Steve O’Donnell is CEO at MEEZA, a major data centre and cloud services company based in Doha Qatar and serving the MENA region. MEZZA is a joint venture backed by the Qatar Foundation and based in the Qatar Science and Technology Park (QSTP). MEEZA offers advanced and innovative services to business clients underpinning Qatar’s stated objective to make the knowledge based society a reality in the region.
Prior to MEEZA Steve was Managing Director EMEA and Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) he specialised in Data Centre Power & Cooling, Data Centre Strategy and Best Practices (planning, consolidation and migration), IT Service Management, Data Centre Automation and Server Hardware and Architectures (blades, server virtualization, cloud computing infrastructure & services).
Prior to ESG Steve ran IT Infrastructure Internationally for FDC, the largest global credit, debit, gift and prepay card processing company in the world. He was Global Head of Data Centres at BT running the largest data centre estate and the biggest IT Operation in Europe. He has a worldwide reputation as a thought leader in Green IT having won six industry awards for his 21st Century Data Centre vision and design. He has developed a framework for categorizing Data Centre Efficiency, leveraging the maturity model ideas from CMM.
O’Donnell became the first non manufacturer and first European based contributing member of The Green Grid when he took BT into membership. He is a professional member of the IEEE, the IET and the British Computer Society.
In this blog he shares his ofttimes controversial and always personal view about what a modern Data Center and IT Operation should look like and how to ride the perfect storm of being green and cost effective at the same time.
“There are some basics that just need to be done to keep a data centre efficient and as green as possible.”
O’Donnell contends that the 20th Century Data Centre is dead and that modern joined up thinking has enabled the creation of a 21st Century Data Centre that uses significantly less energy than it’s 20th Century counterpart. Refrigeration, humidification, inefficient power protection and low equipment utilization are wasteful and unnecessary. Huge capital demands to build out new sites are unsustainable and equipment manufacturers need to wake up and smell the coffee by designing for free and fresh air cooling and DC power.
“With this dramatic cost advantage old inefficient sites will be forced to close. Global organizations are starting to wake up to the need to be dramatically more efficient in their use of power.”
O’Donnell believes that conventional IT Operations management is flawed and focussed on managing a static environment whist actually IT systems, applications and infrastructure are in a constant state of flux and change. His ideas on a Continuous Migration Architecture (CMA) and Cloud Maturity Model are published on this site.
O’Donnell has had a career in IT with over 30 years experience working up to and including board level in large multinational organisations in both international and domestic markets.
He has held senior positions at First Data, BT plc, Cable & Wireless, Lehman Brothers, and Deutsche Bank. In addition Steve has run a number of IT Consulting firms where for example he led the UK merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand to form PWC.
“Green is just common sense; energy is not free (and the laws of supply and demand mean the more we use the more it costs per unit) so why waste it? I remember my Father being green decades ago because he hated wasting his hard earned cash on unnecessary bills!”
O’Donnell has industry recognized Green credentials – as the winner of six industry awards for green data centre projects.
