300 Microsoft Employees Attend 3 Day Envisioning Future Data Center offsite

I didn't believe it when I heard it, but someone else confirmed. Microsoft had a 3 day 300 attendee event to Envision the Future Data Center, hosted by their Data Center Services group who operates and builds all Microsoft's data centers. MS Research had 60 attendees which is good to hear, and I guess we can look forward to more content like this.

That amount of brain power spending 3 days on data center issues is mind boggling. We could speculate on what they would talk about, but you can imagine with Windows, Microsoft IT, Management Tools, Exchange, SQL, Research, Search, MSN, Windows Live, and Data Center Operations all getting together to discuss how data centers could be different there were a lot of ideas no one else has tried.

I bet you if Microsoft opened the offsite to the public they could charge $2,000 each to attend. Maybe even $5,000.

Is Microsoft a new force changing data center design? If Microsoft does buy Yahoo, they will be the biggest data center operator. We all read about Google's data centers, but I don't think we can say they are changing how data centers are built as they don't give tours and share their operations. Microsoft has started to share parts of what they do, and we can hope they share more.

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Linux Ready to go Green, next is Windows vs. Linux comparison?

News.com interviews Linus Torvalds at linux.conf.au, saying Linux is ready to go Green.

In an interview at the linux.conf.au conference, the developer of the Linux kernel admitted that the operating system was lagging behind on power-management and energy-diagnosis tools.

"It is an area we were pretty weak in a few years ago and just building up the infrastructure took a long time, but now we are at a point where we have most of it done," Torvalds said.

"That doesn't mean we are done. Now we have an infrastructure in place... we have the tools to measure power and notice when the power is higher and why that is, which is pretty important. Before, it used to be a black box," he said.

This is just the start of putting power management in the OS, now they are going to have the work of making drivers power aware.  All it takes is one legacy driver to keep a system in a higher power state.

With Windows Server 2008 default power management turned on and shipping power management since Windows 2000, it will be interesting to see power comparisons between Windows and Linux in regards to performance per watt.

But, I think to do big power savings in a green data center you need a power management system which works across multiple systems.  The amount of power you'll be able to save on individual machines is best when you can turn them off.  Linux is playing catch up to Windows, but they could  change the game by providing the infrastructure to do power management across systems.

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Google follows Microsoft's Lead, Hired a Power and Cooling Expert from HP

Christian Belady has been widely covered in in the industry and was a big hire for Microsoft. Google followed Microsoft's lead and hired his successor at HP, Christopher Malone.  Christian and Chris's names are listed on many HP papers.

1  HP, Christopher Malone, PhD, Christian Belady, P.E., “Metrics to Characterize Data Center & IT Equipment Energy Use”, Digital Power Forum, Richardson, TX (September 2006).  Energy-to-Acquisition Cost Ratio (EAC) is defined as the ratio of the 3 year cost of power and cooling for IT equipment to the acquisition cost of the IT equipment. For instance, the EAC for blades, 1U, and 2U servers may be greater than 100%. This indicates that the 3 year cost of power and cooling exceeds the cost of the hardware.
3  HP, Christopher Malone, PhD, Christian Belady, P.E., “Metrics to Characterize Data Center & IT Equipment Energy Use”, Digital Power Forum, Richardson, TX (September 2006) & “How to Minimize Data Center Utility Bills”, HP C. Belady, P.E., Sept 2006, https://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7881&pg=1&topicID=0
4  HP, Christopher Malone, PhD, Christian Belady, P.E., “Metrics to Characterize Data Center & IT Equipment Energy Use”, Digital Power Forum, Richardson, TX (September 2006) & “How to Minimize Data Center Utility Bills”, HP C. Belady, P.E., Sept 2006, https://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7881&pg=1&topicID=0

I would say Microsoft got the best guy picking first. Also, it will be interesting if Google & Microsoft go down the path of water cooled servers as both Christopher and Christian were believers of water cooling while at HP.

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Microsoft Research Publishes Study Saving DiskEnergy in a Microsoft Data Center

Adding another Microsoft Research paper on saving energy by turning off Windows Live Servers in addition to the below about DiskEnergy.

Appended Feb 4, 2008

Microsoft Research has been applying some of their resources to Microsoft Data Centers.  The latest public information is being presented at the Usenix FAST conference in February 2008.  If you want to read their paper you can go to here.

Power consumption is a major problem for data centers of all sizes which impacts the density of servers and the total cost of ownership. This is causing changes in data center configuration and management. Some components already support some power management features, for example server CPUs support dynamic clock and voltage scaling that enables power requirements to be reduced significantly during idle periods. Storage subsystems do not have power management and are consume a significant amount of power in the data center. Modern enterprise grade disks require approximately 10W when idle. As storage requirements generally increase in data centers, the number of disks in data centers is increasing proportionally.

Based on 1-week long traces of core servers in our data center, we have found that there are significant periods of idle time during which disks can be spun down, and even longer “write-only” periods during which all I/O operations are writes. Based on this we have developed a technique called “write off-loading” which allows disks to stay spun down during these write-only periods, by temporarily off-loading the write requests to other volumes in the data center. Our results show that this provides power savings of 45—60%. This work will presented at the Usenix FAST conference in February 2008.

We believe that write off-loading is a viable technique for saving energy in enterprise storage. In order to use write off-loading, a system administrator needs to manage the trade-off between energy and performance. We are designing tools to help administrators decide how to save the most energy with the least performance impact.

Appended Feb 3, 2008.

Based on this post, we can expect more content from the Microsoft Research group in regards to data center technologies.

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Microsoft Research Announces RFP for Power Aware Computing, $500,000 available

Kim Shearer, Microsoft Research's Sustainable program manager just posted this project on their web site.  Microsoft just announced its Power Aware Computing Request for Proposals 2008 to non-profit colleges or research institutions.

Current work in sustainable and power aware computing suggests two fundamental principles for work in the area. The first is the principle of pay for play, suggesting that the power consumed by a computing device should be proportional to the demand placed upon the system. Systems today typically consume approximately 70% of their maximum load power at idle which defeats this goal. Secondly there is a goal of treating power or energy as a first class resource. There exists a significant body of resource management work largely revolving around attaining maximum performance. It is important that energy efficiency be given a role of equal importance in resource management.

This worldwide RFP seeks to stimulate novel research into increasing energy efficiency, thereby reducing the power consumption of computing. We are soliciting work that has the potential to become part of a large research portfolio, and we encourage proposals that are outside the usual line of enquiry.

The total amount available under this request for proposals (RFP) is $500,000. Microsoft Research anticipates making approximately 5 awards averaging $100,000, with a maximum of $150,000 for any single award. All awards will be made in $US. Awards are generally made as unrestricted gifts to the institution. Outside the United States other local restrictions may apply to the terms of the award. For current policy regarding non-U.S. countries, please refer to http://research.microsoft.com/ur/us/fundingopps/faq.aspx.

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