Introducing New Data Center Worldisms

In one of four Data Center World keynotes this week in San Antonio, Texas, a three-person panel of Data Center Institute board members and a very energetic moderator, self-proclaimed millennial and veteran technologist Bill Kleyman, shared the results of the long-awaited State of the Data Center Industry survey findings.

The bulk of the session focused on the trends developing around new digital initiatives with respect to the cloud, disaster recovery, the edge, and DCIM. The 30-plus page report spanned much more, but there’s only so much you can cover in an hour—even with Kleyman’s rapid-fire delivery and to-the-point comments from Hector Diaz, Carrie Goetz, and Bill Doty (the most concise one).

Just as the survey revealed industry trends, the panel may have set a couple as well by coining, let’s call them Data Center Worldisms, for lack of a better term.

Let’s start with two phrases introduced by Kleyman: “Slow is the new down;” and “If everything is critical, nothing is critical.”

Kleyman mentioned his first new buzz-phrase when addressing the technology trends most implemented by IT organizations for disaster recovery and resiliency, including flash storage, hyperconvergence, and active-active configurations.

He explained that it’s no longer just the most crucial healthcare or banking systems that require 100 percent uptime; today, you must appease the single end user who closes his or her laptop in frustration even if it’s only lagging a nano-second. “Slow is the new down” is a result of high expectations coupled with short fuses.

Also in the context of disaster recovery, Kleyman spoke about the importance of performing a risk assessment before drafting any plan that paints a complete picture of how people, products, and processes would be affected in the event of a disaster.

He explained that part of the assessment should involve defining “critical.” Sounds like a no-brainer, but it may just be the most challenging task. This should be done during the risk assessment process as well as over time. Critical systems. Critical processes. Critical people. What’s critical today may not be critical tomorrow (and vice versa), but one thing doesn’t change: “Organizations need to protect what’s critical at any cost, and if everything is critical, nothing is critical.”

While the panel recognized the ongoing need for and evolution of DCIM in the coming years, Goetz pointed out that the process of narrowing down how it can work to meet the specific needs of a data center can be very time intensive and wasteful. She referred to it as “toilet time.”

Oftentimes, data center managers can be sucked into the proverbial dog-and-pony show from sales reps who show you all the bells and whistles while you may only need the basics. It’s best to determine far ahead of time your specific needs and communicate them to a vendor so you can steer the conversation.

While these new Data Center Worldisms rolled off the tongues of Kleyman, Diaz, and Goetz, Bill Doty stuck to no-frills, informative, and concise responses.

Not surprising in the least bit, Kleyman closed the keynote by taking a selfie with the DCI Board trio and his couple hundred new friends sitting in the audience as he encouraged everyone to post #DataCenterWorld #ghettocolo to Twitter.