Smart Folks Leaving Yahoo

Yahoo is all over the news, outsourcing with Google to bring in revenue.  But as Michael Malone writes for ABCNews, the smart folks are leaving Yahoo.  Didn’t KC Mares, Yahoo’s data center strategist leave in April 2008?  Could he see the writing on the wall.

Jeff Weiner, the guy who runs Yahoo.com and Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail, is splitting from the company to go work for a couple of venture capital firms. He joins a growing list of Yahoo's best and brightest who have already bailed out of the company.

If there is any Intellectual Capital equivalent to Moore's Law it is that, no matter what their public explanations, when the smartest folks leave a company that company will soon be in serious trouble, and wherever those folks end up, that company will soon be a whole lot more successful.

Right now, Yahoo is bleeding talent from every doorway. And that means that even if Yang and what remains of his staff can manage to right their listing company, Yahoo will still be dead in the water, lacking in the kind of talent it will need to get moving again and keep up with the competition.

If you are looking for data center staff, maybe you should send someone to hang out in the Yahoo data center parking lots.

Read more

Questions for Amazon Web Services Evangelist

If you are interested in Amazon Web Services, here is video of a presentation by Mike Culver.

I have a meeting with Mike in a week to discuss Amazon Web Services. Mike and I used to work together, and we have been running into each other at the Pro Club for the past 2 years.  We both left Microsoft 2 years ago, and Mike went straight to Amazon to  be an evangelist for AWS.

I’ll write a blog post after my meeting with Mike. If you have any questions you would like me to ask, feel free to comment on this post, and I’ll see what I can do to get answers.  Keep in mind, Mike is not in the data center operations group, but in the evangelism of web services.

One question I have for Mike are there any other tools besides Service Health Dashboard for AWS operations?

Read more

Microsoft says Windows Server 2008 cuts Power Consumption by 10%, What happened to 20%?

InfoWorld writes that Microsoft released a study that Windows Server 2008 cuts power consumption by 10%.

With electricity prices continuing to skyrocket and processors getting ever hungrier for power, it was only a matter of time before Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) chimed in with claims that its latest software can cut energy bills. A Microsoft white paper released this week asserts that Windows Server 2008 can cut power consumption by 10% compared with Windows Server 2003 out of the box, and much more if running virtualized.

Microsoft compared power consumption between two installations on the same server with two dual-core processors and 4 GB of RAM, one running Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition with SP2 plus hot fixes, and the other running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, with a hard drive formatting in between.

The company found that Windows Server 2003 used as much as 10% more power despite only being able to deliver 80% of the maximum throughput as its successor. Microsoft attributes these improvements partially to power management features that Windows Server 2008 has enabled by default, like the automatic adjustment of processor performance based on workload.

But, what happened to the 20% Bill Laing discussed with Mary Jo Foley

We've done power management by default in Longhorn Server. And we think average machines will see maybe 20 percent reduction in power use. You kind of slow the clock down when it's not busy. And it's dynamic enough that you can literally slow the clock down across a disk I/O. If you've got nothing to do while you're doing a disk I/O, it actually drops the power use for that short period of time. It's not like sleeping [for] the laptop; this is really short, what they call P-state for processor state.

This continues to support one of my beliefs that power management needs to exist in a bigger picture than the server itself. What is needed is power management to be designed across systems. This part of what the guys at Cassatt Software have done.

Read more

Usage-based Power Pricing, enables Green Behaviors in CRG West Colo DCs

Data Center Knowledge has a post on CRG's press announcement for Usage-Based Power Pricing.

CRG West is implementing usage-based power pricing at its new data centers in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Northern Virginia and the San Francisco Bay Area. The power pricing model, based on actual utilization, will benefit colocation customers by offering savings to those who reduce their IT electrical loads.

With the installation of Branch Circuit Monitoring (BCM) technology at seven of its 10 data centers, CRG West can provide usage-based pricing for AC power to even single-cabinet colocation customers. In addition, the BCM technology improves upon CRG West’s ability to manage and monitor power consumption at the data center, enabling customers to pay only for the power they consume and providing the visibility into load management that helps customers increase their uptime.

CRG West previously charged a flat monthly fee per circuit for breakered power capacity, which meant that customers would often pay for capacity they aren't using. Under the new model, customers can reduce their bills by turning off hardware that isn’t in use during off-hours or by purchasing hardware that is more efficient. Coming soon, CRG West will also offer customers the ability to monitor their power draws by circuit.

The CRG press announcement is here with a few points on energy efficiency.

With the installation of Branch Circuit Monitoring (BCM) technology at seven of its ten data centers, CRG West can provide usage-based pricing for AC power to even single cabinet colocation customers. In addition, the BCM technology improves upon CRG West’s ability to manage and monitor power consumption at the data center, enabling customers to pay only for the power they consume and providing the visibility into load management that helps customers increase their uptime.

Customers can reap the benefits of this technology by turning off hardware that isn’t in use during off-hours or by purchasing hardware that is more efficient; thereby significantly reducing their electricity expenses. Coming soon, CRG West will also offer customers the ability to monitor their power draws by circuit.

Already an industry leader in green data center design and construction, CRG West also focuses upon providing the information and tools our customers can use to enable them to manage energy consumption and costs more efficiently. Following the deployment of our award-winning, energy-efficient closed-loop cooling design, CRG West’s BCM technology is another example of innovative leadership in the industry. CRG West expects the colocation industry to adopt usage-based pricing and visibility as its standard within the coming years.

We should be a standard practice at many colo facilities. The enterprise data centers in general will move slower.  At an Uptime Institute presentation, there was actually a company which removed their metering system, because they didn't want to deal with the support issues when users challenged the power charges.

Read more