More than three hundred people attended the Tech Summit, and I congratulate organizers for attracting such a large audience. Of the people I met, most came from the IT side and had to cope with facility issues. I heard resounding recommendations for a small firm called RT Kistler and repeatedly heard vendors evaluated for the quality of their design services. These participants did not recognize the names of many of the large organizations that dominate discussions at large national conferences, although they are dealing with similar issues. At the end of the day, strategies like economization, monitoring, and even cloud seemed too exotic and expensive to help them solve problems. I hope Mission Critical gained some new readers from my trip, and our efforts to extend the reach of industry experts and educators benefit them all.

I’m just back from the 7x24Exchange, which was another in a series of successful industry events. 7x24Exchange organizers tell me that more than 700 industry figures participated in a 3-1/2 day event that featured a contrarian perspective on energy from Robert Kennedy, Jr., a report on space weather from Alex Young, a solar astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and several excellent presentations on University of Chicago, UPS, eBay, and Yahoo projects. I hope to bring coverage of many of these projects to a wider readership in these pages in upcoming issues.

I also enjoyed a presentation by the Uptime Institute’s Pitt Turner entitled Uptime - Data Center Issues: Past, Present, and Phuture. Event organizers also did the industry a real service by offering free on-site training to attendees for the DOE Data Center Energy Practitioner (DCEP) Training and Certificate Exam. Magnus Heerlin also reported on the state of the program.

You can read more about these individual sessions and even the food at Dave Ohara’s blog.

I'm looking forward to a similar good experience at DatacenterDynamics on June 30 in San Francisco. I realize that my blog sometimes resembles a travelogue, but events like these shows often include input from people bringing change to the industry. As I have previously written, the DatacenterDynamics folks make use of their extensive industry contracts to host sessions that can be considered newsworthy. Past examples include the announcement of incentives from NYSERDA and a federal end-use lease program. I see some tremendous session in a full-day, four track program that makes this event very promising. Key sessions include Don Beaty (DLB Associates) and Robin Steinbrecher of Intel’s discussion of the new TC 9.9 Standard. Promising, too, is a presentation entitled GSA Report: Energy Efficient Modular Data Center Procurement Guide.