This week I had the pleasure of presenting at the Uptime Institutes Group 3 and 5 network Conferance with my colleague John Gray. First, let me thank the Uptime Institute for the opportunity and also the terrific audience. We received terrific feedback and engaged in some really great discussions. I would also like to thank the other presenters for their fantastic presentations, especially the team from Thompson Reuters who presented on two fantastic topics and the Fidelity team for hosting and providing great input to the group. What a week!

John and I presented on project valuation and selection. As I mentioned, the session was well received and I’d like to think our audience left with something they didn’t already have. We discussed how future cash flows are important, why NPV is the tool of choice for project selection, the undeniable flaws in payback period project selection, estimating cash flows and energy savings and even got into EC Fan vs VFD discussions to illustrate how NPV can be useful to determine the optimum project path. We talked about crafting a long term project plan which builds on the three pillars of data center engineering; capacity, efficiency, and reliability. Fans laws were discussed in our “Overtime” deck, and a few members were able to share their success stories in implementing a long term project plan, using NPV analysis.

Some of my favorite topics for other presenters included demand reduction on a large scale (a back of napkin analysis based on their success indicated our team may be able to save nearly $7mln annually if we were able to implement it), human biases and how the human element can impact reliability with a great analysis from the Challenger shuttle disaster, the importance of procedural compliance in the ITIL spirit (a huge focus for our group), and several others.

Really, every single presentation was fantastic and they all, ultimately, seemed to build on each other. Each topic reinforced the other, and a team that executes on multiple themes will experience compounding benefits.

I have been to a few data center focused events now, and I have to say this was by far the best. Legitimately, every single presentation, was better than every single other presentation I have seen. The member presentation format is just so phenomenal and such a great interaction.

Net-Net, being an Uptime Institute partner is a great experience and I highly recommend it!;