Applying Open Source Strategies to Data Center Delivery

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Introduction

Open Source and the Power of Collaboration

Applying an Open Source Model to Data Center Delivery

Open Source Delivery

Traditional Delivery

Harnessing the Power of the Ecosystem

None of Us Is as Smart as All of Us

Bottom Line: Collaboration as Competitive Advantage

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Introduction

The story of business is often a story of rivalry. Coke vs. Pepsi. Ford vs. General Motors. Sony vs. Nintendo. Microsoft vs. Apple. Rivalries make great stories.

In this environment in which business is characterized as war, business leaders turn to philosophies like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War for inspiration. Businesses, and their leaders, get locked in zero-sum competitions where one wins and one loses.

Organizations have approached their delivery processes in much the same way. They push hard to maximize bargaining power with customers and suppliers, and they position themselves to defend against new market entrants. Strategies and structures are designed to take on the win-or-lose battle.

Yet it’s becoming increasingly clear that the zero-sum game is a losing proposition, that success comes not from defeating the others. The world moves too fast to succeed alone. Organizations must choose where they will cooperate and where they will compete. In fact, cooperation is becoming a powerful tactic in competition.

“The traditional concept of business as a ‘winner takes all’ contest is giving way to a realization that in the networked economy, companies must both cooperate and compete. Termed ‘co-opetition,’ this new perspective requires companies to create

business strategies that capitalize on relationships in order to create maximum value in the marketplace.” Julie Bowser Global Solutions Executive, IBM

In this white paper, we’ll explore how strategic collaboration – specifically, open source development – has driven tremendous gains in the tech world. We’ll explain how Aligned Energy is applying an open source methodology to data center delivery. And we’ll share the benefits that our clients are realizing because of it.

Key takeaways > Collaboration creates incredible

value; we wouldn’t have the internet without it. One of the best examples is open source development – a freely collaborative, iterative process of creating things like software and hardware.

> Taking an open source approach to data center delivery is a natural evolution of the practice of using open source methods to spark rapid innovation in software and hardware development.

> At Aligned Energy, an open source approach to data center delivery allows us to continuously improve, finding innovation by engaging the experts on the ground in each area to find new ways to reduce cost, increase speed, and make the data

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Open Source and the Power of Collaboration

Collaboration is about tapping into the expertise of a broad range of people. And it can unlock incredible value. As Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems put it, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else … It’s better to create an ecology that gets all the world’s smartest people toiling in your garden for your goals. If you rely solely on your own employees, you’ll never solve all your customers’ needs.”

One of the best examples of collaboration is open source development – a freely collaborative, iterative process with people creating things like software and hardware. In the context of software, The Economist explains it well: “Enthusiasts get together on the internet to create a new program, and as well as giving it away, they also make available its source code – the software’s underlying blueprint. This allows other people to make additions and improvements, and those are made available, in turn, to anyone who is interested.” 1

More recently, the concept has extended to hardware as well. The Economist again: Open source hardware “refers to an emerging class of electronic devices, for which the specifications have been made public, so that enthusiasts can suggest refinements, write and share software improvements, and even build their own devices from scratch.”

It would be hard to overstate the value of open source. “Without open source software, the entire internet as we know it would not exist,” says Google’s Chris DiBona, Director of Open Source.2 And the value is growing: IDC predicts that

by 2020 digital transformation teams will source more than 80 percent of their solution components from open source communities.3

But it hasn’t been an easy road. Leaders at some of the top tech companies were initially very critical of open source as a concept. Microsoft’s then-CEO Steve Ballmer, for example, frequently was critical of open source software. Ballmer questioned whether open source development did any more than clone commercial software. Was open source for real? Was it a fad? Did open source put businesses at risk?

It was not a fad at all, and open source methods have definitely produced work that is far beyond business quality. Including at Microsoft, where 16,000 people are now working on open source projects. Microsoft joins a long list of tech giants who embrace the open source process for software and, to some extent, hardware development.

Examples of how open source methods are part of the tech establishment include:

> Open Compute Project (OCP) is an open source data center hardware initiative launched by Facebook, Intel, Rackspace, Goldman Sachs, and Andy Bechtolsheim in 2011 to “break open the black box of proprietary IT infrastructure.” 4

> Open19, developed by LinkedIn, is an open source data center hardware initiative designed for “operators of all sizes.” 5

> OpenStack, open source software for creating private and public clouds, is now eight years old and has an impressive list of users including AT&T, Walmart, eBay, China Railway, GE Healthcare, SAP, Tencent, and the Insurance Australia Group.” 6

> OpenAI, a non-profit founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman to promote collaborative and open research and development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to “ensure AGI’s benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible.” 7

> 331,000 organizations have employees contributing to open source projects on GitHub. Even the Pentagon has announced it hopes to start leveraging open source software. 8

Clearly, over the past decade, open source methodology has been responsible for the leading edge in innovation. And today, open source is moving beyond software and hardware, now offering opportunities for businesses of all kinds.

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Applying an Open Source Model to Data Center Delivery

Given how effective open source development has been in accelerating technology innovation, improving quality, and reducing cost, it only makes sense to look to apply the approach beyond software and hardware. Taking an open source approach to data center delivery is a natural evolution of the practice of using open source methods to spark rapid innovation in software and hardware development.

Open Source DeliveryAt Aligned Energy, an open source approach to data center delivery allows us to continuously improve, finding innovation by engaging the experts on the ground in each area to find new ways to reduce cost, increase speed, and make the data center more adaptive. We engage the data center delivery ecosystem – clients, general contractors, engineers, subcontractors, and manufacturers – to develop the most efficient plan at every stage to deliver what the client needs.

Leveraging an open source approach doesn’t mean we eschew competition. We are competitive, but we recognize the many values of opening up our delivery methods to the very smart people who work for other companies in the ecosystem – the partners we engage to help us deliver our data centers. Incredible value – for our clients, and for us – can be unlocked through collaboration, by using open source methodology in our delivery system and tapping into the expertise of the smart people on the ground.

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Traditional DeliveryIn contrast to the open source approach, a traditional data center delivery approach is a picture of top-down procurement, with the vendor looking to the customer for directives and following a tried-and-true process with tried-and-true partners. The customer or broker contacts the data center provider’s sales team with a list of requirements, the sales team calls up the same engineering firm they always use to provide specs based on the requirements, and if the customer approves, then the data center provider outsources the plan to the same general contractor they always use.

Challenges with the top-down approach include:

> Data center providers and customers have limited exposure to the subcontractors and manufacturers who are the experts in the field, the ones dealing firsthand with challenges and seeing opportunities for innovation.

> General contractors can be more focused on pricing than exploring new ways to achieve customers’ goals.

> The divide-and-conquer environment creates barriers to feedback from the subcontractors and manufacturers who are in the field.

The traditional delivery model can arise when an organization has built tens if not hundreds of data centers, reaching the point where they know what they want and are looking for the best providers to deliver just that. The traditional model does work for many organizations, but for companies looking to continuously improve, companies that rely on constant innovation – improving efficiency, reducing cost, and increasing speed – the traditional delivery model fails to keep pace.

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Harnessing the Power of the Ecosystem

Having bought into the notion that we need the “world’s smartest people toiling in our garden” to “solve all our customers’ needs” we re-architected our delivery process, adopting open source methodologies. Our goal is to be able to deliver the most efficient piece of technology in the most efficient way possible at any given time. In other words, we are determined to leverage best applicable practices in real time.

Rather than delivering a top-down list of requirements to manufacturers and subcontractors, we establish an open discussion about the client’s needs. We include the experts, specialists, and innovators at all stages.

To be clear, we’re not reinventing the data center design-build-operate-maintain wheel every time we respond to an RFP. We’re working with the ecosystem – the smartest people at the moment – to ensure that the wheel is optimized to meet the specific needs of the client in that location at that time. Our standard model allows for up to 1,000 watts per square foot. It’s 2N mechanical and N+1 electrical and we can build in 7-9 months. But there are many cases where a client might want something different. We can do that and we’ll turn to the ecosystem to help us determine the most efficient way to make that happen today.

In this model, our platform delivery team works first with the client’s representative to establish requirements and goals. Then we pull together an extended team of engineers, general contractors, subcontractors, manufacturers, client representatives, and our own solution architects to discuss technical possibilities and costs. This is not yet at the bidding stage. This is the smart people in the ecosystem putting their heads together to talk about the best ways they know of today to meet the client’s needs. From this discussion, we develop a proof of concept.

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Collaborative BrainstormingThe next stage is a bidding process that includes three general contactors, four electrical subcontractors, and four mechanical subcontractors. Each general contractor asks each subcontractor for a detailed bid on the proof of concept as the ecosystem team laid it out. It’s at this stage is where we get to see the vision each player has for the project, where we begin to identify the innovative thinking that will help us reduce costs, increase speed to market, and make the data center more adaptive.

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Collaborative BiddingFor our clients, the benefits of this open source approach to data center delivery include:

> An increased sense of ownership. Everyone who’s at the table in that pre-contract collaborative discussion will have a chance to bid on the contract. Though they won’t necessarily be the only ones to bid, because competitive collaboration drives innovation.

> Dialogue flows all ways – from the client, to us, to the architects and engineers, general contractors and construction managers, subcontractors, manufacturers. Everyone in the ecosystem is a collaborative partner in finding the best way to deliver the most

cost effective data center as fast as possible.

> The collaborative dialogue with the ecosystem partners covers not just cost, but also possibilities – and we explore together how we can do more for less.

> Instead of giving instructions to general contractors, subcontractors, and manufacturers, we give them objectives. They then offer feedback regarding methods to execute the project. After all, they’re the ones in the trenches every day who have the experience and the hard-earned expertise and can share challenges they’ve faced and opportunities they’ve seen to deliver a most cost efficient, more adaptive data center

faster. We know we don’t know it all. So we gather the experts who each know a piece and listen to their ideas.

> The collective knowledge of the ecosystem can help inform (and improve) strategy, which has typically been the domain of the C-suite.

> We don’t know what we don’t know. The ecosystem helps identify challenges at an early stage.

Collaboration creates a talent multiplier effect. None of us is as smart as all of us.

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None of Us Is as Smart as All of us

The beauty of open source is in the ecosystem of experts, specialists, and innovators who are sharing knowledge with each other, forging different routes to solve the same problem. At Aligned Energy, our open source approach is designed to meet continuously evolving future needs that cannot be predicted today.

Closed platform development limits an organization to the resources of its own R&D team. And it does organizations no good to give one person the job of staying ahead of the curve on everything involved in the delivery method for building data centers. This world is moving too fast for that. Businesses have embraced digital transformation in an effort to meet the needs of our anywhere, anytime customer-driven world.9 Until recently, innovation in software and hardware has dramatically outpaced innovation in the foundation of it all – the data center. But data centers, the infrastructure that supports the digital world, are being asked to support exponentially increasing and dynamic loads. And that demands that data centers borrow from the successful methodology used in open source software development.

That’s why we have shifted our delivery model to open source – so we’re not dependent on single individuals or small teams. We’re looking to the strength of the ecosystem – clients, engineers, general contractors, subcontractors, and manufacturers – to deliver innovative methods in the most efficient ways.

Our resources are best spent if every time we want to build something, we find the best experts possible at that time and bring them into our fold. Again, when we talk about open source we’re talking about collaboration in the delivery process. We’re not changing the design; we’re optimizing the delivery. Across the board, an open source strategy helps us solve complex problems while taking advantage of innovation in real time – to reduce cost, increase speed to capacity, and make the data center more adaptive.

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Bottom line: Collaboration as Competitive Advantage

Today’s organizations face continuous change. Keeping pace requires a continuous innovation engine. Open source methods allow a tech organization to deliver the most efficient piece of technology in the most efficient way possible at the time.

Open collaboration is no longer an interesting alternative in business. Tapping into the knowledge of the ecosystem in order to deliver quickly and efficiently is a business imperative. The ability to collaborate is becoming a key competitive advantage.

By adopting its methods in our delivery system, we are continuing the open source story, a story about the power of collaboration in spurring innovation. And stories about the success of creative collaboration are becoming just as inspiring as narratives about the rivalries of business giants.

Experience our open source delivery approach in actionContact us at alignedenergy.com/contact

About Aligned EnergyAligned Energy is an infrastructure technology company that offers cloud, enterprise, and service providers colocation and build-to-scale data center solutions. Our intelligent infrastructure allows us to deliver data centers as a utility- accessible and consumable in the amount and moment needed. By reducing the energy, water and space needed to operate, our technology innovations offer businesses a competitive advantage by improving reliability and their bottom-line, while helping secure the health of the planet.

1 The Economist, “Open sesame,” 5 Jun 2008. http://econ.st/2AFKuV0 2Computer Weekly, “Google launches open source project ‘umbrella’ website,” 29 Mar 2017. http://bit.ly/2AiwRb6

3 Business Wire, “IDC Reveals Worldwide Digital Transformation Predictions,” 1 Nov 2017. http://bit.ly/2icj41f 4 http://www.opencompute.org/

5 https://www.open19.org/ 6 https://www.openstack.org/

7 https://openai.com/ 8 The Verge, “The Pentagon is set to make a big push toward open source software next year,” 14 Nov 2017. http://bit.ly/2jqAK9o

9 Data Center Frontier, “The Role of an Adaptive Data Center in an Anytime, Anywhere World,” 5 Jun 2017. http://bit.ly/2t14cDC