Psychology of the Data Center, learning from the Science of Football - Alabama’s Nick Saban

I just had a conversation with Tom Roth who introduced me to some of the work that The Pacific Institute does.  Tom and I had an interesting discussion on data centers as he is familiar with real estate development in Eastern Washington’s recent data center build out that has used up hydroelectric power which has little employment impact the original dam developers intended.

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When I heard of Tom’s company I thought of some of the top data center leadership (Urs Hoelzle, Mike Manos and Olivier Sanche) all leaders with better people skills better than most.  It made sense that the flaw in many data center is not thinking about psychology and the people.

Tom Roth was a college quarterback at WSU and his brother, Joe Roth was a Cal quarterback.


* Cardiac QB Tom Roth wasn’t the only standout signal caller in his family. Younger brother Joe starred at Cal and finished sixth in Heisman Trophy balloting as a senior in 1976. Tragically, he died of melanoma cancer three months after that season ended. He was forecast to be a first round NFL draft pick.

Behind the Helmet: The Life of Joe Roth

Joe Roth was an exceptional
Joe lived with class and he died with dignity. His football success brought him a great deal of individual attention which he shied away from and shared with his teammates. He was determined to battle his cancer and live his life without pity, excuses, blame, and special attention. Joe taught his teammates, coaches, professors, classmates, friends, fans, and family members to cherish life and to never take a moment for granted.


Joe's life still serves as a model for all of us to live with faith, humility, and courage.

Running a Google search for “The Pacific Institute” I turned up this article about Alabama’s football coach Nick Saban use of The Pacific Institute training.

The Science of Alabama's Nick Saban

Larry Burton by

Larry Burton

Sabanatpractice_cropped

Larry Burton (Panama City Beach, Fla.): The longer I am around Nick Saban, the more I learn about him.

I guess that's true of anyone you know. But I am always surprised when I see a new layer of Saban peeled back.

To understand Saban is like dealing with a mutating virus. Constantly changing, always working, always seeking to grow, and infectious to others.

Of course, I mean all that in a good way.

This sounds like the data center innovators, not a typical data center IT mindset.  Can you imagine if football was played the way IT is run?  Boring and out of sync with current practices like IaaS, PaaS, and other Cloud Computing methods.

Alabama used the Pacific Institute for mental conditioning.

It's all just one more part of the Science of Saban.

Then there is the mind itself. Not just inputting the playbook and the knowledge to do your job, but how to condition your mind, just like your body.

For this, Saban brought in the Pacific Institute, a Seattle-based company that has conducted mental conditioning classes for Crimson Tide players since 2008. So if you have a new untested quarterback as Alabama did last season, you get his mind as conditioned as his arm.

"They've proven to us you can be so much more effective if your mind is allowing you to be effective," quarterback Greg McElroy said. "Both Antowaine and Nesby (Pacific Institute instructors) have helped us incredibly."

We talked about the kind of off-the-field activity that had Alabama players in the headlines a few years back. Now, that too has disappeared, thanks in part to the science of Saban and the Pacific Institute.

Forbes even mentions The Pacific Institute in their article about the most powerful football coach.

All players have to attend personal growth seminars taught by Seattle's Pacific Institute.

I don’t think I’ve run into a Psychology and Data Center discussion, but it makes so much sense.  In the same way a good quarterback makes critical decisions for the rest of the team, shouldn’t data center staff have the skills of a top quarterback.

The main problem is getting IT executives to spend money on people.  A few will get this idea and realize most IT problems are related to a decision someone made before or after an event.

For all the money spent on IT, shouldn’t more be spent on Mental Conditioning, the psychology of a data center?

I am looking forward to many more discussions with Tom Roth and his network to discuss psychology in the data center.

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ARM outperforms Atom in benchmark, watch for the business model for benchmark companies

Anyone who has been in the tech industry knows to take benchmarks statements “with a grain of salt.”  Linley group has a post on the ARM outmuscling the Atom processor.

ARM Outmuscles Atom on Benchmark

ARM—and, for that matter, MIPS—CPUs outperform Intel’s Atom, at least as measured by the CoreMark benchmark when normalized for frequency. ARM rates its Cortex-A9 at 2.9 CoreMark per MHz (CM/MHz), whereas Atom running a single instance of the benchmark achieves only 1.8 CM/MHz. In fact, all of the single-thread CPUs profiled in Table 1 outperform Atom in terms of per-clock performance.

Linley provides a table.

Table-1[1]

The business plug is to buy Linley’s report.  So, their motivation is to sell research, not to support research paid for by Intel, ARM, or a vendor.

In our latest report on CPU IP, we look further at the midrange and high-end CPU cores from ARM, MIPS, and others, including both household names and obscure companies, such as IBM and Beyond Semiconductor. The report compares not just performance but also die area, power consumption, and microarchitecture features. As the above comparison highlights, levels of CPU performance that were once the province of PC processors are now available for system-on-chip designs. When combined with the latest DSP, video decoding, and graphics technology, these CPUs imbue consumer electronics and communications systems with capabilities far beyond what seemed conceivable a few years ago. --Joe

Joseph Byrne, senior analyst

The sentence above that gets people’s attention is this one.

As the above comparison highlights, levels of CPU performance that were once the province of PC processors are now available for system-on-chip designs.

The competition that will be interesting us in the Data Center space is SeaMicro (Intel Atom) vs. Smooth-Stone (ARM).

As James Hamilton mentions in his blog.

Over the past year I’ve met with both Smooth Stone and SeaMicro frequently and it’s great to see more information about both available broadly. The very low power server trend is real and advancing quickly. When purchasing servers, it needs to be all about work done per dollar and work done per joule.

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Australia has largest Carbon footprint per person from Coal electricity generation, largest Uranium reserves WW and no nuclear power plant, where is the logic?

The Economist has an article about Australia’s prime minister backpedaling on the environmental stance.

Australia and carbon emissions

A change in the climate

Make us greener, oh lord. But not yet

Apr 29th 2010 | SYDNEY | From The Economist print edition

ONLY a few months ago Kevin Rudd, Australia’s prime minister, was painting a dark picture about looming storm surges, rising sea-levels, a fall of over 90% in irrigated farming and a drop of nearly 2.5% in GNP over this century unless Australia took action against climate change. “Action now,” he declared. “Not action delayed.” But this week Mr Rudd climbed down from what seemed a defining pledge of his leadership. Instead of using this year to get parliament to adopt an emissions-trading scheme that would put a price on carbon pollution, action will now be delayed until 2013 at least. Some wonder if it will ever happen at all.

I knew Australia had a vast coal electricity production, but didn’t know it put them at the top of a carbon impact.

Relying on coal for most of its electricity, Australia is one of the world’s highest carbon-emitters per person.

Australia has environmentalist who are proud of the nuclear free stance.

Australia

There is an active anti-nuclear movement in Australia,[3][4][5] and the country has no nuclear weapons or nuclear power stations. However it has run a research nuclear reactor since 1958. (The original HiFAR reactor was replaced by the OPAL research reactor at Lucas Heights, 40 km southwest of Sydney, in 2006.[6]) Nuclear weapons have been tested in Australia atMaralinga, Emu Field and the Monte Bello Islands.[5]

Australia also mines and sells a large quantity of uranium ore. Nuclear waste dumps have been proposed in Western Australia and South Australia.[5]

But has the largest uranium ore deposits in the world and second to Canada in Uranium ore export.

2007 uranium mining, by nationality. Data is taken from [2].

Australia has the world's largest uranium reserves, 24% of the planet's known reserves. The majority of these reserves are located in South Australia with other important deposits in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Almost all the uranium is exported under strict International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards to satisfy the Australian people and government that none of the uranium is used in nuclear weapons. Australian uranium is consumed strictly for electricity production.[citation needed]

So, being one of the largest carbon emitters per person is OK, yet you are a leading exporter of Uranium allowing other countries to run nuclear power plants, and 75% of your coal mining is exported.  Seems like the Australia prime minister is in a no win situation to take an environmental stance for Australia.

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Green Incident Management approach, another smart data center blogger to follow

This last week was an intense week of face-to-face discussions talking to some really smart people who are working on innovative solutions.  For example, my meeting with Smooth-Stone was quick and compressed, running at speeds of idea transfer that builds future relationships of information exchange.  When I blogged about meeting Smooth-Stone there is nothing I really wrote about that isn’t public information other than I now know 4 Smooth-Stone executives. 

I keep the GreenM3 blog constrained to either my own thoughts or public accessible information, always asking people for permission to blog about specific areas.  This way I can have intense knowledge sharing conversations and people know I won’t blog about conversations without their permission.  As one executive who I met on the phone last week, then met in person twice, and have taken him on wild ride of ideas introducing him to people who can help him execute green solutions said, “you know 95% of what you talk about, people can’t follow and you lose them.”  

Part of the reason why I write this blog is to slow down, simplify ideas, discuss publicly accessible concepts - thinking about when is the right time to discuss ideas with a broader audience. One of my long time technology friends who I am glad to start discussing his ideas is John Farmer now that he has his own blog at http://farmhead.blogspot.com/.

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Here is a bit of background on John.

I've always been fascinated by machinery, whether software, hardware, or large organizations. I'm currently an Engineering Director at Adobe Systems and work on SaaS-related technology.

Interests

John’s interest and I overlap a lot, including both having black belts which is not relevant for physical fighting, but more as we have gotten older in how you fight battles and win vs. the competition in organizations and the industry.

John’s recent posts on Incident Management reminds me of a green approach to the problem.  How do you be the most efficient and effective in resolving the problem?

Tips for Handling Events, Incidents, Outages, and Maintenance

I get a lot of questions from new service teams about what they should do to prevent downtime but very few people ask for advice on how to handle an incident. This is a bit like asking a boxer for the best way to avoid getting in the ring. It’s not a question of “if” you’re going to be in the ring but “when”. There’s an old saying – the more you bleed in the gym, the less you bleed in the ring and that definitely applies to incident management as well.

John has taken the time to write three posts on Incident Management.

Having sat in on more war rooms than I’d like to remember, I thought it might be handy to write down some of the things that my team has found useful over the years. I think every service organization should have a standard approach towards three specific activities:
1.    Tips for Handling Service Incidents (just one service)
2.    Tips for Handling Service Outages (multiple services affected)
3.    Tips for Handling System Maintenance

Here is one my favorite Tips.

Get your head straight
First, stay calm. The worst thing you could do is cause a major outage, destroy some data, or make the existing problem worse in a panic. Simple problems can easily become large complicated problems after a few bad decisions made in haste. Take a breath before continuing. This is especially important with a page at 3AM or if a panicky client is in your office. Tell the client you’ll handle the problem and run through your normal procedure.

John closes with good advice that is grounded in years of martial arts practice and ways to handle the stress of combat.

I hope these posts help you with your handling of incidents, outages, and maintenance. Success here is mostly about being prepared, being calm, good communication, and practice, practice, practice. If you think your service is bullet-proof and you won’t need the practice – you’re wrong :-)

I’ll be reading John’s blog post on a regular basis, and referencing posts that I think are relevant to a green data center approach.  On my last trip, I was able to squeeze a 1/2 hour meeting with John before I flew from SJC to SEA. 

In the airport, I was able to shake hands with three of the Smooth-Stone executives I met 8 hrs earlier and were flying back to Austin. The Smooth-Stone CEO was on the flight to SEA, and we were able to discuss more ideas when we landed and I hitched a ride instead of taking the bus back to Redmond.  This last week was intensely interconnected.

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Are ARM Servers the disruptive change coming to Green the Data Center? Smooth-Stone is trying

GigaOm has a post on ARM taking on Intel in the Data Centers.

ARM Ready To Take On Intel in Servers

By Stacey Higginbotham Apr. 28, 2010, 3:15pm PDT 2 Comments

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ARM plc has confirmed that within the next 12 months its architecture, which is currently used primarily in cell phones and consumer electronics, will also be used in servers — pitting it against the lifeblood of Intel’s chip business. Speaking with EETimes, Warren East, the CEO of ARM, said servers using ARM-based chips should appear within the year.

The news shouldn’t come as a surprise to our readers, since I profiled Smooth-Stone, one company trying to build low-power servers earlier this month, and in that same post pointed to ARM’s server ambitions. And it’s not just startups that are interested in using the low-power ARM architecture inside data centers, either. Google recently acquired a secretive startup called Agnilux that was rumored to be making a server with the ARM architecture. We also reported on a Microsoft job listing that sought a software development engineer with experience running ARM in the data center for the company’s eXtreme Computing group.

I blogged about this idea in May 19, 2009.

Energy efficiency is a new focus for many, and much to the  frustration of Intel, AMD, and Server OEMs, not everyone wants a multi-core high cost chip.

So, what’s next?

ARM based servers that can be even higher performance per watt.

Don’t know who has done this, but given the hardware ecosystem, there are people who have experimented with this and Linux OSs.  The popularity of ARM chips in mobile devices is where the knowledge exists for low power solutions.

Why not take a mobile device, an iPhone and turn it into a server.

GigaOm has a specific post about Smooth-Stone.

Smooth-Stone Bets ARM Will Invade the Data Center

By Stacey Higginbotham Apr. 9, 2010, 10:00am PDT 2 Comments

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Smooth-Stone CEO Barry Evans

Intel, with its x86 architecture, has owned the corporate computing market for decades, but Barry Evans, CEO of Austin, Texas-based systems startup Smooth-Stone, thinks it’s time for a change. Smooth-Stone, which Evans co-founded in 2008, is using ARM-based processors to create a box for the data center. Its goal isn’t a slight reduction in power efficiency, he said, but to “completely remove power as an issue in the data center.”

However, the specifics of Evans’ stealthy company are overshadowed by one key question: Is ARM ready to invade the data center? Evans thinks yes, and I think the IP licensing company behind the architecture does too, because it appears to be cooking up something that involves using its architecture inside servers. Ian Ferguson, director of enterprise and embedded solutions at ARM Plc, declined to talk to me for this story, saying the timing was not yet right to talk about the company and servers “for a few reasons that I can’t discuss.”

What is hilarious is while I was reading the GigaOm post about ARM taking on Intel, I am sitting in the car as a passenger next to Barry Evans sharing a ride from the airport, and had met three other Smooth-Stone executives that morning for breakfast thanks to a well connected data center insider.

What is Smooth-stone?

Founded in January 2008, Smooth‐Stone brings ultra‐low power mobile phone technology to the datacenter. Smooth-Stone has brought together leading engineers with experience in volume and blade server platforms, mainframes, server CPUs, networking processors, telecom infrastructure, and high performance cellular application processors and cell phone system-on-chips.  With depth in both hardware and software design and development the Smooth-Stone team is uniquely positioned to deliver a complete low power solution.

Smooth-Stone technology, combined with the industry-standard ARM architecture and tools, enables truly green datacenters.

Note the last sentence "enables truly green datacenters."

I did write a brief post about Smooth Stone in Oct 2009, but it was hard to find any other information.

Here is information in local papers. Austin Business Journal.

Smooth-Stone Inc., which is a member of the Austin Technology Incubator and develops low power server technology, will receive an initial $250,000 pre-seed investment from the state with potential for $1 million in total investment for the commercialization of its technology.

“Smooth-Stone’s innovative architecture has the potential to change the server market and keep Texas on the cutting edge of technology,” said Jack McDonald, chairman and CEO of Perficient Inc. and chairman of the Central Texas Regional Center of Innovation and Commercialization.

Now that I know 4 executives from the Smooth Stone team and they know what I do besides write a blog you can expect I'll have more to say in the future about Smooth-stone as they are talking to the right companies and people who have a passion for greening the data center with a change in server hardware.

I had a great time talking to the executives at Smooth-Stone about ARM chip, data center industry, IT issues, energy efficiency, and our backgrounds.  I've been talking to some folks at ARM and other big data center users about the same ideas and our paths were crossing.  There is a perfect storm coming to data centers with a good chance ARM chips will be the power efficiency behind the change.  The environment and customers are going to be happy with the change, the current data center ecosystem will have to adapt fast once the change happens as it is not hard to crank out lots of ARM servers given ARM is the most popular processor now thanks to the mobile industry.

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