China need to decentralize data centers to accommodate demand outstripping supply

January 15, 2011 Dave Ohara

Marbridge Consulting references www.cctime.com article on Jan 10, 2011 that China’s data center demand is outstripping supply.

China's Data Center Demand Outstripping Supply

CCTIME, 1/10/11

Last week, standing deputy director Zhou Hongren of the Advisory Committee for State Informatization (ACSI) said that China's data centers were facing a fundamental problem: the speed with which new data centers are being built is being outpaced by growing demand. Furthermore, China's data centers are primarily centralized in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other regions along the country's east coast, resulting in high power consumption and a heavy concentration of waste heat. Because of this, Zhou said, the migration of data centers northward will be a major trend over time. Zhou added that cloud storage could offer a solution to the issue.

China Unicom has a strategy to create greener data center strategy as data centers move away from the current data center hubs.

Tong Xiaoyu, deputy director of the China Unicom (NYSE: CHU; 0762.HK; 600050.SH) Research Institute, said that owing to energy-saving and cost considerations, Unicom will establish data center industry bases in the energy resource-rich provinces in central and western China.

Keywords: Zhou Hongren, cloud computing, Tong Xiaoyu, China Unicom Research Institute, China Unicom, telecom, Advisory Committee for State Informatization, data center, 0762.HK, 600050.SH, CHU, energy efficiency

Google Mail/Apps ups SLA, removes schedule downtime allowance

January 15, 2011 Dave Ohara

Data Centers and uptime is assumed. Service Level Agreements (SLA) are made between groups. But, many times there are exceptions for planned maintenance/downtime vs. unplanned downtime when calculating SLA.

InformationWeek reports on Google Apps/Gmail's change to this common practice.

Google Promises No Planned Downtime
A new service level agreement (SLA) for Google Apps customers strives to make Google's cloud as reliable as dial tone.
By Thomas Claburn , InformationWeek
January 14, 2011 02:42 PM

Google has changed its service level agreement for paid versions of Google Apps, its suite of online applications. The goal, says Google Enterprise product management director Matt Glotzbach, is to deliver service that's as reliable as telephone dial tone.

For today's mobile generation, who may lack experience with landlines, let it suffice to say that dial tone under Ma Bell was very, very reliable. Not sunrise reliable but chances were if you didn't hear a dial tone when you picked up a handset, the phone was disconnected from the wall.

Google is taking a leadership position.

But with millions of enterprise customers, Google aims to become more reliable. As a sign of its commitment, the company has disavowed planned downtime. "Unlike most providers, we don't plan for our users to be down, even when we're upgrading our services or maintaining our systems," wrote Glotzbach in a blog post. "For that reason, we're removing the SLA clause that allows for scheduled downtime."

Glotzbach says Google is the first major cloud service provider to make that pledge.

In Google's blog post they call out the competition.

Gmail: 99.984%
In 2010, Gmail was available 99.984 percent of the time, for both business and consumer users. 99.984 percent translates to seven minutes of downtime per month over the last year. That seven-minute average represents the accumulation of small delays of a few seconds, and most people experienced no issues at all. For those few who were disrupted for a longer period of time, we're very sorry, and Google Apps for Business customers received compensation where appropriate. We're particularly pleased with this level of reliability since it was accomplished without any planned downtime while launching 30 new features and adding tens of millions of active users.
Seven minutes of downtime compares very favorably with on-premises email, which is subject to much higher rates of interruption that hurt employee productivity. The latest research from the Radicati Group found that on-premises email averaged 3.8 hours of downtime per month. In comparison to Radicati's metrics for on-premises email, our calculations suggest that Gmail is 32 times more reliable than the average email system, and 46 times more available than Microsoft Exchange®.¹

Fortunately Microsoft Exchange® customers can still benefit from the reliability of Gmail withGoogle Message Continuity. Comparable data for Microsoft BPOS® is unavailable, thoughtheir service notifications show 113 incidents in 2010: 74 unplanned outages, and 33 days with planned downtime.

You may be thinking I can't do this in my data center. And you are right you can't. This solution requires geo redundancy between data centers. For a bit on some of Google's approach check out this Google presentation at Stanford University.

Google – A study in Scalability and A little systems horse sense

By ksankar

16 Votes

Google’s Jeff Dean did an excellent talk at Stanford as part of EE380 – it is worth one’s time to listen. Very informative, instructive and innovative. As I listened, I jotted a few quick notes.

Interesting comparison of the scale in search from 1999 to 2010

Docs and queries are up 1000X, while the query latency has decreased 5X

Interesting to hear that in 1999 they used to update a web page store in a month or two, but now it is reduced 50000X to seconds!

They have had 7 significant revisions in 11 years

Trivia : They encounter very expensive queries for example “circle of death” requires ~30GB of I/O

Trivia : In 2004, they did a rethink and refreshed the systems infrastructure from scratch

He discussed a little about encodings – informative discussion on Byte aligned variable length & group encoding schemes << I have to try it out …

Trivia : They have had long distance links failure by wild dogs, sharks, dead horses and (in Oregon) drunken hunters !

The presentation referenced is by Jeff Dean.

Last Month of traffic to Top 5 data center construction companies post, shows Morgan Stanley and Kaiser Permanente

January 13, 2011 Dave Ohara

Took a look at the last month, Dec 13 – Jan 12, 2011 traffic to my Top 5 Data Center Construction companies post.

Roughly 400 hits through Google search.

Two companies popped up with relatively high traffic. Morgan Stanley and Kaiser Permanente.

Good chance someone in these companies is looking for data center construction and design.

Data Center Wingman, who has your back? One of the best Olivier Sanche

January 13, 2011 Dave Ohara

Today a group of people are getting together to raise money in memory of Olivier Sanche for his daughter Emilie's college fund.

The Memorial Fun that has been set up at Wells Fargo Bank under the Olivier Sanche Memorial Fund, account #3165058052. The fund is open until January 23rd, the week following the fund proceeds will be presented to Olivier's family towards Emilie's future education.

Olivier and I spent a lot of time together and one of the ways you could describe our relationship is we were wingman for each other.

"The wingman is absolutely indispensable. I look after the wingman. The wingman looks after me. It's another set of eyes protecting you. That's the defensive part.

"Offensively, it gives you a lot more firepower. We work together. We fight together. The wingman knows what his responsibilities are and knows what mine are. Wars are not won by individuals. They're won by teams."
Today, the strategy of having a good wingman is still relevant, but its application reaches far beyond the arena of aerial assault. When fighter pilots lift off into the great expanses of the sky, they may not know what threats lie beyond the horizon. Similarly, with each new day, we have no idea what lies ahead.

The common denominator is that daily challenges are conquered by responsible choices, and creating a culture of responsible choices is reinforced by the presence of a good wingman. In the spirit of the Gabreski quote, "personal battles are not won by individuals; they are won by the reinforcement of good wingmen."

We had each others back and watched out for each other in the data center industry. Olivier was a wingman I could count on that had integrity that was never questioned. It is a complex task to green the data center. Much more than simply getting LEED points.

The challenge, like a thousand-piece puzzle, is that it can sometimes be more difficult than it first appears. The path of least resistance shouts for us to do nothing while a fellow Airman makes a life or career-threatening decision; however, accepting the challenge of being a comrade in arms is a daily whisper for us to courageously be involved. The moral courage to do the right thing is more than just ornamented words; it is the foundation of our Air Force Core Values: Integrity First.

I miss Oliver as a wingman, but any person who uses the concept of a wingman wants more than one wingman/wingwoman.

Who has your back?

How big are Russian Data Centers?

January 12, 2011 Dave Ohara

A question I got from a friend is how big are Russian Data Centers? As Facebook pointed out Facebook traffic is almost non-existent given they are not an approved site for the country. Huh?

Here is post on Facebook’s traffic.

Paul Butler on Monday, December 13, 2010 at 5:16pm

Visualizing data is like photography. Instead of starting with a blank canvas, you manipulate the lens used to present the data from a certain angle.

When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it. One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.

Note how dark Russia and China are.

What are the Russia web sites if Facebook and others are not allowed?

•Yandex=Google Search

•VKontakte=Facebook

•Odnoklassniki=Classmates

•LiveJournal=blogging platform

•RuTube=YouTube

The biggest data center so far in Russia is claimed to be a 8MW data center as reported by Data Center Dynamics, Yevgeniy Sverdlik.

MegaFon launches new data center in Russia

Telecom says the 8MW data center is the largest of its kind in Russia, offering colocaiton, managed hosting and Internet services out of six 4,300-sq-ft data halls

Published 12th October, 2010 by Yevgeniy Sverdlik

Russian telecommunications company MegaFon has launched what it says is the largest data center of its caliber in the nation. The 8MW facility in Samara is the first facility of the future “national data center network,” according to a MegaFon news release.
Valeriy Ermakov, chief operations officer at MegaFon, said this was the first time a new state-of-the-art data center of this size was built in Russia for commercial use.

Another Yevgyeniy reports on is a Telecom data center.

Rostelecom embarks on $219m data center build-out in Russia

Telecom will build two new data centers and retrofit existing facilities

Published 24th May, 2010 by DatacenterDynamics

Large Russian telecommunications firm Rostelecom is planning to invest $219m into building new data centers and retrofitting its existing facilities into data centers to begin providing data center services in the country, reported Russian news serviceKommersant. The plan is to make the investment over the next four years.
The company is going to build two new data centers in Moscow and Saint Petersburg metropolitan areas. The Moscow facility is designed to accommodate 3,500 IT racks and the St. Petersburg one will support 500. Rostelecom’s existing facilities can support 399 racks.

Megafon and Rostelcom look like the biggest data center builders, but given 8 MW is the largest so far, we’ll see when Russian breaks the 10 MW mark.

BTW, it does like Dell DCS is a supplier to Yandex.

Brannon boasts that while Google famously makes its own servers, Dell caters to three others from the ‘Search engine top five', hinting that Facebook is also a DCS customer.

But, sensing a great business opportunity in hand-me-downs and cheap knock-offs, Dell cunningly decided it would sell on its custom-made designs to smaller outfits, like Russian search engine and portal Yandex, for less cash.