Green (low carbon) Data Center Blog

Twitter Presents on Metrics and Monitoring

I am down in SJ on my now regular visit. Velocity 90 conference just occurred, but I was not able to attend.

The great thing about a conference like Velocity you can get to much of the content on their web site. I am going through a bunch of them, and the Twitter presentation by John Adams triggered some thoughts.

After going through the presentation I found it interesting that data centers are not built to Twitter’s requirements which is a boon  for the collocation companies. Twitter uses AT&T hosting services.

Can data centers be built for companies like Twitter?  Or do collocation companies need to be building different type of facilities for this market?

It was quite refreshing to see an operations team who gets what it takes to green its  operations.  John says nothing about being “Green” in his presentation, but in his passion for performance he is being green.

Here is the full video of the twitter presentation.

Slides that caught my attention for the data center crowd are below.

It is typical that IT Operations doesn’t deal with the physical plant.

And, Twitter figured out clouds don’t work for them as performance and latency is a top issue.

They use closed loop feedbacks.

Prioritize the issues by finding weak points.

Have metrics as a priority.

Present the data with dashboards and admit to data porn.

Then turn the data into actionable information.

The Intel gang must be doing a little jig when they saw this slide about efficiency, and how to people can green their data center with Intel Nehalem.

And makes an excellent point on disk in their scenario.

And provide transparency on the status of the site.  This would be great to have a PUE Status for those who claim record PUE numbers.

Facebook Technical Operations VP Jonathan Heiliger tells Server OEMs “You guys just don’t get it,”

GigaOm has an interview with Facebook VP Jonathan Heileger.

Heiliger had strong words for OEMs and system builders during his chat with Om. To compete with sites like Facebook and Google, Heiliger said, OEMs and system builders need to be more power- and cost-efficient. “You guys just don’t get it,” he said, adding that Facebook has reaped success from investing heavily in its infrastructure.

InternetNews focused on the Intel and AMD dig.

Intel, AMD Get Thumbs Down from Facebook

Head of the social network's technical operations say the latest and greatest from Intel and AMD don't make the grade.

June 25, 2009
By Andy Patrizio: More stories by this author:

SAN FRANCISCO – Intel and AMD just got a nasty smackdown from the person who run's Facebook's datacenters, saying the chips don't deliver on their promises.

Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations for Facebook, was being interview by GigaOm Network founder Om Malik here at the GigaOm Structure 09 conference. Malik asked him about unexpected problems in managing the fast-growing company's datacenters.

Reps from Intel (NASDQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD), both running panels and present at the show, must have clenched their teeth when they heard this:

"The biggest thing … was less-than-anticipated performance gains from new microarchitectures, so new CPUs from guys like Intel and AMD. The performance gains they're touting in the press, we're not seeing in our applications," Heiliger told the audience.

He didn't let the tier one server vendors off any easier. "I'm not sure if I'm embarrassed or pleased for OEM vendors in the audience, but you guys don't get it. To build servers for a company like Facebook and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, they have to be cheap and super power efficient," said Heiliger.

He added he's not sure why hardware vendors fail at the job, but thinks customers need to step up and apply pressure. ""Perhaps in the coming months we'll see more collaboration with people running small clusters and large clusters," he said.

Yahoo Joins PUE Disclosure with 1.21, but Under What Conditions?

Datacenterknowledge reports on Yahoo’s disclosure of its 1.21 PUE at O’Reilly’s Velocity 2009.

Yahoo Unstealths Its Data Center Efficiency

June 24th, 2009 : Rich Miller

 

The Yahoo data center in Quincy, Washington includes cooling-optimized "podules" with a PUE of 1.21 (Photo: Yahoo Inc.)

When it comes to data center efficiency, Yahoo has maintained a lower profile than rivals Google and Microsoft. But the Yahoo team is building a compelling data center story of its own, with innovations in cooling design and energy efficiency ratings approaching the best that Google has achieved.

Yahoo’s Adam Bechtel began telling the story yesterday at the O’Reilly Velocity 2009 conference in San Jose, Calif. Bechtel, the chief architect of Yahoo’s data center operations, shared details of a patented cold-aisle containment system that integrates an overhead cooling module, building the air conditioning units into the top of a “podule” of cabinets packed with servers.

That design has helped Yahoo lower its Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) to 1.21, according to Bechtel, just a hair shy of the best numbers disclosed by Google and a slightly better than the lowest PUE reported by Microsoft. The PUE metric (PDF) compares a facility’s total power usage to the amount of power used by the IT equipment, revealing how much is lost in distribution and conversion.

What is missing is under what conditions was 1.21 determined.

What is needed is transparency for PUE claims.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could connect to a web service at google, microsoft, and yahoo data centers to get their PUE at any time of the day with the current weather conditions?   And, make a request for any other time for the PUE number?

Once we see a data center do this, I’ll believe the PUE claims would stand up to a compliance audit.

I am waiting for a claim of 1.10 PUE.  Competition is good, and this all helps educate more people.  But, we need more transparency on how PUE is calculated.

Frontline PBS Special: Digital Dumping Ground – eWaste Documented

PBS has a special that just aired on June 23, 2009 on Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground.

The video is here.

On the outskirts of Ghana's biggest city sits a smoldering wasteland, a slum carved into the banks of the Korle Lagoon, one of the most polluted bodies of water on earth. The locals call it Sodom and Gomorrah.

Correspondent Peter Klein and a group of graduate journalism students from the University of British Columbia have come here as part of a global investigation -- to track a shadowy industry that's causing big problems here and around the world.

Their guide is a 13-year-old boy named Alex. He shows them his home, a small room in a mass of shanty dwellings, and offers to take them across a dead river to a notorious area called Agbogbloshie.

Agbogbloshie has become one of the world's digital dumping grounds, where the West's electronic waste, or e-waste, piles up -- hundreds of millions of tons of it each year.

The team meets with Mike Anane, a local journalist who has been writing about the boys at this e-waste dump.

“Life is really difficult; they eat here, surrounded by e-waste,” Anane tells them. “They basically are here to earn a living. But you can imagine the health implications.”

Some of the boys burn old foam on top of computers to melt away the plastic, leaving behind scraps of copper and iron they can collect to sell. The younger boys use magnets from old speakers to gather up the smaller pieces left behind at the burn site.

There is an interactive map.

A slide show.

Microsoft rides Bing success, maybe they should rename the company - BingSoft

Microsoft is riding a wave of excitement as bing.com makes progress.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 24TH, 2009 BY JORDAN MCCOLLUM

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Bing’s Paid Clicks Still Up

Bing’s flash in the pan—supposed to burn out a while ago—is extending every day, at least in one important area: paid clicks. So far this month, we’ve seen that

• Bing might be making more per query than Google
• Bing saw an 8% increase in paid clicks and a 20% query volume lift
• Bing is taking a hardline on click fraud
• Bing is increasing its searcher penetration and overall share of SERPs (in the post with the best Bing title ever: Pre Bing Sting With a Post Bing Bang?)

Efficient Frontier is back again this week with more good news: Bing continues to see increases in their paid clicks:

According to our data analysis, Bing expanded its share of paid clicks for the two weeks post launch. Bing’s share of paid clicks is up 13% for the second week post launch as compared to pre-launch. And, it represents an incremental 5% lift over the first week.

 

Maybe Microsoft should rename the company to BingSoft.

What do you think?  It could be part of the plan now that Bill Gates has left.  Rebrand the company.The stock has performed as well.

I would like to see the utilization of those Microsoft Search servers now that they have something to do.