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Friday, April 7th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 2:17a | These Women Know Their Stuff Attended almost equally by men and women, the four professionals on the”Women in the Data Center” panel at Data Center World made it clear that we must spread the word about STEM subjects and the opportunities in technology very early in life. At young ages, we should introduce toys that challenge the brain in math and science so children can recognize their skills and talents. When girls enter junior high and high school, that’s when they should be exposed to the possibility of working in the data center industry. If you have daughters, take them to work with you or Google “data center tours” and watch and explain what they’re seeing to them. Encourage them to take classes simply to help them recognize potential passions. Those were just some of the ideas the panelists had for increasing the number of women in data centers in the future. Below, you’ll learn a little bit about each panelist and what advice she would give a woman just starting out in the industry and how to handle any gender biases they may encounter on the job.
Senior Director, Data Center Operations – West Cindy has been with CenturyLink for last 15 years and held multiple leadership positions, two of which are senior director of data centers west and senior director of engineering and capacity. She manages a team of 180 that run 18 data centers, supporting $20 million of OpEx and $9 million of capital expenditures. On advice to a young women starting out in mission critical: When someone comes to you with an opportunity, which is unusual–you need to be looking for those opportunities yourself–don’t box yourself in. Keep your mind open. There are a lot of things you can learn as you go. Don’t pigeon-hole yourself into the positions or qualities you have right now. On gender bias in the workplace: I don’t think it’s just exclusive to women. If there’s one person that’s giving you a hard time, then talk to his or her peers and find out what the problem is. Let them talk to the person giving you trouble so whoever it is gets quiet. You need to get your voice out there to let he or she know you are successful. Make sure your voice is heard.
Ileana Aquino-Otero Global Critical Infrastructure Engineer Ileana is part of the Data Center Engineering team for LinkedIn, focusing primarily on energy efficiency and operational cost saving measures. Prior to joining LinkedIn, she worked for a sustainability consulting firm and Amazon Web Services’ data center teams. On advice to a young women starting out in mission critical: It’s important to find what your passion is. I learned that I was way more interested in sustainability measures than cabling or programming. It took me to be in a data center to figure it out. If you’re really passionate about something, make sure you let people know what that is. On gender bias in the workplace: I’ve been really lucky and never hit a wall based on my gender. When women show they can be successful, then it’s not a big deal. Just don’t be afraid to make mistakes; if you have a plan you can take those risks.
Cindy Choboian VP Business Development As vice president of business development, Cindy leads FORTRUST’s business development organization. She has more than 15 years of experience in technology and data center account management, with a strong background in healthcare and government markets. On advice to a young women starting out in mission critical: When someone comes to you with an opportunity, don’t box yourself in. Keep your mind open. There are a lot of things you can do and learn as you go. Don’t pigeon-hole yourself. Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know yet. There’s a lot of on-the-job-training in this industry. Even though I’ve been in data center world for a long time, I was on the enterprise side. Now, I’m in colocation, and it’s totally different ecosystem. It took me six or seven months before I was clicking. On gender bias in the workplace: I don’t think it’s unique to women. There are always going to be haters. Ignore them–it’s like water off a duck’s back. Most people are supportive. If you’re a team player, most will be a team player back. You can’t argue with results, so let your accomplishments speak for themselves. Those types of people are out there, but the good news is there are fewer of them. In most cases you can work around them.
Global Director of Technology Carrie has been involved in the computing and networking industries for more than 30 years. Carrie currently works with Paige DataCom, a subsidiary of Paige Electric, as the global director of technology. This division is responsible for data communications and data center infrastructure. On advice to a young women starting out in mission critical: Don’t be afraid to ask questions. The only bad question is the one you don’t ask. Don’t be afraid to try more things. Even if you fail, you’re going to learn something anyway. Don’t be afraid to toot your own horn. Make sure somebody takes notice because it could lead to a new opportunity. On gender bias in the workplace: Sometimes the best answer is to find another job. You have to decide what level of complication you want in your life. If the person giving you a hard time isn’t going anywhere, then go somewhere else and get a job.
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| 6:34p | How Amazon Prevents Data Center Outages Like Delta’s $150M Meltdown It’s typical for hyper-scale data center operators like Amazon to build their own infrastructure technology when it isn’t available on the market or when they feel they can make it cheaper on their own. One piece of technology Amazon built in-house is meant to circumvent what one of the company’s top infrastructure engineers described as misplaced priorities in the way electrical switchgear vendors design their products. It is this problem that likely caused last summer’s Delta data center outage that ultimately cost the airline $150 million, as well as the infamous 2013 power outage during Super Bowl. And John Hamilton, VP and distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services, has seen this type of failure in data centers he has overseen during his career. “Operating at much higher scale, I’ve personally encountered it twice in my working life,” he wrote in a post to his personal blog. It’s unclear where he was working when those failures happened, but the engineer spent about a decade at Microsoft before joining Amazon. Hamilton did not reference Delta specifically in his blog post, but there was only one major airline data center outage last summer from which the airline later disclosed nine-figure fallout. See also: How to Survive a Cloud Meltdown The piece of technology Amazon designed to avoid this type of outage is the firmware that decides what electrical switchgear should do when a data center loses utility power. Typical vendor firmware prioritizes preventing damage to expensive backup generators over preventing a full data center outage, according to Hamilton. Amazon (and probably most other large-scale data center operators) prefers risking the loss of a sub-$1 million piece of equipment rather than risking widespread application downtime. When everything happens as expected during a utility outage (which is the case most of the time), the switchgear waits a few seconds in case utility power comes back (also the most common scenario) and if it doesn’t, the switchgear fires up generators, while the data center runs on energy stored by UPS systems. Once the generators are stabilized, the switchgear makes them the primary source of power to the IT systems. Last year’s Delta data center outage was attributed to switchgear “locking out” the generators at the airline’s facility in Atlanta. That’s what most switchgear is designed to do when it senses a major voltage anomaly either in the data center or on the incoming utility feed. Plugging a live generator into a shorted circuit will usually fry the generator, and switchgear locks generators out to avoid that. See also: Data Center Cooling Outage Disrupts Azure Cloud in Japan In most cases, the fault is outside of the building, so this scheme achieves nothing other than causing a data center outage, Hamilton wrote. (The two events he’s witnessed were caused by cars knocking over aluminum polls, which fell across electrical transmission cables.) In the rare event when there’s a short inside the data center, either a branch circuit breaker opens and the servers it feeds switch to a secondary source of power, or (if the fault is higher in the power distribution system or if a breaker fails to open) a generator may get damaged if it’s not locked out. “I would rather put just under $1 million at risk than be guaranteed that the load will be dropped. If just one customer could lose $100 million, saving the generator just doesn’t feel like the right priority,” he wrote. When Amazon engineers asked their switchgear manufacturer to eliminate the lockout condition from their firmware — with the understanding that they were willing to accept the potential equipment failure — the vendor declined, forcing the decision by Amazon to make its own firmware in-house. “I’m lucky enough to work at a high-scale operator where custom engineering to avoid even a rare fault still makes excellent economic sense, so we solved this particular fault mode some years back,” Hamilton wrote. See also:N. Virginia Landgrab Continues: Next Amazon Data Center Campus? |
Cindy Joos
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