More Details on Dell's XS23 server used in Cloud Computing, HPC, & Containers, designed for high energy efficiency

May 20, 2008 Dave Ohara

Dell has more details on its XS23 Cloud Server. Seems like this is the kind of server's good for containers as well.

XS23 Cloud Server

Tue. May. 13, 2008

There has been some recent press around some of the equipment we’ve developed in our cloud computing group. The core of our business is essentially a consulting and design service and developing new products for customers is a big part of the fun. Because these aren’t mainstream PowerEdge systems, we don’t get the chance to show them off as much as we’d like. Our group has been talking for some time about “optimized designs” for cloud and hyperscale computing without showing what that can really mean, so it’s time to unveil something that’s come out of the lab. Pictured here is one of our favorites: the XS23.

XS23 front – twelve 3.5” SAS or SATA drives; 3 per server

This product was designed for a customer that needed maximum compute density, a healthy amount of local disk and, of course, lowest power draw possible. Our architecture team threw all that in the blender and out came a 2U standard rack mount chassis that houses four dual-socket servers and twelve 3.5” hot plug drives.

The energy efficiency design is driven by customer requirements. Yippeee!!! Cloud Computing and HPC customers are driving the requirements for Greener HW designs.

This was expressly designed for an environment with high node failure tolerance - a cloud application. By designing out a lot of the capabilities that weren’t required (like redundant power) we were able to deliver the performance and power profile required. Efficiencies are gained by shared resources - as seen in a lot of general purpose designs available today. We think the key to designing the perfect cloud server is knowing where to stop and also what not to build in. This is a function of each customer’s unique design goals.

Dell's Cloud Computing Blog, post on High-Density and Co-Location

May 20, 2008 Dave Ohara

Found Dell's Cloud Computing Blog, figured it was a good place to look for ideas on building highly efficient servers. One interesting post was on High-Density & Co-Location.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to tour a recently-commissioned, carrier-neutral co-location data center. Located on the outskirts of a major city, and run by one of the major co-location providers in the U.S., it was clearly a state-of-the-art facility with Tier III uptime, impressive physical security, and access to dozens of telecommunication carriers and ISP’s.
What struck me most about this particular facility was its power density – only 4kW/rack. That’s not to say the provider would turn away a customer with racks pulling 16kW of IT load. In such a situation, the provider would lease higher power circuits and “phantom racks” of white space to bridge the power and cooling gaps. Pretty soon, that one 16kW rack looks a lot like four 4kW racks in terms of cost and footprint.
With blades and high-density compute solutions pushing IT loads orders-of-magnitude beyond 4kW/rack, I was perplexed as to why a co-location provider would invest in a facility that appears to ignore all of the industry trends around the growth in IT load over time. Yet, this particular provider is not atypical. Unless a customer is willing to invest in a wholesale lease of a data center, it’s a challenge to find co-location providers capable of supporting power loads greater than 4kW/rack.
Clearly, the economics of the co-location plays a role. According to Gartner, 60-70% of a data center’s CAPEX lies in the mechanical and electrical infrastructure that defines the total supportable IT load. To build a data center capable of supporting 8kW/rack, and have customers deploy racks pulling less than 8kW is an opportunity cost the provider cannot afford. To increase NPV on the facility investment, design to the lowest common denominator of IT load, and charge for density via circuits and white space.
While co-location providers are acting rationally in building such facilities, innocuous decisions on the part of a customer can yield counterintuitive cost increases. Using quotes from some of the major co-location providers, I ran a simple case study for a customer replacing five 2kW racks with four 5kW racks as part of a refresh and consolidation effort. Between annual fee increases (which have been steeper than usual lately), setup, circuit premiums, and incremental white-space, the customer’s 20% reduction in enterprise hardware yielded a 155% Y/Y increase in co-location costs.
For companies that lack the critical mass to build-out their own data-centers, and depend upon an expanding footprint of enterprise hardware to grow their business (e.g. start-up Web 2.0 companies), these are a challenging set of market dynamics. We’d certainly like to hear from firms if they’ve experienced something similar first-hand, and what strategies can help mitigate the impact to the bottom-line.

I tried to just take a short section of the writer's post, but the background was useful to understanding the point about the costs in 2nd last paragraph. The power usage doubled, the amount of space used decreased by 20%, yet the co-lo costs went up by 155%.

Who is going to Turn off The Virtual Worlds?

May 20, 2008 Dave Ohara

Gartner Group says ninety percent of businesses efforts in virtual Worlds like Second Life fail within 18 months.

Ninety percent of forays by businesses into virtual worlds–animated online communities where people can do things they do in the real world (and some things they wouldn’t)–fail within 18 months. That’s according to the tech researchers at the Gartner Group, although we could have told you the same thing, if not with a specific statistic.

Not so much

Over the last few years, businesses have raced to set up storefronts in these virtual worlds, notably Second Life, in order to test new products, grab some publicity, and maybe even make a few bucks by selling digital versions of their products. But many of these shops are now vacant. Last summer we wrote that “Second Life storefronts for Best Buy’s Geek Squad, Sun Microsystems and Dell were all deserted, and American Apparel’s was virtually boarded up.” Time magazine labeled Second Life one of the worst sites on the Internet and called corporate efforts there “a case of some CEOs trying too hard to be hip.”

How much power is Second Life consuming? Remember Nicholas Carr's infamous Avatar power consumption post.

Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians

December 05, 2006

Tony Walsh has, as others do, some doubts about whether Second Life is sustainable as a business. But he also poses another question that I hadn't come across before: "Is Second Life sustainable ecologically?"

He quotes Philip Rosedale, the head of Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world: "We're running at full power all the time, so we consume an enormous amount of electrical power in co-location facilities [where they house their 4,000 server computers] ... We're running out of power for the square feet of rack space that we've got machines in. We can't for example use [blade] servers right now because they would simply require more electricity than you could get for the floor space they occupy."

I think the guys at Second Life (Linden Labs) need to look at solutions like Cassatt's software that automatically turns off servers as demand decreases.

Updated Cassatt Software Watches Changing Demand on Servers and Automatically Turns Off Idle Computers to Cut Data Center Energy Use

Cassatt Active Response Improves Data Center Efficiency Using New Demand-Based Policies, Increased Compatibility with Third-Party Management Solutions, and Broader Platform Coverage

SAN JOSE, Calif., May 20, 2008 – Cassatt® Corporation, a leader in providing software to make data centers more efficient, today announced a major new capability of its Cassatt Active Response products that enables the software to monitor the changing demand on servers and automatically turn them off when they become idle. The updated software is the first to enable data center managers to actively control server power usage in both predictable and unpredictable computing environments, reducing the amount of energy needed to run and cool data centers, while maintaining application reliability and responsiveness.

This unique, demand-based management capability is part of a major new update to the Cassatt Active Response product line. The new Cassatt Active Response 5.1 release offers:

The ability to use demand-based policies to manage IT infrastructure in real time

Increased compatibility and integration with third-party management solutions, and

Management and control over a larger set of technology and data center equipment from multiple vendors.

Next American Frontier, Being Good Entrepreneurs,

May 20, 2008 Dave Ohara

The Green Movement is happening at an interesting time when people are questioning their strategy for jobs. The WSJ has an opinion article by Michael Malone, Next American Frontier.

The entire world seems to be heading toward points of inflection. The developing world is embarking on the digital age. The developed world is entering the Internet era. And the United States, once again at the vanguard, is on the verge of becoming the world's first Entrepreneurial Nation.

We still have companies and corporations, but now they are virtualized, with online work teams handing off assignments to each other 24/7 around the world. Men and women go to work, but the office is increasingly likely to be in the den. In 2005, an Intel survey of its employees found that nearly 20% of its professionals had never met their boss face-to-face. Half of them never expected to. Last summer, when the Media X institute at Stanford extended that survey to IBM, Sun, HP, Microsoft and Cisco, the percentages turned out to be even greater.

Newspapers are dying, networks are dying, and if teenage boys playing GTA 4 and World of Warcraft have any say about it, so is television. More than 200 million people now belong to just two social networks: MySpace and Facebook. And there are more than 80 million videos on YouTube, all put there by the same individual initiative.

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today's high schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup poll.

The last statistic on 18 - 24 year olds starting their own company. This is the generation that has grown up using the web for its tools, and figured out its getting better functionality for IT tools in the open market than in corporate environments.

And, in the WSJ is Facebook Ignites Entrepreneurial Spirit at Harvard, discussing how Harvard is changing.

ENTERPRISE

Facebook Ignites
Entrepreneurial
Spirit at Harvard

Students, Graduates
Start Firms, Using
The Site as a Model

By VAUHINI VARA

One day during Trip Adler's sophomore year at Harvard University, he saw fellow undergraduates Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz outside their dormitory with suitcases and boxes. When Mr. Adler asked what the two -- who happened to be Facebook Inc.'s co-founders -- were doing, Mr. Moskovitz lightly replied that they were moving from Cambridge, Mass., to Silicon Valley "to make Facebook big."

"I was so jealous," recalls Mr.Adler, now 23 years old. "I thought, 'I've got to find an idea and drop out of Harvard.'"

Mr. Adler is just one of the Harvard students who have caught start-up fever since Facebook, founded when Mr. Zuckerberg was at Harvard in 2004, exploded in popularity. Other recent Harvard-born start-ups include Internet companies Kirkland North Inc., Drop.io Inc. and Labmeeting Inc. And Facebook has become a model for these start-ups on many fronts, from the look of company Web sites to their corporate strategies.

"I would not hesitate for a second to say Facebook's a motivator," says Paul Bottino, director of Harvard's Technology & Entrepreneurship Center. "Facebook creates would-be Facebooks." He says a start-up contest this year attracted 55 entries, up from 10 to 18 for past contests.

Christian Belady asks, "Does Efficiency in the Data Center Give us What we need?"

May 19, 2008 Dave Ohara

In Mission Critical magazine, Christian Belady writes on the topic of efficiency improvements in the data center and the economic effects.

In economics, the scarcity of resources drives the cost of those resources, which results in more efficient use of those resources. When gasoline prices go up, consumers demand more efficient vehicles to offset those increasing costs. Conversely when fuel prices go down, the demand would go up substantially. This latter notion is called Jevons’ Paradox.

Similarly, the well-known phenomenon called Moore’s law has substantially reduced the cost of computation year over year, driving demand up. This cost reduction is completely driven by efficiency improvements in electronics over the past half-century, improvements unmatched by any other industry. This is the most important reason for the significant demand for increases in the number of servers in the data center and more importantly the increase in server power footprint worldwide. So the real question is how would the further efficiency improvements suggested by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its 2007 report to Congress affect these trends?

And in typical Christian fashion, brings up interesting issues as to the effects of energy efficiency.

Conclusion
While driving efficiency is clearly the right thing to do, industry and government agencies must consider a more holistic view on the cause and effect in the IT industry. It is important to understand what the drivers are to the perceived problem of IT power consumption. To date, this “problem” has been tackled as a technical problem and organizations such as the EPA, Green Grid, Climate Savers are doing the right thing to solve the technical problem.

There is no doubt that there are inefficiencies in the data center and in IT equipment, but perhaps it is exactly these inefficiencies that have curbed what the power growth could have been. In addition, it may be that IT is displacing other high-carbon emission industries. Drawing economists into the discussion alongside technologists could lead to a broad discussion of the larger issues and holistic solutions. The hope is that economists will be just as passionately involved in solving this problem as the technologist over the past couple of years.