 Welcome to News Desk on SiliconANGLE TV for Monday, September 24th, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. A year-long examination by the New York Times has revealed that data centers can waste 90% or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, a finding that is at odds with the industry's image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness. Joining us now with breaking analysis on the story is SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier. Welcome, John. Okay, good to see you. Great article by the New York Times. Great to comment. It's so badly, poorly written. I don't know where to start. So, the New York Times spent a year conducting this study. What was concluded other than the fact that data centers use electricity? Well, a couple things. New York Times is running a series called the Cloud Series. And yesterday they put out a front page story above the fold that talked about the data center. 5,000 words. Huge endeavor by them. And some notes. It took a year to develop. They commissioned McKinsey consulting. It took them a year to write this article. And it was really a horrible article, poorly written, inaccurate, just completely misguided. Had they just called SiliconANGLE three days earlier, we could have probably put out, you know, 3,000 words on that. But let me just start and say that, one, the article gets a lot of attention because it's saying that the data center business the computer industry or whatever industry, they weren't even clear. It's causing a lot of pollution and problems because of the inefficiencies of data centers. And today they had an article about power, but that was the main thrust of it. So what were some of the other key points that you believe the article got wrong? Well, first of all, the article is basically saying is that all these web companies like Facebook don't know how to run their operations and that people who power data centers is really the key word that they're focusing in on to the mainstream audience. It has a huge set of problems. It's causing problems to society. So a couple of points. One is the article says that, you know, because of computers, we're sucking all the power out of the world and causing all this pollution. That's dead wrong. One, the article itself has so many contradictions that I can't even point them all out. First one is that they said from a guy in Stanford, 2% of the power is only used for the data. That means 98% is used on other things, heavy industry manufacturing. So it's really not even a problem. The other point is it's not even about the power consumption. It's really about the utilization. So they didn't even talk about that. So we've covered the launches of Dell and HP's low power arm solutions on theCUBE before. So what do you feel the New York Times missed regarding those points? Well, they kind of did a couple of things. They made people who work in the business look like a bunch of monkeys around fans and putting up servers. They quote Facebook, and the guy actually knows what he's talking about. They didn't even talk about some of the advances. So for example, let me give you some of the things that Dell and HP have been working on and people in the industry for a decade. So a couple of things. One, more than two-thirds of the enterprises in the large-scale data centers are completely virtualized, meaning with virtual machines, they can actually now be optimized to run on less hardware, not more hardware. Two, most corporations over the past 10 years, due to some of the recessions and the dot-com bubble going back 10 years, have gone through major consolidations of their data center. So that's point two. Point three is data center software automation like DCIM that we've been tracking on in SiliconANG and in the Wikibon are huge advancements. So one, the New York Times is completely wrong about the whole direction of the business. And two, just in the inaccuracies of the article. So this whole data center is a problem. It's actually not really a big deal. It's really an opportunity because the world is moving to a completely new software infrastructure, software-led infrastructure, and that's going to be reflected in innovation. We've covered that on SiliconANG, on VMworld, software-defined networking. This is absolutely a really big story for two reasons. It's the New York Times and two, it's creating attention to the mass public around things like what HP and Dell have been doing. So energy efficiency is one thing. Actually, utilization is a whole another. And that's really the focus of the conversation. It really needs to be on the utilization, not the power consumption. So these new offerings that you talk about, the low power solutions that Dell and HP are offering, are they sort of a one-size-fits-all solution, or are they geared to a certain kind of computing? Well, the article talks about servers as if they're like just desktops, extensions of desktops. The entire data center business around servers has been focusing on energy efficiency for a long time. We've covered it on with our video on SiliconANGL TV, The Cube, at HP Project Moonshot, which is a whole new architecture around low power, arm-based processors, and Intel is working on this. Intel is absolutely leading the charge on energy efficiency and increasing performance. We were talking about the iPhone 5 last week, more performance, more battery power. That's because of the energy efficiency of the chipset. So certainly the industry's going in the right direction, and it requires a lot of power around these data centers. So there are new servers and new software that's absolutely changing the game. So the conversation really should be more about opportunity for new companies, new entrepreneurs, less about gloom and doom. So it's really kind of disappointing by the New York Times. The New York Times report is part of a series of posts on the data center, and they talk specifically about Microsoft's data center in Oregon, wasting vast amounts of power after promising to be green. Do you feel Microsoft was truly at fault here, or was this part of a larger problem that's maybe stemming from incentives on electric company billing plans, perhaps? Again, this is the gloom and doom sells banner ads and sells advertising, but the bottom line is that story is about the big trend where these big web scale companies who are solving problems that we've never seen before to provide the kind of instant response you get on your iPhone and all these new apps in real time have huge amounts of requirements for processing power, compute power, and also they need actually real power to power these data centers. So you're seeing Facebook and these big web companies that weren't around five, ten years ago moving out their data centers, completely re-architecting them from scratch, which is essentially a technological advancement, in my opinion, but moving to areas where they can have a footprint that has a lot of power like the Midwest, you're seeing in the Northwest, you're seeing up near in the desert actually, and also across the world where there's, you know, follow the sun, where there's efficiencies, and they're building these from the ground up, fully integrated kind of operating system. So, you know, that's the core trend. Now, this article about, you know, Facebook and the towns, it's really an opportunity for these towns, but these digital, these quote, data center factories do consume a lot of power, so it essentially puts strain on the system. On the Silicon Angle Network, software-defined networking has really been a key editorial theme with many of the pundits, including yourself. So can you tell us what's the software-defined angle to this New York Times series? Yeah, I think the innovation around software networking comes down to two areas. One, solid-state drives, we've been talking about, is creating a new paradigm around programming. So you're seeing developers look at solid-state, which essentially is a big disk drive without any kind of spinning head, so it's like RAM. Huge innovation on that. It's been just in the past five years. That has changed the game on cloud. And two, software automation. DCIM is an example of that. These are software techniques that essentially monitor systems and use technology such as big data to solve these problems. This is where the action is. So you add those new innovations on top of an existing trend that's been going on for the past 10 years, which is virtualization. So like I said, virtualization, the ability to virtualize, create, and software, what you've got in hardware is a real innovation. For example, software virtualization, server virtualization means that you can use software to emulate a physical server. And so that is really, really important because actually two-thirds of all corporate enterprise data centers are server-virtualized. That means there's more servers that are software than hardware. That's a huge efficiency and will solve the utilization problem. That is the core conversation that needs to be happened. The second thing is that VMware just recently bought a company called Nasera for $1 billion. They started up that solving the virtualization of networks. So this is the future. These are the biggest trends in technology. That, in my opinion, is the main story focus here. And that'll talk to millions of people working on problems that they've never faced before and building new solutions that the world has never seen before. So to me, the New York Times story completely misses the mark on relevance and also on inaccuracies. Well, John, thanks for your analysis. I'm sure we'll see you again on soon. Thank you. For all the latest in-depth coverage and breaking analysis on tech innovation, keep up to date with News Desk on SiliconANGLE TV.