Facebook's Open Compute discusses HDD Power Savings

Facebook's Open Compute Project has a post by Eran Tal on HDD Power Savings.

SAVING DATA CENTER POWER BY REDUCING HDD SPIN SPEED

THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, 2011 | Posted by Eran Tal at 20:40 PM

Many data centers sit on a lot of “cold storage” — servers containing terabytes of user data that must be retained but is rarely accessed, because users no longer need that data. While the servers are considered cold because they are rarely utilized, their hard drives are usually spinning at full speed although they are not serving data. The drives must keep rotating in case a user request actually requires retrieving data from disk, as spinning up a disk from sleep can take up to 30 seconds. In RAID configurations this time can be even longer if the HDDs in the RAID volume are staggered in their spin up to protect the power supply. Obviously, these latencies would translate into unacceptable wait times for a user who wishes to view a standard resolution photo or a spreadsheet.

Reducing HDD RPM by half would save roughly 3-5W per HDD. Data centers today can have up to tens and even hundreds of thousands of cold drives, so the power savings impact at the data center level can be quite significant, on the order of hundreds of kilowatts, maybe even a megawatt. The reduced HDD bandwidth due to lower RPM would likely still be more than sufficient for most cold use cases, as a data rate of several (perhaps several dozen) MBs should still be possible. In most cases a user is requesting less than a few MBs of data, meaning that they will likely not notice the added service time for their request due to the reduced speed HDDs. What is critical is that the latency response time of the HDD isn’t higher than 100 ms in order to not degrade the user experience.

One of comment responses is from a Western Digital employee.

Brandon SmithAug 20

I work at Western Digital, the largest disk drive producer in the world on motor control, and this is already being implemented. I am not sure how many drives this has already been shipped with, but we definitely have low RPM standby modes. I believe it might take a few hundred ms to get back up to speed and load the heads to get to the data, so if the latency requirement is less than 100 ms, I am not sure this strategy is the way to go for data centers. Also, a spindle motor designed to spin at 7200 RPM will not spin efficiently or consistently at 3600 RPM. 4500 to 5000 RPM is a more realistic number.

For this type of storage, SSD's are not the answer, because they are not even close to cost competitive. HDD's are the way to go, but we need to be realistic about the time it will take to access the data if we want to save energy.

So what Green Technologies does WDC?

IntelliSeek.

Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower unnecessary power consumption, noise, and vibration. View demo

IntelliPower.

A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. Additionally, drives with WD GreenPower Technology consume less current during start up allowing more drives to spin up simultaneously resulting in faster system readiness.

IntelliPark.

Delivers lower power consumption by automatically unloading recording heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag, and by disengaging read/write channel electronics.

Active Power Management.

Drives with WD GreenPower Technology monitor the work load and automatically invoke idle mode whenever possible to further reduce unnecessary power consumption. Drive recovery time from idle mode is less than one second, providing seamless power management between the drive and the host controller.

Ideal for:

Large data centers, web service providers, commercial grade surveillance systems and organizations requiring huge amounts of storage with limited budget and power allotment.

Think your boss is killing you, guess what, your co-workers affect you more

I usually spend over a year getting to know people before I start a project with them.  Why so cautious?  I've learned life is too short to spend time working with people who you don't enjoy spending time and trust.  It is hard to be creative when your co-workers are looking out for their own interests and don't have your back.  One of the best guys to work with was my departed friend Olivier Sanche, and I wrote about the concept of a wingman watching your back.

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

THURSDAY, JANUARY 13, 2011 AT 9:52AM

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.

A common assumption is a bad boss can be bad for your health, but what about your co-workers.  WSJ has an article that discusses how your co-workers can affect your health.

• HEAD CASE
• AUGUST 20, 2011

Your Co-Workers Might Be Killing You

Hours don't affect health much—but unsupportive colleagues do

• By JONAH LEHRER

• Article
• Comments

...

Instead, the Israeli scientists found that the factor most closely linked to health was the support of co-workers: Less-kind colleagues were associated with a higher risk of dying. While this correlation might not be surprising, the magnitude of the effect is unsettling. According to the data, middle-age workers with little or no "peer social support" in the workplace were 2.4 times more likely to die during the study.

But, you know what can be worse than your co-workers.  How about the computer system that treats the individual as a cog.

But that wasn't the only noteworthy finding. The researchers also complicated longstanding ideas about the relationship between the amount of control experienced by employees and their long-term health. Numerous studies have found that the worst kind of workplace stress occurs when people have little say over their day. These employees can't choose their own projects or even decide which tasks to focus on first. Instead, they must always follow the orders of someone else. They feel like tiny cogs in a vast corporate machine.

The things that you may think affect your health long hours and the boss were not shown to worsen your health.

The first thing the researchers discovered is that a lot of the variables they assumed would matter had no measurable impact. The number of hours a person spent at the office didn't affect his or her longevity, nor did the niceness of the boss.

Spend 10% of the budget to solve a Real-Time Traffic Monitoring

Monitoring in the data center can be expensive especially if you use proprietary technologies.  Jalopnik has a post on a Bluetooth MAC address approach to use mobile devices in cars vs. a much more expensive automotive solution.

TRAFFIC

BY MATT HARDIGREE AUG 15, 2011 2:00 PM

12,737 80

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How Houston uses your Bluetooth phone to fight traffic

...

Anonymous Wireless Address Matching (AWAM) takes the individual MAC address on Bluetooth-enabled systems like phones, hands-free devices, computers, and even Sony PSP Go gaming devices and tracks them as they enter a roadway equipped with a sensor.

If you've got your iPhone in your pocket and you drive along Interstate 45 leaving downtown Houston the system records a version of your MAC address.

When you cross another sensor it records you again, recognizing you as the same vehicle. It then takes your speed between the two points and averages it with everyone else passing through the same two points.

This new approach provides Houston with a cheaper, more accurate, and more detailed traffic view than other car monitoring systems such as Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) technology, which the region also uses to monitor traffic.

"[AWAM is] dirt cheap!" said David Fink, with the Texas Department of Transportation Houston District. "If our current multi-lane AVI sensors cost $75,000 on the cheap end to install, the most expensive version of the AWAM with solar power and Wi-Fi costs $8,000."

Here is a PDF of the system.

Michael Dell has fun commenting on HP's decision to abandon PC business

HP's decision to get out of the PC business has Wall Street voting with a 20% reduction in stock value.

Which leaves an opening for Michael Dell to make some comments on Twitter.

MichaelDell Michael Dell

Goodbye HP, Sorry you don't want to be in PCs anymore..But we do more than ever. How would you say goodbye to HP?

2 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

MichaelDell Michael Dell

HP.... They are calling it a separation but it feels like a divorce

18 Aug

MichaelDell Michael Dell

If HP spins off their PC business....maybe they will call it Compaq?

18 Aug

Software in Data Centers is Eating the World

Mark Andreesen of Netscape fame has an essay in the WSJ.

Why Software Is Eating The World

By MARC ANDREESSEN

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.

In short, software is eating the world.

Mark argues that software is dominating industries

The best new movie production company in many decades, Pixar, was a software company. Disney—Disney!—had to buy Pixar, a software company, to remain relevant in animated movies.

...

Photography, of course, was eaten by software long ago. It's virtually impossible to buy a mobile phone that doesn't include a software-powered camera, and photos are uploaded automatically to the Internet for permanent archiving and global sharing. Companies like Shutterfly, Snapfish and Flickr have stepped into Kodak's place.

Today's largest direct marketing platform is a software company—Google. Now it's been joined by Groupon, Living Social, Foursquare and others, which are using software to eat the retail marketing industry. Groupon generated over $700 million in revenue in 2010, after being in business for only two years.

Today's fastest growing telecom company is Skype, a software company that was just bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion. CenturyLink, the third largest telecom company in the U.S., with a $20 billion market cap, had 15 million access lines at the end of June 30—declining at an annual rate of about 7%. Excluding the revenue from its Qwest acquisition, CenturyLink's revenue from these legacy services declined by more than 11%. Meanwhile, the two biggest telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon, have survived by transforming themselves into software companies, partnering with Apple and other smartphone makers.

All of this software goes into data centers, and to grow faster they need to be greener data centers using less energy and reducing the environmental impact.