The fall 7X24 Exchange 2013 Fall Conference event in San Antonio drew a record attendance of about 820 participants, and kicked off Monday with a keynote from former HP chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina. The theme of the conference is "Turning Vision into Action," and was reflected in a day of presentations about leading change at an organization or business, deploying innovative data center solutions such as modular prefabricated units and innovative liquid cooling technologies.
Carly Fiorina, former chairman and CEO of HP, said that the changes happening in today's world - where everything is moving from physical and analog to digital, virtual, mobile and customized - are truly "historic and unprecedented." That change is the beginning of a global transformation, where we live without borders or boundaries, and the pace of everything is accelerating every single day. (Photo by Colleen Miller.)
The morning keynote, by Carly Fiorina, former chairman and CEO of HP, was served up with energy to a packed audience, including many attendees who stood in back. Fiorina, who led HP at a time when revenue was $88 billion annually, said that "leading" is different from "managing" and leading is characterized by "making a positive difference" and "driving purposeful change." (Photo by Colleen Miller.)
Joe Higgins, vice president of engineering and corporate sustainability at Fidelity Investments, spoke about Fidelity's deployment of modular, pre-constructed data centers, including results of the current modular deployment, which compared to traditional data halls, has 50 percent less footprint and 30 percent less energy costs. Seated in the back is Eric Wells, vice president of data center services, Fidelity Investments. (Photo by Colleen Miller.)
The audience takes notes and keeps up with the conference schedule via the new mobile app, rolled out for the first time at this 7X24 Exchange Conference.
For more photo highlights, continue to the next page.
The fall 7X24 Exchange Conference event, held in San Antonio, TX, included opportunities to learn from leading technology companies as well as from enterprise users who have deployed the technologies. There was also room for networking and the afternoon ice-cream-sundae break, too.
Robert J. Cassiliano, chairman and CEO, of 7X24 Exchange, greeted participants and updated the crowd on the group's activities, including launching new chapters (including one in Northern Africa and the Middle East), scholarships and charitable contributions, and partnerships with the National Science Foundation, the University of Texas and the State University of New York. (Photo by Colleen Miller.)
David Rotheroe, Distinguished Technologist for HP, holds his cell phone aloft, making the point that the technology did not exist 10 years ago. He noted that there's an effect, called Jevons paradox, stating that as technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. As the customer demand for compute power and storage increases, it certainly points to this effect. (Photo by Colleen Miller.)
A panel titled, "The Power of Data in Data Center Operations," moderated by Kevin Heslin, Senior Editor, The Uptime Institute, included a discussion of what to do with petabytes of data collected about the systems in the data center, including reliability data, performance data and maintenance data. Pictured left to right are: W. Pitt Turner, IV, formerly of The Uptime Institute, Daid Schirmacher, of Digital Realty, John Sasser of Sabey Data Centers, and Stephen Fairfax of MTechnology. (Photo by Colleen Miller.)
The JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country was the backdrop for the 7X24 Exchange Conference this week. The resort offered ample conference space and two TPC golf courses to challenge those headed for the links after a day of learning and networking.