Partly Cloud Computing

November 23, 2009 Dave Ohara

Pixar has an entertaining video you can see as part of the movie Up, called Partly Cloudy.

Google’s Dan Dodge makes a good point for moving some IT services to the cloud. The new term that people need to think about is Partly Cloud Computing. You don’t have to go complete cloud. And no clouds are not good.

Moving to the Cloud is not an all or nothing proposition

The Enterprise Cloud Summit panel at the Interop Conference yesterday discussed some of the challenges and concerns of large enterprises and government agencies in moving their applications to the cloud. While there are some regulatory and compliance concerns for some applications, it isn’t an all or nothing proposition. Moving your email, calendar, spreadsheet, word processor, and other productivity apps to the cloud now can save big money, and free up your IT resources to focus on more strategic issues.

InformationWeek says “The vendors argued that cloud computing offers enough real benefits at the present time that most organizations should at least consider it for some functions. One approach, said Google's Don Dodge, is to move low-level data and services to the cloud while continuing to maintain sensitive information in-house.

Dodge told New York's CIO Rico Singleton that his cash-strapped state could save $50 to $100 million per year just by moving its 190,000 employees to Google's cloud-based Google Apps desktop applications. "It's not all or nothing," said Dodge. "Take advantage of the cost savings for the simple things," he said.”

CRN’s Channel Web captured the essence of the discussion;

Cloud evangelists from the technology companies led off the keynote extolling the various virtues of the cloud model, fromGoogle developer advocate Don Dodge emphasizing simplicity and cost-savings to Microsoft's Yousef Khalidi, distinguished engineer for Windows Azure, explaining how to leverage public and private cloud models to maximize efficiency for enterprises both public and private.

Next big Oregon Data Center customer? well-funded, well-known

November 23, 2009 Dave Ohara

updated Jan 22, 2010

Company X is Facebook /2010/01/facebook-data-center-115-pue.html

DataCenterKnowledge has a post on Company X Plans for Oregon Data Center.

Company X Plans Oregon Data Center
November 23rd, 2009 : Rich Miller

The city of Prineville, Oregon is negotiating with a large, secretive company that wants to build a data center in its enterprise zone.

A “well-funded, well-known company” is negotiating to build a large data center in central Oregon, and the secrecy surrounding the negotiations has folks in the town of Prineville wondering who it might be. Officials in Prineville have been negotiating with Vitesse LLC, a company performing site selection for the unnamed end user that would build operate the data center, according to local media reports.

The site is several hours from an existing Google data center in The Dalles and a Boardman site whereAmazon is said to be resuming construction on a major data center project. Like those projects, the process in Prineville has been cloaked in secrecy.

Hints of the company are hard to find.

Oregon business registration records indicate that Vitesse LLC was registered Oct 21 and shares a San Francisco address with the law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofksy & Walker. Attorneys with Paul, Hastings have data center site acquisition experience, including past engagements with large financial companies and Internet companies.

The proposed facility would be located near the Prineville Airport in an enterprise zone, which allows the city to waive property taxes for eligible projects. Tomorrow the Prineville City Council is scheduled to consider selling a 1-acre piece of property to Vitesse for $50,000, annex two adjacent properties to the city and approve a 15-year property tax exemption for the company that would operate the data center.

I am off to Oregon for Thanksgiving this weekend and we are planning our own tax-free purchases compared to Washington’s high state sales tax. But, I wouldn’t do that because I would have to pay the sales tax anyway when I brought the goods back to state of Washington. :-)

DataCenterKnowledge makes the same point for data centers and state sales tax.

Washington Repeals Tax Break
In late 2007 Washington State ruled that data centers aren’t manufacturers and were no longer covered by a state sales tax break for manufacturing enterprises, and thus must pay a 7.9 percent tax on data center construction and equipment. This prompted protests from Microsoft and Yahoo, who said they had relied upon the tax break in their decision to build facilities in Quincy.

In a letter to legislators, Yahoo co-founder David Filo said the withdrawal of the sales tax incentive “swings the decision strongly in favor of freezing construction in Washington, and building instead in Oregon (which has no sales tax), as some of our competitors are already doing.”

Microsoft subsequently migrated its Windows Azure cloud computing infrastructure from its data center in Quincy to another Microsoft facility in San Antonio.

How important is it to blog about this problem of Washington State Sales Tax? A funny piece of data for me is Google Search has my one of my blog posts #9 for “Washington State Sales Tax”

Discussing Google, Apple and Microsoft OS

November 22, 2009 Dave Ohara

It is interesting reading the latest reporting of Google’s OS and where they are going.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google's dual-pronged operating-system strategy will likely produce a single OS down the road, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Many Google observers were puzzled when the companyannounced plans for Chrome OS in July, coming amidgrowing acceptance of the company's Android operating-system project as a smartphone and Netbook OS. After all, why design an open-source operating system with the goal of reinventing the personal computing experience when you're currently developing another open-source operating system with the goal of reinventing the mobile computing experience?

Google executives, including CEO Eric Schmidt, have downplayed the conflict ever since, asking for time to let the projects evolve. And a few days after Chrome OS was revealed, Android chief Andy Rubin said device makers "need different technology for different products," explaining that Android has a lot of unique code that makes it suitable for use in a phone and Chrome has unique benefits of its own.

But Brin, speaking informally to reporters after the company's Chrome OS presentation on Thursday, said "Android and Chrome will likely converge over time," citing among other things the common Linux and Webkit code base present in both projects.

As part of my 2 year anniversary writing this blog, I am taking more time to share my background and perspectives.

I am writing this post on a plane trip from SJ to Seattle, so I have a bit of time to reflect on my latest trip. And, one of the ways I consider myself extremely lucky is to understand different perspectives.

Let me share some ideas of Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). And, none of what I am sharing is based on visiting these companies on my latest trip or direct interviews. Huh? On my trips to the bay area I try to meet one of my smartest guys I know. We worked together at Apple and Microsoft, so we have known each other for over 20 years. We have another mutual friend who we worked with, and we compare perspectives on where things are going. 20 years ago, we were all working on the Mac OS, now we are all working on data center related issues, so we are used to be able have complete control over things at Apple, but now we have smaller parts in a much bigger problem.

Now, when we get together we rapidly bounce from what Apple is doing to Microsoft, then Google, and a bunch of other companies. Discussing who is working on the most interesting computer technology.

We were talking about how cool it is that Google gets these guys to talk about what they are doing in technologies. One point I made of why this is good is the act of trying to explain your ideas forces you to simplify and articulate the value of what you are working on. Repeating the presentation forces you to iterate on where the value is and why it is important. Your audience gains value, but the presenter and its company gains knowledge figuring out what is of value. Valuable content is more viral and spreads. And, this has a connection to your products.

We briefly discussed Microsoft as we worked together at Microsoft, and discussed the developer community. We both have worked on the Mac OS and Windows OS, so we are used to discussing new OS technologies and the developer benefit. Without apps that use the platform, the value of an OS feature is minimal. Which brings me back to the previous paragraph on sharing ideas. You can look at OS developer features as the challenge of explaining ideas that are viral and have value. Those developers who can explain their ideas better, iterating on the explanation, have a higher probability developing features that users want.

Now what has this got to do with the data center. Well, not much yet. But, let’s now continue to where the developer community is going. Windows and Mac OS API developers are in decline. Java, AJAX, Ruby, and HTML are growing much faster. And, the platform is the browser - Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and IE. As browser apps grow, the cloud is more important which fits in a cloud computing model which has the all the hype.

So, even though I write about data centers on this blog. There is a bigger plan on how the data centers fit in the changing computing environments. Data Centers are resources for computing. It was client-server applications in the past. Now it is becoming browser-cloud apps.

The Green Data Center is going to be one that doesn’t just have the best PUE, but the one that in the overall system enables the lower resource use. Shifting computing to be in data center, using less resources to low power devices is more efficient than having high powered clients. Smart phones and netbooks are the high growth devices, and the utility is growing fast to do more and more of the things you used to need a laptop or desktop.

Not to say efficient power and cooling systems are not important, but they are only one part in a complex systems. The interaction of all the pieces are not well understood to figure out the most efficient use of resources. Solving this complex problem is what drives me to keep talking about the subject of green data center. Constantly iterating on what is of value. As I figure out what has value, it helps figure out what people should do. What people should do is what I share on this blog. And, it helps create better products and services that use less resources.

In my past life, I traveled a lot giving presentations. With my blog www.greenm3.com , I can share more ideas and quicker to a world-wide audience. Which is a lot greener, saves money, more effective, and better for my family life.

Thanks for continuing to visit my blog.

-Dave Ohara

Greening the Data Center in conflict with outsourced Cloud Computing suppliers

November 21, 2009 Dave Ohara

GigaOm has a post on green computing in the data center.

Green Computing Needs a Data Center Whisperer

By Stacey Higginbotham | Friday, November 20, 2009 | 5:05 PM PT | 0 comments | 17 tweets

As compute demand increases, demand for power in data centers is soaring. To help IT professionals halt the spread of watt-consuming servers, the industry needs to develop software that can communicate the ways in which the various layers of the data center perform and interact. They need a binary version of Cesar Millan — a data center whisperer.

Speaking at a panel held Wednesday night in Austin, Texas, several folks from the large server shops and a distinguished engineer who runs a data center for IBM spoke about the challenges of keeping power consumption down in a world where computing demand is going up. (For a truly in-depth look at this topic, check out our GigaOM Pro report — subscription required.) The panel went beyond just power and cooling (thank goodness) to focus on how companies are increasingly viewing power consumption in the data center as a whole, rather than merely as the sum of of the data center’s processors.

The IBM engineers achieved the results by creating an internal cloud computing initiative.

IBM’s Scott Winters said he saved 30 percent on his energy costs over three years while increasing his computing abilities by 50 percent and his storage by 150 percent. He did this in two primary ways: by virtualizing his data center and creating a pool of shared resources that are used on demand, and by paying attention to software he has running that tells him what’s happening on his servers.

An interesting way to tell the story of being aware of what is going on is the data center is whispering secrets.

“My data center was whispering secrets, and now I have a way to understand them,” Winters said. He said his IBM software and linking that software to the physical infrastructure helped him reach such an understanding, especially in regard to managing power consumption. It’s a strategy that HP has embraced with its products; there are also several startups pushing data center sensor networks that allow the data center’s server hardware and its physical infrastructure like the chillers and air conditioners to communicate.

The IBM expert does a good job of explaining what is next to the writer.

But as the facilities and IT infrastructure merge (the jobs of the facilities manager and the IT manager are also on a path to merge, according to members of the panel) standards are needed. The folks building the physical infrastructure typically use proprietary software in their products and sensors and getting that sensor network to talk to your servers can require a big programming effort. Once folks can manage their physical infrastructure and their hardware, the next step is to tie the physical and hardware layers to the application layer. That’s a big dream, and we’re still far off. But given the demand for computing and constraints on providing the power to meet that demand, it’s an issue that panels like the one Wednesday night will help solve.

Now, here is where the conflict occurs with an outsourced cloud computing company vs. the customer. Whoever the outsource company is – Google, Amazon, Microsoft or IBM, their goal is to minimize their costs while maximizing revenue. A cloud computing company wants easy to host services that are inefficient. because they make more money when the customer runs services requiring multiple server instances with more resources. Their margins don’t improve because the customer runs a high utilization load.

So, in the zest for cloud computing, customers are signing up for suppliers who want you to be inefficient. They’ll sell you their cloud computing infrastructure as lower cost than your own infrastructure, but is it as low as it could be?

The supplier is not going to do as was mentioned in the referenced post.

Once folks can manage their physical infrastructure and their hardware, the next step is to tie the physical and hardware layers to the application layer. That’s a big dream, and we’re still far off.

Cloud computing has its advantages, but the dominant players are going to run their own cloud computing infrastructure and tune the facilities, IT hardware and applications to be efficient – and be the low cost information suppliers.

If your goal is to be lowest cost in IT services think about your cloud computing whether you own it or rent it.

Data Center Executive Popularity

November 20, 2009 Dave Ohara

I was going over my site using Google Analytics looking at keywords. As expected Green Data Center are the top three topics.

1
green data center

2
green data centers

3
green data center blog

What I also found interesting is who came up as data center executive names in the keywords.

And, the winner is?

Olivier Sanche, three times more than Mike Manos.

Christian Belady was just as popular as Mike.

And, next was Chris Malone.

Debra Chrapty showed up, but she is no longer a data center executive.

Now to be fare. My Google Search result for Olivier Sanche shows up #2 whereas my Google Search result for Mike Manos shows up #5. So, it is not a true popularity test, but an interesting thing as far as what executives bring traffic to www.greenm3.com.

For comparison the “green data center” words bring in 5 times the amount of traffic.