Closed Loop Cooling & Monitoring System - Opengate Data Systems

July 8, 2008 Dave Ohara

Part of attending the http://www.energetics.com/datacenters08/ conference is I am able to catch up with a lot of people in a good networking environment. Jason Dudek from APC is one of person who I have worked with off and on for over 10 years. Jason wanted to make the point that he has a lower carbon footprint as he drove to a park and ride, took a bus, and he is riding his bike home. So, yes he wins the lowest carbon footprint for the day.

But more important Jason pointed me to http://www.opengatedata.com/ who have a closed loop cooling & monitoring system for legacy equipment in a data center.

They have a Cooling System

SiteX Rack Airflow Control Systems

SiteX Rack Airflow Control Systems provide reliable, redundant and easily scaleable closed-loop pressure control to eliminate bypass and maintain proper rack to IT equipment airflow in a variety of rack fan configurations.

Network versions allow remote management and alarm notification for superior intelligence and visibility of critical information over Ethernet. Integrate with SiteX HD Fan Trays or use with your existing rack fans.

Deliver predictable temperatures to your IT equipment and achieve the highest degree of data center cooling efficiency with SiteX from Opengate Data Systems.

Effective Rack Airflow Control for the highest degree of efficiency and availability

Reduce or eliminate CRAC over-provisioning by providing physical separation of cool supply and hot return airstreams

Report rack airflow capacity for future application deployment

Couple CRAC cooling to IT equipment heat loads, raising return air temperatures and improving CRAC and chiller efficiency

Report rack airflow rate for CRAC/H airflow delivery control

and, a Monitoring system

SiteX HD Environment Monitoring

Effective environment monitoring with up to 16 temperature and humidity sensors plus three additional I/O ports for water, smoke, and door open position sensors in a 1U rack-mount device.

Communicate using HTTP, HTTPS, XML or SNMP and use DHCP to automatically connect to your network.

Customize alarm limits and behavior using the configuration page. Visibility of critical information with the highest degree of reliability can be ensured with SiteX HD from Opengate Data Systems.

Environment Monitoring Series PDF

SiteX HD™ Environment Monitoring
Effective environment monitoring and visibility of critical alarms over Ethernet.

EM160
Environment Monitoring with 16 sensor ports + 3 I/O ports

EM160D
Environment Monitoring with 5 sensor ports + 3 I/O ports

EMS10
Temperature Sensor, 12 Foot* Cord

EMS20
Temperature / Airflow Sensor, 12 Foot* Cord

EMS30
Temperature / Airflow / Humidity Sensor, 12 Foot* Cord

EMS40
Water Sensor, connect to I/O port

EMS50
Smoke Sensor Kit, connect to I/O port, requires 120V source

EMS60
Door Open Sensor, connect to I/O port

EMS700
Camera, Web Enabled

Greene out at VMware, Big Changes Coming as Virtualization Software is a Commodity

July 8, 2008 Dave Ohara

DataCenterKnowledge chose an interesting headline which got my attention.

VMware Surprise: Greene Out as CEO

Virtualization market leader VMware (VMW) announced that President and CEO Diane Greene has departed and been replaced by Paul Maritz, a Microsoft veteran who has most recently been in charge of the cloud computing operation at EMC, VMware's parent company.

VMware's release also said that "revenues for the full year of 2008 will be modestly below" the 50 percent growth seen in 2007. The switch comes as Microsoft is finally bringing its Hyper-V virtualization technology to market, posing the largest competitive threat yet to VMware's leadership in the sector.

Greene co-founded VMware with her husband, Mendel Rosenblum, who serves as chief scientist and is a prominent advocate for the company's technology. VMware watcher Alessandro Perilli of Virtualization.info noted that Greene had been a popular CEO. "This replacement, if imposed by the parent company EMC, may have a huge domino effect on the whole VMware management team," Perilli writes.

Shares of VMware are off sharply on the news. In early afternoon, VMW is trading at $39, down $14.36 for a decline of 27 percent.

Potential slow sales are bringing VMware stock down as WSJ reports.

The warning and management change are the latest episodes in the volatile VMware saga, which has seen shares in the virtualization software maker rocket as high as $125 following its $29 initial public offering in August 2007, when it was spun off from EMC, before falling back earlier this year. Shares were recently down 26% to $39.06 on the New York Stock Exchange.

EMC still owns a nearly 85% stake in VMware.

VMWare said Tuesday that 2008 revenue growth "will be modestly below" its prior target of 50%. The mean estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial was for 51% growth to $2 billion.

The announcements sent shares of VMWare tumbling 26% to $39.30 Tuesday. Shares of EMC were recently trading down 12% at $13.33.

It will be interesting to see what Paul Maritz does taking his experience with Cloud Computing.

EMC’s New Cloud Infrastructure And Services Division

An important aspect of the press release is that Pi’s founder and CEO – Paul Maritz – will be President and GM of this new EMC division.

I’ve been dropping hints like crazy that something was up in this space, but I guess now it’s pretty obvious – we’re taking this shift in the industry very, very seriously. This ain’t just PowerPoint talking here …

We’re saying that success in this new space will require a very different technology base – and a business model – very unlike other parts of the traditional IT landscape.

The visible parts of this new entity include Pi’s assets, as well as Mozy and the Fortress platform … but I think it’s worth a tour through the rest of the EMC portfolio to see other synergistic aspects.

Paul was one of the best Microsoft VPs I enjoyed working with, and I believe he'll be able to take VMware to a new possibility of cloud computing and virtualization.

Microsoft PUE articles, Part 1, 2, & 3

July 8, 2008 Dave Ohara

Microsoft has posted the complete set of PUE articles in 3 parts.

Part 1 - http://blogs.msdn.com/the_power_of_software/archive/2008/06/20/microsoft-s-pue-experience-years-of-experience-reams-of-data.aspx

Part 2 - http://blogs.msdn.com/the_power_of_software/archive/2008/06/27/part-2-why-is-energy-efficiency-important.aspx

Part 3 - http://blogs.msdn.com/the_power_of_software/archive/2008/07/07/part-3-what-s-your-pue-strategy.aspx

What makes this unique is Microsoft is educating the SW developer and architects on PUE, and have highlighted the blog on the MSDN Patterns home page. Life will be a lot easier to work together when developers understand data center efficiency issues like PUE.

Welcome to The Power of Software blog, a new undertaking by the patterns & practices team. As you may know, our traditional focus has been on building guidance that helps software architects and developers successfully design and build applications.

This blog is a slight departure from that. We’re exploring ideas relating to Green IT and the ways we, as a company, can use energy more efficiently. Some currently planned subjects include ways to save energy through the use of software and ways to optimize datacenters. All posts will be written or reviewed by subject matter experts, just like other patterns & practices projects.

We hope this starts a dialog with the community—please let us know the topics that interest you.

RoAnn Corbisier
Editor

EPA/DOE Energy Efficiency Strategy Workshop

July 8, 2008 Dave Ohara

For the next two days I am at http://www.energetics.com/datacenters08/ conference on the Microsoft campus. If you want you can listen to this conference live.

Dear Data Center Stakeholder,
Please see below call-in information for the National Data Center Energy Efficiency Strategy Workshop and ENERGY STAR Server Stakeholder meeting for July 8 & 9. Agendas are available at www.energetics.com/datacenters08. Presentations and discussion notes will be posted to the conference and ENERGY STAR Web sites shortly following the meetings.
Call-In: (203) 480-8000
Toll Free: 866-500-6738
Passcode: 7217735
Please note that Day 1 discussions are currently underway and the Day 2 meeting is scheduled to begin at 9:00 a.m. PT tomorrow morning.
We hope you can join us.

The first presentation reviewing on Implementing Best Energy Management Practices is Christian Belady.

Christian started out his presentation making the point that he and Andrew Fanara from the EPA have lowest carbon footprint point getting to the presentation, but I have them both beat as I had a 3 mile drive. Christian's drive is 12 miles, and Andrew's is 20 miles. But, Andrew and I both have Christian beat overall as we have home offices.

Christian starts his presentation efficiency is a behavior problem. People are being charged by space. The behavior change is charging by power. Relevant metrics used by Microsoft are PUE/DCiE, DC Utilization, Server Utilization, Cost (move from cost/space to cost/power).

Microsoft End results, focusing on changing behavior.

Optimization of data center design
- Follow best practices
- Adoption of new technologies
- Optimization of code
- Engineer of data center
Right Sizing
- Elimination of stranded compute
- Elimination of stranded power and cooling

Content will be posted on http://www.energetics.com/datacenters08/

Putting IT on a Diet, Double the Success by Keeping an Energy Diary

July 8, 2008 Dave Ohara

I wrote an article for TechNet on Putting IT on a Diet.

MSNBC provides data that show people doubled their weight savings when they used a food diary.

Writing down every morsel doubles weight loss

Dieters who kept daily food diaries were more successful, new study says

By Steve Mitchell

MSNBC contributor

updated 1 hour, 47 minutes ago

In the struggle to lose weight, picking up a pen might be just as useful as putting down the fork.

That’s according to a new study that found that people who kept daily food diaries lost twice as much weight or more as those who didn’t keep a tally of their meals.

Nearly 1,700 Kaiser Permanente study participants agreed to exercise and adopt a healthy diet, but those who took the extra step of keeping track of what they consumed got something of a booster charge in their weight loss.

A good tip to keep in mind when putting your own Green IT/Data Center program in place. If you want to automate your diary data collection you should look at a tool like http://www.osisoft.com/Industries/Information%20Technology/.

Fluctuating power quality and power loss in equipment

Lack of information to correlate IT load and power consumed by IT assets

Inefficient cooling system operations

Lack of information to correlate server IT load and cost of power

Inadequate performance monitoring and condition-based maintenance of equipment

Difficulty in performing capacity planning in terms of power, cooling and IT resources