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?

Data Center Knowledge reported on AFCOM’s new “State of the Data Center” survey results, and pointed out that server and storage deployments are growing, while data center staff is shrinking, or staying the same in most data centers.

According to preliminary results from Uptime Institute’s Inaugural Data Center Survey, 71% of data center owners/operators had 24×7 staffing at their data centers. Around 32% of respondents said their data centers were understaffed. And 60% reported budget as the most significant constraint on staffing needs.

According to Uptime Institute’s AIR database, 70% of reported data center outages are directly attributable to human error. Management decisions regarding staffing levels, training and maintenance may have the most significant impact on a data center site’s availability over time. This is why staffing requirements play such a prominent role in Uptime Institute’s Tier Standard Operational Sustainability (see document for staffing/availability requirements matrix).

The right number of qualified people on appropriate shifts is critical to meeting long-term performance objectives, providing a comprehensive maintenance program, and coordinating effective financial management and capacity planning in the data center.

Click here to participate in Uptime Institute’s Inaugural data center survey and receive a free copy of the findings.

Comment on data center staffing issues on our blog, or reply on Twitter @UptimeInstitute.

This month, Uptime Institute Professional Services brought on two new staffers.

Shawn Novak is a Principal of UIPS’s Digital Infrastructure Services group. He comes most recently from HP’s EYP MCF division, and before that he was in the telecommunications field. He has been in the mission critical data center business for over twelve years.

Novak will be helping UIPS clients plan their data center roadmaps — working with the IT and Facilities teams to find the best solution for their business.

“In a typical engagement, we are brought in to validate business models from the client before they approach the board for financing. The most common clients I run across, engage us because they have run into capacity constraints on the MEP systems, want to upgrade the facilities infrastructure, want to build a new data center, want to consolidate their data centers or just simply need to align their business model with what resides on the raised floor. So, we take their historical growth data, continue it out over 5+ years, then work with the IT teams to try and optimize their environments with strategic planning (virtualization, consolidation, optimization). I have seen clients who are ready to spend millions of dollars on a substantial upgrades or builds, when all they needed is a strategic growth plan that pushes back on the IT teams to be more aggressive on their optimization planning.”

Novak interviews Facility and IT managers, across all of the disciplines to discuss their constraints, and documents data center demand trends dating back two years. Based on historical trending and assumed future growth, the DIS team will develop multiple models representing a customer’s data center’s future growth plans. DIS then creates business models based on CAPEX and OPEX that the client can use to approach the board for funding their projects.

Matt Mescall just joined the UIPS Denver office as a Consultant.  He will be providing both Topology and Operational Sustainability consulting to our clients.

Mescall comes to us from IBM where he both operated their Boulder, CO data center as well as providing consulting to other IBM data centers on a global basis for the last 11 years.  His time with IBM also included various Engineering Project Manager positions as well as Facility Engineer and Financial Analyst duties in locations throughout the U.S.

Mescall has a BS in Civil Engineering from University of Southern California and an MS in Construction Management from Georgia Tech.  He is a member of the local IFMA chapter where he has recently served as Chapter Secretary.  He also is an Engineer-In-Training (EIT) and looks to obtain his Professional Engineer license as soon as possible.

Michael Manos, Senior VP of Technologies at AOL is presenting at the Uptime Institute Symposium in Santa Clara, May 9-12 2011 on the topic of cloud computing.

But before you roll your eyes over another cloud love-fest, you need to hear Manos out. The former Microsoft exec built out one of the largest cloud infrastructures on the planet, and more importantly — he understands the impact of cloud computing on data center operations staff.

C-Level execs are reading about cloud computing in airline magazines, and end users from marketing and software development departments are already working in the cloud without any oversight.

And data center managers are caught in the middle, trying to piece together a strategy that meets the company’s business objectives.

So what happens when an executive decides to move data center workloads into the cloud, because a service provider is “cheaper” than internal IT operations?