Designing a Cloud Friendly Data Center, Jim Kennedy RagingWire & Peter Panfil Liebert

Considerations to think about in Cloud Data Centers is how Jim and Peter kicked off their presentation of what a cloud data center is.

Jim made an interesting point that RagingWire stopped using the Tier rating system in its data centers as it confused the users.  RagingWire's focus is illustrated in the following slide where redundancy of the entire eco-system is a requirement.

To create a cloud data center Jim makes the point that the data center needs to be more sensitive to the load being run.  And the last point made below is a difficult one - getting "DC infrastructure and IT operations to work together to solve this complex problem."

I just wrote about the separation between Facility Ops and IT, so I share many of the same views Jim and Peter are sharing.

Blue Collar vs. White Collar, understanding the separation between data center ops, IT, and business units

WEDNESDAY, MAY 4, 2011 AT 7:08AM

I posted on the idea of a System Program Manager in the data center.  In the same conversation I referenced, my friend and I were discussing how different data center ops is versus IT, let alone the business units who don't get their hands dirty. Getting your hands dirty is viewed by many as beneath them.

After listening to Jim and Peter, I have a simple way to explain what a Cloud Data Center is ... The Cloud Data Center takes what is typically separate groups roles and integrates the individuals into a more efficient team.  A team to provide data center services so customers get better uptime and availability for a given cost.   How well the team functions has a direct relationship to how well the cloud data center runs.  Cloud is IaaS, PaaS, SaaS are integration of teams to provide a service.

How many data center problems occur because individuals don't communicate as much as they should?  All it takes is one individual's mistake to bring down the whole team.

Another example of where I am so glad I have my Verizon 4G Mifi device, Uptime's event network 0.21 Mbps speed in keynote

I am sitting in the Uptime Institute Symposium, and  wrote a blog entry on Facebook's Data Center Design.  The upload was an excruciating 3 minutes or more.  Curious I went to run www.speedtest.net twice and look at the download and upload speeds.

 

Switching to my Verizon 4G mifi modem.

Ahh, now I fill like I can breath.  Crawling at 210 Kbps may be fine for free, but way too painful to blog at an event.

Ready to write about

Designing a Cloud-Friendly Data Center
Peter Panfil
Vice President and General Manager, Liebert AC Power
James Kennedy
Director - Data Center Operations and Construction, RagingWire Enterprise Solution

Facebook's Latest Data Center Design presentation at Uptime

Facebook gave a keynote presentation on its Data Center Design

Facebook's Latest Innovations in Data Center Design
Senior Electrical Engineer, Facebook  Paul Hsu
Datacenter Mechanical Engineer, Facebook Dan Lee

Below is a side by side slide Paul presented on the difference between a typical data center power conversion vs. the Facebook design.

Dan has a slide with side-by-side comparison of a typical mechanical system vs. the Facebook design.

A couple of other slides share are on the Reactor Power Panel and Battery cabinet.

The results Facebook shared.

For more details you can find information at Facebook's Open Compute Project web site.

If you want to see pictures of inside the Facebook data center check out http://scobleizer.com/2011/04/16/photo-tour-of-facebooks-new-datacenter/ and http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/19/video-facebooks-penthouse-cooling-system/

Disrupting the Data Center, Uptime Institute focuses on Cloud, Cost, Capacity, and Carbon

Watching the initial keynotes for Uptime Institute it is great to see the Green Data Center idea manifest in the tag line of Cloud, Cost, Capacity and Carbon.

The keynote kicked off with the idea this the conference for the Disrupted Data Center which pulled together the groups of The 451 Group.

In the coming five years, a series of major technological innovations, coupled with significant, external legislative and market disruptions, will make an ever greater impression on the planning, design and operation of data centers. The economics, the operational practices and the underlying design principles of data centers, and of IT service provision, may be about to undergo some fundamental, disruptive shifts.

And, organizes the top underwriters of the conference.

But, then I ask the question is disruption of the data center come from the above list of companies.  Facebook is presenting part of its Open Compute project.

Open sourcing designs disruptive. 

As I spend the rest of my time at Uptime, I'll keep on thinking of what is disruptive in data centers.  Is Cloud, Cost, Capacity, and Carbon disruptive?  Or is it the companies who are not the underwriters list?

Data Center Analytics supports better decision making, Power Assure ships new capabilities

Power Assure has a press release on their new analytics capabilities. 

Energy Management version 4 (EM/4) software enables actionable-intelligence for maximizing data center efficiency

Santa Clara, Calif. – May 9, 2011 - Power Assure®, Inc., a data center infrastructure management solutions provider, today introduced at Uptime Institute’s Symposium 2011 Data Center Analytics for its Energy Management software platform, version 4 (EM/4). Data Center Analytics gives data center operators for the first time the ability to analyze and synthesize the overwhelming amount of raw data now available on data center equipment performance and turn it into useful business information to improve the efficiency, capacity and performance of their data centers.

The Analytics capability exists side-by-side with the monitoring and automation modules.

Here is a sample dashboard from Power Assure to visualize data center systems.