At Uptime Symposium 2011, Mike Manos gave a great presentation on how data center managers should engage with their IT and business management counterparts to come up with an integrated cloud-data center strategy. Manos said the data center facilities professionals he’s talked to about cloud computing sound like Eeyore, a pessimistic stuffed donkey from the Winnie-the-Pooh children’s books. Here are a set of video highlights from the presentation from Dave O’Hara’s blog.

Manos’s talk covered a lot of ground, but the main takeaway was that data center facilities managers need to embrace change, drive new technology adoption, and take the initiative with executive management. Manos wrote in a blog post that the most popular sessions at Symposium weren’t necessarily end users doing something new or cutting edge, but instead traditional enterprises (i.e. not Google or Facebook) adopting newer technologies.

But still… from Manos’s blog.

There was still a healthy population of people who were downplaying those technologies. Downplaying their own ability to do those things. Re-stating the perennial dogmatic chant that these types of things (essentially any new ideas post 2001 in my mind) would never work for their companies.

Jay Fry from CA wrote a good blog post on Manos’s talk and pointed out the takeaway for data center managers getting ready to jump into cloud computing:

It means an investment to get applications ready for what happens when infrastructure fails (which it does) and to understand the operational impact of moving to the cloud (which is too often overlooked). It means an acknowledgment that a move to the cloud means a clearer understanding between how applications are architected and how data center facilities are run. Or at least an understanding of what you need to know when computing begins to happen both inside and outside your physical premises.

Regardless of the technology — be it cloud computing, higher inlet air temperatures, economization — data center professionals need to actively drive new technology adoption and strategy to stay relevant in today’s corporate environments where increasingly more IT workloads are being moved off-premise. Cloud computing happens to be the most visible at this point.

So to steal one of my favorite sayings from Uptime Institute Executive Director Pitt Turner, what are you going to do when you get back to your office on Monday about cloud computing?

Mike Wills is Director of Facilities Management, Corporate Real Estate, BMO Financial Group and is responsible for facilities operations at BMO Financial Group including data centers, trade floors, contact centers, major office complexes, and the retail branch network. Under Mr Wills’ leadership, BMO has received industry-leading recognition, delivering 11 consecutive years of 100% IT component availability in its major data centers. Mr Wills has more than 30 years of IT and facilities management experience in the North American financial services sector and is internationally recognized for his thought leadership and knowledge in managing highly critical facilities.

In this video, Wills discusses how a diligent IT asset management program extended the life of BMO’s facility by four years. He also discusses how his organization restructured roles and responsibilities to create common language for data center management.

Wills’s work engendered a culture shift, creating a high reliability organization, and has had a positive impact beyond the data center.

Uptime Institute EMEA Network Director Mark Acton discusses Uptime Institute’s endorsement of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres in this video.

Uptime Institute Symposium’s theme for 2011 was The Disrupted Data Center: Cloud, Cost, Capacity and Carbon. Pitt Turner, Executive Director of Uptime Institute discusses the other four “Cs” from Uptime Symposium: Comprehension, Compliance, Courage and Cooling.

Greenpeace made headlines in the data center community by challenging Facebook to move away from coal-fired power in its Prineville, Oregon data center. In the video below, Uptime Institute interviews Greenpeace’s Gary Cook, and discusses the organization’s strategy and motivation for engaging data center owners and operators.

Greenpeace’s recent report, How dirty is your data, ranked ten large technology companies’ data centers on environmental impact — mainly cloud computing providers.

“The cloud computing providers are very brand conscious companies, they present themselves as being very green with goals around energy performance. These companies already get why this is important. We’re trying to get them to take responsibility to drive clean energy. These guys have to get into the policy game, start changing the rules to help drive clean energy for everyone,” Cook said.

“These IT and Web-scale companies can drive clean energy demand. Look at what Facebook is doing with the Open Compute Project, driving design and vendors to get super efficient. Why can’t they take the same approach with the other vendor, the utility?”