or building managers, supervisors and engineers.  7×24 Exchange is the leading knowledge exchange for those who design, build, use and maintain mission critical enterprise information infrastructures.

Here are Larry’s 5 insights:

1.  “Big Data” will continue to drive the Mission Critical side of business.   There exist more and more information/ data for people to analyze, dissect and make decisions from.  This world will only continue to grow and expand.  Business used to analyze only one or two pieces of data, but now we have so much more information to analyze and draw business conclusions from. The demand in the United States is great, but the demand from India and China so enormous massive growth will occur in this area.

2.  Data Centers of the future have increased sensitivity to being more Environmentally Friendly.   In the session “Big Data, Big Opportunity,” data centers revealed their awareness of their huge energy demands, especially in regard to usage of water and power.  They realize the need to go beyond being “green” and become more sensitive to the impact on the environment.  Companies such as Apple and others are building large solar farms as a way to be more environmentally friendly so when they are not as demanding on the current power sources.  Some are starting to look at using effluent from treatment plants so that they can reuse the effluent water for cooling purposes before discharging it back into the environment after additional treatment.

3.  The next generation of data centers are examining  operating temperatures and what the next operating systems should be.  Plus, they are discussing what the next generation data centers will evolve into in regards to these temperatures, operating efficiencies, and being more environmentally friendly.

4.  In addition to the highly technical sessions such as the one on “Energy Efficiency” from Intel, another impactful session was “Retrofitting or Co-location/Cloud: Choosing the Best Location.”  Some industries , such as Healthcare ,  have concerns for security and patient information  sensitivity in a co-location or Cloud.

5.  “Data Center Locations” session addressed concerns for avoiding the worst case scenario geographically.  There will be more on the lessons learned from the recent  Hurricane Sandy  when it  hit recently the East Coast.  The West Coast has the threat of earthquakes.  Middle America is looking more appealing to some if you can avoid tornado alley.   How do we prepare and can we prepare for the worst case situations in the world of Big Data?

We will want to know more and more about our business and our customers.  Therefore, “Big Data” technology, large data centers, co-locations and Cloud  are all going to be  part of the future.

For Wayne O’Neill’s insights from the 7×24 Exchange Fall Conference, click here.