Microsoft Ups the Sharing – Posts Vision for Modular Data Centers, Generation 4

December 2, 2008 Dave Ohara

Mike Manos, Dan Costello, and Christian Belady have a new post uping the ante on sharing Data Center Design.

What is Generation 4?

Generation 4 design has been under heavy engineering for viability and cost for over a year. While the demand of our commercial growth required us to make investments as we grew, we treated each step in the learning as a process for further innovation in data centers. The design for our future Gen 4 facilities enabled us to make visionary advances that addressed the challenges of building, running, and operating facilities all in one concerted effort.

To summarize, the key characteristics of our Generation 4 data centers are:

Scalable

Plug-and-play spine infrastructure

Factory pre-assembled: Pre-Assembled Containers (PACs) & Pre-Manufactured Buildings (PMBs)

Rapid deployment

De-mountable

Reduce TTM

Reduced construction

Sustainable measures

Map applications to DC Class

The article is quite long with lots of details.

Bottom line: Microsoft is building a modular data center where all parts of the data center are containerized/modularized into building blocks.

Think of it like “building blocks”, where the data center will be composed of modular units of prefabricated mechanical, electrical, security components, etc., in addition to containerized servers.

Their vision

“A highly modular, scalable, efficient, just-in-time data center capacity program that can be delivered anywhere in the world very quickly and cheaply, while allowing for continued growth as required.”

CDN, Mathematica, MatLab – Easier to Set up in Amazon Web Services than Corporate Data Center

December 1, 2008 Dave Ohara

Here is a blog entry about the use of Amazon’s new CDN service by Mike Culver. Mike makes a good point that CDNs are a pain many times, because of the sales channel. As part of the bad economic times it will be interesting what the long term effects are to sales processes.

Content Delivery Service Flying High

It’s fun to look at buzz and activity right after a new Amazon Web Service gets launched – in this case the service I’m thinking about is Amazon CloudFront, which is our new Content Delivery Service. Jeff Barr blogged about CloudFront’s features and benefits when the service launched last week.

What prompted this particular blog post was a Twitter message (“tweet”) that Jeff saw and forwarded to me. “Thanks to Amazon CloudFront, small websites can take advantage of a CDN. I don't think Photos.aero will spend $10 ‘til November 30.” The post was about www.photos.aero, which is an aircraft enthusiasts’ site. (I’m a pilot, so Jeff knew that I’d be interested.)

That is indeed amazing! Until Amazon CloudFront came along, setting up content distribution was a real pain, in my opinion. You had to contact the service provider, do the whole “sales cycle” dance, and then wonder if in fact your prices were market price, or whether you signed up to pay a premium. The AWS approach is very egalitarian, and while I am certain that sales folks are nice people, it’s not a scalable approach for the vendor and the fact of the matter is that many technical folks don’t want to put a process between them and deployment.

Joining the Amazon Web Services effort is Mathematica.

Wolfram Research announced last week that they will be embracing the Cloud and providing a "Cloud Computing Service" with help ofNimbis Services, Inc

The Mathematica cloud computing service will provide flexible and scalable access to HPC from within Mathematica, simplifying the transition from desktop technical computing to HPC. "The two largest challenges in using HPC are programming the HPC application itself and ensuring that you can get enough computing power to do the job," says Tom Wickham-Jones, Wolfram Research Executive Director of Kernel Technology. "Mathematica answers the programming challenge by providing an integrated technical computing platform, enabling computation, visualization, and data access. Cloud computing offers consistent access to large-scale computing capabilities.

A Screenshot from recent demonstration at SC08:

And MatLab as well.

Mathworks released a whitepaper on how to run MATLAB parallel computing products -Parallel Computing Toolbox and MATLAB Distributed Computing Server on Amazon EC2. This step by step guide walks you through the steps of installation, configuration and setting up clustered environments using these licensed products from MathWorks on Amazon EC2. It shows how you can create an AMI with MATLAB products bundled in and run them in the cloud.

Whitepaper is available free on Mathworks website:

MATLAB users will learn about the key aspects of using the EC2 service from their desktop MATLAB session and using Parallel Computing Toolbox to send parallel MATLAB computations to the EC2 service.

System administrators will learn the key technical details required for setting up MATLAB Distributed Computing Server on the EC2 service, including licensing and network setup. They will also learn how to configure their users’ desktops to enable the use of the EC2 service for MATLAB computations.

What do all of these have in common. They are all easier to get started than if users had gone to their own IT department. So, AWS are cheaper and easier to use.

I am very excited because this is going to open up powerful MATLAB tools to any developer for not only research but also production applications. Students might be able to do their lab exercises without a lab and impress their professors by turning in the assignments before time. Professors will be able to teach courses using MATLAB by "turning on" a switch that creates their "Instant Labs" for the duration of the course without even contacting the College IT department for resources. Enteprises might be able to crunch the complex BI data over the weekend for a monday morning meeting.

Amazon is probably one of the only data center operators who is growing faster than expected while others are slowing down.

Success Based on Having a Strategy

November 26, 2008 Dave Ohara

It is the day before Thanksgiving and there are many businesses who base their success on the start of the Xmas retail shopping season. The SeattleTimes has an article on Costco’s logistics precision baking a million pumpkin pies.

"Everything's planned out by day. If you don't have a strategy, you're going in blind," Cruz said Sunday night, hairnet in place, leading a pie brigade at the Tukwila Costco's bakery. "Issaquah's doing the same thing tonight. So's Seattle and Bellingham and Portland."

And, Costco works together as a team.

During this busy half-week, managers stamp out fresh pie crust alongside workers.

The holiday season is all hands on deck, and that's good for morale, workers say.

"Managers are everywhere, helping all

To get the team to work together they have a mantra.

Let no oven stand empty.

For those you of you haven’t visited a Costco during this time here is some background.

Costco has pumpkin pies down to a science

Costco stores nationwide bake around the clock Thanksgiving week, churning out more than 1 million pumpkin pies in military precision. The big question: Did they make enough?

By Karen Gaudette

Seattle Times staff reporter

ELLEN M. BANNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Costco baker Camilla Dizdarvic carries a baking sheet with pumpkin pies over to a rack so they can be put into an oven at the Costco in Tukwila. She's been working at Costco for 10 years and has made thousands and thousands of pies.

Balls of pie crust, ready to be shaped into a pie pan.

That's a lot of pies

How many?

Costco will bake and sell more than 1 million pumpkin pies this week.

Today, they will sell half a million.

They'll sell more than 3 million pumpkin pies throughout "pumpkin-pie season," which runs from Labor Day to New Year's Eve.

What's in a million pies?

707,000 6-pound, 10-ounce cans, or 4.7 million pounds, of pumpkin

More than 1.4 million pounds of fresh eggs (roughly 12.6 million eggs)

Source: Costco

When today's final batches of Thanksgiving pumpkin pies emerge from Costco ovens across the land, managers need wait only a few hours to answer one of the year's most pressing questions:

Did they bake enough?

s a vital concern. By day's end, Costco expects to have sold more than 1 million fresh-baked, giant $5.99 pumpkin pies during this short week when in-store bakeries run around the clock.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Greenest Family of Notebooks

November 24, 2008 Dave Ohara

IJust saw the new Apple ads for Greenest Family of Notebooks

Here is the Apple url http://www.apple.com/mac/green-notebooks/

The highly recyclable, even more energy efficient MacBook family has been designed with the environment in mind.

When we redesigned the new Macbook, our designers and engineers set a goal of making not only the greenest notebook Apple ever produced, but the greenest family of notebooks. So every new Macbook has been built using materials that are highly recyclable and free of many harmful substances present in other computers. Apple engineers also designed the software and hardware to work together, in order to maximize energy efficiency and minimize the carbon footprint of the MacBook. Even the packaging was reconsidered and reduced, so there would be smaller boxes to ship and less material to recycle. The result is exactly what we hoped for: the greenest family of notebooks ever made.

Google says it has the most efficient data centers.

Apple says it has the greenest family of notebooks.

Who is next?

Who has the Greenest Software? I bet you Apple will claim their OS while Microsoft spends on its Vista ads.

Google’s New Green Data Center Site, Austria

November 21, 2008 Dave Ohara

DataCenterKnowledge has a post about Google’s new data center in Austria with abundant hydroelectric (green) energy nearby.

Google Confirms New Data Center in Austria
November 21st, 2008 : Rich Miller

Google will build a new data center on this parcel of farmland near Kronstorf, Austria.

Google today confirmed that it plans to build a data center in Kronstorf, Austria, where it has purchased 185 acres of farmland for the project. The project has been in the works since May, when news of Google’s site location scouting trips in Austria was published on Twitter by Kronstorf residents.

Here is the Green Energy part.

The land for the new data center is near several hydro-electric power plants on the river Enns, which would satisfy Google’s requirement for the use of renewable energy sources in its facilities.

But, I also found it interesting this site only has 100 people as Google has had up to 200 for many facilities in the US.

Kronstorf also is close to major universities in Linz, Steyr and Hagenberg, which could supply a trained IT workforce. The project is expected to create 100 jobs.