Google Tours Its Data Centers as part of the Cloud Battle

Google's Joe Kava presented at its Cloud Event.  Go to the 5 min mark in the below video.

Open a Chrome or Firefox browser and you can take this DC 360 degree tour.

Wouldn't it be great if Amazon and Microsoft responded in a similar way?

If you don't like watching videos there are a few news articles that report on the above.


Google finally told its most important cloud customers what they wanted to hear
Business Insider - ‎Mar 24, 2016‎
In fact, Kava claims that Google is the "world's largest private investor in renewable energy," with $2 billion given to wind and solar companies, as it tries to reduce its power consumption as much as it can. That's a cost savings that gets passed on ...

Google Cloud Platform's 3 keys to the roadmap: Data center, security, containers
TechRepublic - ‎22 hours ago‎
Joe Kava, one of the heads of Google's data center efforts, was the speaker who explained the company's strategy in the data center. Early on, there was a big push in the concept of "your data centers are Google's data centers," likely to position the ...
Google Cloud Platform touts investments in security, data centers, and containers


ZDNet - ‎Mar 24, 2016‎
DeMichillie then introduced data center head Joe Kava, who walked through Google's data center strategy. According to Kava, the core principles of Google's approach to data centers are availability, security, and performance. Kava explained the company ...

So is 48V DC a big deal for the Data Center? Google's OCP contribution

Google's Urs Hoelzle announcing the contribution of 48V and rack design at OCP summit was the news of the Summit.

Google's contribution is posted here.

Why is 48V a big deal? if you are pushing higher performing chips as Google's Urs Hoelzle has discussed in his paper on the need for brawny cores vs. wimpy cores.  There is a need for GPUs as mentioned in the post.

As the industry's working to solve these same problems and dealing with higher-power workloads, such as GPUs for machine learning, it makes sense to standardize this new design by working with OCP. We believe this will help everyone adopt this next generation power architecture, and realize the same power efficiency and cost benefits as Google.

Why would Google contribute the 48V DC design?  As one ex-Googler said at OCP Google wants to reduce the cost of the 48V DC converters and to do that they need more volume.  And Google has a history of sharing its innovations.  See the below timeline on Google's contributions

The Missed Opportunity for Open Compute Summit - Business Focus on Scale Out

I have gone to every Open Compute Summit since they have started.  I've met many of the founders of the effort and watched over the years as OCP has developed.  OCP has grown beyond what I thought it could be when I went to the first event in Palo Alto.

A friend asked what is my biggest take away from OCP Summit 2016?

My biggest take away is the OCP is not marketing themselves correctly.  They should be focusing on this is the conference for “scale out.”  They have all the pieces.  The OCP staff are not focused on the business.   The vendors are screaming for more business focus.  And the customers want it too.

I want to give credit to one of OCP founders who is ex-Facebook and ex-Google who said, "OCP is the one scale-out conference."  OMG you are right.  This is the one scale out conference where data centers, racks, compute, storage, and network are all considered for scale-out infrastructure.

BTW, I think the OCP staff do a great job running the event which is a type business focus.  The above business I mention is the focus on the issues to run a scale-out infrastructure.

We'll see if OCP Summit 2017 focuses on the theme of scale-out and the sponsors who are interested in this theme.

Google Joins Open Compute

Wired reports on Google joining Open Compute.  There is no word of this at OCP Summit.  Must be the big news that Jay Parikh will announce in 10 minutes.

http://www.wired.com/2016/03/google-facebook-designing-open-source-data-center-gear-together/

Happy to Share

Google’s Urs Hölzle—one of the company’s first employees and the engineer most responsible for what is probably the world’s largest and most advanced computer network—doesn’t see today’s announcement as a big change. He points out that Google has openly discussed its internal hardware designs in the past.

“I know that historically in the press, there has been a tendency to position it as Open Compute Project versus Google. But it has never been like that,” he says. “Over the past ten years, we have shared many, many things with the industry. This is the latest one.”