Next Green Data Center component - Network Infrastructures

Cisco has added their Green Guru.

Next ITWeek writes about the need for Network Infrastructures to go Green.

But even as IT managers contemplate the case for energy-efficient data centres, some analysts believe that a similar green revolution is about to hit firms’ network infrastructures. Jon Collins, service director at analyst firm Freeform Dynamics, is one of them.

“The network doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to being green. This is ironic, given that it is an area of great potential, particularly considering the efficiency gains that could be achieved if, for example, the data was in the right place at the right time,” he says. “Network efficiency reduces risk and lowers the requirement to store multiple copies of data.”

A branch office, for example, might previously have stored all of its files locally. But using Wafs, the files can all be maintained centrally at headquarters. Utilising a mixture of traffic compression and byte-level mirroring of local data, files can be quickly mirrored between the two sites. This approach reduces not only the capital expenditure on branch office storage systems and the energy needed to run them, but also the operational expenditure and carbon emissions involved in sending out staff for local maintenance and support.

This last point on the branch office is well made.  Just 3 years ago when I was working on Microsoft's Branch Office Infrastructure Solution, we never heard about power costs in any of the considerations, and I would place bets that the Windows Server 2008 doesn't think about power costs and carbon emissions as part of their marketing material, even though Windows Server 2008 has the right features.

Branch Office Requirement
Windows Server 2008 Feature(s)

Cost Control

Reduce cost of managing and supporting remote offices

• Windows Server Core
• Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC)
• Server Message Block (SMB) 2.0

Security

Improve security of data and access

• Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption
• Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC)
• Server Message Block (SMB) 2.0

Agility

Provide an agile and flexible infrastructure that maximizes IT investments

• Next Generation TCP/IP

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Power Monitoring Equipment Review - Smart-Watt and a visit to Microsoft

I've had a chance to play with the Smart-Watt device that I mentioned last month. I am still experimenting with the device, and waiting for my new office/lab space to do more thorough testing. My first impressions are I like Smart-Watt for the following reasons:

  1. It's easy to use as an inline device.  More devices are being developed for 3-phase power and power strip monitoring.
  2. Instead of investing in display and UI on the device, the controls are all from the PC and data is written to your data collection PC/Server in a SQL Express database using the .NET framework as the development platform.  You can set up a FTP server to share the data as well.
  3. A separate network, Smart-Net, using RJ-11 connectors makes daisy chaining devices easy, and does not need the approval of the network administrators to install.
  4. Temperature and Humidity can be collected as well, and leaves the opportunity for expansion for other devices to put additional sensors on the network.

Today Dan Dieso from Smart-Works and I visited Microsoft to talk to some people who run lab environments. It was good to hear the green/energy efficiency effort is expanding at Microsoft.  We heard stories of recently upgraded facilities due to power issues, and people are interested in setting up labs to support Green Data Center projects. Everyone we met at Microsoft was interested in Smart-Watt. One of the good discussions was with Scott Gaskins. Scott has a unique perspective being a SW development manager for microsoft.com's IT operation tools, and he worked for Pacific Gas & Electric for 13 years. So, he understands electricity and the issues about power conservation in the data center.  As a result microsoft.com is one of the most energy efficient properties in Microsoft's data centers, and is an innovation leader already deploying Windows Server 2008 which has power management turned on as default.

Another great connection was with Grant BlahaErath, a Technical Evangelist in Microsoft's ISV partner labs who has an adaptive cooling system with air side economizers in his server lab.  This could allow us to calculate a PUE, power utilization efficiency, for his lab, and he is interested in turning off devices when they are not needed.

As Dan and I make more progress with Microsoft's use of Smart-watt, we hope they'll give us permission to write about their experience.

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# of Data Center Employees (Yahoo, Ask.com, Intuit, and Microsoft) in Washington Columbia Basin

I've seen #'s thrown around that Google employs 200 people at a data center

Eventually, we plan to employ approximately 200 people, ranging from technology assistants to experienced data center managers. We’re confident this $600 million investment will be good for Council Bluffs, Google and our Internet users.

In the Columbia Basin Herald reports on total employment changes, if you add up Yahoo, Ask,com, Intuit and Microsoft employee #'s they add up to 180.  Something seems strange that 4 big data centers in the Columbia Basin have less employees than one Google data center.  What are those 200 people doing?  Are they maintaining and building Google's custom servers?  All of the below people use industry standard servers.

In April the first of three data centers in Quincy went live. The Microsoft data center will be used to house information that is essential to Microsoft's Windows Live Internet service. Employment at Microsoft was around 50 employees in April and will continue to increase as more servers are added to the facility.

In mid June, Intuit, the makers of TurboTax and Quickbooks, broke ground for a data center in Quincy across the street from the Yahoo! data center. The facility is expected to be complete by fall of 2008 and will employ around 50 people.

In December Yahoo! officially declared its data center in Quincy operational as it held a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The data center will employ around 50 people and will house information for the Yahoo! search engine and other properties.

Ask.com , Moses Lake, Data Center, 30 people.

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Visual Studio 2008's saves energy with Application Performance Profiling

I've been searching for the right tool that enables energy efficient application development.  Finally, the Microsoft Visual Studio team has the feature in their 2008 release coming out soon.  Send this post on to your dev teams and architects to develop energy efficient applications.

The first feature that I want to cover is the new comparison document that we’ve introduced to help users compare profiling data from two different profiling runs. Say that you have just checked in a possible fix for a performance issue and you want to compare a new performance report to one that existed before the change to see if your change really helped. Our new comparison features make these types of questions easy to answer. Comparing two files of performance data is a very common scenario for customers, especially when dealing with regression testing, so this was a priority feature for us in this release. After all, performance data when taken in isolation, without goals to hit or old values to compare with, can be pretty hard to work with. Our goal with this new comparison work is to help customers to make better use of their performance data to achieve the performance results that they desire for their applications.

I would be remiss if I did not take a quick second here to dive a little deeper into the importance of setting performance goals for your applications. Too often developers end up in the situation of closing in on product release and realizing “my app is just way too slow.” Now, it is perfectly understandable that developers want to save performance optimization for the end of the product cycle; after all if the underlying structure is going to change greatly why waste too much time early on trying to tweak things to run as fast as possible? But the real issue with the situation above is in the generalness of the “my app is just way too slow” part. What exactly do you mean by “too slow?” What parts of the app are too slow? What type of performance do customers expect from your app? How long does it take for other similar products to do the same task? For our new comparison features to be really useful you will need to take some time before and during development to get at least basic answers to some of the questions above.

And, they've also integrated collecting perfmon data for

With the Visual Studio Profiler we wanted to give customers an easy and integrated way to collect this performance counter information and view it alongside their performance data. This was especially important to us as with this information we could help customers to analyze specific trouble areas of their program or to choose the correct profiling modes based on their performance bottleneck.

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How Microsoft is Going Green Article

NetworkWorld does a good job of summarizing Microsoft's Going Green status.  The article is 4 pages long on the web site, and here are some highlights for interest in green data centers.

Microsoft also is committing billions of dollars for new data centers around the globe that, although they use a lot of energy, incorporate cutting-edge power efficiencies. New facilities are planned for Ireland and Russia's Siberia region, and ground was broken in 2007 for another in San Antonio, Texas.

The company, which will say only that it has between 10 and 100 data centers, has used software to create a map of the world that aggregates 35 factors, such as power costs and climate, to determine the best places to build. The map is a living artifact that changes with world affairs, utility prices and other events.

The showcase, however, may be in Northlake, Ill., a 430,762 sq.-ft. energy-efficient building the company will move into in April 2008. It was built by Ascent to house multiple tenants, but Microsoft will lease the entire building to support data-center operations for Windows Live, Hotmail, and MSN Video.

While Microsoft will install its own green design inside the building, the structure itself has unique qualities.

"I think the real story with the building is the size and scale, the proximity to transmission-grade power, the dedicated onsite substation and the outside air-cooling efficiency. That is where the real sizzle is," says Phil Horstmann, founder and CEO of Ascent, which has been building and operating data centers since 1998.

The building sits on 12 acres and connects to the power grid at 138,000 volts, which is about eight times higher than typical connection voltage, Horstmann says. The connection provides a very efficient power supply and makes the building one of the most powerful data-center developments in the United States, he says. He would not reveal construction costs for the building.

For the inside of its data centers, Microsoft has come up with a set of design classes for energy efficiency and created standards around such things as server and rack configurations.

"It is really about how we take these designs and how they fit into the local area," says Mike Manos, senior director of data-center services for Microsoft. "Which design is going to give you the biggest impact, the most servers, the most efficient power with the most sustainability."

And, here are comments on Power Management in the Windows OS.

Vista's default settings for power management are far more aggressive than those in previous versions, and sleep mode happens much more quickly, Microsoft's Bernard says.

Power management extends to servers in Windows Server 2008, which will support a virtualization technology called Hyper-V that allows consolidation of servers to improve CPU use and provide real-time capacity management.

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