In the category of data center jobs, even Google is out there aggressively looking for people. As we have reported before, it’s hard to find good data center leaders out there. Being a data center manager requires a mix of IT know-how with facility engineering knowledge that, frankly, not many people out there have.

Even Google is apparently having difficulty finding the right people. Shikha Wadhwa, who does engineering leadership staffing for the Mountain View, Calif. Web search giant, sent us an email looking to promote its data center openings, and in particular, “Datacenter Facilities Leadership Positions.” From the note:

Google is Hiring!

Google is looking for highly motivated individuals to provide leadership and oversight of our state-of-the-art datacenter facilities. Our datacenters are industry-leading examples of innovative capital- and energy-efficient designs in action. We are looking for people to provide leadership in areas spanning Data Center Facilities Engineering, Operations, Construction Services, Project Management and R&D.

The full Google job listing adds that they’re looking for a bachelor’s or master’s in a technical field and at least 10 years experience managing a mission-critical facility.

Working at Google has become something of an enigma, with articles devoted solely to describing how to get hired at Google. But with comments in the email to us such as “If you or someone else you know is interested in finding out more, we would love to hear from you!” and promising that they’ll “circle back with you asap!” it’s obvious they’re looking hard for qualified data center types.

Google was one of Fortune’s 100 best companies to work for in 2007, although you should have doubts if you think the Google day care is all it’s cracked up to be.

Since Monday afternoon I’ve been in Las Vegas, Nev., attending the 2008 HP Technology Forum and Expo — enjoying the air conditioned oasis in the 100+ degree desert. The event is different than any I have attended, with it’s broad 7,000+ attendee base that spans the four “S’s” of HP (servers, storage, software, and services). Clearly the company is focused on sharing their new technologies through the Tech Showcase and in the workshops and breakout sessions. But the company is also showing both loyal and potential customers a good time.

The opening session on Tuesday morning was a prime example. The audience entered the Keynote to the beat of a live band playing, and then a troupe of professional hip-hop dancers arrived and performed with so much enthusiasm that even keynote speaker Executive Vice President and CIO of HP commented that it was a hard level of energy to follow.

But follow it he did, sharing the impressive conversion of HP’s data center infrastructure from 85 data centers in 29 countries to six consolidated, state-of-the-art data centers in three continental US locations. Following Mott, Executive Vice President of HP Technology Solutions Group, Ann Livermore discussed how the four S’s can help IT leaders meet the business challenges of the future. She also talked about how the company’s acquisition of EDS (in the works) will bolster the company’s service offerings. Livermore was “interrupted” in her presentation by HP CEO Mark Hurd, who insisted on personally explaining the the answer to the question “Why EDS?”

• Increase vertical market coverage — close to double
• Vertical solutions that complement HPs offerings
• The services business will aligns capabilities with product portfolio

Paul Otellini, CEO and president of Intel, also made an appearance, sharing the connection between Intel and HP and the longevity of their Itanium line of processors.

HP user groups consolidate
Taking advantage of the unique in-person forum for HP users, the independent HP user community, Connect made its debut at the conference’s Monday night opening reception. With the voted consolidation of Encompass, HP Interex EMEA and ITUG, the user group launched a social networking site that all registrants to the conference were automatically directed to. On the site, users can connect by special interest group (SIG) in 15 areas including a storage group, that according to this article from our friends at SearchStorage.com has a lot to say to the company. And that’s the point: The group literally “connects” HP users to the company.

Connect president Nina Buik, senior vice president of MindIQ in Atlanta, shared with me that Mark Hurd is very pleased with the group’s transformation. And he should be, Connect has launched a worldwide user survey — with 50,000 members the data should be significantly helpful to HP (as in, you can’t buy business intelligence that good). But HP won’t be the only beneficiary of the group, really, the end users stand to gain the most for their businesses. By using the social networking and Wiki sites through the Connect hub, users can share their problems and solutions and gain their own business intelligence for their IT operations and influence innovation at HP.

Thursday will be the final day of the event, and it will close with more fanfare than it opened with: a live concert featuring Matchbox 20… (if only I could remember just one of their hits…)

On Tuesday, June 17, 2008, at the HP Technology Forum and Expo in Las Vegas, Nev., Adaptive Infrastructure Consultant for HP, Russ Wagner, presented the introductory breakout session on Strategies and Best Practices for Constrained Data Centers. He emphasized the importance of bridging the gap and breaking down the silos between data center administrators and facility managers — especially in any discussion involving transforming an existing data center or designing new facilities.

Wagner suggested that those facilities guys have a “bit” of experience and knowledge in important things like Ohm’s law, the three power phases, the pros and cons of low voltage versus high voltage power supplies, and the all important conversion factor from BTU to Watts. They also may know a thing or two about industry standards such as NFPA 75, International Electrotechnical Commission standards, National Electrical Manufacturers Association standards, or BICSI cabling standards. Facility managers also will have familiarity with complex cooling standards, facility weather dynamics, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD).

Getting the facility folks in the mix is important when considering a new data center, but considering the knowledge and codified industry standards that are available through key organizations including the Uptime Institute, American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), and the United States Green Building Council are also important. Membership in AFCOM was also suggested as a great way for data center personnel to share their knowledge and experience, and a great way for new entrants to the data center to learn from those who have been there and done that. He also suggested that data center managers and operators get involved in the Sustainable IT (aka Green IT) movement. Examples of this include The Green Grid, Climate Savers Computing, and the EPA Energy Star program for servers.

One of the main reasons that Wagner suggested involvement in and edification about these programs is because of the the critical resource constraints in data centers beyond the obvious power and space constraints, is experienced people. This is such a pertinent and timely issue, it was the topic of an article in the same day’s publication of The New York Times, “Demand for Data Puts Engineers in Spotlight.” The aging workforce that has worked in the evolving data centers of the past and learned the lessons is getting ready for retirement, said Wagner. This leaves a knowledge gap, and the best thing that older workers nearing the retirement point can do is join the organizations and help drive standards and information. The best thing that new entrants can do is learn from these sources of information. Together, these measures can help alleviate the big picture data center asset constraints.

Long relegated to the dungeons of the IT world, hidden in dark rooms and tinkering with facility equipment, the data center facility manager is now becoming more wanted, and harder-to-find.

As the New York Times puts in its article, data center facility managers were often thought of as “blue-collar workers in the high-tech world.” Really, though, that hasn’t changed much. There is much of that blue-collar attitude among data center facility managers that often comes from their penchant for tinkering. That’s why many of them became engineers in the first place, because they like tinkering.

But now those engineering skills, combined with the ability to understand information technology, has become a much-vaunted skill set that isn’t always easy to find. The article quotes Chris Crosby, a senior VP at Digital Realty Trust, as saying that it takes the data center real estate company eight months to find a suitable data center manager. It’s not easy.

The story also mentions that the lucky ones with these skills now have the supply-and-demand equation on their side. Supply is low, demand is high. And so they can command six-figure salaries easily, as well as five-figure signing bonuses and other perks, according to the article.

Hmm, maybe I should start taking some engineering classes at night. Just kidding. Kidding that I’m kidding, that is.

 Trends in data center power was the topic at AFCOM New England Chapter’s meeting this week, and apparently it’s a subject that resonates with members—at least judging by the nearly 100 attendees who showed up. (As the New England chapter enters its third year, President Rocko Graziano, whose real job is manager of infrastructure operations and services at L.L. Bean, said this was the largest meeting yet). Two speakers gave the audience their take on the some emerging trends they see taking shape.

Rudy Kraus, CEO of Validus DC Systems, a provider of direct current (DC) power infrastructure for data centers and telecommunications facilities, naturally sees a bright future for data centers powered by DC rather than AC-based electricity. Kraus cited a number of statistics from the likes of the Uptime Institute and McKinsey outlining just how much power data centers can save by switching to more efficient DC power. If data centers in the United States converted only 10% of their capacity to DC power, that would eliminate $1 billion in electric bills. The co2 emissions for a 10 megawatt data center with 17,500 servers would drop from 99,776,400 pounds to 59,865,840 pounds. Kraus invited members of the audience to do their own comparison by visiting an online calculator offered by Intel that analyzes facility-level efficiency of AC and DC servers.

The other speaker, Brian Ouellette, of J.S. Fleming Associates, a provider of power and cooling systems, spoke about the five power trends heading to a data center near you. The top trend, that energy efficiency is gaining importance, is pretty self-evident. The other four trends centered on ways to make data centers more efficient: New ways to scale UPS architectures into adaptive models that can adjust to changing power requirements; two-stage power distribution that reduces restrictions to cooling air flow, among other benefits; increasing use of monitoring with tools such as smart power strips (that monitor in-rack power) and branch circuit monitoring (that monitor each PDU output circuit). Ouellette also pointed out that data centers don’t have to go high-tech in order to become more efficient. When Ouellette asked the audience whether they use blanking panels in their data centers, only five people raised their hands. “Blanking panels are a great way to get the air where you need it,” he said. “Otherwise, you’ll get cross-contamination of air from your hot aisle and cold aisle.”

Three Hewlett-Packard user groups — Encompass, ITUG (International Tandem Users Group), and HP-Interex — are consolidating into one big one called Connect.

The groups announced their intention to merge earlier this year, and just recently the membership of all three voted to do so. The new merged group will have more than 50,000 participants and will be led by Nina Buik, who was the former president of Encompass. The launch of Connect will take place at the HP Technology Forum & Expo in Las Vegas next month.

At least one of the reasons for the merger is to have a larger voice.

“One of the issues that’s at the top of the minds for all of our members is advocacy,” Buik said in an interview earlier this year. “You tend to get heard a lot more when your numbers are greater. When you go to HP or your vendor partners, they’re going to listen.”

That’s not to say they haven’t been listening; Buik said HP and other vendors have thus far been supportive of the merger.

“It can be looked at from two standpoints,” said Scott Healy, the former president of ITUG. “It can provde greater value because HP really does want to know what users are thinking.”

Buik said that IT folks in the trenches can no longer hunker down in the confines of the data center; they will also need new, non-technical skills, which Connect aims to help them obtain. “IT people really have to know how to pitch ideas to high-level business people,” Buik said. It goes without saying that communications skills free of technical jargon are increasingly required, as are project management skills and the ability to make oneself more visible to an organization’s decision-makers.

Through local, regional and national meetings, one of Connect’s primary goals is to educate members in regard to the brave new world of IT. For Buik, one of her personal interests is to help members safeguard their careers by engaging in some “recession-proofing” practices. “Yes, you should have green IT and virtualization current in your skills,” Buik said. “But don’t emphasize your technology knowledge; instead show how your skills can help reduce costs.”

Buik added that she didn’t think there would be a lot of overlap between the three groups, saying that each catered to different sets of HP customers. The groups’ board members will also be able to learn and share from one another — Encompass, for example, has conducted some webinars, while ITUG has more experience running shows internationally. The combined group will look to increase its online presence and add forums so that HP users can log on and talk to each other about IT issues they’re dealing with.

Features Writer Megan Santosus contributed to this report.

This week I sat down with Microsoft’s Senior Director of Data Center services, Michael Manos at the 2008 Uptime Symposium to talk about Scry, the company’s data center analytics tool that they touted at AFCOM. According to Manos, this tool allows him to look at his data centers’ energy use, carbon footprint, power bill and more — all at an incredibly granular level. It also allows him to slice and dice data to make decisions, for example Microsoft can look at the energy consumption of an individual product like Hotmail. The program is especially slick in that it ties into Microsoft’s CMDB and assett management tools. Microsoft has been touting this tool at various conferences throughout the past few months, but it’s not likely to become a commercial product for other companies since so much of the tool was built around Microsoft’s specific homegrown internal software. But the main point of Manos’s data center road show is to prove to people that it can be done. Microsoft is measuring and improving its energy efficiency in the data center and Manos is not waiting for someone to hand down the perfect metric or the perfect tool. Check out the video below, where Manos outlines how he uses Scry and in the second video he talks you through a 3-D rendering of the new containerized data center being built in Chicago.

We have all seen the headlines lately regarding the H1-B visas, with lobbyists testifying at Congressional hearings about the need to expand the number of H-1B visas and thus the number of qualified workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. One of the leading proponents of expanding the program is Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, who testified to Congress about the need for more “innovation” in the United States.

“While America’s innovation heritage is unparalleled, the evidence is mounting that we are failing to make the investments in our young people, our workers, our scientific research infrastructure, and our economy that will enable us to retain our global innovation leadership,” said Gates. “If the United States truly wants to secure its global leadership in technology innovation, we must, as a nation, commit to a strategy for innovation excellence – a set of initiatives and policies that will provide the foundation for American competitive strength in the years ahead.”

Top on his list was strengthening educational opportunities for US school children. But next was “Revamping immigration rules for highly skilled workers, so that U.S. companies can attract and retain the world’s best scientific talent.”
However, Norman Matloff, professor of computer science at University of California – Davis, disagrees with the notion that foreign workers provide “innovation” to the United States. He recently published a study, H-1Bs: Still Not the Best and the Brightest, arguing that foreign workers are “are people of just ordinary talent, doing ordinary work. They are not the innovators the industry lobbyists portray them to be.”

Other controversies surrounding the H-1B issue include fraud assessment, which has been spearheaded by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). In 2007, Grassley partnered with Senator Dick Durbin (R-Ill.) on a bill to overhaul the H-1B visa program.

This controversy has been in the news for months, but what does this mean to you? Are you an IT professional who is having a hard time finding a good paying job, or are you a recruiter having difficulty filling positions? Do you think this is just anti-immigrant hype? Please share your thoughts.

SearchDataCenter.com ransacked Las Vegas last week, video camera in tow, to bring you the latest data center news from AFCOM’s Data Center World. We met with dozens of vendors and experts, and this is a summary of what we found:

Emerson rolls out new monster Liebert UPS
Emerson Network Power introduced a new uninterruptible power supply at AFCOM, the Liebert NXL, which comes in 250 kVa, 300 kVA and 400 kVa models. We spent some time at the Liebert booth checking out the NXL and going through the latest products with Fred Stack, the vice president of marketing at Liebert. We looked into the new monitoring tools, flywheel technology and more in the video below.

APC Capacity Manager Demo
We also met up with the folks at American Power Conversion Corp. and got a demo of the APC Capacity Manager, which won a Product of the year award in 2007. The tool is tied in with the company’s InfraStruXure rack, power and cooling platform and is able to calculate physical infrastructure capabilities as well as consumption of space and power to help users figure out how much data center capacity is available. Demo video below:

Stopping drive-by plug-ins
While we’re on the topic of knowing what’s in your data center, this really simple tool from the start up Agitan that locks down your power distribution units with plug shields. In this video, we talk to Agitan’s cofounder about the plastic power distribution unit (PDU) savers.

Rackable ICE Cube video tour
Now that Microsoft has signed on to building data centers out of trailers, the Rackable Ice Cube is going to get a lot more attention. Another Products of the Year award winner, the Ice Cube is a data center in a box, much like the Sun Blackbox. But unlike the Blackbox, I can actually fit inside this thing. Maybe if I bought a Blackbox, I’d lose a few pounds. The Ice Cube is roomier because Rackable uses its half-depth server form factor, leaving more room between the racks. You can see about 10 people stuffed into the Ice Cube in this video:

Raritan rolls out intelligent PDUs for power metering
Somerset, N.J.-based Raritan introduced a new power distribution unit, the Dominion PX. I met up with Raritan’s Henry Chan, and we talked about the new PDU. It’s super slick. Controlled remotely via a Web browser or command line interface, the Dominion PX meters, in real time, power at both the PDU level and outlet level and supports environmental sensors to monitor temperature and humidity at the rack. This is huge for data center managers trying to monitor energy use — the first step to managing energy consumption is measuring your usage.

Did you see anything extremely cool at AFCOM? Leave your feedback in the comments.

The people I speak with about virtualization projects always list the same reasons for going virtual; they don’t have enough space in their data center to add more physical servers, they can’t afford power and cooling bills, they want to consolidate physical machines, and they want to consolidate physical people.

That’s right; the majority of people I speak with - employers and employees alike - say nonchalantly that they deploy virtual machines to avoid deploying more IT staff. While this is great for corporations, it doesn’t sound so good for IT job seekers.

A few examples; I went to a VMware Inc. User Group meeting in Boston on March 27, and one user gave a presentation about the virtualization project he oversaw at the paper manufacturing company called SAPPi in Maine.

“One reason we wanted to virtualize is we needed to lower our IT headcount. We needed to get rid of high end support and just keep desktop support,” the systems engineer/presenter said.

Similarly, at the growing law firm Owen Bird Law Corp. in Vancouver, British Columbia, Stephen Bakerman, the sole IT staffer, went with Virtual Iron virtualization to avoid adding more physical servers and having to hire more staff to help him manage it all.

“The cost savings is probably $100,000, and the time savings for me are incredible. Once everything is virtualized, I can run everything from my desktop remotely from my office or at home. I don’t have to hire someone else, and I would have if we kept adding servers,” Bakerman said.

Another company called QualComm Inc virtualized 60% of its data center environment and saw a similar side effect. At the VMware Virtualization Seminar Series in Providence, RI Feb 26, VMware presented a case study of the wireless technology company showing how it started with 1,200 servers and consolidated down to 100 (12:1 ratio) physical servers, increasing data center space and cutting back on power and cooling. That’s great. And the cherry on top? They have not had to increase their IT staff at all in 2.5 years.

Sure, I get how cool virtualization is, and the benefits it brings from a savings and management stand-point, but is anyone else concerned those IT college kids who dream of days spent engineering systems won’t be able to find a job? or is anyone worried about those system administrators who might get consolidated from many to few along with their servers?

I’m interested in hearing from IT folks; is virtualization leading to a virtual job market?