Gartner’s Green Data Centre Press Release

Gartner has a press release on Green Data Centre.

It’s good to hear Gartner is thinking beyond power.

Gartner Says a Green Data Centre Means More than Energy Efficiency
Analysts to Examine the Concept of the Data Centre as a Living Organism at Gartner's Data Center Summit 2008, 21-23 October in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Egham, UK, October 20, 2008 —

Power and cooling will drive the evolution of data centres into becoming conceptual models of intelligent “living organisms” as organisations need to improve energy efficiency and become ‘greener’, according to Gartner, Inc. 
“If ‘greening’ the data centre is the goal, power efficiency is the starting point but not sufficient on its own,” said Rakesh Kumar, vice president at Gartner.  “’Green’ requires an end-to-end, integrated view of the data centre, including the building, energy efficiency, waste management, asset management, capacity management, technology architecture, support services, energy sources and operations.”

Then they go on to discuss Ideas I put in my Living Data Center post.

“Data centre managers need to think differently about their data centres.  Tomorrow’s data centre is moving from being static to becoming a living organism, where modelling and measuring tools will become one of the major elements of its management,” said Mr Kumar. “It will be dynamic and address a variety of technical, financial and environmental demands, and modular to respond quickly to demands for floor space.  In addition, it will need to have some degree of flexibility, to run workloads where energy is cheapest and above all be highly-available, with 99.999 per cent availability.”

They make 6 points.

Achieving an optimised, reliable and efficient data centre environment requires a holistic and integrated approach, which can be broken down into six stages:
1. Pick the location according to a strategic facility strategy.  High-bay, warehouse-type buildings provide more efficient rack layout and airflow
2. Develop the site on a modular basis
3. Include chillers and high-ventilation air conditioning units (HVACS).  Build all new large facilities with chilled fluid plumbing at the outset
4. Introduce some recycling and alternative energy sources
5. Put in monitoring tools
6. Manage the server efficiencies.  Move away from the ‘always on’ mentality and look at powering equipment down

and, promote their Gartner Data Center Summit on Oct 21 – 23.

No surprises in this press release, nothing really revolutionary.  Just common sense when you think about the problems.

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Summary of Microsoft's Data Center Event - Microsoft Set the Bar

TechHermit has three different attendees submit comments about the Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Data Center Event. Mike Manos, Christian Belady, Daniel Costello, and the rest of the Microsoft Data Center team are changing the data center industry. 

As good as this event was, the real one people want to get into is if Microsoft does this again for its Iowa Data Center, its next generation data center.

"The facility that we have planned here in Iowa will be something special and unique," said Manos, Microsoft's general manager of data center services. "It will be the first data center that what we consider our next-generation facility."

The new center will "drive significantly better energy efficiency than any center under construction today," Manos said. "Iowa, specifically West Des Moines, was the perfect location."

They could have an event for a whole week and people would gladly pay $10,000 each to attend.

Here are comments from TechHermit's blogs.

Jenny Rator

TH -

Well we just wrapped up the second day and I am now back in my hotel room relaxing after a very busy day.   The day began for me as I visited the presentation by Microsoft Security chief and General Manager Peter Boden.  The program that Microsoft has around security, compliance, audits and the like is unlike anything I have ever seen before.   You never really think about the requirements for security and Microsoft’s program blends the logical and physical in a way that would astound most people.   Microsoft has an impressive list of certifications for their facilities, something you NEVER hear from anyone else advertising software as a service or operational accountability.  More than that, Mr. Boden shared their approach, growth and evolution on how they got there.  These were incredible lessons for those of us in the audience tasked with security requirements

I then attended a question and answer panel emceed by Michael Manos.  The panel consisted of Microsoft’s top mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, architects, and Christian Belady.  Frankly speaking this session was so information packed and the level of sharing of learnings so deep that its actually hard to describe.  You could have done an entire day with just this team and not exhausted the questions and learnings.  Everyone sitting around me agreed that you just dont get access to this type of information from ANYONE or you would have to pay an architecture and engineering company big bucks to get to talk to these kinds of people.   At lunch afterwards in one of the long hallways in the facility I talked about this session with several colleagues who were equally blown away by two key things - the forthrightness of answers and the level of sharing with the attendees. Microsoft has the most intelligent Data Center engineering organization I have ever seen.   If Microsoft ever does this again - This is a MUST ATTEND event.

Warhawk85:

TechHermit:

Like the person who posted yesterday I thought that I would send you some of my highlevel thoughts of this event. 

IT TOTALLY ROCKED!

Microsoft did in one event what the last three years of attending Uptime Symposiums, DATA CENTER WORLDS, and Data Center Dynamics have completely failed to do!  They shared real world examples, real data and engineering, and gave actual users exposure to real data that they could use.  They did all this in a working data center that would completely blow your mind.  The tour and the level of detail they went into on the facility design was just incredible.  Microsoft knows how to build data centers.  Dont let anyone ever tell you different.  I have been in this business for 30 years and nothing even comes close.

The Microsoft event was vastly different than anything I have ever attended before in my career.  It lacked the uppity air and pretentiousness of the Uptime events, and vastly more detailed than anything Dynamics or Data Center World would get into.  As Michael Manos told me in the hall his goal  was to have a conference “by operations people, for operations people, about operations and real world issues.”  At that they totally succeeded.   Everyone I talked to went on about the quality of the sessions and sheer amazement at their open-ness.  

In my opinion, Microsoft did more for Data Center end-users and the Data Center Community than a hundred conferences.  I know you dont want to post about the Uptime controversy anymore but if there was ever a successor to that work, my vote would be for this group to manage it.

OilCanSam

Hermit,

I just wanted to send you my personal experience at the Microsoft Data Center Experience event in San Antonio as I see you have an entry about it.  The event was wonderful.   Microsoft executives and technical teams were frank, open, honest, and generally extremely generous with their time.  While we have different design criteria and operations models it was great to see how someone else has approached the same problems.   The tours of the facility, the technologies used, the engineering reasons they have done what they have done was clearly articulated to everyone.   The opening night keynote had an interesting line : ” This event is not to show anyone the right way to do datacenters, the wrong way to do datacenters, just the Microsoft way of doing datacenters.”  I have to say I was somewhat dubious that I would get a lot of sales marketing around their products but the event was all about operations and with the exception of some salesy stuff in the Virtualization track around Hyper-V it was incredibly down to earth.   one of the best events around data centers and definitely the best Microsoft event I have ever attended.  My personal kudo’s goes out to the Microsoft teams for an amazing experience.

I hope this creates pressure on Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) to open its doors or maybe people have given up on finding out anything about Google.. Has anyone else noticed how little news there is on Google's data centers?

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Microsoft Changing The Data Center Industry with an Event?

TechHermit has an inside track on the Microsoft MDX event.  Given this is an NDA event there is no press that I know of, so we’ll see what details come out.  But, TechHermit has quite a bit.

Microsoft Data Center "No Frills, Mad Skills" Show gets underway

September 30, 2008

I just got an update from one of my readers who is attending the Microsoft Datacenter Experience Conference in San Antonio.  While the event is under non-disclosure certain facts have already leaked out about its content:

  • Microsoft has opened its doors to its key customers around its data center approach, technologies and plans.
  • The event is being held at the recently opened San Antonio Data Center.  Apparently the lecture halls are actual data room halls of the facility.
  • Microsoft has brought its best and brightest data center engineers, program managers, and executives to the event to discuss the business, economics, and technologies of the data center industry.
  • Apparently this event is the brain child of Microsoft Data Center guru’s Michael Manos and Christian Belady but will have representation from all aspects of Microsoft Operations including Networking

The reader identified as “Jenny Rator” sent us the following email snippet.   She is committed and bound by the NDA and will not be disclosing specifics around the various sessions, but promised to give us a “feel” for what she is experiencing.

Here are more details from Jenny Rator.

I have never been to an actual data center conference in a working data center before and they did a really nice job.  Its clear that the focus is on the data, knowledge sharing, and ability to interact with Microsoft personnel, and not on selling Microsoft product or doing a fancy dog and pony show.   I have honestly never experienced anything like this, and frankly I love it.  Everyone got a tour of facility which is breath-taking.  If you ever want to know how to do a data center right - you should go to this event if they have it again.

What is more credible than having a Data Center event at a Data Center?

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Microsoft's Mike Manos to Present Container Data Center Details

Going over the session program for Data Center Dynamics Chicago on Sept 16, I found the below description of Mike Manos's keynote.


Microsoft’s Chicago Containerized Data Center
Michael Manos, General Manager, Data Center Services - Microsoft
Join this unique Keynote Session, as Microsoft takes us through their Chicago Containerized Datacenter and its C-blox design. Microsoft is embracing containers as the key to building scalable, energy-efficient cloud computing platforms. The company's bold move is an affirmation of the potential for containers to address the most pressing power, cooling and capacity utilization challenges facing data center operators. The Chicago facility is part of the company’s fleet of next-generation data centers being built to support its Live suite of "software plus services" online applications. Microsoft has developed its own specifications that include, for example, configuration for electrical components and the layout of physical servers, for its containers. Those specs make Microsoft’s containers different from anything on the market today, and a potential opportunity for future Microsoft products. The containers, which Microsoft calls C-blox, are largely self-contained and will require very little hands-on maintenance.


The Microsoft Chicago facility is a two floor design where the first floor is a containerized design housing 150 to 220 40’ containers each 1,000 to 1,000 servers. Chicago is large facility with the low end of the ranges yielding 150k serves and the high end running to 440k servers. If you assume 200W/server, the critical load would run between 30MW and 88MW for the half of the data center that is containerized. If you assume a PUE of 1.5, we can estimate the containerized portion of the data center at between 45MW and 132MW total load. It’s a substantial facility.
Container-based data centers allow for better IT reporting all around, users will be able to chart the IT productivity of each unit and get clean statistics on data such as e-mail usage, search queries and any number of other business processes. As the doors are closed, and because of the level of automation in its systems, Microsoft can run them and accept a certain amount of failure over time, which more cost effective to build redundancy and automation into Microsoft’s data center applications and allow some hardware to fail than it would be to physically manage such a large data center. The hands-off approach also means design can be tweaked to allow for maximum cooling and energy efficiency without worrying about how accessible the systems are to human hands. Of course, Microsoft also builds backbones that link power, cooling, and bandwidth among the containers. In the C-blox world, a truck drops off a data center container and then picks it up again in a few years when Microsoft is ready to switch over to new hardware. Administrators will only enter the physical C-blox in the rarest of occasions which will also allow Microsoft to run the entire Northlake facility with a continuous staff of little more than 20 or 30 employees.

I'll be there ready to blog Mike's presentation, but I'll be busy with my own session later.

Fellow press/bloggers you may want to attend the event as well.

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Uptime Institute - A Victim of Fiefdom Syndrome?

Today was a good talking to another architect, discussing disruptive/game changing action.

One of his points he made is Bob Herbold's book on Fiefdom Syndrome.

Is your company threatened by turf battles, shut out of key data sources by territorial "lords," or ravaged by hundreds of "micro-companies?" If so, your organization may be suffering from a potentially crippling case of "Fiefdom Syndrome." Robert Herbold, former COO of Microsoft, presents a wealth of case studies from the usual (and always interesting) suspects--IBM, Proctor and Gamble, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart--to illustrate an affliction that affects for-profit and non-profit organizations alike.

Like headaches, fiefdoms can become a persistent problem and if left untreated, can send organizations into an endless loop of deteriorating health and repeated investigations into the cause. Prudent companies will take Herbold's advice and learn how to prevent and treat their little fiefdom problem. --E. Brooke Gilbert

TechHermit put up the following post on Uptime Leadership Split.

Details are sketchy at the moment but I just received word that John Thornell has left the Uptime Institute.  Thornell who has been an instrumental force at Uptime after his departure from APC.  A key driver in Uptime’s marketing efforts over the last few years was made president of the Institute last year.  Indications are that the split is a result of heated debate and differences between Ken Brill and himself.  There is a growing concern over Uptime Institutes relevancy in the industry and its less than subtle attempts to scuttle alternative data center related organizations and metrics such as Green Grid, PUE, and others.  More to come.

Uptime Institute is not a big company, but from listening to conversations from others who are closer, it looks more like a fiefdom syndrome in action: Uptime Institute vs. other data center  organizations.

I enjoyed attending  Uptime Institute's Symposium 2008, but the main thing I learned is there wasn't much new presented. On the other hand the networking was great.

Personally, I am finding the Data Center Dynamics conferences more useful given their customer focus for regional events. I'll be at Data Center Dynamics Chicago on Sept  16. 

Isn't it greener to have the presenters travel to the customers, reducing travel overall?

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