Leading Edge Design Group

I’ve been a fan of Apple products since computers have been a part of my life.  They’re sleek, efficient and most importantly different.  Every time I see their logo it brings a smile to my face.  Their aura emits a “simple” glow, yet behind the scenes a complex set of developed pieces is working together to make an end users experience painless.  Apple has effectively targeted different groups of end users and offered a plethora of products to cover the different needs/wants of these audiences.  One of their latest releases has received a slight buzz of criticism surrounding it’s presence; the iPad. 

You’ll either love or hate the iPad; the middle ground between these emotions is scarce.  Critics deem it pointless, unnecessary and under accessorized.  I’m at the opposite end of the spectrum; iPads serve multiple purposes, they’re quite useful and come out of the box ready to serve.  E-mail?  Absolutely, the real question is how many of your email accounts do you want delivered to the iPad (including your exchange account from work).  Music, Movies and Photos?  Of course.  Need the weather?  Done, there’s free app waiting to show you more than the 6:00 news. Need something else?  Browse the 10,000 plus apps, chance would have it you’ll find what you need.

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Online stores have a traffic pattern of the sites that people visit; monitoring how consumers got to the site or specific page and how much time they spent looking at products and recording what was purchased.

Owners of retail stores gather information about sales at the register every day. They have a daily record of what items or combinations of items were purchased by each customer, however they don’t have any record of where customers traveled in their store and how much time they spent shopping in a given area of the store. Imagine if that information was available to them so they could better streamline their displays based on foot traffic and shopping behaviors.

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Virtualization technologies today are allowing customers to consolidate servers at ratios of 15:1, 20:1, and possibly more, helping IT teams increase operational efficiency and decrease rack footprint requirements inside their data center.  In addition, organizations are leveraging virtualization for the energy improvements it provides them, as the total decrease in energy realized by consolidating multiple legacy “volume” servers far outweighs the energy consumed by one more high-powered blade center. 

To encourage these efficient practices in the data center, we are starting to see utility companies provide incentives for virtualization/consolidation projects.  Although not universally offered, we have seen existing prescriptive programs where utilities are offering incentives of $100, $200, and even $250 per server removed or consolidated.  By making these programs prescriptive, utilities are essentially equating the replacement of a volume server with a virtual server (through consolidation) to the replacement of a T12 lighting fixture with a HPT8.  In other words, virtualize your servers and you are automatically more efficient. 

Or are you?

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OM1?  OM3?  RCD2?  What do these cryptic fiber optic acronyms mean anyways?  In this case the first two are different grades of glass, the third being a horrible joke that got your attention.  Regardless, I’d like to take a minute to view the world of fiber from a strangers point of view.

Fiber optic cable: a wave of the future in the world of communications (and a slight trip to the past in some cases).  Simply put it’s just a piece of glass that’s drawn extremely thin with some “special” ingredients added to the center, aka core.  Light enters one end and on a good day, it will come out the other.  The real magic of fiber is what concoction of “special” ingredients they lace into the core.  Heading away from the glass there are a slew of different jackets, coatings, tubes and armor options available to help protect the glass for whatever application it’s needed for.  Five sentences later, you’ve just completed Fiber 101.   

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LED lights are here and they are here to stay. The efficacy of the products has got to the point where they have surpassed all of the existing technologies in many applications. Outdoor lights, cold storage facilities and refrigerated cases are ideal uses for LED (LED’s unlike other light sources produce more light and last longer in a cold environment). In these areas well designed LED light fixtures provide a more even distribution of light with far less power consumption than any other lighting technology.

Then why are we not seeing wholesale changes to the current lighting? The answer is cost. Most customers are afraid of the larger upfront cost for this new more efficient product. The LED products are three sometimes up to ten times more expensive than other products on the market. But are they really more expensive?

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So here’s what is happening in the market place. The vendors are all on a major campaign with end users (primarily industrial concerns) to practically give these T5 & T8 systems away since they know that it won’t be long until the LED lighting solution dominates the market… and the rebates for these fluorescent lighting systems are still available, making it all that much more attractive  to the end user.

Although the pricing for the LED solutions will consistently drop as the technology improves and the options increase, there is presently no way to compete with a fluorescent lighting solution on strictly a cost comparison for a turnkey installation, especially when you factor in the incentives provided for the fluorescent solutions that are not available for the LED solutions.  It is like the utility companies, through their retro-active energy initiative programs, are steering their customers to invest in old technology simply because their incentives are based on this old technology and they are not prepared for the technologies that are available today.

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The Pledge: An IP camera surveillance system and a card access solution. Two completely independent systems. One assists covering the details you missed while you weren’t watching and the other guards access physical entry into or around your facility. Most of the setups I’ve come across traditionally stand alone, are separately managed and a link between the two is nonexistent.

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I had the good fortune of attending the Uptime Institute Symposium in New York City a couple weeks ago and found the expertise, knowledge exchange, and call for industry collaboration to be really remarkable (along with the way in which the Institute representatives upheld the schedule by vociferously terminating sessions the second they extended past their allotted time). Although the Institute has focused primarily on improving “reliability and uninterruptible availability,” in the data center, the Symposium almost exclusively revolved around energy efficiency in the data center. In the Opening Keynote addresses, Pitt Turner elaborated on “real” PUE while Lauralee Martin from Jones Lang LaSalle spoke on the “Greening of IT” from a CFO’s perspective. If you couldn’t have derived the theme of the Symposium from the efficiency-dominated schedule, the opening addresses officially declared the Symposium all about energy and less about uptime.

While the clamorous disputes over the validity of PUE and the lack of an information technology component to the Tier Standards were certainly compelling, the most interesting part of the Symposium was the predictive portrait the discussions framed for the immediate future of the industry. Change is coming—rapidly—to the data center industry and it is our job as client advocates to ensure that we are preparing our end users for the impacts these changes will have on their data centers.

A few highlights include:

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An interesting phenomenon has begun to happen when we discuss energy efficiency in meetings and seminars.  The topic has become so commonplace that our clients start to get that glazed over look implying, “I’ve heard it all before.”  This is an unfortunate byproduct of the hype and marketing that many companies currently employ to sell their new, more “efficient” products. The true message of energy efficient design is getting lost in the noise.

Practicing energy efficiency is, on the surface, replacing light bulbs and buying Energy Star appliances, motors, etc… but there are also many who utilize vigorous demand reduction practices, utilizing both passive and active measures to reduce their energy consumption. Passive measures are considered to be the above mentioned product replacements with their more efficient versions while active solutions employ systems that help control the environment, such as daylight harvesting, occupancy sensors, VFD drive and control packages. These combined efforts are significantly more effective than passive alone, and can provide a considerable reduction in a facility’s energy consumption. But we are still avoiding the root of the problem: people. Strategies that focus on energy optimization are designed to leverage the technologies available with passive and active energy management tools, combined with system-wide education, monitoring and feedback. We must employ the people that interact with and design the systems to work in an efficient manner.

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I see it happening all too often on majority of the projects I’ve been involved with, Value Added Engineering (VAE).  The concept of VAE as a whole is fine with me, but the concept that needs to be addressed is the “Hey let’s take a look at this project as whole, and find areas where we can substitute Product A with Product B and save us X amount of dollars.”  As I said, I have no problem with this process, it happens on a large number of big and small projects, but it’s time owners take a different approach to VAE rather than just to eliminate up front cost.

Let’s imagine you the reader are an owner of a new building that’s in the process of being built. The reason you hire all these contractors and designers is because it’s their job to design it to your requirements.  Whoever is running the project for you tells you that the project is going to cost $1 million and you start to panic because the budget was $800K.  VAE is then suggested to cut costs and you say go for it, and a week later you get a new VAE budget of 750K.  Everything is great right?  Your project is under budget, and you are ready to go.

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