As I have worked in my post-Microsoft career advising a host of different companies in the supply chain, I now get a perspective on the strong momentum of the past success of our industry. It’s more entrenched then I thought. Let’s face it: We don’t reward change, especially when the common mantra in the industry is “If there is an outage, you never get fired for doing what we did before.” Or, in other words, why change and do something new, because if there is an outage and it’s perceived that something was done differently, you lose your job.
Right now the industry is facing its biggest expansion in its relatively young history, and the last thing we want to do is change anything during this accelerated pace. The risk is too big (so they say). However, the incentives are wrong: We are optimizing for the job security of the individual as opposed the long term business success and viability. History has shown us how companies that don’t change to the market dynamics become obsolete. Who are the Kodaks, Xeroxes, and Blockbusters of our industry that fail to change because of being stuck in what made them successful in the first place? And who will be the disruptors of the digital infrastructure industry?
Grid Backup
Data centers have always had diesel generators to back up the grid when there is an outage—or, in other words, always had 2N redundancy for electrons. The implications of this approach is that whenever a data center is built and interconnected to the grid, it is relying on idle generation to be turned up or additional generation to be added. This setup means that every data center would have dedicated 2X the generation of its interconnection and someone is paying for that 2N generation. If the grid went down, the UPS was triggered, and the diesels fire up and generate electricity (electrons). This model (also known as 5-9s design for a good customer experience since the grid was only considered 3-9s) is and has been the norm for a few decades now to ensure 99.999 percent uptime.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christian Belady is highly experienced in managing data center and infrastructure development at global scale. Currently, he is an advisor and board member of several companies in the infrastructure space. Prior to this, Belady served as Vice President and Distinguished Engineer of Datacenter R&D for Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure Organization, where he developed one of the largest data center footprints in the world. Before that, he was responsible for driving the strategy and delivery of server and facility development for Microsoft’s data center portfolio worldwide.
With over 160 patents, Belady is a driving force behind innovative thinking and quantitative benchmarking in the field. He is an originator of the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric, was a key player in the development of the iMasons’ Climate Accord (ICA), and has worked closely with government agencies to define efficiency metrics for data centers and servers. Over the years, he has received many awards, most recently Data Center World “Lifetime Achievement Award”, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
