Good Info, Great Panel, Tough Room in the Oriole City

Our panel discussion on “Proven Strategies for Improving Efficiency and Cutting Energy Costs in Your Data Center” at the Emerson Network Power AdaptiveXchange Conference 2007 here in Baltimore went well yesterday, but we had a tough crowd to impress. Especially with a little humor.

Oh, the several hundred IT managers in the vast Baltimore Conventional Center ballroom were listening, all right. And they asked some very good questions of our panelists, who were an impressive group. The lineup:

Steve Andreano, Advanced Data Center Architect from Cisco Systems;

Christian Belady, Principal Power and Cooling Architect, Microsoft; Dr. Albert Esser, Vice President Data Center Infrastructure, Dell; Jack Pouchet, Director of Energy Inititiatives, Emerson Network Power; and Rich Talaber, Vice President, Office of the CIO, VMware.

You can read my colleague Scott Ferguson’s eWEEK report to learn the most important highlights of the discussion, because there were quite a number of valuable takeaways during the hourlong session. But, wow, was this was a serious audience that perhaps needed to lighten up a bit. When The Station, as moderator, tried to inject a bit of humor, only a smattering of laughs were heard.

See what you think. Here was one of the lines: “When our previous speaker (Bob Bauer, president of Liebert) mentioned having to deal with hot spots in a rack, I thought for a second that he was changing the subject to server farms in Baghdad.”

Maybe it was the delivery. Comic timing is an art learned only after years of work. Okay, maybe it isn’t that funny after all.

Anyway, The Station would like to thank all the panel members for their expertise and insightful answers to our questions, and Vince McMorrow, Julie Russo and Emerson for inviting us. We had a great time in Maryland.