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7x24 Exchange Fall Conference Highlights

End-to-end reliability as well as increasing energy efficiency thread that ran through the 7x24 Exchange Fall 2012 Conference, attended by about 750 IT and facilities managers who oversee data center operations. The event setting was the historic Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix. Lots of practical research and helpful information and lessons learned were shared among participants.

The front landscaping of the Arizona Biltmore spells out the location. Plenty of sunshine and a beautiful setting for this week's 7x24 Exchange Conference. (Photo by Colleen Miller.)

A panel presented a case study on the development of a new data center facility at the University of Utah. Brent Elieson, Associate Director, Univeristy of Utah; Robert Sty, Associate, SmithgroupJJR; Sean Thompson, Senior Associate, VCBO Architects; and Tyler Wilson, Director of Mission Critical, Okland Construction, presented how the university data center took advantage of the Utah climate, with a design using ambient air economizers for 85 percent of the year. The chief objectives of the project included: high efficiency, innovation and low operating cost. (Photo: Colleen Miller.)

Paul Hsu, Datacenter Electrical Engineer at Facebook, speaks at the conference while Facebook Datacenter Mechanical Engineer Dan Lee listens. The pair presented about Facebook's innovations in its North Carolina facility and how they are pushing the envelope in terms of server temperatures, unique electrical designs, and using outside air economization as well as misting for cooling the data center. (Photo: Colleen Miller)

Kevin Timmons, the CTO of global colocation services provider CyrusOne, described the company's Chandler, Arizona project, which is currently underway with its first building having an expected completion date of December. He described the team's "massively modular" approach, which includes planning for expansion from the nascent stages of the project.  (Photo: Colleen Miller)

7X24 Exchange Conference is known to be highly interactive, encouraging dialog among attendees and speakers. This participant asked a question and was listening to the answer. (Photo: Colleen Miller.)

Winston Saunders, Director of Data Center Power and Security Initiative for Intel Corp., discussed the trend line of server efficiency - the compounded growth of energy efficiency and performance in fixed power density. In simpler terms, since 2006, servers have become more efficient and perform better. (Photo: Colleen Miller)

Deva Bodas

Intel Principal Engineer Deva Bodas addressed the future challenges on the energy efficiency of IT, including big data, high performance computing and cloud. He and his Intel colleague Winston Saunders (at right) also pointed to the need to expand beyond the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric and create a measure called Data Center Usage Effectiveness (DCUE) which would increase understanding of the facilities work efficiency.

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