Do you have a Power Hog in your Data Center? AOL saves the bacon moving to the cloud

I wrote about Mike Manos's post on Attacking the Cruft and how the best part I liked was the Power Hogs.

What I like is the the Power Hog part.

Power Hog – An effort to audit our data center facilities, equipment, and the like looking for inefficient servers, installations, and /or technology and migrating them to new more efficient platforms or our AOL Cloud infrastructure.  You knew you were in trouble when you had a trophy of a bronze pig appear on your desk or office and that you were marked.

I took a picture from Pike Place Market's infamous brass pig and put it in my post as a placeholder.

Within 30 minutes Mike sent me a picture of the "AOL Power Hog"  With the call to action "The Cloud is Calling…Help Save Our Bacon."

Photo 3

Do you have a Power Hog in your data center?  One way to get them to move on to a diet is give them this trophy.

Maybe data centers need a the wall of shame.  The top 10 power hogs.

Who would you nominate?  Your HR system? The latest acquisition? The executive pet project that has grown and grown?

 

Identify the Power Hog in your data center, AOL uses the brass pig award

Mike Manos has a post on eliminating the cruft in data center.

Attacking the Cruft

March 28, 2012 by mmanos

Today the Uptime Institute announced that AOL won the Server Roundup Award.  The achievement has gotten some press already (At Computerworld, PCWorld, and related sites) and I cannot begin to tell you how proud I am of my teams.   One of the more personal transitions and journeys I have made since my experience scaling the Microsoft environments from tens of thousands of servers to hundreds of thousands of servers has been truly understanding the complexity facing a problem most larger established IT departments have been dealing with for years.  In some respects, scaling infrastructure, while incredibly challenging and hard, is in large part a uni-directional problem space.   You are faced with growth and more growth followed by even more growth.  All sorts of interesting things break when you get to big scale. Processes, methodologies, technologies, all quickly fall to the wayside as you climb ever up the ladder of scale.

What I like is the the Power Hog part.

Power Hog – An effort to audit our data center facilities, equipment, and the like looking for inefficient servers, installations, and /or technology and migrating them to new more efficient platforms or our AOL Cloud infrastructure.  You knew you were in trouble when you had a trophy of a bronze pig appear on your desk or office and that you were marked.

NewImage

 

MSN data center construction video

Many data centers have video cameras taking on site filming the construction project.  I've seen plenty, but normally these videos are only for the project team.

If you want to see a project, here is a Microsoft MSN data center video that shouldn't probably be posted.  Check it out before before it gets pulled down.  It is only 2 minutes.

1000 Genomes, 200+TB of data available in AWS to run compute jobs

Normally when you think of running a compute project in AWS, you need to move you data and then compute.  AWS has hosted the 1000 Genome project with over 200 TB of data available to run compute jobs against without moving the data into the environment.

The 1000 Genomes Project

We're very pleased to welcome the 1000 Genomes Project data to Amazon S3.

The original human genome project was a huge undertaking. It aimed to identify every letter of our genetic code, 3 billion DNA bases in total, to help guide our understanding of human biology. The project ran for over a decade, cost billions of dollars and became the corner stone of modern genomics. The techniques and tools developed for the human genome were also put into practice in sequencing other species, from the mouse to the gorilla, from the hedgehog to the platypus. By comparing the genetic code between species, researchers can identify biologically interesting genetic regions for all species, including us.

This is a lot of data.

The data is vast (the current set weighs in at over 200Tb), so hosting the data on S3 which is closely located to the computational resources of EC2 means that anyone with an AWS account can start using it in their research, from anywhere with internet access, at any scale, whilst only paying for the compute power they need, as and when they use it. This enables researchers from laboratories of all sizes to start exploring and working with the data straight away. The Cloud BioLinux AMIs are ready to roll with the necessary tools and packages, and are a great place to get going.

Making the data available via a bucket in S3 also means that customers can crunch the information using Hadoop via Elastic MapReduce, and take advantage of the growing collection of tools for running bioinformatics job flows, such as CloudBurst and Crossbow.

It is interesting to think that AWS is hosting data that is too expensive for people to move around.

More information can be found here http://aws.amazon.com/1000genomes/

If you want to get the data yourself.  here it is

Other Sources

The 1000 Genomes project data are also freely accessible through the 1000 Genomes website, and from each of the two institutions that work together as the project Data Coordination Centre (DCC).

Is the end of Coal Power coming to the USA? EPA proposes new rules

MSNBC reports on EPA's new rules for Coal Power Plants.

End of coal power plants? EPA proposes new rules


By msnbc.com staff and news services

The Obama administration on Tuesday proposed the first-ever standards to cut carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants -- a move welcomed by environmentalists but criticized by some utilities as well as Republicans, who are expected to use it as election campaign fodder.

The difficulty for Coal Power plants is they need to meet the same emissions as natural gas plants.

While the proposed rules do not dictate which fuels a plant can burn, they would require any new coal plants essentially to halve carbon dioxide emissions to match those of plants fired by natural gas.

The pessimist view comes from the Coal industry.

Steve Miller, CEO and President of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a group of coal-burning electricity producers, took a more dismal view, saying it "will make it impossible to build any new coal-fueled power plants and could cause the premature closure of many more coal-fueled power plants operating today."

Other opponents of the long-delayed EPA proposal say it will limit sources for electricity by making coal prohibitively expensive.

The NRDC and American Lung Association cheered the new rules.

Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called it a "historic step ... toward protecting the most vulnerable among us — including the elderly and our children — from smog worsened by carbon-fueled climate change."

The American Lung Association agreed. "Scientists warn that the buildup of carbon pollution will create warmer temperatures which will increase the risk of unhealthful smog levels," said board chairman Albert Rizzo. "More smog means more childhood asthma attacks and complications for those with lung disease."

Do you get your electricity from Coal?  What happens to your electricity prices in the future?