June, 2009

Yahoo! to reportedly turn data center 10 degrees for better cooling

The designs for a new Yahoo! data center in western New York have changed - by 10 degrees.

The engineering firm for the future 180,000-square-foot facility told local planning officials in Lockport, N.Y., that it was changing its design plans by 10 degrees to improve cooling. This according to Orest P. Ciolko of the Wendel Duchscherer engineering firm.

“That has to do with the prevailing winds during the months we need cooling,” Ciolko told The Buffalo News. Ciolko said that computer modeling done by Yahoo!’s designers “realigned the pods so the prevailing winds will blow directly into louvers on the sides of the buildings,” according to the story.

Apple to reportedly build $1 billion data center in Maiden, N.C.

Apple will reportedly build its huge new East Coast data center in Maiden, N.C., according to local media and Data Center Knowledge.

According to the reports, the facility will be built in Maiden, N.C., a small town of about 3,300 people in the western part of the state, about an hour north of Charlotte. The $1 billion price tag is supposedly what Apple’s investment will be over the course of nine years, and the facility is expected to employ at least 50 full-time employees. The North Carolina Department of Commerce estimates that the data center will create more than 3,000 jobs total, many of them related to facility construction.

Microsoft hires Yahoo data center exec

Microsoft recently hired Kevin Timmons to lead Microsoft Global Foundation Services (GFS), the company’s data center services organization. From Microsoft’s data center blog:

Kevin brings a wealth of knowledge and passion in this space, most recently serving as vice president of Operations at Yahoo!, where he led the build-out of their data centers and infrastructure. Before that he was a director of Operations at GeoCities, and prior to that he served as a senior software engineer at Marconi Dynamics.

Kevin is known as a hands-on leader with a great grasp on the issues in his field and a keen interest in increasing energy efficiency. One of the key ways he has approached that challenge was by closely measuring efficiency at each data center and using PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) as a key metric—a strategy that helped build more efficient data centers.

Timmons was hired to replace Mike Manos, who left Microsoft earlier this year to join data center real estate company Digital Realty Trust.

CRG West changes name to CoreSite — a Carlyle Company

Data center colocation provider CRG West changed its name to CoreSite — a Carlyle Company this week. CoreSite Senior Vice President David Dunn said the company changed the name to reflect its more unified culture, and to better identify with its parent company. Dunn said the company plans to continue to build efficient data centers that meet the needs of a majority of its customers, which are primarily Uptime Tier 3 facilities designed for concurrent maintainability.

New York Times Magazine story on data centers

The New York Times Magazine this weekend will have a story on the data center industry. The story, “Data Center Overload,” is already online.

Major sources in the article include Michael Manos, the former data center pro at Microsoft who is now at Digital Realty Trust, as well as Ken Brill from The Uptime Institute. The author also spoke to Chris Crosby from Digital Realty Trust, Jonathan Koomey, the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory scientist who wrote the study a couple years ago on data center energy consumption, and other sources from Microsoft.

The only issue with the story I have is the author seems to equate the cloud with all data center infrastructure, which isn’t the case. Other than that, it’s a pretty good overview of the industry.

EPA releases documents on Energy Star for storage

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has now started down the road to developing an Energy Star spec for storage equipment. Late last month, the EPA released the first version of its Energy Star spec for servers, and it continues to work on making enterprise data centers more efficient. (At least for now, it seems that most data center managers are indifferent to Energy Star for servers.)

This week the EPA released a framework document for Energy Star storage equipment. Among other things, it looks like the spec will cover direct attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS) and storage attached network (SAN), hard disk, tape, optical, solid state, hybrid storage, and bladed storage. The EPA has a dedicated Energy Star site for storage if you want to check it out.

Energy Star for servers: Unexpected impact on data center efficiency

This blog post was written by SearchDataCenter.com contributer Julius Neudorfer.

It’s out! After several years, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released the first version of the Energy Star specification for servers. Now, how fast can we adapt?

It was created through a solid collaborative effort between government and major equipment vendors. The spec addresses many areas of power usage and waste in the power supply (and redundant power supplies) for servers. Until now, there has been no standard for server power supply efficiency — the existing Energy Star program covered PCs but exempted servers. Most server manufactures have been voluntarily improving their power supply and server energy efficiency, but few published their complete specifications. The spec also addressed standby power and efficiency at less than full load. In fact, it calls for a minimum of 85% efficiency at 50% of rated load, and 82% at only 20% of rated maximum. This is an extremely important step forward, since many servers normally run with dual power supplies, each one only loaded at 20-30% of its maximum rating due to load sharing (under 2N, they normally never operate above 50%). The spec also calls for the second (redundant) power supply to have a static loss of 20 W or less. This is a major improvement to the fixed losses found in typical servers with dual power supplies.

The spec covers more than just power supplies. It even limits the idle power of hard drives to 8 W and memory to only 2 W per gigabyte. (Note: There are some limitations on this, but is part of the requirements.)

Power management is required! Moreover, the spec mandates that idle servers must draw much less power than existing servers and that power management must be enabled when shipped. Until now, most manufacturers shipped servers with the power management disabled, and most IT shops never used or chose not to enable it. In fact, the Energy Star spec calls for a base server with one CPU to draw only 55 W at idle. This is about one-third or less of the typical single CPU server, which can draw 150-200 W at idle.

However, the spec excludes blade servers! Due to the complexity of blade chassis, power supply options and server blades from different vendors, this first standard wisely decided not to further delay the release date to include blade servers. (This is still being worked on and is expected to be addressed later this year.)

I predict the specification will have unexpected effects on data center efficiency in the future. While at first blush all this should save energy in the data center, this is just the first of many mandated server and IT equipment energy-efficiency regulations that will impact the relatively flat power curve of data centers. Until recently, most servers and IT equipment drew a substantial amount of the maximum power, even while idle. As these new servers begin to replace older equipment, it will begin to be felt and seen in the IT power load, which will vary much more widely that it does today. This means the UPS and cooling loads will become much more dynamic and will require more responsive, scalable infrastructure systems to operate efficiently (on demand) at peak power and cooling loads as well as low loads.

The data center infrastructure of the future will need to be responsive to continuous and rapid changes in power demands and especially to moving and changing cooling loads, as IT equipment powers up and down in different areas of the floor. As this new paradigm evolves, The “smart” data center of the future will use advanced power management systems to interactively broker and negotiate power requests (and perhaps charges and rates) from IT equipment to the UPS, intelligent PDUs and, most importantly, intelligent cooling systems, which will need to adapt to varying heat loads while trying to operating efficiently.

Stay tuned as this specification develops. As they say in the auto business, “Your actual mileage may vary”

Data center pro Michael Manos draws a comic strip, so I do too

Michael Manos, the former data center pro at Microsoft who is now at Digital Realty Trust, just wrote a blog admitting his childhood dream of being a comic strip artist. So he gives it a try here. It’s data center related:

Not bad, although I don’t think Manos would be offended if I told him he should keep his day job. Actually, Manos inspired me to do one of my own. Here goes (mine isn’t data center related, but it’s in color!):

CA to buy some Cassatt assets

Last month we reported that Cassatt Corp., a data center energy management software company, was nearing bankruptcy. The CEO said they had been unsuccessful in finding any suitors.

That has changed, as CA announced this morning that it would buy some of Cassatt’s assets, including patents, technology and staff. According to the CA press release:

Cassatt’s Rob Gingell, executive vice president of Product Development and Chief Technology Officer, and Steve Oberlin, Chief Scientist and co-founder, have joined CA, along with their team of developers, engineers, and other key employees. In addition, CA has acquired several Cassatt patents and patent applications, as well as other intellectual property.

Cassatt’s founder and CEO Bill Coleman will not be moving to CA — it’s unclear why.

Cassatt made its name by selling software that controlled a server’s power consumption by putting it to sleep when it wasn’t processing any work, though it was trying to also make a name for itself in the cloud computing space. Just yesterday we wrote about Cassatt’s recent user survey on data center energy efficiency, which had some bright points and sore spots.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. It will be interesting to see whether CA will incorporate the server sleeping technology into its own systems management software, but from the looks of the press release, it seems like CA will use the technology mostly to push some kind of cloud- or utility-based computing infrastructure. Our guess is that CA will probably run into the same issues as Cassatt did if they try to encourage users to shut down unused servers. The mentality against it within IT is just too strong. We’ll see.

Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff has a piece on the deal, going into some detail about why he thinks Cassatt was doomed — mainly because it was a small company trying to sell cutting-edge software to big companies. Not often is that a recipe for success:

Automation technologies such as Cassatt’s address very real problems. But they’re tough for a small company to sell for a couple of reasons.

The first is that they remain on the leading edge of the adoption curve. Large IT departments are indeed handing off more and more operations to their management software. But relinquishing control of data center operations has long been a slow and incremental process.

The second is that automation software is primarily interesting at large scale. If you only have 10 servers, you probably don’t feel a pressing need to automate. It’s when you have a thousand servers and you can’t run things manually any longer that you are most driven to turn to software for help.

But adopting a management platform for large swaths of a data center is a big commitment and requires a level of trust that enterprises are more likely to place in a CA, Hewlett-Packard, or IBM than they are in a start-up–however great the products.

Jay Fry, a Cassatt marketing guy, weighs in on the CA-Cassatt deal, addressing Haff’s points by saying that an acquisition by CA makes adoption of Cassatt’s technologies by large companies more likely. Unlike Coleman, Fry will be moving over to CA.

Cassatt survey on data center efficiency: Some great findings

Data center power management software and cloud computing company Cassatt Corp. has a great survey out now on users’ perceptions of data center efficiency. What makes the survey especially powerful is it’s in its second year, so it can be compared to last year.

Jay Fry from Cassatt has a couple blog posts on the survey, and takes a detailed look at how the results this year differ from last year (check out our own report on Cassatt’s survey last year). I won’t go into all the details of the posts, each of which are worth your time to read, but here’s a quick bullet list on some of the findings:

Good

• More companies have a corporate “green” initiative
• More people know how efficient their data center is, and are measuring it
• More companies have a data center efficiency program in progress
• The IT/facilities gap is shrinking

Bad

• Fewer companies can justify shutting off servers when they’re not being used
• Users are still going primarily to vendors to get information on data center efficiency (as opposed to the media or industry groups like The Green Grid and The Uptime Institute)

Check out Fry’s first post and second post for all the details.