Microsoft’s Mike Manos Sr Director of Data Center Services, speaking engagements

I found the following post on Mike Manos's blog. I've seen plenty of people from HP, Intel, Oracle, Sun, and Yahoo speaking at industry events. Microsoft and Google had a noticeable absence. Given Mike's travels to DC, LV, and Orlando, he'll be local for a lot of people.

I'll work on getting a summary from someone who is attending these events. If any of you do attend, feel free to send me your comments, and I'll add them to a blog entry.

 

03/10/08 - IASA - IT Architect / Regional Conferences 1:45pm - 3pm

Washington, DC

   

 

04/01/08  - Data Center World - Keynote Talk 7:45am - 8:45am

Las Vegas, Nevada

   

 

04/27/08 - Uptime Institute Symposium / Green Enterprise Computing

Orlando. Florida

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Microsoft Research Data Center Paper, Simulating Energy-Aware Server Provisioning and Load Dispatching for Windows Live Messenger

Microsoft Research has another paper on creating a Green Data Center by turning off servers. The paper has been well received and the authors will present at USENIX Networked Systems Design & Implementation conference in April 2008.

The specific scenario they have studied is Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger Servers, combining the challenges of a connection-intensive Internet service (Windows Live Messenger) with turning off servers.

Energy consumption for hosting Internet services is becoming a pressing issue as these services scale up. Dynamic server provisioning techniques are effective in turning off unnecessary servers to save energy. Such techniques, mostly studied for request-response services, face unique challenges in the context of connection servers that can host a large number of long-lived TCP connections. Such servers usually limit on how many new connections they can accept per second and, therefore, a server cannot be fully utilized immediately after it is turned on. Moreover, before a server is turned off, all its active connections need to be reconnected or migrated to other currently active servers. In this paper, we characterize unique properties, performance, and power models of connection servers, based on a real data trace collected from the deployed Windows Live Messenger. Using the models, we design server provisioning and load dispatching algorithms and study subtle interactions between them. We show that our algorithms can save a significant amount of energy without sacrificing user experiences.

The simulated energy savings ranged from 20 to 30% depending on the server-initiated disconnection rate.

Microsoft Research also published a paper on saving Disk Energy in a data center.

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# of employees in FedEx and UPS Data Centers less than Google, How Efficient is Google's Infrastructure

My post on # of employees in Google and its competitors data centers has been popular. 

Keeping up with the idea I found an article about FedEx's # of employees 100

Meanwhile, FedEx could land soon. The company’s back-up center won’t mean a tremendous number of jobs, possibly 100 or so. But the jobs for these centers pay above average median income in the range of $70,000-$80,000 a year.

And UPS's # of employees 125

Windward is somewhat of a mixed-use facility – about 125 people (support personnel) work at the data center. The increase in chilled water temperatures has not affected human comfort in any way.

There have been articles about how efficient Googles' infrastructure is, but if you make the leap of faith that Google really does have 200 data center employees, then how efficient is their infrastructure?

IT management at Google is decentralized. The company has neither a CIO nor CTO, but it's brimming with senior-level engineers and other technologists. They include Bill Coughran, VP of engineering for systems infrastructure, who oversees the distributing computing programs that power Google's online applications, and Eustace, who's responsible for product R&D. Sergey Brin isn't just Google's co-founder--his day-to-day job is president of technology. Merrill, brought in as senior director of IS three years ago, now is responsible for internal engineering and worldwide support.

He then takes a jab at CIOs--which he describes as a title used by "old-world companies"--at other companies. "Most people in my job try to control. 'Here are the three things you can buy.'" Merrill explains. "I try to control as a little as I possibly can but make it easy to work within parameters that I know how to work with."

Especially when you consider how many data centers they have in the US.  It is tough for many of us to believe in the 200 #, but Google needs to keep that # out there to protect their tax breaks.

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Customer Story, Green Data Center, 40% energy savings

EOS International released their press announcement on their Green Data Center project, installing VMWare and Dell systems to reduce their data center electricity by 40%. I found this one interesting in that it was released by the company itself and not the vendors whose equipment was used. They have a quote from the CEO who makes environmental commitment statement.

Leading library services and knowledge management company EOS International announced their first step in reducing corporate energy use by installing state-of-the art systems in the EOS global data center. The installation of the new VMWare and Dell SAN [server] systems allow EOS to cut their data center's electricity use by forty percent, while increasing the data center's capacity.

"Installation of our new, energy-efficient servers is the first of many steps that EOS International hopes to take to become a more environmentally-responsible corporate citizen," said Tony Saadat, CEO of EOS International. "We are committed to utilizing the most innovative technology possible to help reduce our environmental impact."

"I am delighted to learn of EOS's intention to be more 'green,' said Marlene Vogelsang, MLS, Resource Specialist, Pacific Energy Center. "Energy efficiency is key to reducing energy use and reducing carbon emissions. I am glad that "my" server in Carlsbad is an efficient one! Congratulations on your efficient Global Data Center!" finished Voglesang.

The EOS Global Data Center's initial installation of four new servers is the equivalent of forty older models. The new servers reduce costs associated with maintenance, temperature control, and additional space within the data center. Further roll-outs of this nature will take place throughout the year, once the benchmarks for operations are complete.

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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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