Will Ireland stop being a destination for Green Data Centers?

November 20, 2010 Dave Ohara

Part of companies locating their data centers in Ireland besides the potential to run a Greener Data Center is the tax situation.

The Telegraph reports on potential changes.

US firms warn Irish over tax move

The Irish government has been given a stark warning from some of the biggest American companies in Ireland on the risk of a mass exodus if the country's low corporation tax rate is raised.

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Executives at Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Intel ? spoke of the "damaging impact" on Ireland's "ability to win and retain investment" should the country's corporation tax rate be increased from 12.5pc. Photo: EPA

By James Quinn 9:30PM GMT 20 Nov 2010

The warning – from executives at Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Intel – spoke of the "damaging impact" on Ireland's "ability to win and retain investment" should the country's corporation tax rate be increased from 12.5pc.

It came as talks between members of the Irish government and the European Union and the International Monetary Fund continued around the clock on a financial aid package of as much as €100bn to shore up the country's beleaguered banking system.

Although Brian Lenihan, the Irish finance minister, has indicated Ireland's 12.5pc corporation tax rate – the lowest in the eurozone – will not be raised, a number of factions within the European Union are known to have pushed for it to be increased in return for the bail-out.

Obama endorses TSA Pat-downs as necessary

November 20, 2010 Dave Ohara

Reading about the current TSA pat-down/screening issues reminds me of IT users frustration with corporate IT. When executives tell the users that the new IT procedures are essential to protect the corporate data do the users roll-over and say OK.

President Obama says the TSA Pat-Downs are frustrating, but necessary.

LISBON, Portugal — President Barack Obama on Saturday acknowledged some travelers' "frustrations" with having to go through full-body pat-downs and scans at airports, but he said the enhanced security measures are necessary to keep America safe.

In response to a question at a press conference in Lisbon, where he was attending a NATO summit , the president said that the Transportation Security Administration has been "under enormous pressure" to find better ways to screen for explosives and other dangerous items ever since the attempted 2009 Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner over Detroit. In that case, a passenger with links to an al-Qaida extremist group tried to set off plastic explosives concealed in his underwear.

Seth Godin makes an interesting point on a different way to look at the TSA situation.

Groping for a marketing solution: TSA and security theater

There's plenty of controversy about the new full body scanners that the TSA is installing at airports, and plenty more about the way some TSA agents arehandling those that choose to opt out.

The heart of the matter comes from the fact that the TSA often doesn't understand that it is in show business, not security business. A rational look at the threats facing travelers would indicate that intense scrutiny of a four ounce jar of mouthwash or aggressive frisking of a child is a misplaced use of resources. If the goal is to find dangerous items in cargo or track down Stinger missiles, this isn't going to help.

Instead, the mission appears to be twofold:

1. Reassure the public that the government is really trying and

2. Keep random bad actors off guard by frequently raising the bar on getting caught

One of the key successes to Steve Jobs and Apple is they put on a great show. Watching the TSA show is painful, and it will probably get worse as Obama endorses the pat-down procedure as necessary and the TSA will keep on raising the bar.

Will the following video be the future TSA procedures?

Amazon Web Services Supercomputer configuration, 880 Servers

November 19, 2010 Dave Ohara

AWS announced their supercomputer configuration with Amazon’s James Hamilton posting on the configuration.

The cc1.4xlarge instance specification:

· 23GB of 1333MHz DDR3 Registered ECC

· 64GB/s main memory bandwidth

· 2 x Intel Xeon X5570 (quad-core Nehalem)

· 2 x 845GB 7200RPM HDDs

· 10Gbps Ethernet Network Interface

The AWS supercomputer configuration is 7040 cores. At 4 cores per processor and 2 processors per server you get 880 servers (nodes) in the compute environment.

If you assume assume about 350 watts/server you can get 300KW of power. 20 2U server per rack makes for 44 racks and 7KW per rack. Sounds abut right.

Amazon is one of 4 self-made configurations.

10Ge is rare in many of supercomputer clusters, but AWS chose 10G Ethernet which may explain their self-made configuration.

But AWS was after a specific scenario like Hadoop.

It’s this last point that I’m particularly excited about. The difference between just a bunch of servers in the cloud and a high performance cluster is the network. Bringing 10GigE direct to the host isn’t that common in the cloud but it’s not particularly remarkable. What is more noteworthy is it is a full bisection bandwidth network within the cluster. It is common industry practice tostatistically multiplex network traffic over an expensive network core with far less than full bisection bandwidth. Essentially, a gamble is made that not all servers in the cluster will transmit at full interface speed at the same time. For many workloads this actually is a good bet and one that can be safely made. For HPC workloads and other data intensive applications like Hadoop, it’s a poor assumption and leads to vast wasted compute resources waiting on a poor performing network.

2 Dell DCS Customers, LBNL & Saudi Aramco

November 19, 2010 Dave Ohara

I was talking to a friend and he said whenever they talked to Dell they couldn’t find out much information about who Dell DCS’s customers were. There are approximately 30 clients of DCS. Part of their criteria is customers purchasing over 2,000 servers with the following characteristics.

So, I spent a few hours researching who Dell DCS customers. I came up with about 20 DCS customers. I am not going to share the complete list on this blog, but I am sharing the list with a few others who can help me figure out who the others are.

Let me tell you how I found two of the DCS customers – Lawrence Berkeley National Labs & Saudi Aramco.

LBNL was easy as they have a bunch of Dell DCS Xanadu systems in Top 500 Supercomputer list.

I blogged about Xanadu first generation. Here is generation II.

Dell has launched new XS-23 II high-end x86 servers, codenamed Xanadu II in celebration of the IInd birthday of Data Center Solutions (DCS), a division producing servers aimed at easy customizability for cloud computing and other data center applications.

The XS-23 come with a choice of several different processors, including Intel Nehalem chip, although those machines will be offered in blade configurations with a built-in fabric architecture. It will be provided as four two-socket servers in a 2U standard rack mount footprint, accommodating up to 24 disk drives. According to Norrod, customers can configure up to 88 of Dell's new servers with 704 processing cores and 396 TB of storage, plus switching, in a single rack, for 25% higher density in comparison to similarly outfitted blade servers on a per-U basis.

When I was going through Dell DCS documents on their web site I found a reference to an Oil & Gas customer.

The Data Center Solutions (DCS) team have an Oil & Gas customer that is always looking to push the envelope when it comes to getting the most out of GPGPU’s in order to deliver seismic mapping results faster.

On the Supercomputing 500 site going through Dell Hardware, I found Saudi Aramco with a bunch of HP and Dell Hardware. 5 systems all with 512 servers, dual processor, 4-6 core processors.

The other 18 on the list are interesting to study. It’s not that hard to find the Dell DCS customers

Dell powers up its Cloud

November 19, 2010 Dave Ohara

I just started following Barton George’s blog as I found it an easy way to track Dell’s cloud and server innovation.

What I do, and have done, for a living

Last year I joined Dell as their cloud computing evangelist. As such I act as Dell’s ambassador to the cloud computing community (I had to supply my own sash). I also work with analysts and press and am responsible for messaging as well as blogging and tweeting (you can follow me on twitter at barton808 and you know where my blog is).

Prior to Dell I spent 13 years at Sun Microsystems in a variety of roles from manufacturing to product and corporate marketing. My last three years there I spent as an Open Source evangelist, avid blogger, and driver of Sun’s GNU/Linux strategy and relationships.

Barton posts on Dell’s launch of its Cloud Solutions.

Dell Cloud Solutions up and running!

Back in March we announced Dell’s cloud solutions. Today at a press conference in San Francisco we announced their general availability along with some examples of customers who are employing them. (Woohoo!)

What’s the big idea

The idea behind these offerings has been to leverage the experience we in the DCS group have gained over the last several years providing custom systems to some of the world’s largest cloud providers. These new solutions are targeted at organizations the next tier down (the “next 1,000″) from the hyperscale customers we have been working with.

Here is the official Dell press release.

Dell Data Center Solutions Unit Momentum Builds; Helps Customers Easily Build And Deploy Cloud And Hyperscale Computing Infrastructures

Date : 11/19/2010

Round Rock, Texas

Uniserve , InsightExpress and Eightfold Logic are building out highly efficient and scalable data analytics and cloud computing infrastructures with help from Dell

Dell’s Data Center Solutions team is providing specialized cloud and data analytics solutions that are workload optimized and deliver a great return on investment by leveraging partnerships with Joyent, Aster Data andGreenplum

Dell’s new PowerEdge C series experiencing rapid market adoption to be the popular choice with customers looking for high-density compute performance with energy and cost efficiency

Dell today announced growing market adoption and interest in its Dell Cloud Solutions as customers across a variety of industries including market research and IT hosting services have chosen Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) to build out their own cloud computing, data analytics and hyperscale data center installations. Supporting Dell’s broader Virtual Era strategy, these holistic cloud solutions are comprised of pre-tested, pre-assembled, fully-supported and optimized hardware, software and services. As a result, these customers have experienced a more responsive web infrastructure, deeper business insights and reduced overall operating costs.