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.

Power behind the New Dell Blades

January 22, 2008 Dave Ohara

There has been wide coverage in the news on Dells new Blade Servers, and the Green Data Center features have helped to get attention. Power savings are claimed to be

The PowerEdge M-Series consumes up to 19 percent less power and achieves up to 25 percent better performance per watt than the HP BladeSystem c-Class¹. Compared to the IBM BladeCenter H, the M-Series consumes 12 percent less energy and achieves up to 28 percent better performance per watt¹. Built on Dell’s Energy Smart technologies, the PowerEdge M-Series enables businesses to save on power and cooling costs while increasing server capacity. The M-Series also provides lead-free configurations, delivering a “green IT” solution that further helps customers minimize their environmental impact.

To achieve these kind of savings Dell must have made significant inroads in power and cooling design.

Dynamic power management enabling administrators to set high/low power thresholds to help ensure blades operate within their defined power envelope;

Real time reporting for enclosure and blade power consumption, and the ability to prioritize blade slots for power to provide optimal control over power resources.

At Microsoft's IT Forum in Barcelona, I moderated a Green Data Centre Panel Discussion where Ed English from Dell spoke. I am going to reach out to Ed and see he has any more details on the power and cooling improvements.

Digging on the web site here is Dell's white paper on the Power Distribution System for the new blades. It's great they added real time AC power draw #'s the trick is what tools you can use to get the data. Here are some other highlights from the paper.

Power for the Dell PowerEdge M1000e Modular Server Enclosure system is provided by a set of Power Supply Units (PSUs) that are installed in the rear of the enclosure. Each PSU is capable of delivering 2360 Watts of power to the system at 12 Volts DC (note: PSUs take in single phase 180‐264v AC and convert it to 12v DC to supply to the system). Three PSUs provide enough power for an entire fully loaded PowerEdge M1000e system, however the PowerEdge M1000e holds six PSUs to support redundant power modes.

The PowerEdge M1000e system has a Chassis Management Controller (CMC) that performs power monitoring and management for the enclosure. The CMC provides the following functionality:
• Power Monitoring
o Reports the enclosure’s real time AC power draw
o Reports maximum and minimum AC power draw with a time stamp
• Power Management
o Manages and allocates the system power budget, ensuring sufficient power is available based on PSU population, redundancy status, system
configuration, and any power limits set on the enclosure
o Allows users to select required power redundancy mode
o Allows users to optionally set a maximum AC power draw for the enclosure
o Allows users to set a power priority for enclosure slots in the event that the CMC needs to reduce system power consumption
o Manages Dynamic Power Supply Engagement (explained below)

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.

Next Green Data Center component - Network Infrastructures

January 18, 2008 Dave Ohara

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

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

January 17, 2008 Dave Ohara

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:

It's easy to use as an inline device. More devices are being developed for 3-phase power and power strip monitoring.
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.
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.
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.