Is Facebook the Lightning Rod for Environmental Impact of Data Centers?

DataCenterKnowledge posts on Facebook's 100KW Solar array.

Facebook Installs Solar Panels at New Data Center

April 16th, 2011 : Rich Miller

Facebook has built a large solar array next to its new data center in Prineville, Oregon (Photo: Rich Miller, Data Center Knowledge).

Facebook has installed a large array of solar panels at its new data center in Prineville, Oregon, which will supplement the local utility in providing electricity for the 300,000 square foot facility, which was officially opened at a ceremony yesterday.

For more than a year, the environmental group Greenpeace International has been bashing Facebook over its use of electricity generated by “dirty coal” to support its huge new Oregon data center  – a campaign that continued Friday as Facebook opened the new facility.

The photo Rich has of the solar array on a cloudy day reminded me of a post I wrote 2 years ago on who Greenpeace's first data center target would be.

What is the First Greenpeace Data Center Target? Apple? Google? Microsoft?

TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2009 AT 9:20AM

Datacenterknowledge blogs on how quickly Apple is building its $1 billion dollar data center.

APPLE MOVING QUICKLY ON NC PROJECT

July 28th, 2009 : Rich Miller

Apple is known for keeping its new technology secret prior to launch.

And, I closed with the following.

How can Greenpeace, not already have a plan in place to address Apple’s data center for its environmental impact?

Now, you could say Greenpeace why not go after Google or Microsoft?  Greenpeace could, but why haven’t they already.  It is not worth it for media coverage.  Going after Apple would get people’s attention.

If not Apple, who else makes sense to go after if you were Greenpeace?

With Earth Day coming up Facebook is the one company as a target for Greenpeace and the rest of the data center industry is relieved.  Facebook is a convenient target being the only data center operator I know that had an option to source hydro or coal power for its data center and selected coal.

When Greenpeace went after environmental impact of PC products they targeted HP, Dell, and Apple.  Is it time for Apple, Microsoft, and Google to feel the attention of Greenpeace or is Facebook the only high carbon impact data center user out there?

I'll be at Green:NET 2011 later this week and will be in this session.

GREENPEACE INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP – ROOM 2

Dirty Data: How the Cloud is Powered and Why it Matters for the Climate

Greenpeace will release a new analysis that looks at leading IT companies (Facebook, Apple, Google, and more) and asks if IT, as it builds out the cloud, will perpetuate the dirty energy issues of older, entrenched industries or will be the innovative sector that creates a business model that prioritizes a future built on clean, renewable energy?

Speakers:Gary Cook - Senior IT Policy Analyst, Greenpeace International

Data Center shortage is not Power, Cooling, or Network, but executives - Apple hires Microsoft's Data Center GM

Much of what you hear about data centers is from the vendors who have marketing budgets to sell solutions for power, cooling, and networking issues in data centers.  But, you know what is one of the scarcest resources around? Data center executives.  If vendors had a way to package up executives, we'd hear more.  Wait maybe that is a way to think about the new wave of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools.  Data center executive in a box.  Interesting idea, but that is a later post.  Back to data center executives.

Whenever I sit down with a data center insider to catch up, we almost always discuss executive movement to other companies.  In some ways it is a short hand way to discuss what is going on in the industry as it can mean many different things why an executive moves from one company to another.

News that a bunch of us have been discussing is Apple hiring Kevin Timmons (GM of Microsoft's data center services group).  Don't expect any press releases from Apple or Microsoft on this one.  Here is probably one of the last articles we'll see featuring an interview with Kevin Timmons talking about green data centers and knowledge sharing posted by DataCenterDynamics. 

Datacenter Leaders Q&A Kevin Timmons, Microsoft

Kevin Timmons, General Manager, Data Center Operations, Microsoft believes in sustainability, knowledge sharing, security and modularity

Published 13th April, 2011 by Ambrose McNevin

DCD Q: What can the data center industry do to increase its influence over government policy?

KT, A: At Microsoft, we think there is an opportunity for everyone in the industry to help share our collective knowledge to help the entire industry evolve and influence policies that benefit all our customers and increase greater efficiencies. We are committed to driving software and technology innovations that help people and organizations improve the environment.

The position Kevin is going to fill is not known and is not the position vacated by the departed Olivier Sanche.  Olivier's position has been filled by another data center operations executive. 

It is such a small world in data centers and especially smaller for the executive rank, information flows as recruiters call and others want opinions on various candidates and companies to work for.  Besides the executives, senior data center design engineers are heavily recruited like Facebook recently hired a senior mechanical engineer from Equinix and Google's Daniel Costello who also came from Microsoft.  Mike Manos is proud of his renegade action to recruit Daniel from Intel to Microsoft while he had the job that Kevin Timmons had filled and now departed.

I called him [Daniel Costello] and told him I needed him for my program.  No HR.  No Recruiters.  I wanted the best talent possible and he was it.   I offered him the job on the spot over the phone.   We were building something incredible.

One of the interesting problems is at many companies working in the data center group is not respected and as well paid as other technical positions.  In fact, some technology companies probably don't even think of their data center staff as technical.  Which then leaves the opening for the neglected to find greener pastures.  At Google the data center group is respected.  At Facebook, the data center group is respected.  At Apple, most learn about data centers from the media as there is little news on Apple's data centers discussed.

In one of the data center insider conversations a friend jokingly mentioned The Manchurian Candidate where sleeper agents are placed in strategic positions, and later are activated for covert activities.  With so many executives moving from competing companies will there be psychological analysis looking for latent devious action?  Nah. But, it was good for a laugh.  Which by the way is part of chatting about who is moving where.  We eventually start laughing about some move somewhere which could make this appear like gossip.  But, we know the data center executive shortage is real, and where the scarce resources go influences the system. 

Data Center Gossip can be useful.

Have You Heard? Gossip Turns Out to Serve a Purpose

By BENEDICT CAREY

Published: August 16, 2005

...

People find it irresistible for good reason: Gossip not only helps clarify and enforce the rules that keep people working well together, studies suggest, but it circulates crucial information about the behavior of others that cannot be published in an office manual. As often as it sullies reputations, psychologists say, gossip offers a foothold for newcomers in a group and a safety net for group members who feel in danger of falling out.

"There has been a tendency to denigrate gossip as sloppy and unreliable" and unworthy of serious study, said David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology and anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and the author of "Darwin's Cathedral," a book on evolution and group behavior. "But gossip appears to be a very sophisticated, multifunctional interaction which is important in policing behaviors in a group and defining group membership."

Amazon Announces Cloud Drive, that explains Amazon’s data center build out in Oregon

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) just announced Cloud Drive along with Cloud Player.

Introducing Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon Cloud Player for Web, and Amazon Cloud Player for Android

Buy anywhere, play anywhere and keep all your music in one place
Start with 5 GB of free Cloud Drive storage - upgrade to 20 GB free with purchase of any MP3 album

SEATTLE, Mar 29, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) --

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced the launch of Amazon Cloud Drive (www.amazon.com/clouddrive), Amazon Cloud Player for Web (www.amazon.com/cloudplayer) and Amazon Cloud Player for Android (www.amazon.com/cloudplayerandroid). Together, these services enable customers to securely store music in the cloudand play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC, wherever they are. Customers can easily upload their music library to Amazon Cloud Drive and can save any new Amazon MP3 purchases directly to their Amazon Cloud Drive for free.

"We're excited to take this leap forward in the digital experience," said Bill Carr, vice president of Movies and Music at Amazon. "The launch of Cloud Drive, Cloud Player for Web and Cloud Player for Android eliminates the need for constant software updates as well as the use of thumb drives and cables to move and manage music."

Here is the site for Cloud Drive.

After 5 GB here is the pricing.

The music battle between Apple iTunes and Amazon MP3 Store are turned up a notch.

Here are some technical details on what is behind cloud drive.

A Drive in the Cloud

To build Amazon Cloud Drive the team made use of a number of cloud computing services offered by Amazon Web Services. The scalability, reliability and durability requirements for Cloud Drive are very high which is why they decided to make use of the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) as the core component of their service. Amazon S3 is used by enterprises of all sizes and is designed to handle scaling extremely well; it stores hundreds of billions of objects and easily performs several hundreds of thousands of storage transaction a second.

Amazon S3 uses advanced techniques to provide very high durability and reliability; for example it is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. Such a high durability level means that if you store 10,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000,000 years. Amazon S3 redundantly stores your objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an Amazon S3 Region. The service is designed to sustain concurrent device failures by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy, for example there may be a concurrent loss of data in two facilities without the customer ever noticing.

Cloud Drive also makes extensive use of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to help ensure that objects owned by a customer can only be accessed by that customer. IAM is designed to meet the strict security requirements of enterprises and government agencies using cloud services and allows Amazon Cloud Drive to manage access to objects at a very fine grained level.

A key part of the Cloud Drive architecture is a Metadata Service that allows customers to quickly search and organize their digital collections within Cloud Drive. The Cloud Player Web Applications and Cloud Player for Android make extensive use of this Metadata service to ensure a fast and smooth customer experience.

DataCenterKnowledge just posted on expanded data center growth by Amazon in Oregon, speculating on AWS growth, but the big growth is Amazon Cloud Drive & Player which is specifically in Amazon S3.

Amazon’s Cloud Goes Modular in Oregon

March 28th, 2011 : Rich Miller

The data center arm of Amazon.com is building data centers at three sites in Oregon, according to local media, who report that two of the sites are using a modular design. A third site, which has been the focus of on-and-off construction activity for several years, appears to be employing a more traditional design.

With the new projects, Amazon.com joins major cloud builders Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in embracing factory-built components as a strategy to reduce the cost and deployment time for data center capacity. The Oregon construction is part of a larger effort by Amazon to prepare for a significant expansion of its data center capacity to accommodate the growth of its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon has also been acquiring property near Dublin, Ireland to expand the European data center hub for AWS.

Who will ship the first Thunderbolt Server? For now use a MacBook Pro as a server to test performance

10 GB Ethernet is expensive due to low volumes.  Fiber channel is lower cost, but still not high volume and not cheap enough for mass deployments.  Now that Apple and Intel have announced Thunderbolt, 10 GB IO connections will be low cost. 

Why not use Thunderbolt for SAN and network connectivity.  Look at the difference between these two designs.

Figure 1 illustrates a typical topology of building out a server cluster today, in which, while the form factors may change, the basic configuration follows a similar pattern. Given the widespread availability of open-source software and off-the-shelf hardware, companies have successfully built large topologies for their internal cloud infrastructure using this architecture.

Figure 1: Typical Data Center I/O interconnect

Figure 2 illustrates a server cluster built using a native PCIe fabric. As is evident, the usage of numerous adapters and controllers is significantly reduced and this results in a tremendous reduction in power and cost of the overall platform, while delivering better performance in terms of lower latency and higher throughput.

Figure 2: PCI Express-based Server Cluster

We'll see what server vendor is first with Thunderbolt support.  For now some innovative users could use a bunch of MacBook Pros.