Mark Bramfitt - Utilities & IT

Great Site For Guidance On Data Storage

Here's a great site for those of you interested in developments in the data storage world.

The three Davids (Vellante, Floyer, and Butler) behind this effort have perfected a great model for sharing industry insight and developing and delivering high-quality content. They have a real interest in the energy efficiency attributes of storage technology, so this is the place to gather information on that subject.

I recommend signing up and enrolling in the subscription service, and watching out for regular webinar briefings. I sat in on one this week which clued me in to the move to solid state storage in data center applications, which utilities and data center operators should be watching with keen interest.

(It's clearly time that I develop a resource links section on my landing page - I'll get right on it!)

Intel Site: Great Utility Data Center & IT EE Program Resource

This is one of those things I should have posted a long time ago, but a recent client inquiry at least prodded me to do it now.

The client wanted to know how to find out about utitlity energy effciency program offerings for data centers across the US, without having to do endless internet searches on his own.

Intel has created just such a resource at their Premier IT Professionals site, which features not only a map and lookup feature for program information, but a blog, technical resources, and useful links.

Full disclosure: Intel is one of my clients, and I have been producing some blog content for this site. But I don't at all mind you bookmarking it along with my blog!

Reading Now: Collapse by Jared Diamond

I must confess I was wary of delving into Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, as I was never able to plow through to the end of Guns, Germs, and Steel.

I'm glad I worked through this one though, even if it was a few years after publication, as Mr. Diamond has added to my world view of environmental issues beyond my extensive reading about climate change.

Here, for both ancient societies and our current global community, he describes how societies have failed to manage natural resources to such an extent that they completely fail.

I highly recommend the work, though I would steer people to read the Prologue, maybe just the section on Easter Island in Part Two, the chapters on China and Australia in Part Three, and all of Part Four, where he discusses practical lessons that can be applied based on the analyses of each collapsed or collapsing society.

There is no explicit discussion of energy resources in the book (though it does come up in the discussion of China and Australia), but it isn't at all difficult to apply the thinking around resource depletion to the energy sector. 

In summary, a challenging read in terms of scholarly tone and sobering conclusions, but worth the high praise it has received.