The Tech Side of Server Monitoring & Capacity Planning

The days of the big monolithic software stack are quickly fading in my opinion. With open standards, APIs and a little elbow grease we are now able to build solutions that provide far more value than the sum of their parts and at a cost lower than the monolith and on timelines shorter than the monolith.

This is also something that is starting to creep into our every day lives as we use more and more technology in our daily lives and in our homes.

When I built my house a few years ago, I prewired the place for whole home audio, networking and a myriad of other things that were in an effort to provide me with a sort of home technology integration nirvana. Then I realized just how expensive it was going to be for all the high end hardware required to make it all work.

So, for a while I had my speakers wired up to my AV receiver and would have to go to it whenever I wanted music in my bedroom, or any other room. Which as you can imagine was somewhat of a pain.

Next came the Airport Express configuration, where I had an airport express from Apple hooked up to each zone. I could now send music from iTunes to whereever I wanted to. The centralization problem still exists however, I have to go to my computer running iTunes whenever I want to do anything with the music. I got around this by using RDP from my laptop to the computer running iTunes, but it wasn't ideal. I didn't always have my laptop handy and it was impractical to have with me whenever I wanted to fire up some tunes.

Then came the iPod Touch, and a little piece of software called the Signal Server. When you run Signal on your system running iTunes it gives you full control of your iTunes player (including airport express speaker control) from the iTouch over your wifi network. And along came nirvana!

I now have a solution that lets me control the audio throughout my home from a small handheld touchscreen device with full library/catalog access, playback control, volume control, speaker control, everything control!

Just like open standards, api's and elbow grease provide in the datacenter, a selection of components, software and elbow grease allowed me to build out my whole home audio control solution for far less than it would have cost for the high end home audio distribution solutions.

Now being from uptime software, it just wouldn't be right if I didn't have an up.time plug in here somewhere. So here goes. For the sophisticated capacity planning customer who is interested in doing not just capacity planning, but true capacity modelling, up.time coupled with software from Hyperformix provides the user an extremely powerful modelling solution that can be implemented at a cost reduction to the single source systems management and modelling vendors. The right tools for the job!

Labels: integration capacity modelling software tools

My colleague and our fearless CTO Alex Bewley recently wrote about the impact of technology on our environment in his piece titled Reductionist Mindset. There was also an article recently in the New York Times Bits Blog Data Centers Are Becoming Big Polluters, Study Finds discussing how by the year 2020 it is expected that data centers will contribute more greenhouse emissions than the airline industry.

The following quote from the NYT article sums up how until now we have been looking at efficiency within the data center.

For example, computer servers are used at only 6 percent of their capacity on average, while data center facilities as a whole are used at 56 percent of peak performance. In other words, if data centers were hotels, they would be bankrupt and shut down instead of growing like kudzu.

So it is not all doom and gloom. If we can increase the utilization of our infrastructure even nominally, the reduced impact we can as data center operators have on the environment can be significant. Through virtualization (VMware, LDOMs, LPARs, etc) we are now starting to see utilization/efficiency rise on servers to levels that the mainframe days enjoyed.

As the management tools for virtual infrastructure mature, I think that we're going to see more and more capabilities built in around managing data center power and cooling as part of the overall virtualization strategy. Distributed power management and localized cooling, rather than cooling the entire data center. Also as power density rises, centralized cooling will become an increasingly difficult proposition to implement.

Labels: Virtualization Power Environment