March, 2009

Update on AFCOM Data Center World figures

Just now I received a call updating me on the attendance figures from AFCOM’s Data Center World. As it turns out, there were 822 attendees, about 95% of which were end users (that makes about 781 end users, within the 700-800 range I wrote about last week in a post about the AFCOM Data Center World show).

Also, there were 275 exhibiting companies and 345 booths, according to an AFCOM spokesperson. The spokesperson didn’t know how many exhibitor personnel there were. From talking to people from AFCOM and vendors at the show, I heard there were more 900. This makes sense, as it rounds to a little more than 3 people per exhibitor.

I also said in my original post that only one of about a dozen AFCOM board members is an end user. I was wrong. The representatives from Intel and Nortel are data center users that work for vendor companies, and I left them out, so there are actually three end users on the board.

Needless to say, the AFCOM leadership is upset because I said the show was vendor-heavy, but the fact is that it was. Of the 40 educational sessions in four tracks — best practices, data center management, emerging technology, and facilities/greening — 35 were run by vendors or consultants.

In a down economy, I realize there’s a higher chance of there being more vendors than users. But I did hear from users who thought there was too much vendor presence at the show, and not enough end user presence, especially in the educational sessions. I stand by my hope that AFCOM gets more end users to run sessions in future shows.

Multi-tiered data centers

Building a data center with one level of redundancy across the facility might seem foolish to some. Do your Web servers need to have the same uptime as your mainframe?

And expensive, too. Peter Gross, the vice president of critical facilities at Hewlett-Packard who was the CEO of EYP Mission Critical Facilities before HP bought them, said that a Tier 4 data center costs about $3,500 per square foot, while a Tier 1 costs $1,000 per square foot.

“With a 50,000-square-foot data center, the cost of a Tier 4 would be about $180 million,” he said. “But if you could do half at Tier 4 and half at Tier 2, it might cost $140 million. So you could save $40 million right there.”

That is the idea behind a new offering from HP and EYP - the ability to build multi-tiered data centers. Gross said the concept consists of building modular data center blocks, each with their own level of redundancy. You can connect them in different backup power configurations — for example N+1 or 2N — and thus can provision your data center in a more detailed way according to what suits your business.

Though HP is calling it a multi-tier specification, the redundancy definitions won’t have anything to do with The Uptime Institute’s tier classification system, which is the de facto standard on data center reliability. Gross said they’re just using the word “tiers” because that’s what data centers are used to hearing. Although using that word might confuse their potential customers, I think.

Gross also said that the redundancy levels will not be restricted to the four-level system from Uptime. Instead, a customer will tell HP EYP, for example, that it wants a 2% failure probability in the next five years for this portion of the data center, and a 7% failure probability in the next five years for that portion of the facility. Then HP EYP will go off and design a data center to that specification, and (presumably) draw up some kind of contract that solidifies it.

Sorting through data center utility rebates

There’s a good chance that your utility company has an incentive program in place if you boost your data center energy efficiency. But sorting through the programs can be a hassle, and dealing with the back-and-forth with the utility company can as well.

In addition, said Adam Fairbanks, vice president of data center services for Bluestone Energy Services, data center managers have enough on their plate. They’re more concerned with keeping their facilities online, not looking for utility rebates.

Bluestone is a consulting firm that serves as a middleman between data centers and the utility company. It looks to get data centers utility rebates. By coming into the building and doing an audit, Bluestone can determine if there needs to be a more detailed technical assistance study, and then report on how much money you can save by implementing the utility rebate program.

Fairbanks said that utilities will usually pay for half of this assistance study, and in the end, the utility company itself sends the end user a letter detailing how much of a rebate the utility will give if you move forward with energy efficiency measures.

Data center utility rebate programs from Pacific Gas & Electric have made the most headlines in the data center world, but Fairbanks said utilities up and down the East Coast, in the Midwest and on the West Coast offer incentive programs. Not all of them are as specific as PG&E’s, which for example has one specifically for server virtualization projects. Most of them just give a rebate based on how much power you can prove you’ll save through an energy efficiency project.

Is hiring Bluestone or another consultant worth it? It could be by lessening your own headache, and if Bluestone can prove that the utility rebate will save you more than you have to pay Bluestone in the first place. Then again, if you have the in-house expertise and knowledge to do it yourself, go for it. Exploring your utility’s rebate programs is a great way to pick up some extra savings.

Should AFCOM rename it the Data Center Vendor World conference?

Attendance at this year’s spring Data Center World conference was lighter than in past years, which was expected.

The economy has affected turnout at tradeshows this year. Last week I was at the Share mainframe user group conference in Austin, and that had lower attendance as well. Usually Data Center World in Las Vegas brings in the crowds, but that wasn’t the case as much this year.

Vendors I spoke to said traffic was steady, but definitely lighter. I heard that there were 700-800 end users at the show, but more than 900 exhibitor personnel. Whenever the vendor presence is larger than the end user presence, that’s not a good sign. Then again, Data Center World has always had a large vendor turnout, with dozens of booths on the show floor. Which isn’t a bad thing, as long as you’re getting end users to those booths with intentions to buy.

Speaking of vendors, I noticed there were more vendor-led sessions at Data Center World than in past shows. Some of them were good — Richard Sawyer from EYP Mission Critical Facilities (part of HP), for example, gave a great talk on data center staffing — but others were not. Even the keynote by Sun’s chief technology officer Greg Papadopoulos, though very interesting, was seen by some data center users I talked to as a veiled sales pitch for Sun’s cloud computing technology. I will say that I thought Papadopoulos did what he could to make his talk about the cloud computing trend, and not Sun products. But it’s inevitable that end users will feel the way they did when Papadopoulos had slides in his presentation that mentioned Solaris, Java and xVM.

Nathan Montgomery, data center operations manager for Brinks Home Security, told me he went to an all-day tutorial on Monday that was supposed to be about building and expanding your data center. But he said it was more like a vendor “show and tell,” and was upset enough to seek a refund from AFCOM (the tutorials were an extra $200 fee). To AFCOM’s credit, they did refund him that fee.

Even AFCOM’s board of directors is vendor heavy. It has about a dozen members, but only one of them is an end user. The rest are vendors and consultants. So here’s to hoping that AFCOM reaches out more to the end user community. If they can get more of them on the board of directors, maybe that could lead to more of them giving end user-focused sessions, which is what Montgomery and most other users are looking for.

Can you afford data center CFD?

Computational fluid dynamics has become a popular way for data centers to analyze the air flow in their facilities and determine if the cold and hot air is going where it should. But for smaller businesses, CFD is simply out of their price range.

There are different tiers of affordability out there, however. The cheapest I’ve seen is CoolSim, which at its most basic level, costs $7,500 a year. The other two major data center CFD vendors — TileFlow and Future Facilities’ 6Sigma — go for about twice and four times that, respectively.

Another unique aspect of CoolSim is that it’s a client-server, more services-based model. You have a basic desktop application where you build your data center model. Then you export that model to a file and send the file to CoolSim, which crunches the numbers and sends back a report. With TileFlow and Future Facilities, you do the crunching in-house.

“We deliver it as a SaaS model,” said Paul Bemis, president of the Concord, N.H.-based company. “Since it’s client server, you only pay for what you need.”

But the most important aspect of CFD modeling is accuracy, and with a product like CoolSim, there’s a question around whether you get what you pay for. Pete Sacco, president of engineering and consulting firm PTS Data Center Solutions, has said that cheaper CFD modeling tools such as CoolSim simply aren’t as accurate as the Future Facilities product, which his company uses.

Bemis acknowledges that the Future Facilities software encompasses more detailed results, but says that a lot of data centers don’t really need or want that much detail. And obviously he disputes claims that CoolSim results could be inaccurate. But as with any product out there, it’s all about caveat emptor. If you do your due diligence, you can quickly find out for yourself what is the right product for the right price.

Hot aisle cold aisle and chaos air distribution

For many years, hot/cold aisle design has been a de facto standard in data center design. But at least one person thinks that was a temporary — and perhaps sub-premium — fix to the problem, and that’s because of chaos air distribution.

Hot/cold aisle design is the concept off aligning IT equipment racks in rows so that the fronts face the fronts and the backs face the back. That way, cool air can come up through a raised floor or from overhead into the cold aisle, enter the front of the servers to cool them, and then exhaust hot air in the hot aisle. It helps prevent the mixing of hot and cold air, which leads to wasted cooling.

But letting that cold and hot air roam free in the hot and cold aisles leads to unpredictability, said Carl Cottuli, a VP of product development for Wright Line. Like a toddler who needs discipline, air in a data center needs better direction so it doesn’t go off and do whatever it feels like. That’s chaos air distribution.

“The real problem all along was not the arrangement of racks, but reliance on chaos air distribution,” Cottuli said at the AFCOM Data Center World conference in Las Vegas this week.

Cottuli said the solution is to contain your hot or cold aisles to guide the air directly to the servers or out of the room. If you can contain both, all the better.

Now, Cottuli does have a specific interest in this. Wright Line builds and sells server cabinets, ceiling plenums and cold aisle containment products that fight this so-called chaos air distribution. But the idea of hot/cold aisle containment is not Wright Line’s alone — a lot of vendors are selling aisle containment products, and a lot of users have bought these products or built their own custom aisle containment systems.

Sun using SuperNAP data center facility for cloud computing

Sun Microsystems chief technology officer Greg Papadopoulos gave some insight today into Sun’s cloud computing venture while speaking at the AFCOM Data Center World show in Las Vegas.

He said Sun will be use Switch Communications’ SuperNAP facility for some aspects of the infrastructure. Sun made a splash in the cloud computing industry earlier this year, acquiring a company called QLayer that focuses on internal private clouds.

The SuperNAP data center that Sun will be in is built on slab, engineered around overhead cooling and hot-aisle containment. Switch claims power densities around 1,500 per square foot, or about triple the industry standard for air cooling. The hot exhaust air enters the contained hot aisle, rises into a ceiling plenum and circulates outside the IT equipment room through a bunch of huge heat exchangers. Then it recirculates back into the room as cool air.

So it appears that Sun will be using the cloud to provide the cloud.

“We have thousands of nodes and petabytes of storage there,” Papadopolous said.

He added that with Sun entering the cloud computing market, it may have to change its logo from “The network is the computer” to “The network is your computer.”