Attendees comment on Mike Manos 's keynote at Data Center World

OK, one more post on Mike Manos's keynote from an attendee.  Seemed worthwhile as it gives a different perspective than datacenterknowledge and searchdatacenter.

The Michael Manos keynote this morning at Data Center World was inspiring. Michael doesn't read off of note cards and you can tell that he not only knows this material inside and out, but that he is passionate about it. I gained a number of things from this talk -- including him mentioning that their new Chicago facility will have upwards of 200 shipping containers pieced together like the RV campsites like I have talked about in previous posts.
Here are my notes from his talk:

  • Microsoft challenges: 15x growth on servers, 9x growth on egress, 15x growth on power, 3x growth on number of data centers.
  • 30% of the audience had active prograMicrosoft to monitor and measure power in their data center
  • Next to nobody in the audience knew what their carbon emissions were for their data center
  • Sustainability regulation 'is' coming ; not if, but when
  • How many are working on green programs? 30% (audience)
  • Industry challenges/minefields:
  1. sustainability reporting & efficiency reporting
  2. data center inventory globally becoming a challenge
  3. increasing power densities at the rack level
  4. power costs
  5. green-washing
  6. expertise shortage
  7. organizational structures
  8. increasing capital cost barriers
  9. innovation hoarding
  10. heterogeneity versus homogeneity mindsets.

And the post goes into more detail and pretty much covers everything Mike presented.

John Rath good notetaking.

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AFCOM interview with Microsoft's Mike Manos and Christian Belady

Searchdatacenter.com reports from AFCOM with a dual interview with Microsoft's Mike Manos and Christian Belady, titled Microsoft spills the beans on its data center strategy at AFCOM.

On Tuesday, April 1, Microsoft Senior Director of Data Center Services Michael Manos delivered the keynote presentation at AFCOM's Data Center World conference. The company has opened its kimono in non-Redmond fashion -- sharing its insights on data center operations with anyone who's interested. We spoke with Manos and Microsoft Principal Power and Cooling Architect Christian Belady about Microsoft's experience with a rapidly expanding data center footprint, the problems the company has faced and challenges for the industry ahead.

What does Microsoft have to offer the AFCOM attendee?
Michael Manos: Most of the presentation focuses on two things. One is to talk about the challenges we've faced at Microsoft. But more importantly, we're going to talk about what everyone at this conference is going to face over the next two to three years and, to a large degree, show how Microsoft has solved these problems.

How much of the secret sauce of operating your data centers can you give away without losing the competitive advantage?
Manos: What's competitive advantage, and what's the right thing to do? You see people solving the same problems in different ways over and over. There is not a key driver or direction to the industry because we are solving the same problem 30 other people just solved. We have to share the findings that each of us is coming up with in order to make an impact on the industry at large.
Christian Belady: The industry is very fragmented. There is a loss of efficiency opportunities. If we share and others share, we start having a converged vision of what should be in the future.

Speaking of convergence, it seems like the message has taken hold in terms of infrastructure efficiency metrics like power usage effectiveness. Lots of data centers now work to make the power-and-cooling infrastructure as efficient as possible. But when will we get to the next step: measuring useful work? For example, what is the usefulness of an "efficient" server that runs an application twice a month?
Manos: I think it's coming. Some [of our] product groups have started to make the transition. You can't get there without effective monitoring in place. Also, exposure of that information to the developers is key. Most developers never think about energy, but we have a program that charges our developers for the energy they use. Measuring and exposing that internal chargeback brings focus to the product groups. You can't get there unless you can effectively measure what you're doing and expose it.
Belady: We're looking at using containers inside our future data centers. One of the things we like about them is we can take a bunch of servers and look at the output of that box and look at the power it draws. At the end of the day, we can determine, "What is the IT productivity of that unit? How many search queries were executed per box? How many emails sent or stored?" You can get into some really interesting metrics. A lot of people say you can't look at the productivity of a data center, but if you compartmentalize it -- not as small as the server level, but at some chunk in between -- you can measure productivity.

I've heard rumors, Google is contemplating its data center disclosure given Microsoft's big moves.  Wouldn't it be great if we had Google and Microsoft competing to show who has the most efficient data centers and who is greener?

Google chose the path of being an electric company with its renewable energy initiative. Microsoft took a different path and chose to help people immediately save energy in their data centers. Who chose the greener path?  Let's see what Mike Manos presents at his next keynote at the Uptime Institute's Symposium 2008.

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Microsoft Embrace, Extend, and Innovate the Data Center Container

DataCenterKnowledge reports on Mike Manos's statement, Microsoft is embracing data centers containers.

The data center container revolution has officially arrived. And Microsoft's cloud computing initiative is driving it.

Microsoft will forego a traditional raised-floor environment in its new data center in Chicago, and will instead fill one floor of the huge facility with up to 220 shipping containers packed with servers, the company said today.

Versus other companies concept demonstrations of data center containers, Microsoft follows its infamous "Embrace, Extend, and Innovate" strategy made public with focus on the Internet in 1994.

In order to build the necessary respect and win the mindshare of the Internet community, I recommend a recipe not unlike the one we’ve used with our TCP/IP efforts: embrace, extend, then innovate. Phase 1 (Embrace): all participants need to establish a solid understanding of the infostructure and the community - determine the needs and the trends of the user base. Only then can we effectively enable Microsoft system products to be great Internet systems. Phase 2 (Extend): establish relationships with the appropriate organizations and corporations with goals similar to ours. Offer well-integrated tools and services compatible with established and popular standards that have been developed in the Internet community. Phase 3 (Innovate): move into a leadership role with new Internet standards as appropriate, enable standard off-the-shelf titles with Internet awareness. Change the rules: Windows Microsoft Data Centers become the next-generation Internet tool of the future.

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And the datacenterknowledge article continues

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.

But the design of the Chicago data center will go beyond the optimizations seen in Microsoft’s new facilities in Quincy, Washington and San Antonio.

"The entire first floor of Chicago is going to be containers," Microsoft director of data center services Michael Manos said this morning in his keynote at Data Center World in Las Vegas. "This represents our first container data center. The containers are going to be dropped off and plugged into network cabling and power." The second floor of the immense facility will be a traditional raised-floor data center, Manos said.

"It's a bold step forward," said Manos. "We're trying to address scale with the cloud level services. We were trying to figure the best way to bring capacity online quickly."

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Christian Belady's Bottom Line Opinion 10 years ago, We Need A Better System

Microsoft's Christian Belady was going through his old presentations and found a public presentation on The Big Picture, A Philosophical Discussion to Make US Think. Download Cbelady.pdf The presentation is an accumulation of predictions he was making in the late '90s as part of making a case for more efficient computing while at HP.

This topic seemed appropriate as Christian and I sat in a Green IT presentation today from a major IT corporation, and were discussing afterwards with an ex-semiconductor engineer on what has caused companies to make the change to energy efficiency.  Coincidentally, we all had made the realization 10 years ago, and compared how long it took for executives to accept that energy efficiency is an important feature. Even though we had all figure it out, Christian is the one who can point to a specific presentation and putting his predictions out there.

Jumping to the bottom line, here is Christian's call to action:

Summary
Power is not just a….
•component problem
•System problem
•Data center problem
•Utility Infrastructure problem
We have a huge opportunity to solve these problems as one system and optimize the solution.
WE NEED A BETTER SYSTEM!

Big Picture
Bottom Line
We need to cooperate to solve these problems on a much larger scale.
Develop consortiums to address these global issues and influence the industry, government and culture proactively.
We need to ensure that we have a better world.

Here are some additional notes Christian provided for his presentation.

This public presentation (first time I talked about all of this externally) was where I talked about the following:

1) 100MW data center was and their water needs - Slide 30

2) How the government is going to care about us  - Slide 32 (data is wrong though) and Slide 34

3) How when China standard of living will increase and really squeeze our energy costs

4) The hypocrisy of how we get all mad that people are burning down the rain forests to live and the US lights up the globe Slide 36

5) My Quote on how data centers will need your own power generation Slide 37

6) How we need to solve as a system Slide 40

7) My bottom line “My Plea for Industry Cooperation and Consortiums” Slide 41

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Article on Green IT Architecture, written by a Microsoft CTO and Field Architect

IEEE Computing has an article, Green: The New Computing Coat of Arms? by Microsoft's Joseph Williams, CTO of WW Enterprise Sales and Lewis Curtis, an architect for developer platform and evangelism. The article is not representative of Microsoft's views, but they are the views of two people who are thinking of Green Data Centers, and have regular discussions with companies who are taking a leadership role in going Green.

An Architectural Approach to Green Computing There’s no simple path to green computing, but there are some low-hanging fruit. You can spin the dial on some straightforward actions, such as orienting racks of servers in a data center to exhaust their heat in a uniform direction, thus reducing overall cooling costs. You can also implement Energy Star guidelines (www. energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=prod_development.server_efficiency) for energy efficiencies in the data center. But these are point solutions. A
comprehensive plan for achieving green computing really does require an architectural approach.

Because of IT’s ecosystem complexities— ranging from the data center to client computing and from customer impacts to business impacts—some investment and process decisions almost always involve trade-offs, or, if you aren’t architecturally proactive in your thinking, a tapestry of unintended consequences. You won’t find a silver bullet or a single vendor solution that will magically make anyone “green.” In fact, given all the interdependencies and complexities, it isn’t entirely obvious yet what a green outcome would even look like.

They close with

Using an analogy from security, in the past 15 years IT has learned that purchasing a firewall doesn’t necessarily make an IT environment secure. It takes an entire security architecture to provide a vision against which secure computing can be executed. The same is true for green computing. Point solutions will help, but really addressing the issue takes an architectural view.

To be Green is going to require somebody in your company to think the way Joseph and Lewis do. The architects are there at most companies, but do they think Green?

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