Capacity Planning

HP’s energy efficiency crusade to control server, data center power

A few Hewlett Packard (HP) executives visited with me yesterday to discuss their Green data center mission - and surprisingly, they admit that it doesn’t always mean using HP hardware.

They started off our meeting with a discussion about new and existing server power control tools, which I’m not convinced many IT admins actually take advantage of.

HP’s new Dynamic Power Capping tool within Insight Power Manager lets IT set power caps on HP servers based on peak load trends to prevent over-provisioning of power. The cap can be set on single servers or on an entire chassis of blade servers, and can also be based on user-defined policies, according to HP’s VP of Enterprise Server and Storage Infrastructure Software Mark Linesch.

HP’s ProLiant servers shipped within the past few years already have the hardware for this feature baked into them, so ProLiant users need only do a firmware upgrade to add the Dynamic Power Capping feature, Linesch said.

“HP has invested a huge amount of money in green technology not just for the sake of being green. It has very practical implications that save companies significant amounts of money,” Linesch said.

Other companies offer power capping features on their servers as well, including IBM. IT can set a power cap for IBM servers and IBM BladeCenter systems via Active Energy Manager firmware, when the firmware supports capping.

These tools sound great, but I question whether or not power capping features are actually being used in data centers. I’d like to hear from users about this; power control features have existed on servers for many years, but does anyone use them? Is a tool like HP’s Dynamic Power Capping a viable option for virtualized servers?

HP’s execs also told me about their vendor-neutral data center efficiency consultancy services. Since HP’s acquisition of EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc. a year ago this month, HP  has offered vendor agnostic consulting services to data centers to help them (for a fee) measure energy efficiency, without any pressure to use HP equipment, said Bill Kosik, energy and sustainability director of HP’s EYP Mission Critical Facilities group.

“That was actually part of the deal when we were acquired; we wanted to stay vendor neutral and we have been able to do that,” Kosik said.

So far, HP’s EYP group has performed consultancy work (including thermal mapping and energy analysis) for about 30 data centers that are either on the brink of a major power consumption dilemna or in a transition phase and need help planning, designing and developing their data center, Kosik said.

On November 3, HP announced new EYP services packaged in a tidy bundle, as vendors love to do, called HP Energy Efficiency Design and Analysis Services, which includes energy efficiency analysis and design services that help data centers meet compliance regulations like those from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).

And of course, HP isn’t the only company offering  data center efficiency software and services to data centers these days. The list is long, which is great for consumers.

Eight reasons data center managers should thank Wall Street

Earlier this week I spoke with Rob Gardos, the CEO of the New York-based IT automation company GridApp Systems, about his paper “Eight Reasons Data Center Managers should thank Wall Street for the Financial Meltdown.”

As a reporter, I am keenly aware that when it comes to spinning crap into silk, product vendors are pros. So I was pretty skeptical when I saw the title of his paper.

So I asked Gardos to explain why in the world data center managers should thank anyone for the economic cesspool in which they now exist.

For starters, companies have had to reduce their head count because of the economy, so they have half the IT staff to do the same amount of work, he said.

And this is good?

Well, no, but data centers can’t have servers failing left and right and unorganized systems when there are fewer people to manage the issues. “This meltdown has accelerated the path to something dramatically more efficient,” Gardos said. “People are coming up with a new paradigm and are finding ways to improve their systems, because they have to. People are looking at how to minimize costs and how to cut down on tasks that don’t add value to the organization.”

Now that it is time to tighten ship, Gardos said data centers are doing things that will result in long-term benefits:

1.  Reducing costs, energy consumption and waste. Businesses have to find ways to minimize energy costs in the data center, reduce overspending on compliance efforts and automate time-consuming tasks.

2. Core data center priorities. IT professionals have seen the true centrality of product and project performance to company competitiveness. The downturn is to thank for the newfound clarity and redefined priorities.

3. Frugality. Businesses are forced to check line items and cut frivolous spending. This nuisance is a blessing in disguise and will improve spending for years to come.
4. Innovation. IT decision makers and managers have put their heads together to improve efficiency, productivity and competitiveness. This trial-by-fire brainstorming cbreathe new life into companies.

5. Cultivating talent. This includes talent. There is a surplus of once untouchable and highly qualified IT professionals swimming around. IT managers can beef up their staff for less.

6. Green IT. Ideas for operational savings have actually provoked businesses to engage in greening techniques. Many companies will emerge with lowered costs and a greener data center.

7. Competitiveness. Businesses are learning to do more with less, and those habits will continue after the crisis and improve competitiveness in times of prosperity.

8. Long-term benefits. Things are tight now but will the downturn actually spur budget increases in the post-short term for projects that have been placed on the backburner? Lessons learned may actually induce additional spending on virtualization, automation and other cost-savings initiatives.

Of course, it should be noted here that GridApp provides data center automation equipment and would probably love to see data centers using its tools, but Gardos made an effort to remain vendor neutral during our discussion.

“It is clear that infrastructure management and automation will drive efficiency forward – -things like [IT automation software company] BladeLogic make a lot of sense when there are fewer employees to do the work,” Gardos said. “Companies have to change their processes to do more with fewer people, and get more value out of the people the company has.”

He made some good points , and I wonder how many companies now lay off employees only to find themselves buying expensive software to automate the tasks their staff once performed. Seems likely that the data center automation market could ultimately benefit from these hard economic times.

Data Center efficiency tips and tricks from Data Center Decisions

The overarching theme of the Data Center Decisions conference in Chicago last week was energy; how much data centers use, how much they pay for it, and how much they could be saving. 

The keynote addresses on both days of the conference, October 24 & 24, covered data center efficiency at length, with plenty of tips and resources to help data centers cut back on power consumption, though it appears that not many people are taking the necessary measures to reduce consumption. Because of this, government plans to step in and mandate power saving measures to prevent future climate change.

As awful as this sounds, government intervention is a necessary measure at this point, because facility spending has increased tremendously over the past two years with no end in sight, and with all of this additional compute capacity, the outlook for the environment is grim.

The energy required to power and cool a single server emits four tons of greenhouse gases, so by 2012, data centers worldwide will exceed greenhouse gas emissions of the airline industry, according to Ken Brill, President and Executive Director for the Uptime Institute, who gave a keynote address called “Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency” on October 24 based on the McKinsey / Uptime Institute report.

So, why has data center power consumption spun out of control? In addition to the increasing demands from Web 2.0, 80% of today’s compute demand is performed on distributed systems with only 5% to 20% utilization rates, whereas before 1980, mainframes were used, and at much higher utilization rates, Brill said.

The way to reverse the trend sounds easy enough; use virtualization to consolidate systems and increase server utilization rates, and also kill comatose servers.

Simple as these steps sound, it can be difficult to do when you don’t keep track of servers to know their utilization rates, Brill said. In this case, implementing a formal de-commissioning program using ITIL to document, bill back and audit the systems is a first step. 

“If we want to become energy efficient we have to become better engineers,” Brill said.

Other measures that can make a major impact are correctly setting the cooling unit set point, shutting off humidification and de-humidification functions, implementing hot aisle/cold aisle containment, turning off unneeded cooling units, and if possible, increasing eco-friendly water side cooling, Brill said.

Data centers that are adding hardware should make an effort to buy efficient power supplies and hardware, which all the major vendors offer, and rightsize memory to avoid using excess power, Brill said

If your asking yourself who in IT has enough extra time to do all of these things, Brill had a suggestion for that, too; appoint an “Energy Czar” - someone who cares about the environment and wasting power - to make sure the data center facilities and operations are as efficient as possible.

Of course, the Energy Czar could also get a bonus here and there for lowering the company power bills, which most certainly will happen when even some of the above measures are implemented.

Companies can also use efficiency software tools or hire outside consultants to help increase energy efficiency, and there are plenty of choices today.

Unisys updates server with six-core Intel Xeon, enhances services

Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys Corp. announced its new ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server using Intel Xeon six-core processors (Dunnington), which Intel also announced today; along with new business assurance services and software in the Unisys Infrastructure Management Suite.

Unisys’ new ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server is based on the new six-core Intel Xeon processor 7400 series. It has 16 sockets providing up to 96 processor cores. According to Unisys, the 7600R is designed for database and online transaction processing environments, large-scale consolidation and virtualization initiatives and business intelligence deployments with Microsoft SQL Server.

Model 7600R can support consolidation of 64 SQL Server databases into a single four-socket, six-core Xeon processor configuration – with 24 total processor cores – which Unisys claims is better than a commodity server farm of 64 dual-socket, single-core Xeon processor servers with 128 total processor cores, while using less disk and providing better response times.

The new server also supports VMware ESX Server and Microsoft Hyper-V, and supports dynamic partitioning so users can add more processor, memory and I/O resources on the fly without disrupting system operations. Unisys plans to introduce secure partitioning in the first half of 2009, which provides partitioning capabilities at the processor core level.

Prices for the ES7000 Model 7600R range from $26,430 to $135,000. Unisys will exhibit the ES7000 Model 7600R at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, Sept. 15-18.

Unisys business services
Unisys also announced new Business Assurance Services that help companies evaluate the cost and benefits of disaster recovery products, reduce the time it takes to deploy the best ones and reduce operational costs by improving resource utilization.

“We are vendor-agnostic and will implement whichever technology is best for the client. It could be a Unisys product, or it could be from another vendor,” said Jody Little, vice president of solutions and services at Unisys.

The Unisys Business Assurance Services, using discovery processes and tools developed with support from Unisys partner GlassHouse Technologies, include the following:

• Unisys Disaster Recovery Architecture Service, which provides a methodology to build application and data disaster recovery capabilities.
• Unisys Backup Modernization Service, which helps clients select new technologies and services to support backup environments at both core and remote sites.
• Unisys Data Protection for Backup Service, which helps clients improve backup and restore operations for business information, reducing costs by improving utilization of assets. Unisys experts also make vendor-independent recommendations and create a prioritized action plan

Unisys has also added new management software components to its Infrastructure Management Suite, which automates and orchestrates management of a real-time IT infrastructure. More information can be found on the Unisys website.

IBM BladeCenter servers now shipping in ICE Cube

Rackable Systems, Inc. entered into an agreement with IBM to offer IBM’s BladeCenter servers inside its ICE Cube modular data centers.

As part of this agreement, IBM BladeCenter will be the only blade server platform available for custom ICE Cubes. Prior to this agreement, Rackable’s containerized data centers only supported Rackable’s own server hardware.

IBM also started offering its own containerized data centers recently, as did Hewlett Packard with its version, called POD. Unlike most containerized data center offerings, HP is letting customers fill the POD with servers from any vendor - IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems, or otherwise.

There are some other vendor neutral containerized data centers, like American Power Conversion (APC)’s InfraStruXure Express and Verari Systems Inc.’s Forest, though Verari does push customers to use its proprietary blade servers, a spokesperson said.

Effective today, Rackable’s ICE Cube modular data center will be outfitted with IBM BladeCenter T or HT systems, which are NEBS-3/ETSI-compliant, meaning they’re certified for use in telecommunications environments and carrier facilities.

The ICE Cube is available in 20 or 40 foot container sizes. BladeCenter-specific configurations of ICE Cube can reach densities up to 1,344 dual socket, Quad core Intel Xeon blades, or 672 quad socket, dual core AMD Opteron blades.

Zimory testing data center resource trading marketplace

Zimory, a spin-off of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, the research and development unit of Deutsche Telekom AG in Berlin, Germany, is testing a global trading platform to exchange data center resources on-demand via the Internet.

The Zimory Marketplace is basically a data center resource trading platform where users can buy and sell server resources and Virtual Machines (VMs). The company claims to be the first to introduce and operate an international trading platform to exchange data center resources.

The marketplace sounds like a great idea for data centers that experience workload surges  and need extra capacity on-demand, and data centers with underutilized servers can sell or rent their extra capacity to re-coup some power costs.

Zimory software

The Zimory software stack has three levels of operation:

• Zimory Host is the basic entity of a Zimory infrastructure. It is installed on each server which then becomes a part of a Zimory network of computing resources.
• Zimory Manager allows the user to oversee and manage an unlimited number of physical and virtual servers with Zimory Host installed and is available in a Zimory network. Zimory Manager ships with a web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI).
• Zimory Marketplace is the hub of the Zimory network and collects information about all available server resources and their status.

Servers having Zimory Host or Zimory Manager installed reside behind the Firewall within the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) of a data center, while Zimory Marketplace is located outside of the DMZ. All three of them interact with each other via standard HTTP.

Installing and using Zimory

To create a network of Zimory-enabled servers, the data center administrator downloads and burns the freely available Zimory Live CD image to boot each of the servers which is supposed to advertise their resources within the Zimory infrastructure. The administrator could also use a network bootable live image (also freely available) from Zimory. Both approaches will automatically turn a virtual server into a Zimory-enabled server. The installation process is almost identical for Zimory Manager.

Inside of Zimory Manager, the administrator can configure the available data center resources for direct online outsourcing and trading on Zimory Marketplace, and define limites to the available resources, as well as a pricing scheme (flat fee or pay-per-use).

For instance, the administrator can specify a particular group of Zimory-enabled servers or just parts of such a server for sale to third parties on Zimory Marketplace. Another option would be to rent remaining resources of a server with, say, less than 10% utilization.

Zimory in action

Before a workload peak occurs, systems in Zimory are running fine and the additional systems for load balancing are stored as VMs in Zimory Manager.

When an expected or unexpected load peak occurs, the IT administrator clicks on to Zimory Marketplace through Zimory Manager and searches for appropriate server resources. After finding those resources, she starts the VMs for load-balancing from within Zimory Manager.

The software applications contained in the newly deployed VMs will connect to the load-balancer of the core systems and start to take over parts of the workload. After the peak is finished the system will shut down the VMs automatically.

Of course, this can also be automated. An administrator can pre-define the thresholds for when the load is to be taken over by servers on the Zimory Marketplace.

The company plans to start beta testing soon and invites interested sellers, and purchasers, of virtualised capacity to register their interest on the Zimory website.

Symantec data center guru talks about riding herd on IT assets and the challenge of chargeback

I recently spoke with Kenneth Gonzalez, leader of Symantec’s Data Center Transformation Services team about how data center managers can get rogue business units to give up their crappy old servers and how to make data center costs explicit to internal end users. This is an excerpt of that conversation.

In a recent data center paper you produced, you talk about decommissioning legacy servers to optimize data centers. So how do you get rid of them? Experts estimate that up to 30% of the servers in a given data center aren’t doing any work. It seems like business units like to hang onto these things, putting them under desks, in the Test-Dev lab., or in closets.

Ken Gonzalez: Asset management is a huge challenge for IT. It ends up being a real manual exercise because organizations grow by accretion. Going back to find what you have is so overwhelming, very few organizations ever start. The scope is too huge. It requires rigor and operating practices a lot of organizations aren’t willing to take on with a vengeance.

This is an asset management problem. IT needs to know where the assets are going when they unplug them. Are they being sent to an organization to responsibly dispose of the equipment? IT managers that don’t track this could be cutting their own throats. You should be able to bring in a more space saving, energy efficient asset in its place. The IT team needs to be responsible for having positive control over the assets under its charge.

In order to get people to change behavior, it often boils down to money, showing users how much it costs to deliver an IT service. Some folks, like The Uptime Institute and Vernon Turner at IDC have recommended chargeback. Does that work in these situations?

Gonzalez: Chargeback is one model, but a lot of organizations are against trying it. Many organizations don’t know how to price it. Applications aren’t one size fits all. Some applications don’t do a whole lot, but use a lot of resources. Organizations are reticent about coming up with a cost model.

The notion of a service catalogue is pretty popular — to be able to charge what it costs to deliver a service. The intent of the service catalogue would be to clearly communicate to your customer, what services you can provide and the most effective way for you to deliver them. You produce a standard profile of the services you offer. If there is something a customer needs that doesn’t fit the standard catalogue, you have to go through someone to see what resources the project will take. You expose the detail to the customer and there is a forecasting and capacity planning benefit that comes with that approach.

If the demand for power and computing resources continues to outstrip IT’s ability to provide capacity in a cost effective way, are companies going to turn to cloud computing and other outsourced options?

Gonzalez: I think that is an important component that private organizations are going to have to confront at some point. Some services are going to have to move into the cloud, either software as a service (SaaS) or infrastructure as a service. Whether or not a company moves an application into the cloud will primarily revolve around the criticality of the services and the security of the data, how long it would take to recover it if something happened. The issues that need to be worked through now are business issues. Dealing with the technical issues is putting the cart before the horse.

Right now we’re just getting an initial level of awareness. You could call it “Utility Computing Part 2.”

Do you have a data center question or comment for Ken? Leave a comment.