A Look Inside Microsoft’s Green Data Center Efforts, Educating Enterprise Developers and Sys Admins

July 17, 2008 Dave Ohara

Microsoft hosted a panel discussion at TechEd 2008 in Orlando. The panel was moderated by George Cerbone with Mike Manos, Lewis Curtis, Beth Humphreys from Microsoft. Additional panel members are Kathy Malone and David Platt.

The video is here. Don’t hesitate to just hit play, and listen to the audio while you are surfing the web. It has some good perspectives.

Lewis Curtis presented first his past experiences over the last year working on Green IT at Microsoft.

Mike Manos presented why going Green is a business responsibility to save energy and has monetary savings.

Beth Humphreys shares her experiences in customer engagements discussing Green IT.

Kathy Malone talks about her efforts to build compliance systems and a green IT developer community.

David Platt, a recognized .NET developer expert, explains why developers are not creating green applications. His view is green should be an OS function, and developers don’t have enough time for this.

Mike Manos brings up a good rebuttal that once Microsoft changed to an energy based chargeback system, the business units started to understand the impact of their SW on their energy bill, and have chosen energy efficiency vs. a focus on only performance.

David Platt continues to make the point developer costs and power is negligible, repeating his point that the energy efficiency is the responsibility of the OS, and none of the effort should be taken on by the developer.

The good thing is the rest of the panel think David Platt is wrong.

Kathy Malone makes excellent points on compliance systems.

This video gives you an idea of some of the people in Microsoft who are driving the Green Data Center efforts to the software developer community.

I am glad I caught Lewis’s post.

An Application Architect who Cares about Energy Efficiency

July 16, 2008 Dave Ohara

Pat Helland put up his post about a week at Foo Camp.

What is Foo Camp? Pat gives an entertaining summary.

A Weekend at Foo Camp

Well... I was lucky enough to get invited to Foo Camp (which was last weekend) and I figure "What the heck! Let's do it!".
Foo Camp is held at the O'Reilly headquarters in Sebastopol, CA which is 1 to 2 hours (or more depending on traffic) north of San Francisco. It is an invitation only event whose name stands for "Friends Of O'Reilly" and involves about 300 diverse and interesting individuals from different walks of the computer industry (and related industries). Tim O'Reilly host it at their headquarters and supplies very nice buffet food, showers, rest rooms, and meeting rooms. I was informed that the best way to enjoy the event is to camp there which means either pitching a tent on their lawn or finding an available space in a meeting room or hallway to throw a sleeping bag. It was an option to get a hotel room in town. Now... I haven't camped in about 20 years so this required some thinking...
I concluded I had two options:

Stay in a hotel room and ensure I remained sober enough to drive at the end of the evening, OR
Buy a tent at REI in Santa Rosa and then hit the high-end liquor store in Santa Rosa to buy enough whiskey to lubricate a serious subset of the 300 attendees.

Naturally, I chose the second option and bought six bottles (some of my favorites and others I hadn't tried).

It turns out James Hamilton and Pat Helland are friends and are putting their heads together on Energy Efficiency software. James is left, Pat is center, and Jesse Robbins is right.

But, back to the Energy Efficiency software. Here are Pat's comments.

Sometimes, it was hard to select between the various cool sessions.   I remember the following ones:

Data center power -- James Hamilton (my friend from Microsoft) and Jeff Hammerbacher who leads the Facebook data team (but will be leaving soon). Both James and Jeff were filled with information about running large and dynamic data centers.   The power issues for data centers have been on my mind the last few years and I find that James is a wonderful font of knowledge.   I most definitely love that he is at Microsoft and my friend... I plan to come pepper him with additional questions in the months to com.   Jeff, also, has tons of knowledge from supporting the data needs of Facebook as it has undergone its explosive growth. This was a fun and invigorating discussion in which I met an attendee, Roger Magoulas who is a research director at O'Reilly.   I have a feeling that there will be opportunities for me to work with Roger, too.
Parallel Programming -- Kerry Hammil of Microsoft Research.   We had a fun discussion of the difficulties of getting applications (and, indeed, their libraries and OSes) to be parallel. There were about 25 great and interesting people participating in this group and, not surprisingly, I participated, too.     This was such a lively discussion for me that it ended up in the hallway and we skipped the next session.

Here is an application architect who cares about data center power and parallel (multicore) programming. I hope we see more people like Pat show up.

Jesse Robbins in the above picture has an interesting background.

Technical Program Manager at Amazon.com
Manager - IT Operations at Amazon.com
Task Force Leader at World Shelters Task Force 1

Systems Engineer at Amazon.com
Firefighter/EMT (Intern) at Palo Alto Fire Department

How Hard is it Staff Energy Efficient Data Centers, even Google Needs Help Recruiting

July 16, 2008 Dave Ohara

SearchDataCenter.com has a post about how Google's engineering leadership staffing (Shikha Wadhwa) asking for help promoting data center openings.

Even Google looking hard for good data center types

July 16th, 2008 by Mark Fontecchio
In the category of data center jobs, even Google is out there aggressively looking for people. As we have reported before, it’s hard to find good data center leaders out there. Being a data center manager requires a mix of IT know-how with facility engineering knowledge that, frankly, not many people out there have.
Even Google is apparently having difficulty finding the right people. Shikha Wadhwa, who does engineering leadership staffing for the Mountain View, Calif. Web search giant, sent us an email looking to promote its data center openings, and in particular, “Datacenter Facilities Leadership Positions.” From the note:

Google is Hiring!
Google is looking for highly motivated individuals to provide leadership and oversight of our state-of-the-art datacenter facilities. Our datacenters are industry-leading examples of innovative capital- and energy-efficient designs in action. We are looking for people to provide leadership in areas spanning Data Center Facilities Engineering, Operations, Construction Services, Project Management and R&D.

The full Google job listing adds that they’re looking for a bachelor’s or master’s in a technical field and at least 10 years experience managing a mission-critical facility.
Working at Google has become something of an enigma, with articles devoted solely to describing how to get hired at Google. But with comments in the email to us such as “If you or someone else you know is interested in finding out more, we would love to hear from you!” and promising that they’ll “circle back with you asap!” it’s obvious they’re looking hard for qualified data center types.
Google was one of Fortune’s 100 best companies to work for in 2007, although you should have doubts if you think the Google day care is all it’s cracked up to be.

Changing Behavior, follow up to Christian Belady's point at Energy Efficiency Workshop, NY starts posting calories on restaurant food

July 16, 2008 Dave Ohara

Microsoft's Christian Belady made the point at last week's Energy Efficiency Strategy Workshop that Changing Behaviors are best done by a change in charge back methods.

Another proof of Christian's point is what is happening in NY as the state requires calorie disclosures on restaurant food.

New Yorkers try to swallow calorie sticker shock

600 calorie muffins? The first city to adopt law faces unappetizing surprises

Although touted as "fat free," a slice of banana chocolate chip cake at Starbucks packs 390 calories, as New Yorkers discovered when the coffee chain began displaying calorie counts to comply with a new New York City law.
Nora Cara was flabbergasted.
She was about to order her usual morning coffee and muffin at Dunkin’ Donuts when she saw the new calorie labels. The chocolate chip muffin she had her eye on was 630 calories.
“I was blown away,” said Cara, a 27-year-old homemaker from Forest Hills in New York City. “I’m not a no-carb type of person, and I usually don’t even think about it. But you pick up a little muffin with your coffee, and it has 630 calories in it? That’s a bit extreme!”
New Yorkers have been in the throes of sticker shock since this spring when the Big Apple became the first city in the country to implement a law forcing chain restaurants to post the calorie count of each food in the same size and font as the price.

People will change their IT behaviors if they saw the Power and Carbon impact of their actions. I am sure a lot of people will be surprised with the #'s, just like this.

1,360 calorie salad
Many New Yorkers are finding that even the foods they thought were lower calorie really aren’t. Vicki Freedman, who lives in Manhattan, watches her weight and always tries to choose a light option when eating out. But the 26 year old just discovered that the Friday’s pecan-crusted chicken salad, served with mandarin oranges, dried cranberries and celery, has 1,360 calories.
“That surprised me the most because they market it as a healthy option,” she said. “It’s like false advertising. You think it’s better than the burger and the fries. It’s misleading.” (The cheeseburger served with fries is, indeed, 1,290 calories.)

Microsoft's James Hamilton Presents "Where Does Power go in Data Centers and How to get it Back?"

July 16, 2008 Dave Ohara

James Hamilton has a blog post about his attending O'Reilly's Foo Camp and his presentation on "Where does Power go in Data Centers and How to get it Back?"

The title for my session was Where Does the Power go in Data Centers and How to get it Back? I didn’t show slides but much of what we covered is posted at: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/TalksAndPapers/JamesRH_DCPowerSavingsFooCamp08.ppt. In the session, we talked through how contemporary large data centers work first looking at power distribution. We tracked the power from the feed to the substation at 115,000 volts through numerous conversions before arriving at the CPU at 1.2 volts. We then talked about power saving server design techniques. And then the mechanical systems used to get the heat back out. In each section we discussed what could be done to improve the design and how much could be saved.

Our conclusion from the session was that power savings of nearly 4x where both possible and affordable using only current technology. For those participated in the session, thanks for your contribution and for your help. It was fun.

James comes to the conclusion there is a power savings of 4x. If you are curious as to how he comes to this look at his slides. One of his ideas that flies in the face of high density computing is Thin Slice Computing.