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Scenes from the SVLG Data Center Summit

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) presented its 2011 Data Center Efficiency Summit Friday at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. IBM served as host for the event. The SVLG dates back 30 years and was started by Dave Packard (co-founder of HP) and others in the technology industry.

Jai Menon, IBM Fellow, CTO and VP

Jai Menon, IBM Fellow, CTO and VP, Technical Strategy, Systems and Technology Group. All photos by Colleen Miller.

Jai Menon, of IBM, greeted the attendees and emphasized the practical nature of the discussions. He noted that 95 percent of the conference material was focused on what you can do immediately in your data center.

The airflow panel included: (left to right) Orlando Castro, Kaiser Permanente; Jim Kennedy, Raging Wire Data Centers; Don Jenkins, Fortune Data Centers, and Dennis Symanski, Electric Power Research Institute. Oracle's Mukesh Khattar (standing) moderated.

The discussion on airflow included techniques, like reducing fan speeds and wireless monitoring, that can be implemented to reduce energy costs and eliminate problems with hot and cold spots. See  Focus on Fans Delivers Cost Savings on Cooling for more on this panel session.

DC Power Discussion

Case studies on DC power were presented by (left to right): Keizo Hoshijima, NTT Facilities USA; H. Ezzat Khalifa, Syracuse University; and Dennis Symanski, Electric Power Research Institute. The talk was moderated by Bill Tschudi of Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory.

Dennis Symanski, of Electric Power Research Institute, presented a case study of the Duke Energy company's data center experiment with the use of DC power. Small changes to the power supply on the servers enabled them to run at 380VDC.

Paul Hsu, of Facebook, presents at Silicon Valley Leadership Group 2011 Data Center Efficiency Summit. He and Dan Lee (not pictured) discussed Facebook's data center design and the Open Compute Project (Photo: Colleen Miller)

IBM

The IBM Almaden Research Center served as the setting for the annual Data Center Efficiency Summit put together by the Silicon Valley Leadership group.

The panel of John Musilli, Intel; Sandeep Gopisetty, IBM Research Center; and Jeff Rose, Vantage Data Centers, discussed the next "big thing" in data center technology.

In a forward-looking panel, speakers discussed how to move from the traditional Facilities and IT silos, emphasizing that the human factor of changing decision-makers minds often blocks real energy and cost savings.

Hard_Disks_IBM

IBM invented hard disks in the mid-1950s and a display of some of the world's first hard disks can be seen in the hallway at the Silicon Valley research facility.

It's hard to ignore IBM's history in the technology sector, when you can bump into it in the halls of their facility. The photo above shows two of the world's first hard disk drives which were invented by IBM in San Jose in 1955. The first commercial hard disk shipped in 1956, with the IBM 305 RAMAC machine.