Google Drops More than 160 points, culture shift?

January 22, 2008 Dave Ohara

Are people getting nervous about the economy and advertising budgets? John Battelles' Blog writes about how Google's culture shift.

It's on a steep decline in the past few days, perhaps due to the new search stats from Nielsen, as well as jitters about the economy at large.

I can only imagine what this is doing to the Google culture. Don't tell me no one watches the stock there. Anyone who's joined since September of 2007 - and that's a lot of folks - now find their options underwater.

2008 will be the year Wall Street gets frustrated with Google. The company has incredible numbers, and will continue to impress, but analysts, tired of bidding up the stock, will start to question the company's myriad ocean-boiling projects - after all, it's merely trying to reinvent Health, Energy, Telecom, IT (both consumer apps and OSes), and a few other major portions of the GDP.

Seems like Google is spending more time marketing itself as a company to work for. Lots of press articles about their cafeteria's, office, game rooms which is usually a sign they are having a hard time recruiting. We can all remember back when other technology companies were "the" company to work for and they had no problem recruiting. Times change.

This is significant for data center development in that once Google's cachet becomes tarnished, it will be more difficult for them to get their attractive tax breaks. Many of us think there is a misperception on what the value of Google data center to a local economy. I am waiting for some one to do a study on the economic impact of a data center to an area, and I'll blog it as soon as it pops up, or volunteer to help research it.

Another interesting view is of Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo in the last 3 months.

What are the Top 10 Benefits of a Green Data Center?

January 18, 2008 Dave Ohara

As many of you know most companies are sitting on the fence as to whether a Green Data Center Initiative is worth the effort. To help you persuade the people who think this is a fad let me go over some benefits I've observed for those who run Green Data Centers.

There is pride in the Data Center team as they are leaders in the industry.
They are saving money on their power bills now vs. their competitors who are paying more and doing less with power constrained data centers and under utilized equipment.
They are moving on to the next steps of building energy efficient solutions on energy efficient infrastructure.
They are questioning standard practices to see if there are different ways to run servers in a data center. When you look in the big picture the way each server is designed in isolation, you wonder what would happen if power, memory, IO, storage was a shared resource across multiple servers.
As the internal PR teams realize they have a green initiative hiding in their data centers, they are promoting the environmental friendly activities.
Capacity Planning becomes a lot easier given there is awareness that power and cooling are critical resources to be proactively managed.
Charge back models are changed to report actual power consumption by business units, giving the business units incentives to develop energy efficient solutions.
They already have carbon emission monitoring systems in place , and have no fear when it is government regulatory requirement.
They know a lower TCO is a benefit of a sustainable solution.
They evaluate hardware from vendors in a way that cuts through the marketing hype, and addresses the bottom line.

Part of my inspiration for this article is sitting in an area this weekend with plentiful hydroelectric power, but connected to the Internet with 1 bar of cel phone reception when I go to the highest part of the house with the cel phone resting on the highest shelf in the room. So minimal bits is part of the economizing. Being Green is all about the best use of your resources.

Dream or Nightmare of Measuring power within devices

December 17, 2007 Dave Ohara

It is a nice dream to have power consumption measurements built into IT devices (pc, laptop, servers, storago, and switches). The problem is this is not a high priority for any vendor and it will be done at minimal cost for development and production to provide a checkbox feature. This method is why wake-on-lan is so unreliable no one uses it once they figure out how inconsistent Windows and the devices are for this feature, and how different implementations from vendors cause frustration for users.

Power management as much as we would all love it to be built in to devices is going to be inaccurate an inconsistent. The google guys say they measure power consumption of their servers by tracking the cpu utilization <link>.

But, I think a more elegant way is to measure the power consumption on in a labo and a sampling of production units while collecting data from Windows Device Manager on an inventory of enumerated devices while collecting performance monitoring data for cpu, IO, RAM, monitors, and other power consuming devices.

Closed loop feedback systems are one of the architecture methods I use to think about whether systems have been thought through for how the system provides data on its operations.

Closed loop feedback is a well proven technique, but surprisingly is not used much in IT systems.

Path to Green: Prioritize and Focus

December 15, 2007 Dave Ohara

This weekend in reading some other blogs, I went to scobelizer.com.

In reading scoble's latest 2 entries, http://scobleizer.com/2007/12/15/my-feedback-for-microsofts-mapping-team/ and http://scobleizer.com/2007/12/15/surviving-the-2008-recession/ each had 18 - 19 things he was telling the audience to do.

Why am I writing about Robert's entry? It reminds that Green is a broad topic and you can go on for hours talking about all the Green things you could do in a data center - eWaste, energy efficiency, cooling systems, UPS, building construction, blades, virtualization, storage systems, networks, power supplies, processors, design isues, power management, RAM, solid state drives, renewable energy, carbon credits. There are dozens of vendors ready to sell you green upgrades.

If you are going to successful in creating a Green Data Center you need to prioritize the changes and focus on develop a strategy of how you will measure the effectiveness of change.

Robert has some good suggestions for his audience, but how do you know which ones have the highest return? Being Green requires an iterative approach and measurement system to determine how much greener you are after each change, and whether you may have take a step backward. It is easy to throw out a bunch of ideas, it is hard to execute and prove the effectiveness.

Keep this in mind when implementing Green Data Center projects. It is easy to have the Robert Scobles of the world tell you all the different things you should do to make a Green Data Center. It's hard to prioritize and focus.

Another related topic is my post at /2007/12/its-not-easy-go.html

I am basing part of my opinion on the time I was at Microsoft watching Robert Scoble operate.

Electricity Supply Chain Management

December 11, 2007 Dave Ohara

Sun guru foresees data center disaster in '08

One of the top engineers at Sun Microsystems this week predicted that a large data center would suffer a "massive failure" during the next twelve months, causing "major national effects," including possible "national security issues," and underscoring "the importance of data centers as national assets.” In a talk with reporters, Sun vice president and distinguished engineer Subodh Bapat said the disaster would be on the scale of that caused when Robert Morris unleashed his infamous Morris Worm on November 2, 1988.

Bapat is also right to point to electricity as a weak link in the system. The centralization of computing can bring dramatic increases in overall energy efficiency, compared to the fragmented, subscale private data centers we have today. The megacenters tend to operate at much higher levels of capacity utilization than the private centers can achieve, and their operators have the skill and wherewithal to install cutting-edge power-management and cooling technologies. At the same time, however, the centralization of computing assets concentrates energy demand, putting new strains on the aging electric grid. Efficiency increases, but vulnerability does, too.

I agree that a major data center will suffer a massive failure, and that electricity is the weak leak in the system. Whether it will cause a national effect, don't know. Will it be hyped and draw attention to the importance of data centers and electricity supply chain management, hopefully, yes.