Equinix CTO 10 year perspective, data center changes in highly connected Internet services

I had the pleasure of interviewing Equinix's CTO David Pickut as part of Equinix reaching its 50th data center.

Equinix Opens 50th Premier IBX Data Center

Equinix’s 50th IBX Data Center Opens in London; Will Help Company Service Global Demand From Financial Services Firms and Cloud Service Providers

FOSTER CITY, CA and LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – March 30, 2010 – Equinix, Inc. (NASDAQ: EQIX), a provider of global data center services, today announced a major company milestone: the opening of its 50th premier International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data center. This announcement demonstrates Equinix’s ability to help its customers fully leverage all of the benefits of an interconnected world.

If you are not familiar with David here is some background.

David Pickut

David Pickut

Chief Technology Officer

Dave Pickut joined Equinix in 2004 and served in several roles before settling into his current role as Chief Technology Officer. Prior to joining Equinix, Mr. Pickut held Vice President positions with a Tier 1 ISP and an IT products/services company, with responsibilities for data center operations and business management. His engineering experience encompasses both consulting services and product design related to mission-critical data center power, cooling, security, controls, and fire protection systems.

Mr. Pickut received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Ohio State University and is a registered professional engineer, a member of the IEEE and NFPA.

The perspective I was looking for is David's view of the past 10 years and what the future looks like. Over the past 10 years, Dave has seen three big changes in data centers.

  1. Energy density in racks has gone up.
  2. Energy Efficiency awareness has increased.
  3. Transition from stand alone data center mindset to highly connected data centers.

This is best illustrated by drawings David provided.  Here is what data centers looked like 10 years ago.

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And this is what data center design looks like it 2010

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Note in the upper left of each of these slides the external forces affecting data centers. This is proof I was looking for that Equinix is on the right path to Green (low carbon) Data Centers.

The mass media industry will cover Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple data centers.  But, here is a simple way to understand the future of data centers.  David and I chatted about many more things regarding the future 10 years, and he said it is easy to build energy efficient cost effective data centers.  The hard part is accounting for the accelerating rate of external factors that now affect data center design.  Those who put their "head in the sand" and geek out are setting themselves up for unexpected reactions like Greenpeace's focus on Facebook's coal powered data center.

Facebook Responds on Coal Power in Data Center

February 17th, 2010 : Rich Miller

An architectural rendering of the new Facebook data center planned for Prineville, Oregon.

Facebook has responded to growing criticism of its power choices for its new data center in Prineville, Oregon. This is one of the first cases in which a data center’s energy sourcing has attracted this kind of public attention, but it won’t be the last. 

I am looking forward to more posts on what Equinix is doing, and their willingness to share ideas, and what the future of data centers look like.  In 2010, there is SaaS, Cloud Provider, Ethernet Exchange, and Mobile Carrier.  Can you imagine what 2020 will look like?

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Apr 29, 2010 deadline for NY St Data Center Energy Efficiency Leadership Award

There are two more weeks to submit for NYSERDA's data center energy efficiency leadership award.  Here are the details.

2010 New York State Data Center Energy Efficiency Leadership Award

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The 2010 New York State Data Center Energy Efficiency Leadership Award, sponsored by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), recognizes an organization within New York State that demonstrates leadership in pursuing policies and projects that promote data center energy efficiency. New York State data centers’ energy consumption is equal to the energy consumption of nearly 700,000 single family homes per year – 4.5 billion kilowatt hours. According to Lawrence Berkley National Laboratories, if this trend continues, energy consumption by servers and data centers is forecasted to double over the next three to five years.

The winning organization and its project will be showcased at the Uptime Institute Symposium on May 19, 2010 in New York City and will be highlighted on the NYSERDA website. The award recipient has the exclusive right to identify itself as the award recipient on its public relations and marketing materials.

DESCRIPTION

The New York State Data Center Energy Efficiency Leadership Award will be presented to an organization that demonstrates leadership in pursuing policies and projects that promote the efficient use of energy in its data center. The winner of this award will serve as a model within New York State of an organization that is dedicated to sustainable, efficient load growth in its data center.

ELIGIBILITY

The winning organization’s policies and/or projects must be implemented in a data center that is located in New York State. The award will be presented at the Uptime Institute Symposium on May 19, 2010 in New York City. A representative from the award recipient’s organization should be available to attend the Symposium on May 19th.

I'll be looking at what gets submitted as I am part of the evaluation panel, but I will not be at Uptime Institute Symposium award ceremony this year.  I was at Uptime last year as a blogger, and got an interesting view from a media perspective. 

Different perspectives help you see what is of value to others.  I regularly am amazed at how easy this is for me to shift, but I can lose people as I bounce from different perspectives.  Luckily the people I interact with often know my brain is running free form.  And, part of what organizes my thoughts is writing this blog.

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GreenM3 search results "dan barber fish farming" example of search engine optimization

Part of running www.greenm3.com blog is to understand how successfully I can write content that has high Google search results.  I am surrounded by Microsoft friends where I live, and people regularly ask why I don't use Bing search.  Because over 90% of my search comes from Google.

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And my top browser traffic is from Firefox.

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Which are interesting insights into the technical audience for my blog.

Mobile is small traffic, but interesting distribution.

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I had fun writing the blog post on Dan Barber's Sustainable Farming.  Yes, I have fun writing some entries which is why I write so much. :-)  When I first wrote the entry I realized I was behind the curve.  The TED video had gone live Mar 10, 2010 and there were multiple media/bloggers who wrote about Dan's video.  My post went live on Mar 26, 2010, two weeks after others.  And, when I checked on Google search, I was buried down in 4th page of 10 results.

But, today I just got this Google Search, making it up to spot #8.

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Which is kind of mind blowing that my one post beats so many other professional media sites.The traffic from you is what drove my Google Search ranking up.  I had about 800 views/hits over the past 2 1/2 weeks.   On average, I get about 400 views/hits per post.

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One site with more details on the fish farm Dan Barber references is on Monterey Bay Aquarium's blog.

The Future of Fish Farming?

It's a story that almost sounds too good to be true -- except that it is true, and it says a lot about the kind of world we're creating for ourselves. It's a world we can live in, for the long term.

Flamingo

I first heard the tale from chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill during theSustainable Foods Institute we put on last month at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. He described his delight in touring a multi-species aquaculture farm in Spainthat is a seamless part of a wetland restoration project in the Guadalquivir Marshes of Andalusia. Where the farmers produce abundant, high-quality seafood -- sea bass, bream, red mullet and shrimp -- AND where predators like flocks of flamingos are welcomed as a sign that the ecosystem is flourishing.

The Vera La Palma web site is here.

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www.time.com has an article on Sustainable Aquaculture.

A ABEND / ISLA MAYOR Monday, Jun. 15, 2009

Click here to find out more!

CHANNELING NATURE: Veta la Palma pumps estuary water into rehabilitated wetlands

Daniel Perez for TIME

It is rare for a farmer to appreciate the predators that eat the animals he raises. But Miguel Medialdea is hardly an ordinary farmer. Looking out on to the carpet of flamingos that covers one of the lagoons that make up Veta la Palma, the fish farm in southern Spain where he is biologist, Medialdea shrugs. "They take about 20% of our annuel yield," he says, pointing at a blush-colored bird as it scoops up a sea bass. "But that just shows the whole system is working."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1902751,00.html#ixzz0l7yJldTZ

Thanks again for visiting GreenM3 blog.

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What is behind the Adobe vs. Apple feud?

I have been meaning to write this post, and news just got hotter with the latest news that Adobe is preparing to sue Apple.

Adobe vs. Apple is going to get uglier

You think things are bad now between Apple and Adobe? Just wait until the lawsuit.

207 comments | 36I like it!
Tags: Adobe, Apple, developer, flash, ipad, iPhone, iPod

April 12, 2010, 05:36 PM —

Usually I write about security here, but Apple's iron-bound determination to keep Adobe Flash out of any iWhatever device is about to blow up in Apple's face. Sources close to Adobe tell me that Adobe will be suing Apple within a few weeks.

It was bad enough when Apple said, in effect, that Adobe Flash wasn't good enough to be allowed on the iPad. But the final straw was when Apple changed its iPhone SDK (software development kit) license so that developers may not submit programs to Apple that use cross-platform compilers.

Below is more information, but I want to put my thoughts up here on what is behind the Adobe vs. Apple feud.  Apple's business is built on a closed system approach to its hardware and software.  Adobe's approach is cross platform technologies.  Adobe's history of postscript, type 1 fonts, Acrobat, and Mac/Win app development have targeted customers who need to work across different systems.  Postscript and Type 1 fonts worked because you could use the same postscript on Mac/Windows desktops, then on your high end printers.  This Adobe strategy also made it so their IP was owned by them to sell to others who wanted to be compatible with Apple printers and hardware, eventually bringing an end to the Apple LaserWriter as Apple couldn't compete.

Building on the success of the original LaserWriter, Apple developed many further models. Later LaserWriters offered faster printing, higher resolutions, Ethernet connectivity, and eventually color output. To compete, many other laser printer manufacturers licensed Adobe PostScript for inclusion into their own models. Eventually the standardization on Ethernet for connectivity and the ubiquity of PostScript undermined the unique position of Apple’s printers: Macintosh computers functioned equally well with any Postscript printer. After the LaserWriter 8500, Apple discontinued the LaserWriter product line.

Steve Jobs has learned this lesson well, and knows what happens if he lets Adobe's cross platform technologies into Apple products.  Steve's made his decision.  Adobe Flash will not ship on the iPhone as he can see what happened with postscript.  In addition, Steve has provided technical reasons why Adobe Flash is not appropriate for the iPhone, but if he really wanted Flash he couldn't he work with Adobe to address the technical issues?

Steve jobs has slammed Flash.

by Erica Ogg

Jobs iPad Flash

Jobs using the iPad, sans any support for Adobe Flash.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has reportedly continued his campaign against Adobe's Flash video technology, this time at a meeting with The Wall Street Journal, according to a report in Valleywag.

People who were at a recent meeting Jobs had with some of the paper's executives told the Gawker-owned sitethat Jobs dismissed Flash as "a CPU hog," full of "security holes," and "old technology" and would therefore not be including the technology on the iPad, or presumably, the iPhone. (Adobe did recently promise to make theMac version of its browser plug-in faster.)

It's not the first time we've heard this. At an Apple shareholder meeting two years ago Jobs explained why Flash wouldn't be on the iPhone any time soon. He told those present that the full-blown PC Flash version "performs too slow to be useful" on the iPhone, and that the mobile version--Flash Lite--"is not capable of being used with the Web."

The following reminds of the frustration at Apple and Microsoft when we cussed about Adobe Type Manager (ATM) crashing the OS. (I worked on both the Mac and Windows OS while at Apple and Microsoft.)

More recently, word leaked out from Apple's employee-only meeting after the iPad introduction that Jobs had slammed Flash. According to a report on Wired, he responded to an employee question that "whenever a Mac crashes, more often than not, it's because of Flash," and that "no one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5."

The little piece of irony is Google believes HTML5 is key to mobile growth as well.

This is starting to feel like a feud similar to the Hatfields vs. McCoys.  Although a more modern term is a smackdown.


Steve Jobs hates Adobe Flash: iPhone 4.0 SDK lockdown smackdown

9 comments

Ouch. Looks like writing apps in Flash is verboten, according to the latest iPhone OS 4.0 SDK legal language. CS5 and other cross-compilers could be dead in the water. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers uncover more proof that Steve Jobs hates Adobe.

By Richi Jennings. April 9, 2010.
(AAPL) (ADBE)

He's back: your humble blogwatcher selected these bloggy morsels for your enjoyment. Not to mention Michelle Obama's biggest fear...
Cade Metz has met the enemy, and it's Adobe, apparently:

Apple's new SDK for the iPhone ... will likely prevent ... Adobe's upcoming Flash ... development suite from converting Flash scripts into native Jesus Phone apps. ... Apple's iPhone SDK has always said that "applications may only use Documented APIs." ... But Steve Jobs and company have now tacked on a few additional sentences.
...
It would appear that Steve Jobs has landed another blow against ... Adobe. ... Steve Jobs has already barred untranslated Flash from the iPhone and the iPad, calling it "buggy," littered with security holes, and a "CPU hog."more

John Gruber is widely credited with breaking the news:

My reading of this new language is that cross-compilers ... are prohibited. This also bans apps compiled using MonoTouch. ... The folks at Appcelerator realize ... that they might be out of bounds withTitanium. Ansca’s Corona SDK ... strikes me as out of bounds.
...
The language in the agreement doesn’t leave much wiggle room for Flash. ... Wonder what Adobe does now? ... They’re pretty much royally ****ed..more

Hank Williams calls it an "insane restraint of trade":

3.3.1 not only bans cross platform tools, it bans everything that is written in other languages and are ported to C. This, obviously, includes libraries. ... [It's] an insidious concept and strikes at the core of product development and of computer science in general. Everything is built on other stuff. ... This language is fundamentally unreasonable.
...
Some may say my interpretation is too pedantic. But the point is that in order for Apple to limit people in the way that they want to ... they are inflicting collateral damage. ... There is a reasonable risk that not only is 3.3.1 restraint of trade, but that the entire ... App Store concept ... is found to be restraint of trade. ... Adobe, and/or class action lawyers start your engines!
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Microsoft writes humorous blog post to educate SW developers of the power costs to run their code

Microsoft has a blog on "How Much Does Your Code Cost?", interjecting humor into a typically dry topic.

The big difference is that with cloud computing, you’re renting computing power in a data center somewhere. As far as you’re concerned, it could be on Saturn. Except that the latency figures might be a bit excessive. If you’ve accidentally opened one of those magazines your network administrator takes with him to the bathroom, you might know that these data centers contain racks and racks of servers, all with lots of twinkling lights. If you’ve ever been to a data center, you’ll know that they can be very hot near the server fans, much colder around the cooling vents, and noisy everywhere. All this activity results from removing the heat that the servers produce. But that heat doesn’t get there all by itself – the servers create it from the electricity they use. What’s more, it requires even more electricity to remove that heat.

Consider sending this post on to those who are involved in SW decisions to get them thinking of the impact of their SW code.

When you’re up against deadlines to turn in a software project, you probably are focused on ensuring that you meet the functionality requirements set out in the design specification. If you have enough time, you might consider trying to maximize performance. You might also try to document your code thoroughly so that anyone taking over the project doesn’t need to run Windows for Telepaths to work out what your subroutines actually do. But there is probably one area that you don’t consider: the cost of your code.

You mean what it costs to write the code, right? No.

Er, how about what it costs to compile? You’re getting warmer...

What it costs to support? No, colder again.

OK, you win. What costs do you mean?

I mean what it costs to run your code. In the bad old days, when clouds were just white fluffy things in the sky and all applications ran on real hardware in a server room somewhere or on users’ PCs, then cost simply wasn’t a factor. Sure, you might generate more costs if your application needed beefier hardware to run, but that came out of the cable-pluggers’ capital budget, and we all know that computer hardware needs changing every other year, so the bean-counters didn’t twig. A survey by Avanade showed that 50% of IT departments don’t even budget for the cost of electricity to run their IT systems. For more information, see this Avanade News Release, at http://www.avanade.com/_uploaded/pdf/pressrelease/globalenergyfindingsrelease541750.pdf

Life would be so much easier in the data center if SW developers and others thought of the data center infrastructure costs direct relationship to the code they write and how it is architected.

The good thing is cloud computing is helping to get SW developers to think about the costs to run their code.

If you deploy applications into the cloud, it is highly likely that your service provider will be charging you based on the energy that you use. Although you don’t see electricity itemized as kw/hr, you are billed for CPU, RAM, storage and network resources, all of which consume electricity. The more powerful processor with more memory costs more, not just because the cost of the components, but because they consume more electricity. In many ways, this is an excellent business model, as you don’t have to buy the hardware, maintain it, depreciate it, and finally, replace it. You simply pay for what you use. Or putting it another way, you pay for the resources you use. And this is the point at which you need to ask yourself: How much does my code cost? When power usage directly affects the cost of running your applications, a power-efficient program is more likely to be a profitable one.

The blog post references Visual Studio and Intel resources to help SW developers.

It is possible that future versions of Visual Studio will include options for checking your code for power usage. Until that time, following these recommendations should help minimize the running costs of your applications within a cloud-based environment.

  1. Reduce or eliminate accesses to the hard disk. Use buffering or batch up I/O requests.
  2. Do not use timers and polling to check for process completion. Each time the application polls, it wakes up the processor. Use event triggering to notify completion of a process instead.
  3. Make intelligent use of multiple threads to reduce computation times, but do not generate threads that the application cannot use effectively.
  4. With multiple threads, ensure the threads are balanced and one is not taking all the resources.
  5. Monitor carefully for memory leaks and free up unused memory.
  6. Use additional tools to identify and profile power usage.

For more ideas on how to reduce the memory, check out the following resources and tools:

Energy-Efficient Software Checklist, at http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/energy-efficient-software-checklist/.

Creating Energy-Efficient Software, at http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/creating-energy-efficient-software-part-1/.

Intel PowerInformer, at http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-powerinformer/.

Application Energy Toolkit, at http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/application-energy-toolkit/.

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