Green Data Center Blog

HP Joins the Container Data Center Market

The Register writes on HP’s Container offering.

Hewlett-Packard has finally found its way into the data center trailer park.

It took a while, but the hardware vendor is introducing its own scheme for selling chunks of data centers in pre-packaged containers. HP joins the likes of Sun, IBM, Rackable, and Verari with similar White Trash Data Center programs.

HP calls its offering a "Performance Optimized Data Center" or POD. HP joins IBM by providing the option of filling containers not just with the vendor's own kit, but also a wide variety of third-party metal.

"We engineered our PODs to be the most flexible infrastructure in the industry," said Paul Miller, HP's marketing chief of enterprise gear. "If it can fit into a 19-inch rack, we can pretty much fit it into our POD."

Miller said customers are all about standardized hardware in the container arena. For example, the standards approach lets customers start with half a POD and then move their existing equipment into the container when they need the extra space.

Most other vendors have chosen a ground-up approach for the job — fitting their containers with specialized gear made for life in a 40-foot unit. HP, however, doesn't have new hardware for its container. But at least it's managed to cram a lot of what it currently has in there.

HP claims the shipping containers will support more than 3,500 compute nodes, or 12,000 large form factor hard drives. The company estimates that's equivalent to 4,000-plus square feet of typical data center capacity. It also promises delivery within six weeks of the customer's order.

Here is HP’s POD web site.

HP’s slick video is here.

Nortel’s Energy Efficiency Calculator

Greenmonk has a post about Nortel’s Energy Efficiency Calculator.

Nortel announced the release their Energy Efficiency Calculator online last week.

The tool is available for anyone to use after a quick registration (name, email and country) and uses best guestimates to give figures for energy spend.

The data are highly customisable, you can vary country, energy costs, company setup (network, no. of employees, etc.). It outputs costs to run the network infrastructure, kWh consumed, MBTUs generated and CO2 emissions.

This is an extension of the “Cisco Energy Tax” campaign which Nortel have been running very successfully now for some time.

And, they close throwing out a challenge to Cisco

Having said that, this is a neat tool and reinforces the connection for companies between saving costs and lowering CO2 emissions.

Now Cisco, where is your rebuttal?

[Disclosure: Nortel are a GreenMonk client]

Nortel must be pleased with its Green Data Center efforts it announced at Interop.

Microsoft Research Paper on SSD Performance and Design Tradeoffs

StorageMojo has a post about Microsoft Research’s paper on Design TradeOffs of SSD.

Design Tradeoffs for SSD Performance

July 15th, 2008 by Robin Harris in Architecture, Future Tech, SSD/Flash Disk

A new Usenix paper looks at NAND flash SSD performance. From a team at Microsoft Research and the University of Wisconsin, including Ted Wobber who worked on last year’s A Design for High-Performance Flash Disks [see Flash chance for the StorageMojo take on that excellent paper - a post Ted was kind enough to review and comment on].

Design Tradeoffs for SSD Performance (by Nitin Agrawal, Vijayan Prabhakaran, Ted Wobber, John D. Davis, Mark Manasse and Rina Panigrahy) makes a deep dive in flash translation layer (FTL) issues. As the authors note, flash vendors keep their FTL designs secret, so the team developed a NAND flash simulator to look at how design choices affected performance.

What they found
They ran several workloads on their trace-based simulator, including TPC-C, Exchange and some file system benchmarks. They found several critical issues in SSD design.

• Data placement Needed for wear leveling and load balancing.
• Parallelism Single flash chips aren’t very fast so they need to work together.
• Write ordering Small random writes are a killer.
• Workload management You can optimize for sequential or random workloads, but managing both well is hard.

and as StorageMojo closes you need to read the Microsoft Research paper to get a full understanding.

The StorageMojo take
This paper is too rich in detail to summarize well. If understanding SSD controller design is important there is no substitute for a careful read.

The net is that engineers have many options in configuring and managing flash devices inside a solid state disk. The interaction of these design choices with applications is likely to remain a fruitful area of study for years to come.

Expect to see many performance oddities as new solid state disk designs are released. This is a different world than disk drives. There is much innovation and much to learn.

A macro longer-term trade-off is the extent to which SSD vendors should attempt to alter operating system behavior to better match SSDs. In the short term designers must conform to today’s disk I/O oriented operating systems. In the long term however, there must be major opportunities to tweak operating systems to enhance solid-state disk performance.

For this reason SSDs is may find their best short term market to be inside storage arrays where array vendors have complete control over the interface to the array software. This will be no small advantage as array vendors struggle to remain relevant in a world where high performance solid state disks have the potential to replace midsize arrays.

James Hamilton also has a post referring to Spansion’s Flash Memory announcement.

Giving Cloud Storage a Try

If you have been thinking about giving Cloud Storage a try here is a blog post on Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an easy and inexpensive Internet hard-drive from Amazon Web Services (AWS) with absolutely no limits.

Now some people assume that Amazon S3 is a storage service meant primarily for web start-ups who store data in-the-cloud but that’s not correct because just about anyone (home users included) can benefit from S3.

For instance, you may backup your large music collection or even your entire computer hard-drive on S3. Similarly, bloggers can use Amazon S3 to store web images without worrying too much about their bandwidth bills.

If you never had a chance to explore Amazon S3 before, read the following guide that makes S3 simple even for non-geeks. It has all the information and tools you would need to quickly get started with Amazon S3.

The Basic Requirements:

To use Amazon S3 service, you’ll need an Amazon account (yes, it’s free; you pay only if you buy something from them) and an Amazon AWS S3 account.

Now go to AWS Access Key Identifiers and generate a unique Access Key ID + Secret Access Key pair that is required for using Amazon S3.

The post continues with a variety of tools you can use.

Intel IT: Relevance of Architecture – Closed Loop Feedback System

I found this following blog post on Intel’s Expert Center for IT best practices. It’s kind of a long post, but makes good points on the importance of architecture for Manageability and Automation which are key methods for a Green Data Center

Intel Open Port: Intel vPro Expert Center Blog: Relevance of Architecture: Part 3 - How Architecture Can Help

The primary role of architecture is to provide an orchestrated plan to meet short term and long term Manageability & Automation (M&A) objectives. Architecture is all about technical planning and can enable reduced operational costs and agility if done correctly. I strongly believe that architecture can help accelerate the rate of change and provide real value for "M" and for "A".

The below graphic is one which does a good job of articulating the need for a manageability bus.

 

Unfortunately, he misses the simplicity of explaining what you need is a closed loop feedback system as he has this diagram which is drawn backwards.

This is the diagram he should have used. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory

I am amazed at how often the IT community misses the opportunity to use control theory to explain management systems.  Most IT systems actually run open loop.

On a related topic I had a chance to meet with a fellow consultant, Michael Emanuel who has worked on IT management tools, and knows of a company developing some innovative solutions to the challenge of building a closed loop management tool for a Green Data Center.  After I  have had a chance to review the product features, it will be in a future blog post.

Boeing and Airbus - Environment Sites

Boeing and Airbus have their environment sites.  This is interesting to look at for companies who have now had to make Green, carbon emissions, energy efficiency part of their everyday communications.

Pulling the Plug: Summer of '08 Sparks Creative Conservation - WSJ.com

WSJ has an article on how people are being creative turning off their air conditioning. It is 2nd most popular article today behind the US bolsters fannie and freddie.

As the article cites, get ready for the electricity price increases.

Pulling the Plug: Summer of '08 Sparks Creative Conservation - WSJ.com

Because many power plants run on natural gas, which has shot way up in price, utilities in every region of the nation have imposed -- or are planning -- big rate increases this year, some approaching 30%.

In response, nearly two-thirds of families are cutting back on air conditioning, according to a recent Associated Press-Yahoo News poll. They're buying ceiling fans and programmable thermostats; burning up hot afternoons in malls and movie theaters; and bombarding blogger Erin Huffstetler, who writes about frugal living, with questions about the merits of tinting their windows dark to block the sun.

I know the Microsoft guys say they save energy cleaning the roof.  Here is one guy who thinks he saves energy by sprinkling the roof.

On hot afternoons, Mr. Newman runs a hose to the roof and douses the shingles for 20 minutes, which he swears lowers the temperature inside. "I don't know if it's all that good for the life span of the roof," Mr. Newman says, "but when it's 110 degrees, I really could care less."

And WSJ even included a story of a bad move in air conditioning.

And Reba Kennedy, who turned off her central air altogether?

Ms. Kennedy now cools just the three rooms she uses most in her San Antonio home, with window units set at 78 degrees. To her surprise, she has found it pleasurable. With her downstairs windows open, she can smell the honeysuckle in her yard. She loves the look of her sheer curtains blowing in the breeze.

Last week, though, when she reviewed her electric bills, Ms. Kennedy found that her sacrifices haven't translated into savings. In June of 2006 -- with the central air on full blast -- she used an average of 26 kilowatt hours a day. Last month? An average of 44.

Harvey Sachs, a senior fellow at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, says that isn't surprising, because window units are notoriously inefficient.

But Ms. Kennedy was upset. Since quitting her job as a business lawyer two years ago to take up writing, she has tried to live simply and frugally; conserving energy is central to that goal.

Are you crazy enough to succeed? - Behavior- msnbc.com, Possible explanation for Extreme Green Behaviors

Saw this MSNBC article and it provides a possible explanation for some people who are obsessed with Green practices that have no science backing their actions.

Are you crazy enough to succeed? - Behavior- msnbc.com

I'm at the Obsessive Compulsive Disorders Institute (OCDI), a residential treatment center in McLean Hospital — Harvard's psychiatric center — to see if my own OCD problem wasn't just my secret but maybe also the secret to my success. All my adult life, intrusive thoughts have alternately halted my progress and saved my ass, and I'd finally like to separate the bad from the good.

The medical director at the center, Michael Jenike, M.D., is both a maverick and a pioneer in the OCD community. He founded this facility, the first of its kind, to help sufferers of what he considers the most agonizing of psychiatric disorders.

"I had a 17-year-old who had kidney cancer that was going to kill him in 5 or 6 months. He also had a bad case of OCD. He said he'd rather get rid of his OCD and live only 6 months, than get rid of the cancer and live with the OCD. That's when it first hit me: This is some serious stuff."
The people seeking treatment at OCDI do not have the minstrel-show version of the disorder acted out by Tony Shalhoub in Monk or Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets. The institute's residents are seriously impaired. They have the kind of shattering anxiety that would make the rest of the OCD world — roughly 1 percent of all adults, 2.3 million of them in the United States alone — want to scrub their hands. The real numbers could be even higher, because OCD may be underdiagnosed and undertreated. Half of all OCD cases are serious — and that's the highest percentage among all anxiety disorders. On average, people flail about for 17 years and see three or four doctors before they find the right care.
That horror aside, OCD has become cool. Perhaps it fascinates us because it forces otherwise normal people to carry out insane acts — acts that they know are insane. It has great dramatic tension. We secretly enjoy the dissonance of a perfectly rational man becoming convinced that he is fatally contaminated and washing his hands with bleach and a scrub brush, only to repeat the whole routine 10 minutes later. Paging Lady Macbeth.

For any you have started a green program in your company, I am sure you are familiar with people who could possibly be put in the category of having a Green Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

GE Earnings: Appliances Out, Energy In

WSJ’s Environmental Blog points out GE’s strength is now its energy businesses, both traditional and renewable. 

GE Earnings: Appliances Out, Energy In

Posted by Keith Johnson

General Electric didn’t disappoint with its second-quarter earnings — they were as dismal as expected, with a profit drop of more than 5%.

The bright spot, as in past quarters? Infrastructure and energy. And regardless of what the ads might say, that isn’t all wind turbines and green energy (though GE’s wind business is going gangbusters). There’s plenty of old energy in there, too, from gas turbines to coal and nuclear.

Which is why GE is rubbing its hands. World leaders are trying to figure out whether their priority is to tackle climate change with a lot more clean energy, or to fight poverty by bridging the energy gap in poor countries with a lot more old energy. Unlike a lot of its specialized rivals, GE has the luxury of cheering on both camps — it can sell wind turbines to Texans and coal plants to India. That helps explain the conglomerate’s makeover away from 100-year old lightbulbs and toward new energy sources.

And closes with the current economic conditions favor GE.

Now, GE’s just got to hope the dollar stays weak. That means pricey oil, more attractive renewable energy, and an easier export story for all of its energy products.

SalesForce.com Cloud Computing Service Performance History

SalesForce.com is another company in cloud computing service that has a service report like amazon.com’s.

SalesForce.com’s policies are here.

Trust.salesforce.com

Success is built on trust. And trust starts with transparency.
Trust.salesforce.com is the salesforce.com community’s home for real-time information on system performance and security. On this site you’ll find:

• Live data on system performance
• Up-to-the minute information on planned maintenance
• Historical information on transaction volume and speed
• Current and recent phishing and malware attempts
• Information on new security technologies
• Best security practices for your organization

Our trusted, secure, reliable infrastructure is the foundation of our Force.com platform as a service. No other application or platform—on-demand or on-premise—offers a comparable level of transparency.
Trust.salesforce.com was inspired by conversations with our customers. Let’s continue that conversation. What would you like to see here? Post your suggestions on ideas.salesforce.com today.