Educational Sessions

Professional development is a key component of what associations provide. To that end, AFCOM is constantly exploring new programs and opportunities for the data center industry. It is this ever-evolving plan that has led us to create a new conference experience for our traditional and non-traditional data center members. Take a look at our new sessions and tracks below.

Suhas V. Patankar, President, Innovative Research, Inc.
This session will introduce basic concepts of airflow and temperature distribution in data centers. You will be shown why the flow distribution is usually not uniform. It is determined by the pressure variation under the raised floor. By calculating this variation, you can predict the amount of airflow emerging from each perforated tile. Through such a calculation, you can study the effect of the layout of the CRAC units and perforated tiles; height of the raised floor; and presence of obstructions under the raised floor. With the airflow rates determined, you can calculate, in the above-floor space, the velocity and temperature of the air moving through the server racks and back to the CRACs. Many examples will be presented to develop an understanding of the physical processes and to draw practical conclusions. The results of the calculations will be compared with measurements conducted in many real-life data centers.

F02: The Data Center of the Future: What You Can Do to Prepare for the Next Generation of Technology

Peter A. Panfil, Vice President of UPS Engineering, Emerson Network Power/Liebert
Equipment power requirements and heat emissions are reaching new levels with each generation of technology. Organizations adopting blade servers and other high-density systems are already pushing traditional power and cooling systems to their limit. Will it be necessary to tear out these systems to support future technologies? This presentation addresses that question directly and provides good news for data center managers dealing with increasing densities. It presents strategies for meeting the power and cooling requirements of today’s equipment and outlines how these strategies can be adapted to the next generation of equipment.
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James Magallanes, VP of Engineering, MaxPower Corp.
Wiring closets are a critical subsystem of a network environment and require careful selection of appropriate cooling systems. While wiring closets at one time primarily housed passive devices such as patch panels, small hubs and small switches, they now are often required to house large, high-power switches and equipment to support new applications such as VoIP and IP Telephony. Unfortunately, these closets weren’t designed with adequate floor space or cooling to support today’s equipment. Network managers have several options available to remedy this: extending building air conditioning to each location, deploying traditional computer room air conditioning, or using modular air conditioning. Attention to this problem now will improve network reliability and safeguard equipment in the future.

Dr. Yogendra Joshi, Professor and McKenney/Shiver Distinguished Chair, G.W. Woodruff
School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology Michael Wagner, Technical Director, Morrison Hershfield Corporation.
The Consortium for Energy Efficient Thermal Management (CEETHERM) includes two universities (Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland) in partnership with industry and national laboratories to explore thermal management from the chip to the data center level in an integrated and holistic fashion. In this presentation, a summary of the ongoing computational modeling and experimental work undertaken at CEETHERM will be provided. A new 2,000 square foot raised floor data center laboratory has recently been designed and constructed with input from the various members of the consortium. The facility allows several commonly used airflow patterns to be generated. It is also equipped with a plenum whose depth could be varied. Distributed chilled water lines allow for the exploration of liquid-cooled cabinet architectures. Ongoing efforts on the characterization of airflows within data center and advanced thermal management concepts will be described.

Dr. Kenneth L. Uhlman, P.E., Director, Business Development, Eaton Corporation
A paradigm shift from data center professionals’ traditional methodologies includes waiting until an item breaks; then diagnosing it; then fixing it. By incorporating leading-edge-proven technologies and advanced analytics, data center professionals and their service providers are able to proactively monitor, diagnose and repair equipment, reducing system downtime.

John Consoli VP Global Sales AFCO Systems
Gary Aron SVP Mission Critical Enterprises
Today’s design standards for data centers are evolving at a rapid pace. The need for future proofing (flexibility) and scalability lends itself to a dynamic team-based effort. Creative design, thorough systems research, and concurrent partnering can and should lead to a holistic solution. However, today’s budget constraints force end users into a box and can lead companies down a path that may constrain and impair their efforts to service the customer. This session will discuss today’s trends and tactics and how the current budgeting practices may, in the long term, actually impair the performance of a company’s data center.

F07: RFID Planning and Deployment for Data Centers Applications

William L. DiBella, President, Connectivity Technologies Inc.
Learn how to integrate RFID technology into your physical layer connectivity not only to help you automate and manage your connections, documentation, moves, adds, changes, availability, and help you simplify and automate your information input process, but also to add to your organization the ability to manage your assets, assist in information retrieval, improve operational efficiencies, improve reaction to new business requirements, maintain efficient information, eliminate manual spread sheets, improve assets tracking, and achieve real time accurate information.

F08: Manufacturers Answer the Cooling Challenge

Richard Sawyer, Director of Data Center Technology, American Power Conversion
It has been over three years since blade server technology entered the market in significant numbers. The technology has been met with increasing acceptance in the market place, offering high capacity computing that is modular, scalable and cost effective. Indeed, blade server arrays are replacing mainframe applications in large companies. The topic of the cooling issues surrounding this technology has been well studied and discussed, and finally manufacturers have had time to develop and market solutions to the cooling challenge they present. This presentation will briefly quantify the magnitude of the cooling problem, review the "band-aid" approaches offered as interim solutions, and present a thorough overview of today's solutions and strategies available for blade server users from a variety of manufacturers - real solutions, to the very real problem of high heat in the data center.

Emerging Technologies

E01: Data Center Security Technology Trends

Alan Kruglak, Senior Vice President, Genesis Security Systems LLC
This presentation focuses on which technologies are being successfully applied as standard products to electronically protect data centers. It includes a brief discussion of concentric levels of protection, access control and CCTV systems. It also covers trends in security technology, including the hottest topics in this area: biometrics, smartcards, and IP digital video.

E02: The Impact of Wireless and Mobility Initiatives on the Data Center

Michael Dempsey, Technical Editor, Processor Magazine
Throughout corporate America, wireless and mobility initiatives abound. While many business leaders consider the productivity benefits of such endeavors to be self-evident, they often do not fully understand the security, infrastructure, and support implications of their initiatives. As an IT leader, your charge is to align your company’s technology with those business initiatives. The good news is, with the right information, you can. This presentation focuses on how to successfully implement wireless and mobile technologies in a variety of environments. Discussion will concentrate on tools and techniques; what you can and cannot secure; mobile user support; and current and near-future technologies. For all the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that surround wireless networks, when done correctly, they can be as stable and secure, if not more so, than their wired counterparts—and with all the mobility benefits your CEO is hoping for.

E03: Liquid Cooling: A Next-Generation Data Center Strategy

Herb Villa, IT Product Specialist, Rittal Corporation
Now that heat loads of 20-25 kW are projected for individual enclosures, heat removal and dissipation are becoming more critical. Heat must be evacuated from enclosures and cannot overwhelm a facility’s cooling capacity. Proposed solutions must be compatible with site climate control systems. Traditional air-cooled server cabinets cannot support escalating heat loads, so new solutions are required. Enclosure-based liquid-cooling solutions represent next-generation networking strategies, offering more effective heat transference from high-density installations. This presentation will discuss a variety of liquid-cooling systems—both enclosure and processor-based. A review of enclosure and facility heat loads and current climate-control solutions will lead into a discussion of options available for extreme density installations. End user and facility issues will be addressed followed by application-based solutions for the most stringent criteria.

E04: Managing the Operations of a Remote Data Center

Cliff Unger, Sales Engineer, DirectNET, Inc.
Patrick Cameron, Sales Engineer, DirectNET, Inc. Faced with the ever-changing IT landscape, data center managers must constantly adapt to accommodate new technologies. IT professionals are faced with numerous challenges, including headcount reduction, remote site management, heterogeneous environments and increased service level expectations. This lecture will focus on future technologies in server management, intelligent power control and environmental monitoring. Attendees will review case studies and practical applications of leading-edge technologies, such as lights-out data center management, remote console-based access, out-of-band power control, and real-time monitoring of environmental, intrusion, and power conditions.

E05: Next Generation of Blade Servers

Steve Simon, Director BladeCenter Strategy, Director Wall Street Development, Systems and Technology Group, IBM
Server work loads are taking advantage of recent technology advances like increased number of cores per processor, 64b processors, expanded memory addressability, virtualization in hardware, diskless servers, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 4x Infiniband. The next generation of blade servers is exploiting these technology advances adapting to and expanding work loads of server consolidation, mission critical high availability applications, and scale up applications like data bases. Growth in these work loads will affect the way we build, operate and manage data centers.

Best Practices

B01: The Choice for Facility Monitoring

Robert J. Deveau, Facility Engineer, Bovis Lend Lease
This presentation discusses the need for facility monitoring systems, including examples of how these systems have benefited facilities that have them installed. It examines the history of monitoring systems, the factors that should be considered in choosing them, and the specific choice the speaker’s company made for its monitoring system. Included are examples of information displays, graphical programming language, and historical database information.

B02: ANSI Data Center Standard, Relevance beyond the Technology Lifecycle

Bill Mazzetti, Chief Electrical Engineer, Rosendin Electric Phil Isaak, Principal, Reliable Resources There has been a significant initiative within the industry to create a new ANSI-certified data center standard that develops facility and infrastructure design and operations best practices. This session will explore the differences between this ANSI standard and other standards available. It will include a review of the content within this standard, how it can benefit data center managers in evaluating their current environment, and how it can provide valuable information to justify improvements.

B03: How The Data Center Can Work with the Service Desk to Provide Service Level Excellence

Dawn Sawyer, Operations Manager, GuideStone Financial Resources
How is your data center’s operating level agreement (OLA) with your service desk/help desk designed? Does it highlight the excellence of your data center? Do your response times stretch you to constantly achieve more? The benefits of aligning IT with the business via service level management are too good to pass up, and the penalty for not spending time negotiating mutually beneficial SLAs can harm your ITIL implementation. As service level management continues to grow in visibility, how can you get involved to make sure the business value of your data center is seen clearly through the lens of your organization’s SLAs? In addition, this session will discuss how to make your operating level agreement another marketing tool for your data center

B04: IT Infrastructure Library/IT Service Management 101

Mart Rovers, President, InterProm USA Corporation
In this presentation, the audience will learn the basics of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) and ITSM (IT Service Management), as well as how to assess the IT process maturity and how to apply these industry best practices for IT process improvement initiatives.

B05: Best Practices in Network Monitoring

Jamie Lerner, CEO, CITTIO
To help minimize costly downtime, network administrators often rely on automated monitoring solutions to alert them to trouble. However, the hidden costs and operational complexity of many traditional monitoring solutions have made them far more expensive to implement and maintain than originally anticipated. This presentation will outline best practices for deploying a network and systems monitoring solution. Several industry-leading companies, including Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Hawaii and The Gymboree Corporation, have successfully used this approach. The audience will learn best practices in terms of data center monitoring and management; Web-based data center monitoring; standards-based systems and open source solutions; choosing automation rather than consulting- or manpower-intensive approaches; and working with vendors to avoid products with many add-on modules or hidden costs.

B06: Best Practices – Developing and Implementing an Infrastructure

Training/Certification Program in Your Data Center Steven Ford, Facilities Program Manager, MSN/Microsoft Corporation Joe Soroka, Director, Technical Services, Lee Technologies With human error recognized as one of the top causes of infrastructure outages in mission-critical facilities, it is apparent that facility best practices need to also encompass a formal training program for its staff to truly increase site reliability. A detailed site-specific training and certification program should be implemented in each data center, which also includes capturing the knowledge and history of the site, thus preventing loss of this critical knowledge when employees and vendors transition in and out. This presentation will guide you in how to get started on a training program, including development of an equipment matrix, as well as identifying all required operational and emergency procedures, and how to implement the training program so that it does not impact the current operation of the facility. Development of detailed operational procedures is the cornerstone of operating a data center to its fullest reliability possible, but is valuable only if your staff is trained and certified to use them.

B07: Translating Engineering Best Practices into Practical Solutions

Tad Davies, Executive Vice President, Bick Group
Jon Jonz, Vice President of Business Development, Bick Group With all the talk of engineering best practices in today’s data center, this session will take the most popular concepts and turn them into hard reality. Not getting a brand new data center this year? Wondering what can be done to improve your operation on a limited budget? We will offer practical, actionable inspection points for all systems that support your site, from critical power to cooling to fire protection to security. This session will provide immediate ROI by providing participants with a checklist of improvements that can be applied immediately to the data center environment.

B08: Best Practices for Running a World-Class Data Center

Doug Hall, Technical Architect, Target Corporation
accurately documenting equipment for capacity planning and management is essential for running a world-class data center. In this presentation, best practices for key data center processes, including capacity planning, equipment installation and production of reports and audits will be discussed. Finally, the solution that Target Corporation has implemented will be presented.

D02: Measuring ROI in Data Center Automation

Sean McDermott, President, RealOps, Inc.
The new mandate for enterprises and service providers is to better align IT service and operations with the needs and priorities of the business. This means a new level of automation that bridges people, process and technology to deliver heightened service levels, faster problem resolution and improved security. This session will examine the latest in operations automation—and even more important, how and what to look at in benchmarking performance and measuring improvement. Real-world examples from the data centers of Tier 1 companies will illustrate how industry leaders are measuring business process improvements, customer support and the strategic utilization of IT staff—and simultaneously reducing overall costs.

D03: Using Service Plans to Improve Team Performance

Andy Kerestes, Senior Manager, Office Depot
A good way to improve team efficiency, reduce costs, and lessen the likelihood of outsourcing is to run your team like it's a separate business. Using service plans to define your business processes, key objectives, costs, and success factors is a great place to start. This presentation describes how to develop effective service plans with all the necessary components to lead to success. It also shows how to use your service plans to create a performance scorecard and demonstrate your team's value to executive management.

D04: Merger Mania From the Data Center Standpoint

Paul Schlattman, Technical Program Consultant, ESD, Inc.
Michael Kuppinger, Senior Vice President, ESD, Inc. Your company has just announced that you've merged with a major competitor. Panic sets in! Most data center executives are not experienced in the merger process and the integration of two cultures and processing techniques. This session will review the merger and acquisition process, high-level strategies, and the consolidation effort required between two separate companies. In addition, there will be a discussion of the IT capacity planning process and planning strategies of the consolidated data center.

D05: Strengthening Network Reliability Through Out-of-Band Infrastructures

Marcio Saito, Chief Technology Officer, Cyclades Corporation
Early out-of-band technologies were utilized to safeguard networks against service disruptions by providing an alternate access path to IT assets in the event of a failure. Out-of-band infrastructures (OOBI) now harness the reliability, familiarity and proven concept of their predecessors, while more than meeting the rigorous challenges of today’s distributed, performance-driven, interconnected and multi-technology networks. This presentation will trace the increasingly proactive and preventative role of out-of-band networks in the context of today’s evolving data center environments. Attendees will learn how the modern OOBI facilitates greater security and helps companies adhere to business policy and compliance requirements, while continually improving on the efficiency of the data center.

D06: Enabling the Real-Time Environment

Denise P. Kalm, Sr. Prod Mktng Mgr, Cybermation, Inc.
Every business is facing the challenge of an on-demand, service-oriented world, where customers demand quick responses, instantaneous access to data and more. The real-time environment (RTE) requires a real-time infrastructure, but who has the time or money to re-architect the environment? Fortunately, a complete overhaul isn’t necessary if you select the right IT Workload Automation Broker (ITWAB) software to help you get there. The next generation of job scheduling software involves automating event-driven work, not just calendar-based work. Learn what you need to look for in a solution to get you to a real-time world; plan your software evaluation with the RTE in mind. Highlights will include some real-world examples in which leading-edge job scheduling solutions enabled companies to ‘get real.’

D07: SWOT - Mastering the Ultimate in Brainstorming Techniques

Rich Schiesser, Founder and President, RWS Enterprises, Inc.
How many times at work have you sat through a dull, boring brainstorming session with little or no results in the end to show for your valuable time and effort? Enough! Come learn how to effectively brainstorm the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of most entities, and have fun doing so. This session is guaranteed to be energetic, entertaining, and informative, and will include an audience participation exercise.

D08: Managing Performance of Clustered Applications

Yori Lavi, Founder and Chief Product Officer, OpTier
As more enterprises turn to J2EE to deliver their mission-critical applications over the Web, there is a greater reliance on clusters to provide mission-critical services to ensure minimal downtime and maximum scalability. The challenges in clustering a J2EE application can be attributed to the very nature of distributed computing. Clusters promise to bring affordable mainframe-level computing power and reliability, using cost-effective servers. But clustering also introduces increased management complexity and fosters the need for new transaction-level monitoring tools.

D09: Everything You Need to Know About Commissioning

Steve Guzzardo, Managing Principal, EYP Mission Critical Facilities
This presentation may challenge your understanding of commissioning—when commissioning starts and when it ends. It will review the phases of commissioning, what they should include, when they should start, and your potential for cost savings when the process is working properly. It will also explore how you can improve the success of your building by conducting an operations review and risk assessment. Additionally, it will cover what vendor-provided preventive maintenance does and does not provide, and offer best practices to enhance vendor-provided maintenance

D10: IT Cost Trends and What They Mean

Doran Boroski, Executive Consultant, Compass America
While IT unit costs have been declining overall for some time, trends vary significantly across different IT service areas, as well as within individual categories, with costs increasing in some cases. As CIOs increasingly focus on aligning spending plans with business requirements, a detailed and specific understanding of the full range of IT cost and performance trends is essential to developing budgets that address business needs. This presentation will examine detailed cost and trending data for mainframe, midrange, desktop, and service desk environments, and describe cost drivers and anticipated future trends. In addition, the implications of these trends for budget planning will be analyzed.

D11: Selecting a New Infrastructure Services Provider

Steven Ford, Facilities Program Manager, MSN/Microsoft Corporation
Joe Soroka, Director, Technical Services, Lee Technologies When selecting an infrastructure services provider, it is important to develop an overall plan and approach. This should include a request for proposal (RFP); an interviewing and proofing component; a decision matrix, including key performance indexes (KPIs); a detailed scope of work (SOW); and a transition and implementation plan. This presentation describes how to develop an RFP for the operation and service of your facility infrastructure, as well as an interviewing and proofing plan that will help see through a vendor’s “sales pitch.” It also covers how to develop a decision matrix for evaluating the experience level and pricing structures vendors offer, as well as a quality SOW. A detailed transition and implementation plan, as well as a successful “back-out” plan will also be reviewed.

Frank Scavo, President, Computer Economics
Have you ever had trouble getting senior management to approve an important new data center investment? Sometimes the problem is a failure in communication. To get a large capital expenditure approved, data center managers must be able to speak in the language of shareholder value. The most effective way to do this is to use the concept of Economic Value Added (EVA)--a simple but powerful tool for calculating the business value of an IT investment. At the end of this presentation you will be able to: Identify the elements of economic value; Calculate the improvement in economic value for an IT investment; and communicate with senior executives using the language of economic value.

Gene Kim, CTO & Founder, Tripwire
Kevin Behr, CTO and Chief Operational Strategist, IP Services ITIL is gaining ground as a leading way for data center and operations management to institute processes that will improve service delivery. However, one of the main complaints about ITIL is that it does not help practitioners answer the question “where do I start?” While many have personal theories about where to start, to date there has been no attempt to statistically determine which ITIL processes and controls correlate most closely to high performing IT organizations. As a result, this session will discuss survey and research results unearthed by the IT Process Institute, with the help of the Software Engineering Institute and the Institute of Internal Auditors, which quantify the value, effectiveness, efficiency and security of controls. Known as the VEESC study, Gene Kim and Kevin Behr will share with the audience this completed research and the practical steps the results outline for any organization looking to improve IT operations.

C01: Anatomy of a Disaster

John Diamond, Principal, Strategic Facilities Inc.
This presentation is a case study that outlines a building electrical riser fire that necessitated the evacuation of a 30-story building. Included will be steps taken to allow for re-occupancy, the relocation of tenants to alternative space, and the consequences to two data centers and a brokerage trading firm that were unable to transact business for much of the two weeks following the fire. This case study outlines (from a landlord’s, tenant’s and management firm's perspective) the dynamics that take place during a disaster recovery worst-case scenario—when your business is down and all your competition is up and running.

C02: Too Much, Too Little or Just Enough Backup Power?

John Sears, Product Marketing Manager, Active Power
Most corporate data centers take the “fortress” approach to power and cooling, with multiple layers of redundancy, fault tolerance and maintainability. This is entirely appropriate for a company’s primary computing site, but how much redundancy is appropriate for the distributed resources? In particular, what should be done for “dark” disaster recovery sites that are either ignored or suddenly mission-critical? This presentation will explain the different tiers of data center power protection and identify which tiers are appropriate for different categories of computing resources. Some regional sites can actually be allowed to shut down if the software applications are designed to be transferred to other sites during emergencies. This session will also discuss the challenges of designing a “dark” site. These facilities need to be robust enough to support a mission-critical operation; nevertheless, the overriding need for these sites is durable shelf life rather than multi-level redundancy.

C03: Building a Secure Gateway for Remote Access to the Data Center

Naim Malik, Senior Product Manager, Raritan
In today’s complex, distributed environments, enterprises have to strike a balance between security and business operations. How does one balance the need for increased access to the data center with stringent security? Requirements for such access are increasing as more companies implement remote management solutions to simplify and accelerate IT management and to improve operations uptime. Demand for remote data center access is also growing as more organizations outsource the management of some or all of their IT assets to third parties. This session will cover the latest secure IT infrastructure management tools for remote access. Also, it will examine important considerations in implementing a remote access and management solution in data centers—including security, ROI, scalability and remote collaboration.

C04: Case Study of Disaster Planning and Testing at American Fidelity

Phil Larson, Director, ISD Operations, American Fidelity American Fidelity operates a mid-sized data center with a mainframe and 200+ servers adapted to support disaster recovery with offsite facilities and integrated testing. Testing is at the enterprise application level, connecting the mainframe and servers in Chicago with the recovery network in Oklahoma City twice a year. Learn about their process of DR design; budget and approval; business impact analysis; and resulting prioritization and sequencing of recovery, validation and testing.

C05: The Nuts and Bolts of Security

James Callahan, CPP, ABCP, MCI Data Center Security
Often times, data center managers are left scratching their heads when asked about deploying security devices or guards. What does it do? How does it work? Will it work for what you need? The answer to these questions lies in a fundamental knowledge of security systems and services. This talk will focus on the nuts and bolts of security in data centers: different kinds video systems available (cameras, recorders, etc.); how access control systems work (panels, readers, biometrics); and how to spec and select guard services contractors (wage rates and contract terms). This presentation will provide data center managers with a basic working understanding of these items, as well as questions for prospective vendors and answers for bosses and auditors.

C06: Automating Policy Enforcement with Directory-Based Security

Danny Kim, CTO, FullArmor
Internal security vulnerabilities—not perimeter security weaknesses—remain the biggest threat to enterprises. However, enforcing security policies on client machines across large networks is a manual, time-consuming, and costly process. Directory-based security provides a centralized approach for creating, managing and enforcing security policies that are linked to individual users and machines. This session will cover the benefits and challenges of using an existing directory infrastructure to automate security policy controls; reduce manual security administration; automatically enforce security configurations on individual and groups of users/machines, including disconnected notebooks and kiosks; eliminate unnecessary administrator privileges on client machines; apply secure configurations for VPN/dial-in access; prevent users from installing unauthorized software; and enforce access control policies on removal media to prevent users from copying confidential data.

John O’Brien, Director of IS, David Evans and Associates Inc. (DEA)
A disaster recovery plan is not just having a mechanism in place to be able to recover lost or corrupt files. Disaster recovery is standing outside of your building without the ability to get in or access your network in any way. Zero access. How do you minimize losses and get back to creating revenue in the shortest amount of time when a true disaster hits?

P01: Measuring for Dollars: Monitoring, Measuring and Reporting

John Powers, Vice President Global Marketing, AFCO Systems
Todd Lowe, Product Manager, Monitoring Systems This session will highlight how AFCO systems “Kool-SCAN” suite of products gathers dynamic, real-time data to monitor, measure and manage heat and power at the enclosure level. Using real-time data, users can develop robust models of power usage and heat densities at the enclosure level. These models can be used by Facilities, IT and Real Estate to determine capacity, reliability and utilization issues across the entire enterprise.

P02: Using Rack Based Solutions to Manage Critical Data Center Needs

David Joy, Vice President of Marketing, Emerson Network Power/Liebert
High speed servers and network switches are driving power management, cooling and monitoring to the rack level. This has transformed the humble IT equipment rack into a strategic asset that can play a valuable role in enabling operational flexibility and availability. This presentation will highlight the trends that are driving change within the rack, including changing densities, increased use of multi-corded devices, and blade server deployment of power and cooling management within the rack, and look at managed power distribution, unique cable management solutions, and advanced system monitoring.

P03: Cooling Your Data Center: Part 1 – Mysteries of the Under Floor

Amir Radmehr, Director, Sales and Marketing, Innovative Research, Inc.
In a data center, the delivery of airflow is controlled by the pressure distribution below the raised floor. The software product TileFlow calculates this under-floor pressure variation and obtains the airflow rate for each perforated tile. The TileFlow is delightfully easy to use, runs very fast, and produces attractive displays of results. The presentation will include a live demonstration of TileFlow. You will see how to use the product for different layouts and discover the mysteries of the under-floor space.

P04: Cooling Your Data Center: Part 2 – Wonders of the Above Floor

Suhas Patankar, President, Innovative Research, Inc.
Proper cooling of server racks is assured when their inlet air temperatures are within acceptable limits. The software product TileFlow, originally designed for calculating the under-floor airflow, can now be used for the simulation of the above-floor flow and temperature distribution, while maintaining the same ease of use and fast execution. The presentation will include a demonstration of the above-floor capabilities of Tile Flow, show a spectacular display of the results, and thus convey the wonders of the above-floor space.

P05: Evaluate Before You Execute: Planning for an Upgrade, Expansion, or New Data Center.

Tad Davies, Executive Vice President, Bick Group
Jon Jonz, Vice President of Business Development, Bick Group
Whether you’re upgrading an existing data center or constructing a new one, you’re faced with challenges. You have questions. What do you need to do? How much will it cost? How long will it take? Are you following best practices? Your questions can be answered with Bick Group’s Facility Analysis, where a team of highly-trained experts examines the existing conditions and operational goals of your facility, analyzes the findings, and makes recommendations for improvement.

P06: Solimar: Dramatically Increase the Productivity and Flexibility of Your Data/Print Center

Mary Ann Rowan, Vice President, Solimar Systems, Inc.
Today’s data/print center environments have never been more demanding. They are being pushed to deliver higher levels of productivity, while taking on new projects and larger workloads. Does this sound like your environment? If so, you need to attend this session and discover why nearly 40% of the Fortune 100 organizations have implemented Solimar technology to improve data/print center productivity and optimize operational efficiencies, while providing the system flexibility that IT professionals require.

Carrie High, Networking Applications Market Manager, SIEMON
From cabling to cooling, many myths and rumors are floating around when it comes to data centers. This session will address these myths with ROI and TCO considerations. Companies today tend to sacrifice one budget to save another and may be spending pennywise and dollar foolish. This session will provide downtime numbers, cost comparisons, and day one and two considerations for overall data center planning in a standards compliant manner.

Steve Yellen, Vice President of Marketing, Aperture Technologies, Inc.
Data Centers today are a mission-critical resource to the enterprise. They are complex environments that undergo extensive change, and must be managed as world-class facilities. This session will show how organizations are enforcing best practices and using decision support systems to manage their enterprise. Learn how you too can automate the manual change processes in your data center and how you can manage the infrastructure resources to meet the demands of your organization.

Simone “Cy” Genna, Network Safety Specialist, DuPont Communications Cabling
In networked facilities, the amount of communications cables abandoned and in use can represent a significant fuel load, smoke and fire hazard. New technology makes it possible to produce communications cable that not only reduces building fuel load and smoke generation potential, making occupants and equipment safer, but also increases the survivability of the network in a fire situation. We address the technology behind the fire safety performance of available classes of communications cable and review them in context of the minimum requirements set forth in building, fire safety and electrical codes and standards.

Charles Crouchman, V.P., Product Management, Cybermation
Real-time, event-based automation is the next evolution for enterprise job scheduling. To create a real-time infrastructure, enterprises need a solution that provides end-to-end automation of straight-through processing requirements based on events, workload and schedules. As a single, unified enterprise IT automation solution that works across all platforms, Cybermation ESP enables enterprises to transform their legacy-entrenched enterprise job scheduling solutions to successfully prepare for the Real Time Enterprise.

Gary Bernstein, Director of Product Marketing-Network Cabling Solutions, Hellermann Tyton Corporation
This session will discuss the infrastructure requirements in the recently published TIA-942: Telecommunications Infrastructure for Data Centers. The session will also give an overview of RapidNet—a revolutionary pre-terminated plug and play copper and fiber network cabling system. RapidNet has been designed specifically for data center cabling applications, such as going from switch to server, and has been proven to reduce installation time by 75%.

Michael Carter, Director of Sales, Connectivity Technologies
The elimination of risk in the data center environment is a primary concern for all DC managers. Thoughtful planning and design combined with the use of appropriate products makes it possible to significantly reduce the possibility of downtime and outages. This presentation covers the use of conveyance products, cable management devices, cabinets, trunks and other cable assemblies, connector types, patch panels, and management software in the creation of a low risk/fault tolerant cable infrastructure.

Paul Vereb, Global Accounts Manager, Connectivity Technologies
This presentation focuses on the installation of fiber optic and copper physical layer connectivity cabling infrastructure in the data center. An emphasis is placed on the use of specifically engineered products that offer high-density SAN solutions. These solutions provide the data center manager with the ability to future-proof their infrastructure. The components associated with these products and how they work together to create a total solution with also be discussed.

Gerry Cullen, IT Design Engineer, Geist Manufacturing, Inc.
Equipment environment monitoring is as important as network performance monitoring. Server rooms, racks, and closets are vulnerable to hostile environments. One hour of air conditioner failure can reduce vital IT equipment to scrap in dense rooms. The presentation will cover how to economically monitor temperature, water, access, video monitoring, humidity and electrical power condition. Techniques in web access and alarming through SNMP, SMTP, and other methods will be discussed. Developments in low-cost web microprocessors make this monitoring equipment low-cost and easier to install than earlier generations. Examples of how to achieve the earliest warning will be shown.

Jim Fink, Product Manager, APC
In today's competitive environment, many organizations are adopting the latest equipment and processes to improve IT productivity and increase business value. However, these environments are also creating new availability challenges. For instance, high-density blade servers can greatly increase the likelihood of downtime from inadequate cooling. Agility and low TCO have become equally important considerations. InfraStruXureT Systems for Applications respond to NCPI demands like no traditional architecture can. Learn how in this NEW presentation by APC.

P16: The Advantages of deploying Enhanced Bandwidth 50/125µm Multimode Fiber For Datacenter Applications

Todd Harpel, Director of Marketing, Berk-Tek
Enhanced bandwidth (2000+ MHz-km) 50/125µm laser optimized multimode fiber (LOMF) has recently gained much popularity. To date, the primary advantage associated with this fiber has been its ability to extend the transmission distance capabilities of economical 850nm VCSEL-based transceivers. These devices are typically used for 1 or 10-Gigabit Ethernet transmission in Local Area Network (LAN) or campus backbones whose lengths can extend 300 meters. But for shorter link lengths, such as those commonly found in a datacenter or Storage Area Network (SAN), there is an additional advantage that 50?m LOMF can offer. This presentation will explore the capability of 50?m LOMF to allow for increased link loss budgets at short distances, adding flexibility in cabling system design.

Dr. Kishor Khankari, Lead Consulting Engineer, Fluent Inc.
With increasing heat loads, maintaining adequate air temperatures in data centers has become a challenging task. CoolSim, Fluent’s Cooling Audit Service software, can help facility engineers and data centers managers optimize the cooling performance of existing and future data centers. This user-friendly tool computes temperature distributions and airflow patterns both under and above floor spaces and pinpoints hot spots and possible air short-circuiting in the data center. This presentation will show a live demonstration of CoolSim.

P18: The Changing Data Center: Managing, Tracking and Maximizing Data Center Assets

Bruce Gansler, Senior Project Manager, Align Communications, Inc.
Change within a data center is a constant and challenging issue. Planning, expanding, consolidating, migrating and/or regulating a data center is never easy. Moreover, how your company manages and tracks its data center assets can differentiate between success and failure. Learn how Align Communications – with over 20 years of data center experience – and our software Asset Point ®, can effectively manage change and assets in your data center, as well as the environmental impact associated with it.

Tom Turner, Business Development Manager, Panduit Corporation
Significant Developments are taking place in the world of grounding and bonding of networked equipment. The grounding section of the Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard for Data Centers specification (TIA-942) was designed specifically to address issues that affect data centers, and has grounding information that cannot be found elsewhere. Learn about TIA-942 grounding and how this document, along with J-STD-607-A and the IEEE Emerald Book (IEEE Std. 1100) work together to form a comprehensive network grounding system.

Robert “Dr. Bob” F. Sullivan, Ph.D., IT Environmental Consulting Expert, Triton Technology Systems, Inc.
The demand for high-density equipment, such as blade servers, results in increasing thermal loads in a data center room and higher equipment air intake temperatures. This threatens overall site uptime, reliability, and flexibility. Methods and practices must be established to ensure your cooling capacity is utilized to its fullest extent. KoldLok® products and KoldWorks services provide information and tools that can optimize your current infrastructure, cool what you already have, and confidently plan for additional loads. This session includes a discussion around ASHREA TC 9.9 recommendations on facility health and audit tests. These tests are used to proactively determine the health of the data center to avoid temperature and humidity related electronic equipment failures.

P22: Batch Service Level Agreements and Operations

Martin Willis, Senior Systems Engineer, MVS Solutions, Inc.
Where does the buck stop when it comes to meeting those (explicit or implicit) Service Level Agreements for your batch workloads? With the Data Center Manager, of course. And yet, what tools does the data center have to manage, monitor and report on their performance against these SLAs? How do they know – and prove it to others - when the SLAs are impossible given their current configuration?
ThruPut Manager Automation Edition introduces real batch management based on real goals for your ad-hoc batch (e.g., target queue time of 5 minutes, treat as critical after 20) and for your scheduled production (e.g., out by 3 am, prioritize based on dynamic critical path). It provides instant feedback on your progress toward your goals as well as after-the-fact reporting. Come and hear what your future can be

P23: Overview of Black Box Data, Voice and Hotline Products and Services (D/V/H)

Joe Callahan, Manager - Product Marketing, Black Box Corporation
This presentation is an introduction to “Black Box Data, Voice and Hotline Products and Services (D/V/H)”. Black Box D/V/H Products and Services are a comprehensive, end-to-end product and services offering for passive and active enterprise solutions. Black Box D/V/H consists of end-to-end copper and fiber structured cabling solutions and a complete suite of networking and multimedia products. Black Box’s ServSwitch Central is a dedicated resource specializing in KVM products and services. ServSwitch Central combines best-of-breed KVM products with Black Box’s industry leading technical services and support.