Data Center Power
Yet another interesting story on the huge power consumption of data centers, in the Economist. Microsoft is building a data center that consumes 198MW!
The Big Picture in IT Systems Management
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Monday, May 26, 2008
Inflation Visualization
This is an interesting visualization of inflation and how price changes relative to our total spending are related: NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/05/03/business/20080403_SPENDING_GRAPHIC.html
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/05/03/business/20080403_SPENDING_GRAPHIC.html
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Reductionist Mindset
About a month and a half ago, I purchased and electric bike that looks like a scooter and have been riding it to work on a regular basis. The speed is capped at 32km/h and electric bikes are part of a three year alternative transportation pilot project by our Ministry of Transport.
Barring comments from peers about riding my electric razor, it takes me less time to get into work on the e-bike versus driving. I also realized that I don't really need my SUV to cut through downtown and travel a wopping 6.5km (4 miles) to work. Rather than spending hundreds of dollars a month in gas, it now costs me about $5/mnth in electricity to charge the bike. In discussions with colleagues, they are also now starting to question the feasibility using an e-bike. I don't know how many will actually make the leap, but at least they are aware of this alternative technology.
So, why I am telling you about my e-bike instead of server virtualization or systems management? Because downsizing in the datacenter is also starting to become front-of-mind to a larger group of IT staff (and the lines of business that drive IT). The general attitudes are changing and going "green" (or lightening our eco-load) isn't perceived as a tree-hugging activity anymore.
For years, we used to have lots of older Sun servers (E4000's, V220's) along with a host of other platforms used for development. The cost of power consumption (and the corresponding air conditioning) was never in our minds. When the management of the building our office is in decided to install electric meters on a per-tenant basis and start billing usage; well, let's just say power consumption became front-of-mind! We couldn't believe how much juice a few hundred servers sucked up -- as food for thought, data centers create almost 2% of global CO2 emissions. We have agressively turned off the older Sun servers and migrated to their new Niagara platforms and we are actively virtualizing our x86 infrastructure using VMware.
The power consumption mindset has manifested itself in a different way in the telco world. Because the telco facilities manager who was responsible for all the switches also bore the cost of the power consumed, most vendors in the telco space engineered their products to be low power consuming. This is unlike regular IT, whereby the "business," which is the prime buyer of technology to solve business problems, was divorced from the cost of power to drive their computing platforms. Nortel has accidentally stumbled on a green play in that most of their technology was designed to be low power (from their telco background).
Back to consolidation, we are taking the virtualization program on VMware even further than simply consolidating physical systems into virtualized ones. We're working on technology to identify workloads that can be offlined or VMotion'd to core servers during low-usage periods and then subsequently idle the physical systems that contained the instances. For example, in our development lab environment, QA and Support require hundreds of instances for testing and simulating. When staff go home at night, about 90% of these instances are not required. It would be ideal to be able to move the workloads of the active 10% onto one or two physical systems and then shut-down (or go into low-power mode) the rest of the physical infrastructure that supported the active 90%. When people start coming in in the morning the systems and instances would then be brought back to life.
The long term savings for power and HVAC of being able to quiesce off-hours workloads is potentially huge.
So, let's take a look at our carbon foot-prints and see what we can minimize.
Barring comments from peers about riding my electric razor, it takes me less time to get into work on the e-bike versus driving. I also realized that I don't really need my SUV to cut through downtown and travel a wopping 6.5km (4 miles) to work. Rather than spending hundreds of dollars a month in gas, it now costs me about $5/mnth in electricity to charge the bike. In discussions with colleagues, they are also now starting to question the feasibility using an e-bike. I don't know how many will actually make the leap, but at least they are aware of this alternative technology.
So, why I am telling you about my e-bike instead of server virtualization or systems management? Because downsizing in the datacenter is also starting to become front-of-mind to a larger group of IT staff (and the lines of business that drive IT). The general attitudes are changing and going "green" (or lightening our eco-load) isn't perceived as a tree-hugging activity anymore.
For years, we used to have lots of older Sun servers (E4000's, V220's) along with a host of other platforms used for development. The cost of power consumption (and the corresponding air conditioning) was never in our minds. When the management of the building our office is in decided to install electric meters on a per-tenant basis and start billing usage; well, let's just say power consumption became front-of-mind! We couldn't believe how much juice a few hundred servers sucked up -- as food for thought, data centers create almost 2% of global CO2 emissions. We have agressively turned off the older Sun servers and migrated to their new Niagara platforms and we are actively virtualizing our x86 infrastructure using VMware.
The power consumption mindset has manifested itself in a different way in the telco world. Because the telco facilities manager who was responsible for all the switches also bore the cost of the power consumed, most vendors in the telco space engineered their products to be low power consuming. This is unlike regular IT, whereby the "business," which is the prime buyer of technology to solve business problems, was divorced from the cost of power to drive their computing platforms. Nortel has accidentally stumbled on a green play in that most of their technology was designed to be low power (from their telco background).
Back to consolidation, we are taking the virtualization program on VMware even further than simply consolidating physical systems into virtualized ones. We're working on technology to identify workloads that can be offlined or VMotion'd to core servers during low-usage periods and then subsequently idle the physical systems that contained the instances. For example, in our development lab environment, QA and Support require hundreds of instances for testing and simulating. When staff go home at night, about 90% of these instances are not required. It would be ideal to be able to move the workloads of the active 10% onto one or two physical systems and then shut-down (or go into low-power mode) the rest of the physical infrastructure that supported the active 90%. When people start coming in in the morning the systems and instances would then be brought back to life.
The long term savings for power and HVAC of being able to quiesce off-hours workloads is potentially huge.
So, let's take a look at our carbon foot-prints and see what we can minimize.
Labels: virtualization vmware
