What do The Cebit, the Hannover Messe and the Museo del Prado have in common?

It’s already a while ago but here some words about my visit to the Cebit in Hannover.  I visited this exhibition with a short interruption of a couple years  since the mid 1990’s. Most of the time I returned home with a freshup of idea’s and the feeling that I got an impression of what’s going on in the digital world. But this year was different. Driving home with my colleague we concluded that this is probably the last Cebit for us to visit. A lot of things we saw looked as old news already discussed in e-magazines and on Linkedin discussion threads. And overall there wasn’t that much to see. Most of the players in the Data Centre world weren’t there. Yes “the system” guys where there with an impressive stand but there connection with the Hannover Messe is more than the just the Cebit. On Data Center’s it was more a German exhibition than a world wide one and even some important German players were missing.  I had the same attitude last week when I started my visit to the Hannover Messe, but this worked out completely different. The Hannover Messe is more a melting pot of all kind of technological ideas. On electrical installations there is a lot of heritage but also quite some innovation. Measuring and controlling is becoming more and more affordable and I have seen a lot of products with which it will much easier to control energy consumption in a Data Centre.  If you don’t know what your PUE or energy consumption is, it got nothing to do with the technological possibilities but everything with the importance of these KPI to you. One other striking observation I would like to mention is the influence of standards.  As soon as we want to communicate we need the standards to state what the capabilities of the different types of equipment are. The IEC 61439 (Low-voltage switchgear and controlgear assemblies)  is a good example of a standard which acts like this. In part 2 different switchgear assembly forms are defined.  All the 4 different assembly forms will give a save installation but only the higher rated assembly types give the possibility for concurrent maintainability and the advantage of  extending a data centre while in operation.  Using these standards in the Program of Demands can greatly help to simplify the definition of your new Data Centre.  Another nice example is the Standard IEC 61000-4-30 (Testing and measurement techniques – Power quality measurement methods).  Power quality analysers complying to class A of this standard can give good information whether the power in your data centre complies with the ITI (CBEMA) Curve. If it does computers should feel happy and no power related problems should occur .  But to analyse the results you must have some good knowledge on power quality in low voltage systems. If you are lost now with all these detailed information I can imagine a bit how you feel. I made a city trip last weekend to Madrid and visited the “Del Prado Museum” after a while it was hard to see the beauty of yet another world famous painting and I got lost too,  until I came in the room with the painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymous Bosch.

In the very crowded room I stood eye to eye to an incredible visualization of somebodies  view of the world?  500 years ago. There is so much to see in this painting that its hard to explain what you all see but overall it gives you a  complete feeling of a surplus of ideas. This feeling was similar to my feeling of the visit to The Hannover Messe. There are still a lot of new techniques which we are not aware of and which can and shall be used in the data centres over the next coming years.  Data Centres are complex systems. To see what general trends are, you will get more information on visiting dedicated data centre events like datacentre dynamics or Datacentreworld London. If  Cebit wants to keep the data centre public something drastically has to change.

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