Schedule

Bob Cassiliano, 7x24 Exchange chairman, will open the conference, provide an overview, review meeting logistics and address general housekeeping items.

In order to lead, you have to inspire people to want to follow. A true leader knows that leadership extends beyond self. From the arenas of professional sports to the boardrooms of major companies, Molly shares what drives top leaders and how they inspire collective success.

Molly Fletcher (bio)
Former Sports Agent, Consultant & Author

Leadership Logic Consulting and the Allied Testing & Commissioning Council will present 7x24 Exchange International and its Board of Directors with the prestigious 2018 Platinum Heart Award, specifically for the delivery of innovative national conferences to the Data Center and Mission Critical Operations Industry! The award is given in recognition of individuals and organizations whose contributions, innovations support the information technology and mission critical operations industries.

Today, retention is more a matter of attention, of capturing the mindshare of your leaders for the brief time that they are with you. For however loyal and engaged your leaders are, so too are the 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 people in your organization who are being led by them. Fran will share the techniques that helped him retain highly marketable technology employees throughout a 30 year highly successful technology career.

Francis (Fran) Dramis (bio)
CEO 
FDRAMIS, LLC

MTech has conducted over 100 studies using Fault Tree Analysis to calculate the reliability of data centers. All studies were performed as described in IEEE Std 3006.7-2013 - IEEE Recommended Practice for Determining the Reliability of 7x24 Continuous Power Systems in Industrial and Commercial Facilities. The presentation will review and summarize the results of those 20 years of studies. The 7x24 industry has evolved rapidly over the past 2 decades. This presentation will identify common questions and weaknesses, trends in technology, design, and customer goals, and recurring problems. The rich output of a fault tree analysis study includes much more than the summary metrics of the probability of failure, reliability, availability, and unavailability of data centers. We will describe the process MTech has developed to perform the studies and present representative results.

Steve Fairfax (bio)
President 
MTechnology

Credit to:

• Neal Dowling
• Tim Griffin
• Yoonik Kim
• Katherine Poole
• Pat Weidknecht

Designed to encourage in-depth discussion and debate on the latest challenges in data center planning, design and operation, topics will include: trends in infrastructure design resiliency, energy efficient design and operational practices, capacity planning and management, and the day-to-day challenges in managing data center operations. The moderator will guide the discussion with the use of PowerPoint slides and handouts; However, the real star of this session will be you, the end user! Bring your appetites, but more importantly, be ready to engage your peers in an exciting interactive discussion on the latest challenges of our industry. Don’t forget those business cards as this will be a great opportunity to meet your peers in the industry!

Moderator:
David Schirmacher (bio)
President, Reset Advisors, LLC and
President, 7x24 Exchange International

As we look at fostering the next generation of talent, we want to ensure we are harnessing all available resources for greater growth and innovation and that we are diminishing the power of unconscious bias from important business decisions. It is well documented that diversity has a direct and positive impact on an organization's financial performance. According to McKinsey, diversity increases economic performance up to two times for profitability and stock valuation of companies with gender-diverse management teams generate 40% higher operating margins. Further, organizations in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to have positive financial returns and organizations with the highest rate of racial diversity brought in nearly 15 times more sales revenue. With this in mind let us learn how our panelists are helping their organizations foster the next generation of talent.

Moderator:

Juli Ierulli  (bio)
Marketing Communications Manager  
Caterpillar, and  
Director-Marketing, Vendor Representative 
7x24 Exchange International

Panelists:

Tamara Budec (bio)
VP, Implementation Services
Digital Realty

Randi Johnson, PE, CxA, LEED AP (bio)
Data Center Facilities Operations Manager  
Facebook

Nancy Novak  (bio)
VP of Construction 
Compass Datacenters

James Swensen   (bio)
Global Facilities Operations Director  
Facebook

Don’t just reject heat, put it to use. Discover how to address heat at the source by harnessing its energy, and employing it as an integral part of the entire data center cooling infrastructure. The potential of performance enhancements along with the efficiency gains and footprint reductions will be outlined. The presenter will discuss how scalable such solutions can be in a stand-alone configuration, within Micro-DC’s, as an element of modular DC structures or fully integrated as part of large-scale deployments.

Joerg Desler (bio)
President 
Stulz Air Technology Systems

David C. Meadows II, (bio)
Director of Industry, Standards, and Technology,
Stulz Air Technology Systems

Today’s hyperscale facilities continue to place efforts on design models involving common elements such as diesel engine generators and traditional UPS systems. These elements are often designed to provide extended off-grid runtime, reaching a point of diminishing returns. The presenters will discuss new battery storage technology for data centers and the application of incorporating the technology for backup power and power conditioning into hyperscale facilities. Integration of the battery storage system technology will be discussed on a technical level as well as the associated design challenges and schedule drivers.

Rajan Battish (bio)
VP 
CallisonRTKL

Jake Millan  (bio)
Senior Project Development Manager 
Tesla

This presentation discusses data center optical trends, including updates on emerging technologies, as well as Ethernet and Fibre Channel standards activities. Attendees will understand what is driving transmission electronics and standards to evolve, and what is making optical connectivity the dominant media in the data center. They will also learn more about data that shows why OM3 / OM4 fiber is the primary optical connectivity, and how it supports easy migration to 10G/40G/100G data rates.

Doug Coleman (bio)
Manager, Technology Standards 
Corning Optical Communications

SPONSORED BY:

As the leading knowledge exchange in the mission critical space, 7x24 Exchange recognized the importance of increasing the engagement and participation of women in the industry which led to the development of WiMCO. The committee focuses on recruiting women into the organization, supporting WiMCO initiatives at a Chapter level and providing leadership opportunities through the community. Join us for an interactive networking session and engage with your peers in the industry.

MODERATOR:
Juli Ierulli (Bio)
Marketing Communications Manager,
Large Power Systems - Industry Solutions, Caterpillar and
Marketing Director, Vendor Representative
7x24 Exchange International

Bob Cassiliano will review day one highlights, recognize the conference Corporate Leadership Program sponsors and give a 7x24 Exchange update.

Part of what is considered the "programmable economy," blockchain is the core technology that is used for verification and recording of cryptocurrencies transactions, such as bitcoin and few thousands more "altcoins." The interest in the blockchain technology is way beyond digital currency, but for its potential to provide the platform for the "next internet,” for applications such as signing contracts, authentication, real estate registries, etc. The distributed ledger, that is blockchain, is able to keep all transactions in blocks linked cryptographically one to the other. The presentation will discuss the directions of the technology, it will present a few use cases and it will debate some related security concerns.

Kfir L. Godrich (bio)
Managing Director, Global Head of Technology and Enterprise Services  
BlackRock

Fueled by cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things, video streaming, & mobile applications, the hyperscale data center has become a foundational component in data center network architectures. As the hyperscale market continues its unprecedented growth, the data center construction industry has needed to evolve to meet the deployment needs. This presentation will highlight how the roles of the value chain, including construction managers, electrical contractors, and consulting engineers, have adapted to the new hyperscale landscape. The panelists will explore the historic role of the value chain, the drivers of this role change, and the projected evolution in data center construction.

Moderator:

Frank Nash (bio)
Senior Director of Sales 
Schneider Electric

Panelists:

Greg Botteon (bio)
Vice President Mission Critical / Mechanical-Electrical Services  
Whiting-Turner Contracting Company

Addam Friedl (bio)
Managing Principal
kW Mission Critical Engineering

Nathan Hazelwood (bio)
Director of Strategic Procurement  
QTS

Bill Mazzetti, PE (bio)
Senior Vice President, Engineering & Chief Engineer 
Rosendin Electric

James McMurry will provide an overview of the amazing work of St. Jude, their approach to and the impact of research, statistics, latest technology, and their relentless pursuit of cures. He will talk about the importance and challenges of having their own facility and what he expects this facility to do for the next 50 years. Presenters will discuss the facility design, MEP and Architectural, and its tie-in to the campus and the master plan for the future.

Rich Donaldson (bio)
Associate Partner 
Syska Hennessy Group, Inc.

Greg LaCour (bio)
Principal 
Gensler

James McMurry (bio)
Director of Operations and Research Computing 
St. Jude Children’s Hospital

Edge computing is ready for dramatic growth in 2018. While various types of edge devices have been around for years, they were mostly relegated to ancillary or communications aggregation functions, with the vast majority of ‘real computing’ still being conducted in large centralized data centers. In 2018, that is all changing. Distributed computing and cloud-type services are now being fully deployed at the edge, requiring this new boundary to exhibit the same mission critical characteristics that were previously found only in centralized data centers. IT departments need to expand their definition of a data center to include reliable computing at the edge. This session will explore the ways in which IT Departments will be able to embrace the edge without incurring many of the same traditional risks associated with remote infrastructures.

Matt Thoene (bio)
Senior Vice President of Global Services
Uptime Institute

In this presentation, we’ll address the opportunities and challenges of an edge-to-core data center strategy and provide a roadmap for implementing this strategy. We’ll review the trends driving the growth at the edge and the implications of this growth to core and edge facilities alike. We’ll also provide best practices for edge deployment and management, ranging from single rack locations to freestanding data centers. In addition, we’ll review emerging technologies that can be used to remotely monitor and manage edge locations, including using IoT technology to holistically manage infrastructure in remote locations.

Patrick Quirk (bio)
Vice President & General Manager 
Vertiv

Data Centers have come a long way from the old mainframe computer rooms of the past. Today’s data centers showcase the latest advances in software-defined storage and networking, Artificial Intelligence, modular and scalable hardware, and virtualized and containerized applications. We will show how today’s physical infrastructure has evolved to keep up with these technology advancements. We will highlight what can be done to keep data centers highly available and operating at peak performance by implementing a rigorous process of assessing, “fixing the basics,” optimizing, and driving automation/control. This process will illustrate how traditional data centers of the past can become smart data centers of the future.

Russell Senesac (bio)
Director of Data Center Strategy Development 
Schneider Electric

Data center cooling systems have varied widely over the years, yet the goal was always the same: keeping the facility running smoothly by preventing the internal equipment from overheating. Today’s data centers are ranked not just on reliability, but also on efficiency and cost effectiveness – and the means of cooling the data center is one of the biggest energy and cost factors. As designs keep moving forward we can see how cooling solutions and strategies have evolved and where they seem to be headed into the future. This discussion will review the iterative design steps that have been taken in the past to see how cooling strategies have improved, and then forecast the next phases we may see in the near and perhaps not-so-near future.

John Peterson (bio)
Program Manager 
AECOM

Get ready for some movie making fun… Our first stop includes three different locations in Universal CityWalk™ at Universal Orlando Resort™. Enjoy three themed rooms and a huge dance floor at the groove™ nightclub, strike out your hunger with classic hot dogs from some of the nation’s most famous ballparks at the Hot Dog Hall of Fame®, and head south of the border for a taste of Mexico City at Antojitos Authentic Mexican Food™.

Afterward 7x24 Exchange will be escorted to Universal’s Islands of Adventure™ where we’ve reserved Skull Island: Reign of Kong™ and Jurassic Park™ just for you. All night long, you’ll have unlimited access to amazing rides and attractions. You’ll escape the jaws of a hungry T. rex, explore the earth’s primordial past, embark on a colossal ride for your life, and more.

Jurassic Park TM Universal Studios/Amblin. Hot Dog Hall of Fame is a registered trademark of Creative Attractions, LLC. Universal elements and all related indicia TM & © 2018 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.

Special thanks to the partners that made this event possible:

ABB, ASCO, Caterpillar Inc., Clune Construction Company, Critical Facilities Solutions, Data Aire, Federal Pacific, EnerSys, Florida Power and Light, Gordon, Inc., MTU Onsite Energy, PDI, Powering America (NECA/IBEW/LMCC), PowerSecure, S&C Electric Company, Schneider Electric, Siemens Industry, Inc., Sika Corporation, Southwire, Starline, Stulz Air Technology Systems, Sunbelt Rentals, Inc., Syska Hennessy Group, The Whiting-Turner Contracting Co., Thomson Power Systems, Wärtsilä North America, Inc.

Bob Cassiliano will review highlights from day two and address housekeeping items of interest.

Large data center operators such as Google, eBay, Microsoft and others have the ability and resources to optimize all aspects of their data center, including reliability, availability and energy efficiency. These operators are able to unify control and management aspects at all levels and boundaries in the data center starting with customized server designs to cooling systems to sensing, overall control, and power distribution and to the service classes offered. However, there is a large percentage of data centers that use commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) components for their data center and come up with specific management techniques that may not be at the leading edge. This panel discussion focuses on emerging techniques for bringing these COTS-implemented data centers up to the agility, reliability and efficiency levels that represent 21st-century practices. The panel also aims to initiate a discussion on enabling technologies, design and operational guidelines for COTS-based data centers. The panelists will have short presentations and will be asked to address the pros and cons of requiring data centers to be run by intrinsically intelligent operating systems utilizing controls, distributed sensing and self-learning algorithms.

Moderator:

Bahgat Sammakia (bio)
Center Director, Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2) and 
Vice-President for Research, Binghamton University

Panelists:

Dereje Agonafer (bio)
Jenkins Garrett Professor
Site Director, NSF IUCRC Center in Energy Efficient Systems
Director, Electronics, MEMS & Nanoelectronics Systems Packaging Center
University of Texas, Arlington

Kanad Ghose (bio)
BU Site Director, ES2 and  
Professor of Computer Science, Binghamton University

Roger Schmidt (bio)
IBM Fellow Emeritus, Traugott Distinguished Professor,
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dept.,
(Retired IBM Chief Engineer for Data Center Energy Efficiency) Syracuse University

Mark Seymour (bio)
CTO 
Future Facilities

Blockchain oriented technologies have initiated a new digital era, which those who know technology have compared to the very beginnings of the Internet. The Blockchain is being heralded as the second generation of the world wide web. The first generation collected wisdom and connected information on our planet, and the next, in the use of Blockchain, adds consistency, transparency, and truth. This session explores the impact of legitimacy crises, unknown accountability, erroneous or profit-centric expert opinion, and the need to use intermediaries for the validation of identity, actual value or project performance. Attendees will consider that the end is very near for the wrong thinking and misunderstandings that have arisen from the influential data center tier rating systems, uptime style availability ratings, and the myth of Five 9’s infrastructure resiliency. From definitions to analysis of impacts, attendees will gain valuable insight into improved forward-thinking data center strategies, and how design and construction efficiencies will be affected.

James McCarthy (bio)
Director - Solutions Engineering 
M+W Group

This case study examines how self-contained, rack-based, micro data centers have been deployed in lieu of traditional enterprise constructed IT facilities for distributed computing sites. These sites include both single room environments and on-premise DR environments. The presentation will show how the use of micro data centers grew from a custom designed targeted use to flexible, modular, solution that can meet a global standardization and be deployed in various environments. The implications of global provisioning will be explored along with lessons learned and the challenges faced in deploying this non-traditional system.

Daniel Boyce (bio)
Global Manager, IT Room Support 
GlaxoSmithKline

Ron Magee (bio)
Owner 
RonM, LLC