Even Larry Ellison embraces Sustainability for Lanai

The WSJ has an article on Larry Ellison's efforts on Lanai.  Embedded in the article are a lot of environmental issues.

He says the hotel will be a model of sustainability—generating electricity from the sun, making its own fresh water, reusing "gray water for irrigation, and all the buildings will be made from light, renewable materials, like bamboo."

...

In the near term, Mr. Ellison's most important challenge is to get a new desalination system in place to convert saltwater to fresh water. He wants to bring the number of gallons of available fresh water to 10 million daily from four million. But he also is forging ahead with other projects. He is setting up charging stations for electric cars and plug-in hybrids, and replacing Island Air's old-model Dash 8 aircraft with new ATR 72s.

There is a vision to add commercial agriculture to the island.  Water is a top issue for the island and will require power to make water.

"We have the right climate and soil to grow the very best gourmet mangos and pineapples on the planet and export them year-round to Asia and North America. We can grow and export flowers and make perfume the old-fashioned way—directly from the flowers, like they do in Grasse, France. We have an ideal location for a couple of organic wineries on the island. But the reintroduction of commercial agriculture to Lanai is 100% dependent upon increasing the available water on the island. So we're going to use solar energy to convert seawater to fresh water."

I wonder if Larry Ellison's experience in environmental issues will show up in Oracle's business?

7x24 Exchange honors Ken Brill with Lifetime Achievement award

At this year's 7x24 Exchange, Ken Brill was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Kenneth G. Brill is the Founder of the Uptime Institute and the Site Uptime Network.

Below are pictures from the ceremony.

The award is presented by Robert J. Cassiliano, President and CEO of Business Information Services and Chairman & CEO of 7x24 Exchange International. “7x24 Exchange International is honored to recognize Ken for his lifetime of accomplishments,” said Bob Cassiliano “It is a uniquely special individual that influences an industry with their leadership; Ken Brill is such a person with his significant and demonstrable contribution to the Mission Critical Industry. Ken has been a friend, a mentor and an industry colleague and for that, I am forever grateful.”

Accepting the award on Mr. Brill’s behalf will be longtime colleague, W. Pitt Turner IV. “I am honored to be able to accept this award on behalf of my friend and leading data center pioneer, Ken Brill,” said Pitt Turner. “Ken’s leadership in the data center space over the last thirty years has led to increased efficiency and operational excellence within the industry.”

Others that will pay tribute to Mr. Brill include David Schirmacher President of 7X24 Exchange International and Senior Vice President of Operations at Digital Realty, and Dennis Cronin, COO of Steel ORCA and one of the founders 7X24 Exchange International.

NewImage

NewImage

NewImage

NewImage

NewImage

NewImage

Photos by Convention Photography courtesy of Professional Images Photography Joe Rodriguez 2013.

Google shares its 10-20% Server performance improvement technique, analyzing micro architecture of AMD and Intel Servers

If you told someone in the data center industry you could get 10-20% performance gain, people wouldn't believe you.  If you said you had a new processor, memory, storage, or network architecture, you would have a higher chance of people thinking you tell the truth.  Would you believe someone if they told you at the micro architecture level of servers, if you designed the software to access local memory vs. non-local memory on existing systems you could get a 10-20% performance gain?  Well Google has shared this information and is deploying the solution in its data centers.

 This indicates

that a simple NUMA-aware scheduling can already

yield sizable benefits in production for those platforms.

Based on our findings, NUMA-aware thread mapping is

implemented and in the deployment process in our production

WSCs.

Here is the Google Paper published in 2013.  Warning this is not an easy paper to read if you are not familiar with operating systems and hardware.  But, I hope it gives an appreciation of another way to green a data center by making some changes in software.

Optimizing Google's Warehouse Scale Computers: The NUMA Experience

Abstract: Due to the complexity and the massive scale of modern warehouse scale computers (WSCs), it is challenging to quantify the performance impact of individual microarchitectural properties and the potential optimization benefits in the production environment. As a result of these challenges, there is currently a lack of understanding of the microarchitecture-workload interaction, leaving potentially significant performance on the table.

This paper argues for a two-phase performance analysis methodology for optimizing WSCs that combines both an in-production investigation and an experimental load-testing approach. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this two-phase methodology, and to illustrate the challenges, methodologies, and opportunities in optimizing modern WSCs, this paper investigates the impact of non-uniform memory access (NUMA) for several Google's key web-service workloads in large-scale production WSCs. Leveraging a newly-designed metric and continuous large-scale profiling in live datacenters, our production analysis demonstrates that NUMA has a significant impact (10-20%) on two important webservices: Gmail backend and search frontend. Our carefully designed load-test further reveals surprising tradeoffs between optimizing for NUMA performance and reducing cache contention.