Facebook posts on its Data Center Efficiency Project

October 27, 2010 Dave Ohara

Facebook data center engineering’s Jay Park posts on what Facebook presented at SVLG Data Center Efficiency Summit.

Optimizing Data Center Energy Usage

by Jay Park on Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at 8:32am

When it comes to optimizing data centers for energy usage, the minutest changes can have significant impact. Facebook’s growth over the years has expanded our data center footprint greatly, and we've learned many lessons and applied some of the industry’s best practices to make our data centers much more efficient, saving us money and using less energy. At the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's Data Center Efficiency Summit last week, we shared these lessons and the new strategies we've implemented with the data center community at large so they too can utilize these techniques, multiplying the energy savings and environmental protection across the infrastructure of many other companies.

Based on this graph

A 9% improvement in IT load for a 276 KW savings means the IT critical capacity was 3 megawatts. Assuming low power servers with around 6,000 servers per megawatt, the servers in the environment are 18,000.

Jay discussed saving 3 watts per server.

We discovered that the server fans were spinning faster than necessary, so we worked with the server manufacturers to optimize their fan speed control algorithm while keeping temperatures within the recommended range. For each server, this saves up to 3 watts and requires less air (up to 8 cubic feet per minute), which quickly adds up in a 56,000 square foot facility.

3 watts per server is 54,000 watts. With 56,000 sq ft and 3 MW of power, the power is only 50 watts per sq ft which fits with this low density image below. Note the amount of open space.

The inlet temperature is not mentioned in the post, but I recall that Jay said 68 to 72 degrees which fits with the raise in return temperature.

In the end, we raised the temperature for each CRAH unit's return air to 81 degrees Fahrenheit from 72 degrees Fahrenheit.

The group I was sitting with during Facebook’s presentation wasn’t overly impressed, but with 50 watts sq, ft, 3 megawatt IT load, leasing a facility (not owning), the Facebook engineering group most likely had a very short ROI payback, and wanted to keep their capital investment to a minimum.

Ray Ozzie posts on Dawn of a New Day, Continuous Services and Connected Devices

October 25, 2010 Dave Ohara

Ray Ozzie has started a new blog and posts on Dawn of a New Day.

Dawn of a New Day
To:           Executive Staff and direct reports
Date:         October 28, 2010
From:         Ray Ozzie
Subject:      Dawn of a New Day
Five years ago, having only recently arrived at the company, I wrote The Internet Services Disruption in order to kick off a major change management process across the company. In the opening section of that memo, I noted that about every five years our industry experiences what appears to be an inflection point that results in great turbulence and change.

Ray finds information about 25 years on Nov 20 1985.

Imagining A “Post-PC” World

One particular day next month, November 20^th 2010, represents a significant milestone. Those of us in the PC industry who placed an early bet on a then-nascent PC graphical UI will toast that day as being the 25^thanniversary of the launch of Windows 1.0.

25 years ago I was working at Apple. Wow look at where Apple is after 25 years and where Microsoft is. In 1992 I moved from Apple to Microsoft.

From 1985 to 1992 here is Apple vs. Microsoft stock.

But what are the last 5 years like as Ray is infamous for his e-mail waking up Microsoft.

Ray argues for simplicity

Complexity kills. Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT. Complexity makes products difficult to plan, build, test and use. Complexity introduces security challenges. Complexity causes administrator frustration.

And Data Center Services he calls Continuous Services

Continuous services are websites and cloud-based agents that we can rely on for more and more of what we do. On the back end, they possess attributes enabled by our newfound world of cloud computing: They’re always-available and are capable of unbounded scale. They’re constantly assimilating & analyzing data from both our real and online worlds. They’re constantly being refined & improved based on what works, and what doesn’t. By bringing us all together in new ways, they constantly reshape the social fabric underlying our society, organizations and lives. From news & entertainment, to transportation, to commerce, to customer service, we and our businesses and governments are being transformed by this new world of services that we rely on to operate flawlessly, 7×24, behind the scenes.

And future are appliance devices.

But there’s one key difference in tomorrow’s devices: they’re relatively simple and fundamentally appliance-likeby design, from birth. They’re instantly usable, interchangeable, and trivially replaceable without loss. But being appliance-like doesn’t mean that they’re not also quite capable in terms of storage; rather, it just means that storage has shifted to being more cloud-centric than device-centric. A world of content – both personal and published – is streamed, cached or synchronized with a world of cloud-based continuous services.

Ray’s vision is centered around always on data center services with a range of simple appliances to connect to the services.

Who wants to go back to a time when editing win.ini or Mac ResEdit?

Ray paints an interesting future where Google, Microsoft, and Apple will compete for Continuous Services and Connected Devices.

Kindle momentum continues

October 25, 2010 Dave Ohara

Amazon’s made a few announcements on its e-Book reader solution demonstrating the momentum for a greener book reading solution.

If you are curious on the environmental impact of an e-book reader vs. print check this out.

After an analysis of a number of studies on the publishing and e-reader industries, we predict that, on average, the carbon emitted in the lifecycle of a Kindle is fully offset after the first year of use. Any additional years of use result in net carbon savings, equivalent to an average of 168 kg of CO2 per year (the emissions produced in the manufacture and distribution of 22.5 books). There are additional savings in toxic emissions from publishing and water usage that we haven’t quantified.

Multiplied by millions of units and increased sales of e-books, e-readers will have a staggering impact on improving the sustainability and environmental impact on one of the world’s most polluting industries: the publishing of books, newspapers and magazines.

Amazon says the Kindle 3 is the fastest selling Kindle.

Amazon Says Latest Kindle Is Fastest-Selling Version So Far

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) said the latest generation of its Kindle was "the fastest-selling" of its e-readers and the best-selling product on the company's websites in the U.S. and the U.K.

As of Monday, the e-commerce retailer said sales of the new, cheaper Kindle already surpassed total Kindle device sales from October through December 2009. Amazon began taking orders in late July and started shipping the models in late August.

Meanwhile, Amazon said it has sold three times as many Kindle books in the first nine months of the year from the year-earlier period. And in the past month, customers purchased more Kindle books than print books--hardcover and paperback combined--for the top 10, 25, 100, and 1,000 bestselling books on Amazon.com.

You can be suspicious of a press release as most of have learned.

An interesting piece of data I have is the traffic to my Kindle 3 frozen blog post.

Google Search is the overwhelming dominant way the post is found which would mean this is coming from users who are encountering a frozen Kindle 3. I am quite surprised how consistent over 2 months people are looking for an answer to their frozen kindle.

With the growth of the Kindle installed base, Amazon will be adding a lending feature.

later this year, we will be introducing lending for Kindle, a new feature that lets you loan your Kindle books to other Kindle device or Kindle app users. Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period. Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable - this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.

One of these days we can hope Amazon will post how much carbon they have saved with electronic books. Maybe Amazon should add a counter to their Kindle page showing how many tons of carbon are saved as a kindle book, magazine or newspaper is purchased.

Imagine how few Kindle Servers Amazon needs. The Kindle solution could be one of the greenest data center solutions as paper, water, and environment are saved.

Taking a short blogging break, Go Longhorns!

October 21, 2010 Dave Ohara

I have been in heavy research mode working 7 days a week for the last month, and for the next few days I am going to attempt to unplug. To restrict my ability to blog I am taking my daughter to her first Texas Longhorn Football game.

I am a UC Berkeley alumni, but have more fun cheering for friends and families alma mater. One of our best family friends are Oregon Ducks who are #1.

There are distractions in Austin, TX. Smooth-Stone is HQ in Austin. Dell is Round Rock. And, the University of Texas has a new data center.

On the other hand, my cousin I am visiting in Texas was an-American swimmer for UT, so we will be busy with his swimming friends. We could talk about water, but I don't expect many data center discussions.

I'll be back researching data centers on Monday, and I am sure I'll have a bunch more to discuss.

Checking my own metric on whether the break is good my blood pressure dropped back to 117 over 78 a day after I made the mental break.

Can your Data Center survive a drought? Future predicts record droughts

October 19, 2010 Dave Ohara

I’ve heard of data centers shutting down due to water main problems. The availability of water is going to diminish around the world. MSNBC reports on a computer model showing record droughts.

Future droughts will be shockers, study says

1970s Sahel disaster will seem mild compared to areas by 2030s, models project

Courtesy Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews, redrawn by UCAR

This map illustrates the potential for drought by 2039, based on current projections of future greenhouse gas emissions. The map uses the Palmer Drought Severity Index, which assigns positive numbers when conditions are unusually wet, and negative numbers when conditions are unusually dry. A reading of -4 or below is considered extreme drought. Blue or green regions will likely be at lower risk, while those in the red and purple spectrum could face more unusually extreme drought.

Increasing drought has long been forecast as a consequence of warming temperatures, but the study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research projects serious impacts as soon as the 2030s. Impacts by century's end could go beyond anything in the historical record, the study suggests.

How bad are the numbers?

To get an idea of how severe droughts might get, scientists use a measure called the Palmer Drought Severity Index, or PDSI. A positive score is wet, a negative score is dry and a score of zero is neither overly wet nor dry.

The most severe drought in recent history, in the Sahel region of western Africa in the 1970s, had a PDSI of -3 or -4.

By contrast, the study indicates that by 2100 some parts of the U.S. could see -8 to -10 PDSI, while Mediterranean areas could see drought in the -15 or -20 range.

"Historical PDSI for the last 60 years show a drying trend over southern Europe but nothing like those values at the end of this century," Dai said. "Decadal mean values of PDSI have not reached -15 to -20 levels in the past in any records over the world."

What areas are at risk?

Areas likely to experience significant drying include:

the western two-thirds of the United States;

much of Latin America, especially large parts of Mexico and Brazil;

regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea;

large parts of southwest Asia;

southeast Asia, including China and neighboring countries;

most of Africa and Australia.

Maybe putting a data center in Canada isn’t a bad idea?

While Earth is expected to get dryer overall, some areas will see a lowering of the drought risk. These include: much of northern Europe; Russia; Canada; Alaska; and some areas of the Southern Hemisphere.