Data Center World took me down memory lane: until RFID was mentioned
Posted by Patrick Sweeney on Tue, Oct 05, 2010
I’m out in sunny Las Vegas speaking at the 30th AFCOM Data Center World about RFID Asset Tracking for the Data Center. I started to stroll down memory lane when I saw old friends and heard talk of watts per square foot and Megawatt generators. You see, I spent the first half of my career running data centers and knew the industry back when…well back when things were comparatively like Henry Ford’s Model A. That has all changed and RFID is right in the thick of the change.
Today I heard talks about how Yahoo doesn’t even use cooling in their data centers or Google drops in pre-built pods. And the first three sessions I attended from the opening keynote to a leader from Australia all had a slide that mentioned RFID. Why?
Data center automation ends with RFID
Many facets of the data center that used to be manual and very customized, from racking servers and connecting power to tagging chassis and manually entering data are being automated for two reason:
1. Increased efficiency meaning lower cost
2. Greater security and accountability
The data center world I knew ten years ago has given way to a fully lights out, automated environment where the goal is to have no people ever have to go into the facility once the pod or container is up and provisioned. The term run-book automation wasn’t even invented back then. The last link in the automation chain is RFID. That means for inventory and SOX compliance you need to be able to push a button and inventory a rack or full data center. RFID solves that pain.
I first found out about RFID in 1999 when I read an article about it in the MIT Technology review. I then looked at using it at ServerVault where I was the CEO. The technology wasn’t ready for prime time back then – but it sure is now.
Three reasons RFID is working in the data center
Most of the world’s top banks are now using RFID to track data center assets. The federal government is also adopting aggressively. This adoption has only happened in the last 18 months because of three primary reasons:
1. Technology has improved allowing 99.9% read accuracy
2. Cost has been cut in half from only a few years ago
3. International standards mean all the ISO readers can read all the ISO tags without any fear of obsolescence.
The bottom line is that RFID is a great tool for data center managers and end-users here at Data Center World are living proof of the value of the technology. No more hype – just well documented use case studies.