Data Centers

Vice president of Eco-Responsibility is a rather new job title in the industry. What prepared you for this job?

My interest in this whole space got started early in my career building supercomputers in Cambridge [Douglas received his bachelor of science and master of science degrees in computer science and electrical engineering at MIT]. We built some of the first air-cooled supercomputers back then. Then at Sun, I was really involved in getting into low-end server business, which was a similar process -- how to take these big mainframe servers and put them in people's offices and have low-power and low-noise solutions. It's something I've been hitting over and over and it became a theme for me in my career. On the personal side, I've been looking at my kids and the world where I'm raising them and thinking about things we enjoy doing as family. I've been thinking about how we make sure our kids have a great place to live in future.
Is the VP of eco-responsibility an evangelist, a manager or an engineer?

All of them. Some people who will be reporting to me will be running specific projects. But there is certainly a lot of evangelism both inside and outside the company trying to raise awareness. At Sun, I'll help get a lot of the various businesses moving in same direction.
Eco-responsibility is a broad concept. Where do you think you will be focusing most of your attention this year?

There are two broad areas. Some of it being set by outside players, like the [Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)], and the regulatory stuff happening in Europe. They kind of have a time frame of their own. Another big priority is internally working on our short-term and long-term road map. And there are tons and tons of other things to do, like "Bike to JavaOne." [During its annual Java developers' conference JavaOne on May 16 in San Francisco, Sun will encourage local attendees to ride bicycles to the conference. A local biking coalition will offer free bicycle valet service.]
Environmentalists see virtue in an eco-friendly computing initiative, but why is it good business for Sun and for your customers?

I think it's a really similar situation to why people are buying hybrid cars today. There is money savings to be had by paying attention to energy consumption. And doing more eco-friendly things, there is a class of people to whom it's personally important to do that. Toyota is seeing customers demand eco-friendly products, and we're seeing the same thing with Sun, demanding our CoolThread processors. People are saying, "You've really hit something important for me going forward."
When and how did you realize that eco-friendly computing was going to be an important issue?

It is kind of something that has sunk in over the last four or five years, just thinking about the energy that's consumed in the data center. And then on the flip side, watching our customers use our technology to try to solve eco-friendly problems, such as designing better cars, tightening up the supply chain. It's a yin-yang situation, [IT is] part of problem but it's also part of solution.
Where is Sun strongest in its commitment to eco-responsibility?

There are a lot of programs under way. With just three days on the job, what jumps out at me is the product leadership right now with the new processors and servers and our work with AMD on x86 compatible servers.
Where is it weakest?

I think it's a Sun problem and also a bigger industry problem. There's amazingly little data available that decision makers who want to factor power into their decision-making process can really turn to. We are not doing a good job at this at Sun. Nor is anyone else. One priority is to keep pushing to work with the EPA to get visible metrics out there so we can be up front and honest about what people can do. Data and transparency drive a lot of things in this country and the world overall just getting the facts out on the table can do a lot of good.
What can you tell us about the formal metric for measuring the miles-per-gallon equivalent for servers? Why is this metric important?

It's a process that started up with leadership from Sun, the EPA and others. The goal is to give people an up-front, visible way to make tradeoffs and understand what the long-term costs are going to be for various technology choices. Today you go in and talk to people setting up data centers, there are a lot of back envelope things and an overdesigning of things for cooling just in case. This is just a way to say this company is doing better than that company (with energy consumption). [People might say] 'This technology might get me where I'm going at a lower cost for power and cooling and that stuff.' If you give people facts they can make better decisions.
What is Sun doing to make its technology run cooler and more efficiently?

A lot of it starts down at the chip and processor level, very low-level engineering. You focus on how you do computing with less power. There's no magic. It's just been the focus for awhile. Sun took a particular leadership position with the multi-threaded and multi-core space. It re-thought processor design from ground up. We're doing a similar thing with AMD, who we use in our x86 systems.
Will you be Sun's point man on the Green Grid consortium?

Yes, I will certainly be very active and we've got other folks in company involved already. I think that's going be a nice piece of technology, particularly around interacting with broader population.

Why come back to Sun? A couple of reasons. There are still a lot great people here who I knew from last time here. And I'm very upbeat on the long-term business. And third, what I really want do -- what I felt like I wanted do in the eco-responsibility space, Sun already has some momentum. It has the engineering capability to really go and tackle these kinds of problems. If you look at Dell, for example, they have got to go get processors from someone else. We design our own processors. It's a big enough company and it's got a lot of horsepower to go and do some fundamental things.
CIOs dealing with out-of-control energy costs in the data center have been talking about eco-friendly computing for some time. But this week, Sun Microsystems Inc. has taken that idea one step closer to reality with the newly created position of vice president of eco-responsibility, naming industry veteran David Douglas to the post. Douglas will head Sun's environmental initiatives across the company, including advancements in energy efficiency and cooling technology, product recycling, clean manufacturing and improvements in Sun's day-to-day operations.

Douglas, who is returning to Sun after 5 1/2 years, co-founded in 2001 ConnecTerra Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup radio frequency identification middleware company, where he served as vice president of products and strategy. In 2005 Douglas became BEA Systems Inc.'s chief architect for WebLogic after San Jose, Calif.-based BEA acquired ConnecTerra. In his first interview as VP of eco-responsibility, Douglas talks to SearchCIO.com about how serious Sun is about eco-friendly computing and when CIOs can expect energy solutions from Sun.

You tried a little junior college before deciding to skip higher education and go to work. Do you have any formal training in computer science?

I did take a course in COBOL, which was extremely useful, mainly because I saw that not everybody could do something that came pretty naturally to me. I discovered that everybody is good at something. You just have to figure out what it is.
You started out as a computer operator, at 18, at Computer Sciences Corp.

I got in trouble real bad. Because I could sit there and just operate the thing, I started logging on and trying to snoop around. But instead of being fired, I got promoted and I got a wonderful opportunity to work in another division, which was working on something they called DNS but was actually the very early stages of client server technology. I was developing database applications. I was exposed to a variety of customers.
Like who?

St. Jude's Children's Hospital came to us and said we'd like to use your computer and could you help us build an application that would help us keep track of all of our donors. I was behind the scenes developing this application according to spec. When it came time to turn it over, I was brought in and went to train people on it. Bless their hearts, there are these two little old ladies who were afraid of the computer.

I always hark back to that. Here I was behind the scenes having a blast designing this database, thinking about how to make it more efficient and all this other stuff, but I realized none of that made any sense to these ladies and they didn't care. In my career I have seen the habitual problem that IT has of not understanding the business value, and very early on in my career I had an opportunity to see that problem.
What was your worst job?

I was working at a major financial institution with a 700-person IT shop. You got lost. It was tough to accomplish anything. It was around that time I realized I really am a doer. I can get bored. I remember the day when I came in and cracked open a newspaper like everybody else did and ended up reading it cover to cover I said, 'I can't do this. This isn't me.'
How did you get into the entertainment business?

I had left CSC and was working at the financial institution and various other things and came back to Computer Sciences. Then one day I got approached by a headhunter about a job at MGM United Artists. I started off as a manager over the financial systems and became a director of applications and development. When I took that, it rejuvenated me about what I was doing.
Is there any entertainment experience in your background?

In junior college, I worked in theater arts behind the scenes. I did publicity, lights, sound, stage managing. I am a musician. I have a studio in my own house. I have a Christian rock band. We play in boy's prisons. We even played a Christian biker festival.
Getting back to your career, what's the best career advice you've gotten?

Don't argue with a fool because somebody walking into the middle of the conversation won't be able to tell you apart. IT is a strange business. People, for example, don't call you up and thank you when however many thousands of users are on your network are able to log in today successfully. They only call you when they can't.
So the enabler rarely gets to bask in the success.

We become the go-to source, and that has a good and a bad side to it. They're always running to us and complaining, but I started to realize that they're running to us because we are the geeks, or whatever you want to call us, within the organization that people are looking to and trust will be able to solve their problems. Inherent in that is the thank you.
Tell me about a good CIO decision you've made recently.

When our data warehouse went live, the first people that were going to receive the reports were our store personnel, not the executives. The week that store system went live, our store managers ran with that ball. We have graphs that show all the key performance indicators in each store. And the store managers are excited. If that system has a minor hiccup we hear about it immediately. They're out there tracking the horse race [sales] every day.
Can one store see what the other stores do?

I've worked in other environments where they are so protective of data. But in our case, we let any store see what the other store's performance is, down to department, down to a SKU, down to a 15-minute increment.
How do you do data management?

We use the Microsoft SQL Server for our data warehouse. I brought together a user team to go out and evaluate business intelligence technologies and ultimately pick. We came down to a bake-off between Hyperion Essbase [TK] and Microsoft's SQL Server. Behind the scenes I had been doing my homework and realized the way SQL Server was priced and the tools that came with it blew others away. One day the team asked me what I was voting for and I refused to answer them. They laughed, and said, 'We knew you would do that.' They made the choice.
So music is an avocation. What's your favorite guilty pleasure?

Golf.
Your handicap?

My entire game. But I play anyway.
What technology do you wish you lived without?

I wish I did live without mobile e-mail.
Are you worried about BlackBerry service being shut down?

I chose not to go with BlackBerry as a standard for our organization. We're using the various Windows Mobile-based or Palm devices. We ourselves at Virgin certainly have been approached about patent infringement, which we've tended to walk away from it pretty unscathed. But I understand the right of the guy who truly created the technology to come back and ask for his just due. It would seem foolish to me that would cause the service to come to a halt.
Robert Fort was in kindergarten when his mother, an applications developer, started taking him to work to help sort punch cards. At 8, he dressed up as a computer for Halloween. After graduating high school a year early, he skipped college and took a job at Computer Sciences Corp. Self-taught and self-assured, the 46-year-old Californian got his big break when he went to work at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. Now, as director of IT at Los-Angeles based Virgin Entertainment Group Inc., the North American subsidiary for the U.K. conglomerate, Fort keeps IT rocking at the $200 million company, recently bringing the sales data for every store online to managers throughout the 17-store Megastore chain. We spoke by phone about his vocation and avocations.

How do you pick a channel partner?

We have very specific guidelines that we follow when selecting channel partners. Those guidelines typically revolve around how quickly they can deliver, the breadth of their offering and pricing.
What do you buy and from whom?

Because of the big differential between what we spend on storage versus the rest of our IT needs, we typically look to vendors that handle the largest breadth of gear as possible. For EMC gear, for example, we work very closely with Dell. EMC has one of the largest networks of resellers and VAR [value added reseller] partners out there but we have found that we still get better service from a firm like Dell because of the fact that we buy so much other nonstorage-related equipment, servers, etc.

For smaller purchases or purchases we need in a faster delivery window, we work with a variety of local and national VARs and in many cases buy direct. In the case of software, we will, whenever possible, buy direct if the firm offers direct download. Even when a VAR can offer better pricing, the convenience of a direct download or automatic license purchase is far more important.
In your opinion, what are the advantages of working with a channel partner?

As an organization, we find that we need to be able to have established relationships with a variety of vendors and resellers to meet all of our needs. This is especially true when we are on a tight delivery timetable. A local reseller may charge a premium versus a larger national reseller or the vendor themselves, but they are able to add value and justify that price with a quicker turnaround.

The second key issue is that when we work with the larger resellers, we are able to get a lot better service because of our larger purchase volume. For example, we recently purchased an entry-level EMC SAN for a specific project, and had the scope of our project change overnight. We needed a SAN that could scale much larger and had to go with a higher end model that would scale further. EMC has a policy that once a PO [purchase order] is signed, they will not take a unit back unless it is due to a technical problem. Because of our relationship with Dell, they were more than willing to work with us, and did so in as painless a way as possible. If I was working direct or with a VAR that only handled storage or that I did not have the same dollar volume with, I am not confident we would have had the same experience.

Third, in theory, channel partners can introduce us to new products that we were otherwise unaware of, but in practice that is pretty rare in the current business climate.
What are the downsides to working with resellers?

This depends largely on the specific reseller and the way in which the manufacturer themselves has setup the reseller program. We have seen some nightmare scenarios when resellers are responsible for first tier support or sales engineering and the resellers are not equipped with the necessary technical resources to meet our needs. This is especially true when the reseller does not have the right number of specific subject matter experts and tries to utilize more generalists.

We also have a hard time with resellers that do not stock product. In the current climate, we typically make final purchasing decisions a week or two before we need the product installed in our data center. In some cases, due to project scope changes or emergency capacity upgrades, we need to be able to have a product the next day. Most resellers today, and for that matter, many vendors themselves, are not prepared to meet that kind of delivery timetable. For organizations with static needs or even static rates of change, that may be fine, but for a rapidly growing Internet-centric business it causes a lot of problems. To resolve this issue, we typically have three or four key resellers that can source any one product we use, so with a little legwork we are able to meet our timetable.
Are channel partners really independent?

Absolutely not. In my experience, channel partners are sales organizations and we treat them as such. We have had countless interactions with technology resellers that pitch either the product they have the highest margin on, or a product they need to move for internal purposes. We address this by doing as much homework as possible ahead of time and then utilize their subject-matter experts for specific implementation or integration questions.
Do you think you can get a better price working with a channel partner versus dealing with vendors directly?

My experience with pricing has been that it is directly related to the size of the manufacturer. We find that vendors with a large, diverse, mature product line, like EMC or Sun, offer their best pricing through the channel. Newer players or vendors rolling out a new product and looking for early adopters will inevitably offer better pricing and terms directly, than through their partners. With the competitive VAR landscape, there are fewer firms willing to distribute products on a loss-leader basis, but that still remains a vital strategy for vendors attempting to push a new product into the market place. Like any savvy buyer, we try to exert our pricing pressure and take advantage of such situations.
Buying storage gear from the channel needn't be as dicey as you might imagine as long as you know what to look out for. Aaron D. Sawchuk, co-founder and chief technology officer of managed services provider ColoSpace Inc., in Rockland, Mass., talked with SearchStorage.com about his experiences buying from the channel and some of the advantages this has brought him in dealing with key suppliers.

application and all of the related data in the time frame of 24, 48 or 72 hours?" For most companies the answer is no, Morency said.

So to keep testing relevant...

business rules and processes and data structures directly on that environment, Akgonul explained.

Michele Cantara, who covers the software markets at...