SearchDataCenter.com Editorial Blog

New data center blog on TechTarget

2007-02-23T13:49:00.000-08:00

The new, improved, and official data center blog is now available from Tech Target. Thanks for your patience. For those of you still reading, you will be happy to see this new blog -- it's going to be updated more frequently and offer more perspectives than just little ol me. Thanks again.

The Data Center blog

Whatis.com foiled again?

2007-02-05T20:21:00.000-08:00

Good stuff from Associate Editor Alex Howard at Whatis.com, who found his desk looking like a prop from the movie Signs. According to Howard, revenge is a dish best served cold.

EPA server efficiency workshop this month

2007-02-05T19:55:00.000-08:00

The EPA is hosting a technical workshop on energy efficient servers and data centers on February 16, 2007 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Unfortunately, the press were expressly uninvited to the event itself. We are welcome to come on down for a post-workshop breifing. It's too bad, a lot of companies at the last briefing were really candid about problems they were having in the data center. Even the vendors had interesting things to say for once. The article turned out to be one of my favorite stories last year.

Daylight savings time: Interview w/ the CTIA

2007-02-02T06:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Mark Fontecchio and I were wrapping up a story on the impact Daylight Savings Time (coming early this year) is going to have on IT. I did an email interview with John Venator, president and CEO of the Computing Technology Industry Association. The full interview didn't make it into the article, but I thought he made a lot of good points, so I'm printing the full interview here:

Why now? This has been on the books forever, why the panic all of a sudden?

The daylight saving time issue is one of those unintended consequences of government legislation. When the change in the start and end dates for daylight saving time in the U.S. was included in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, much attention was focused on how the change would save the energy equivalent to 100,000 barrels of oil a day. The issue of how it would affect computers and other electronic devices received some attention in 2005, but the issue soon faded to the background. Part of the problem is that the software patches have to reflect any changes in DST made in countries other than the U.S. (Canada and Mexico, for example) for the fixes to work properly. It’s a country-by-country decision on when DST starts and ends. Vendors were delayed until other countries decided whether to adopt the same dates as the U.S. or other dates. In some cases, those decisions were not made until late in 2006.

Are people expecting planes falling out of the skies? Banking systems to collapse? Or is it small potatoes?

The DST issue isn’t on the level of Y2K because the impact and consequences will be much less severe, but it will have an affect on consumers and businesses. It will likely result in multiple little aggravations. At risk are all time and calendar features on corporate E-mail, PDAs, voice mail, and database applications. Some of the things that could be impacted include calendar/scheduling applications; date/time calculations (current and historical); transaction logging; and tariff billing applications. At least at the start of daylight-saving time, some people will likely be an hour early for appointments, meetings and conference calls. They may find that the TV program they thought they’d recorded is actually another program because of the time change.

But given the broad range of technology in use today—and the integration of systems between customers, vendors, and partners, we're recommending to our members that they act now to determine what needs to be done to mitigate the impact of DST 2007 on their organizations. Though six weeks may seem like a long time, if you wait until the Friday before DST and discover that the software patch doesn't work, you may be working 24/7 to get it fixed.

What industries are facing the biggest challenges here?

The issue is not so much tied to specific industries as it is to devices. In that regard, virtually any industry could be impacted. Computers, PDAs, VCRs, DVRs, phones, and any other electronic devices that have a time zone setting will require a small software update to accommodate the change in DST. Otherwise, the internal clocks in the devices could be off by one hour for three weeks in this spring and for one hour for one week this fall. Mobile phones which are not connected to the Internet, voice-over-IP phone systems, GPS navigation systems, alarm clocks, and other “smart home” appliances may also be affected. The change can potentially affect tens of thousands of users.

What do the vendors need to do? Are they doing anything?

Vendors are working to make their customers aware of the issue and to make the necessary patches and updates available as soon as possible. Here are a few links to manufacturers’ information pages:

Cisco

IBM

Microsoft

Red Hat

Sun

What do the IT pros need to do?

If IT pros start now, the DST updates can be part of regular and routine system maintenance. Technology resellers and solution providers who manage networks and services for customers should also act now, or they may be working overtime in March to get all their customers updated.

Super January on SDC

2007-01-18T09:57:00.002-08:00

We have been cranking out some quality content on SearchDataCenter.com this month, so I'm going to take this chance to toot my team's own horn. Here is a list of the best content we've pulled out in the last few weeks.

Data center design:
Green data centers tackle LEED certification
Achieving the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED certification is a tall order for power hungry data centers. Despite the challenge, two companies have certified their facilities.

Prefab data centers offer modular expansion alternative
Prefabricated modular data centers may provide a viable alternative to new construction. But the adoption of these "turn-key" data centers is yet to be seen.

Study ranks cheapest places to build a data center
Princeton, N.J.-based site selection specialists, The Boyd Company Inc., has published its list of the best places to build a data center, taking into account 50 cities in the U.S. and focused on the healthcare industry. The list compares the annual operating costs of building a 150,000-square-foot facility with 150 employees.

DC power worries data center planner
United Air Lines Inc. isn't sure if using DC power for a new data center will lead to a safe landing. The Chicago-based company is building the facility in Denver to consolidate disaster recovery operations and direct current is on the radar because of its reputed reliability and better energy efficiency. But there are concerns. For one, not all the hardware it needs is DC-compatible. And having grown accustomed to the power and cooling redundancy of AC systems, it's worried about a single DC-power input.

Systems and server news:
Best data center products of 2006
The editorial staff at SearchDataCenter.com requested submissions from vendors and users and we came up with four categories: servers, data center backup power, data center cooling and systems management tools. We selected three winners in each category. The winning products come from all corners of the data center industry: from well-established companies to companies you may have never heard of.

Sun beavers away at UltraSPARC server line
Sun announced speed improvements to its Sun Fire T2000 Niagara server and is hard at work on next-generation silicon for the platform.

HP server management software tracks power usage
Hewlett-Packard Co. announced upgraded server management software that controls how much power a system draws. HP Insight Control Environment is a software package targeted for the company's ProLiant servers and costs about $550 per server. It was originally introduced alongside HP blade servers back in June.

IBM BladeCenter H gets tenfold bandwidth increase
IBM introduced new networking capabilities for its high-performance blade server system today, including 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) connectivity to the blade, courtesy of a collaboration with Blade Network Technologies and NetXen Inc.

Sun boosts Unix partitioning on Solaris
Sun Microsystems Inc. has upgraded its Solaris operating system with Logical Domains, a partitioning technology on its UltraSPARC T1-based servers that, combined with Solaris Containers, can be used to create up to 32 separate Unix OS instances on each system.

Mainframe strategies and trends:
Third-party software costs killing mainframe growth
Attendees at the annual Gartner Data Center Conference sounded off in a survey published by the Stanford, Conn.-based analyst firm this week. Mainframers weighed in on third-party software costs, Linux on the mainframe, IBM's efforts to get new blood in the job market and more.

Mainframe year in review 2006
The mainframe experienced a lot of growth in the last year. This is a review of the stories, technologies and trends that shaped 2006, listed in chronological order.

HP makes the case for mainframe migration
John Pickett, Hewlett-Packard's worldwide mainframe alternative program manager, discusses who should "augment" their mainframes, who should migrate applications to another platform, and who should replace it outright.

We're actually on track to break a page view record this month, and we've got more content than we can even post. But come talk to me in July when I can't buy a story to write about...

Doomsday Clock tolls for thee

2007-01-17T22:15:00.000-08:00

The end is nigh folks. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has nudged the Doomsday Clock forward two minutes, putting us at 11:55 PM on the metaphorical countdown to Armegeddon. While this group of scientists listed North Korea's recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran's nuclear ambitions, and a renewed U.S. emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons -- and they pointed to another danger.

From the report: We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.

That said, is it time to start cutting down on your data center's power consumption? Or are we too far gone? Maybe it's time to run up the energy bill, bust out an umbrella drink and bring on the global warming.

I've gotten nihilistic since the last time I posted. I've been holding off, waiting for the new Data Center blog to get up and running, and it's getting to me.

Bush signs data center efficiency bill

2006-12-22T06:46:00.000-08:00

This week President Bush signed a bill calling for research into data center energy efficiency. The bill, H.R. 5646, lays out nine different areas where the EPA-led study should focus. They include looking at the proliferation of servers in federal government, analyzing how much energy they consume, potential cost savings by making machines more efficient and recommending how to encourage manufacturers to build energy efficient equipment. SearchDataCenter.com has been following the issue since it passed the House back in July.

The Wall Street Journal wrote up a story about energy efficiency in the data center as well this week. Nothing new if you've been following along with us on SDC, but it's good to see WSJ paying attention to the issue.

Also, I have a blog announcement. The powers that be at TechTarget have deemed that a blog is a worthwhile vehicle for IT news and commentary. Therefore, the company has picked up a WordPress server and will be rolling out blogs on TechTarget sites in '07. That also means TechTarget will be reeling in rogue editors like me with unofficial sites. Look for me to be rerouting readers in the next couple weeks -- assuming the functionality of the corporate blog structure works. Will I be able to do pictures? Post opinions? We'll find out together. On the plus side, it'll be an official site and I won't be doing it in my free time. Also, I'll be joined by more of the SDC editorial team. So if nothing else, the new iteration of the SDC blog will be updated more frequently than this one. Stay tuned.

ASHRAE liquid cooling book available

2006-12-19T06:36:00.000-08:00

It's here... The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers Inc. [ASHRAE] has published a book on data center liquid cooling that could promote standardization of the technology.

The book is the fourth in a series written by ASHRAE Technical Committee 9.9.

The cost of Liquid Cooling Guidelines for Datacom Equipment Centers is $49(ASHRAE members, $39) and is available in print and download versions. To order, contact ASHRAE Customer Service at 1-800-527-4723 (United States and Canada) or 404-636-8400 (worldwide); or visit the Bookstore at www.ashrae.org.

For more info, check out our preview of the book with Don Beaty from back in September.

Publishing server energy efficiency ratings

2006-12-12T12:18:00.000-08:00

A few weeks back we asked the question: Could an organization publish side by side data on server energy usage based on the EPA's recently annoucned metric for one-unit and two-unit servers? And if so, who should do it?

We polled experts and participants -- here is a sampling of the responses:

Charles King, principal analyst, Hayward, Calif.-based Pund-IT: Up until now, you could go through and reverse engineer [to find the server efficiency], but you would have to be really handy to have some kind of rating. Personally, I think it would make sense for the EPA to put something out like this. You want something where the numbers aren't bent by any vendors' product strategies. I'd be interested to see the overview work that LBNL is doing as well. From everything I've read so far, server efficiency plays a critical role, but it's a small role. So I imagine the work that LBNL is doing will put it in context beyond whose server model draws less power this quarter versus the next quarter.

Gordon Haff, analyst with Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata: EPA/Energy Star would probably have the most credibility and independence. Among industry organizations, SPEC benchmarks are also quite well accepted. A standard measurement suite and methodology that was harmonized between those two organizations would, I believe, have a high probability of being accepted as a credible standard measurement.

Ken Brill, executive director, Uptime Institute, from his recent Q&A with SearchDataCenter.com: [The Uptime Institute] would be interested in [publishing the data], but we haven't figured out the economic model. There are three basic models. There is the 'Consumer Reports' subscription model. They buy products at the consumer level so you're not getting a hyped-up machine, and the consumer of the information pays for it. Because they pay for it, they feel a certain amount of integrity for the testing that's been done. The second model is the manufacturers can run the testing on their own and publish the results, but then it's not all in the same place, and there's always the suspicion of whether the tests are rigged. In the middle would be tests the manufacturers paid for but which were run by a third party and available through the third party. I think the best way to do that is if it's user-paid-for. As long as it's vendor-paid-for, then it's always subject to some concern. We have the technical resources to do it, but is it something that's going to be financially viable? Personally, I think the 'Consumer Reports' approach is going to be the one that people are going to feel the most comfortable with, but how much will people pay for these reports?

Mark Bramfitt, supervisor of the customer energy efficiency program for the high tech market at PG&E, from a recent Q&A with SearchDataCenter.com: The industry right now publishes servers' top speeds and they test each others' equipment. If you say top speed is 250 miles per hour, and it's really only 200, you can bet that one of your competitors will point that out. I think the industry has a good model for publishing data. If they add the miles per gallon figure, which is what SPEC and the EPA are working on, I don't know why that wouldn't fit in with what they're recording already. Whether that information is all in one place or not, or whether you have to go to the vendors' individual sites, it doesn't really matter. As long as it's reported in a transparent fashion and it's self-policing. It may be that the EPA runs a Web site that runs it all in one place and that would be magnificent. That way a customer doesn't have to pull up 3-4 different Web sites.

Jonathan Koomey, Ph.D., Professor/Staff Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University: My feeling is that the data should be publicly available on the Web, so that customers can easily compare. It's probably better if there is one place that compiles the data. That could be SPEC, it could be LBNL, it could be the Green Grid. I'll be talking with various companies about this in coming months, and will probably have some insight into it early next year. It probably makes more sense for someone who really knows servers to pull together the information, with feedback from AFCOM and other user groups.

Christian Belady, distinguished technologist, HP: HP expects to do its own measurement following the protocols published by established benchmark organizations which reflects our current approach with existing performance benchmarks. HP then would make these results openly available to customers as would the organizations. In addition, HP has also published data center level efficiency metrics that it is currently socializing in the industry.

What do you think? Drop me a comment.

Top data center trends and technologies for 2007

2006-12-01T10:50:00.000-08:00

Gartner prognosticators looked into their crystal balls this week to point out the top data center technologies and trends for the coming year. I made my own list based on the most popular stories on SearchDataCenter.com and my own secret sauce and here's what I came up with:

Coming in at number one -- data center pros are looking for metrics. You can't manage what you can't measure. Systems like the Uptime Institute's Tier Ratings, Syska Hennessy's Criticality Levels, server energy efficiency metrics from the EPA, cooling guidelines from ASHRAE and a continuing interest in ITIL will be in demand for 2007. The tools to measure data center performance are out there, but it takes digging and some knowledge to use them.

Number two -- people are talking about Big Iron again. Having trouble with power and cooling issues? Configuration nightmares? Who the hell let the Wintel admins start running the asylum anyway? Mature processes, new open system workloads, cheaper hardware and a smaller power and cooling footprint are all having an effect on mainframe buying decisions -- sales are booming right now. And it's time to take a look at your staffing requirements if you're executing millions of lines of COBOL for the foreseeable future.

Number three -- blades are hot and heavy. They're new, tiny and look a lot better than that old pizza box. It sounds like a midlife crisis, but data center pros are learning to deal with these high-maintenance lovelies. A few guys got burned or had a rack bust through the raised floor, but people have learned you can't treat them like any old server. Bottom line: isolation is key. Look for new power and cooling infrastructure products that accommodate and isolate blades in the coming year.

Number four -- Configuration management databases (CMDB) take over the systems management space. Dave Wagner at BMC put it best this week during a conference at the Gartner Data Center expo. He explained why the need for a CMDB has reached a tipping point. "Proprietary legacy platforms all had very rich process disciplines around change. That was because if you brought down an iSeries, you brought down a whole company. Mainframes, AS/400s, VAX systems didn't have the automation because the scale was easy enough to manage manually." So in comes the age of pizza boxes and it's one app to one server and if something goes FUBAR, you just buy another one because it's cheaper to replace it than to pay somebody to figure out where the problem is. But here comes the tipping point -- virtualization. Running multiple apps on the same physical infrastructure, if you break it you affect more people. "Everybody knows 80% of all failure is because you changed something. Virtual environments are dynamically changing by nature." Hence, everybody rolls out a CMDB. According to data from audience participation at Gartner, HP's Mercury line and BMC's Atrium are leading the pack.

Number five -- Everybody makes nice with the utilities. Want to save hundreds of thousands of dollars on energy costs but don't want to get crushed on the front end cap-ex for the upgrades? Call the electric company. Utilities have historically offered commercial customers rebates for avoiding demand spikes, but now power companies like PG&E and Avista have teamed up with hardware and software vendors like Sun Microsystems, VMware and ISR/SprayCool to offer prescriptive rebates to offset upgrade costs. Execs from IBM and Emerson/Liebert confirmed that both companies (along with many others) are already in talks for more announcements like this. Other utilities across the country are looking to get involved. Get in now while it's still a free-for-all.

Number six -- Liquid Cooling. You can't fight physics folks. Nobody wanted to bring water back into the data center, especially not the systems vendors, but that's just too damn bad. It's here. SearchDataCenter.com called it back in April 2005 when cooling guru Bob McFarlane said: "While everyone knows servers are one day going to be water-cooled, no one wants to be first, believing that if their competitors still claim they are fine with air cooling, the guy who goes to water cooling will rapidly drop back in sales until others admit it is necessary." Who's in? Companies like Target and Goldman Sachs are preparing facilities for it. Companies like APC, Liebert, ISR/SprayCool, IBM, HP, and finally Sun Microsystems are making water-cooling products. And everybody has a different take on it, which is the main factor holding it back from acceptance. Once ASHRAE's book on liquid cooling technologies comes out this month, we might start to see some standardization and more acceptance.

Number seven -- Site selection continues to be big business and the data center construction boom is officially on. Web2.0 Companies are outgrowing their facilities faster than they can build them. The build out of the 1990s is coming to the end of the 10- to 15-year facility turnover cycle. Companies are looking to consolidate multiple outlying, outdated facilities. The price of power matters more and the geography matters less -- look for more companies to move IT operations to the Midwest in '07.

Number eight -- Green computing continues to sell. The economics of "eco" took the facility management and construction industry by storm back around 2003. Why? Because the U.S. Green Buildings Council started to prove that companies could save money building high-performance green buildings, and vendors could make money selling greener products. It's taken a while for IT to catch up, but companies HP and Sun are now competing on miles per gallon, as opposed to miles per hour. The IT industry has formed a group called The Green Grid -- a bunch of vendors hoping to solve the problems they created. But if it can appoint highly respected people into leadership positions, expect the organization to play a dominant role in the definition of green computing in the coming years. Green Grid doesn't need Paul Perez (HP), Dave Douglas (Sun), or Bruce Shaw (AMD)out front, they need a spokesperson like Bill McDonough. If Green Grid plays out as an industry mouthpiece, expect it to be ignored and go away. But the issues will not -- someone is going to fill this vacuumm in 2007. Also, expect legislation around energy usage and e-waste.

Number nine -- multicore processing. Here's one where I agree with Gartner's list. The firm predicts the number of cores on a chip will double approximately every 18 months through 2015. But those gains won't mean much unless users address software. "We're entering a software crisis," research VP Carl Claunch said. "If your software runs one big workload, you need to rearchitect it to be parallel. There is a challenge to make our apps multithreaded."

Number ten -- virtualization and disaster recovery. According to a recent reader survey from TechTarget, most people are using server virtualization today for test and development sandboxes and consolidating servers, but very few are thinking about disaster recovery. The value of the portable virtual machine has yet to be realized. Time to recovery is going to shrink dramatically when companies can start deploying failover virtually. Disaster recovery giant SunGard says it can shrink downtime in a disaster from 48 hours with tape transport and infrastrucutre set up to under four hours by blowing out virtual machine files to already up and running hardware.

For more info, check out our top ten stories of 2006 based on page views.

Data center editorial on the road continues

2006-11-09T15:04:00.000-08:00

This week I'm reporting from the City by the Bay -- San Fran. Right now I'm sitting in the Web2.0 Summit. Marissa Mayer, Google's product management leader on search products [pictured below] is currently presenting on the engineering behind Gmail.

SearchDataCenter.com Editorial Blog

New data center blog on TechTarget

Whatis.com foiled again?

EPA server efficiency workshop this month

Daylight savings time: Interview w/ the CTIA

Super January on SDC

Doomsday Clock tolls for thee

Bush signs data center efficiency bill

ASHRAE liquid cooling book available

Publishing server energy efficiency ratings

Top data center trends and technologies for 2007

Data center editorial on the road continues

Server efficiency metrics: Who should publish them?

365 Main data center tour photos

Storage feels the pain of power crunch

Johnny Five crashes Data Center Decisions

Sun Blackbox Dos and Don'ts

Sun Blackbox photos

Data center blogs

Energy efficiency standard for storage next?

Stallings, IBM: Savvy, not stodgy

ISR SprayCool M-Series photos

Data center to feel the effects of mineral costs

Data centers the HP-way

Server efficiency draft released; Going green pays

Data center on the road, Part 2