Postcards from TelaData's Convergence Conference

I attended and presented at TelaData's Data Center "Convergence" conference yesterday, and had the opportunity to chat with a number of Facilities and IT Operations managers for really big companies. Over 300 folks were at the event, and I bet 2/3 of them were facilities managers looking for an edge to improve the efficiency (and reduce the cost) of building/maintaining large data centers.

Bob Brown, TelaData's CEO offered that the theme of "convergence" applied to 3 areas:

• Technology Convergence as it applies to voice, video & data all converging to a IP-based standards, and what the implications are on data center build-out, power, cabling, etc.
• Organization Convergence - the need/requirement that IT and Facilities cooperate and drive new efficiencies; without this cooperation, breakthrough efficiencies and cost reductions just aren't possible
• Automation convergence, e.g. building/facilities automation standards (like BACnet) interoperating with IT automation (power control, distribution)
  

One of the highlights was an end-of-day panel with Robert Aldrich (Cisco - Green Data Center solutions), Bill Weihl (Google's "Energy Czar"), and Dean Nelson (Sun's Global lab & data center services person). The panel was congenial, but it was clear that the companies approach "greenness" from slightly different perspectives:

• Google made it clear that all employees are encouraged to look at Total Cost of Ownership for every project they pursue; they encourage tradeoffs from everyone, esp. between Facilities, operations and IT. It's a numbers game, which benefits the company overall.
  
• Cisco operates huge data centers as well - they're also numerically driven, and seem focussed on deriving metrics and standards around energy use - before they implement new programs/policies
• Sun also drove home the need for IT & Facilities to interact (Dean brought his Facilities counterpart along) and really emphasized that one of the massive benefits of efficient IT is to "give back" real estate to the company. Real estate is the 2nd largest cost to a company (next to payroll) and this has made a huge impact on Sun's margin and bottom line.

A number of talks on the "energy efficiency" track (including mine) dealt with power control at the server level. During our presentations, Cassatt, Server Technology, PowerAssure and VMware all alluded to various approaches to actively managing server power status. Server Tech took a clearly Facilities-minded approach to "Load Shedding" in emergency conditions; PowerAssure takes a managed-services approach, and VMware spoke to future product capabilities. Cassatt (from my biased perspective) had the best holistic and cross-platform story for actively managing server power status across an enterprise.

What was clear from conversations with folks who attended was that there still a rift between facilities managers and IT. For there to be any meaningful progress in data center efficiency, there had to be shared corporate and economic goals for both. And this had to start at the CFO level (for example).

More Leading Indicators for Cloud Computing

Two more companies I've recently come across that will help accelerate this model: RightScale, essentially brokers AWS infrastructure, while providing a easier-to-use "dashboard, and FlexiScale, a UK-based company, that's trying to take-on Amazon's web services at its own game. (I guess you need to have the word "scale" in your name nowadays...)

• RightScale provides a platform and consulting services that enable companies to create scalable web solutions running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that are reliable, easy to manage, and cost less. The RightScale dashboard saves time in maintaining, managing and monitoring all AWS activities, while RightGrid coordinates the auto-scaling of servers according to usage load. The RightImage library provides pre-built installation templates for common software stacks, and RightScale DeltaSets make it easy to customize and manage modifications to machine images. Together with Amazon Elastic Compute CloudAmazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) — RightScale enables a next-generation platform for deploying highly scalable web applications.
  
• FlexiScale's claims:
• Provisioning & Scalability:Additional servers can be launched and load-balanced in <1 style="font-weight: bold;">
• Flexibility:OS agnostic - we support MS Server and all common versions of Linux; Clone a server image and re-use for another test or production server; Policy engine based load-balancing between physical servers
• Self-service via Control Panel or API:Provisioning of Virtual Dedicated Servers; Start, stop and delete Virtual Dedicated Servers; Resize memory and storage
• Quality of Service: Fully monitored system - network, storage and servers; Fully automated HW recovery;Flexible snapshot based backups;Secure - each customer has their own VLAN and their own virtual disks
• Pricing: No subscription fees and no minimum term contract;Simple to understand utility pay-as-you-go pricing model with no catches;Billing module that lets customers see transparently what resources they have been using

I'm sure we'll be seeing more competitors like these in the coming months.

Is Cloud Computing Mainstream?

Well, not yet. But by now you've probably heard of the deal between IBM and Google to provide an initial 6 universities (University of Washington in Seattle, Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley and University of Maryland) with hardware to allow students to program to the cloud.

But this just accelerates my prediction that the concept of "cloud computing" will quickly mature. Folks are beta-testing Amazon's (somewhat fault-prone) EC2 and S3, upon-which anything from components (i.e. queuing services) to entire website storage, can be hosted.

So now, students will be educated in this form of programming, and go into industry with a new level of comfort with this paradigm. This will surely turn the hosting market on its ear in 1-2 years.

Obstacles to Greener Computing

In a post on Greenbiz.com, Emerson Network Power, the Data Center Users Group (a Emerson-sponsored organization), the EPA and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs conducted a survey showing that at least 65 percent of IT managers are using at least some form of energy efficiency practices to reduce costs and lower their environmental impact.

The obstacles they found to achieving such efficiencies include:

• 40% - lack of encouragement from top management
  
• 36% - widespread unawareness of the cost/benefit relationship of energy efficiency
  
• 35% - enterprises not wanting to risk reliability
  
• 33% - lack of communication between IT and facilities departments
  

There were some other interesting statistics on energy consumption in the data center:

• 60% of the data center electrical load is used to power IT equipment:
  - 56% of that being used to power servers,
  - 27% for storage
  - 19% for network equipment

Some other interesting random data points:

• 41 % of survey respondents said their data center electrical usage is not metered separately from the rest of their facilities.
• 81% of operators believe that by 2012 they will need additional data center capacity, despite the fact that 64 percent have built or upgraded their data center in the last five years.
• 27% of respondents believe that despite consolidation and the use of virtualization, their server inventory will increase throughout the next five years.

My big takeaways from this: (1) There's still a big awareness & organizational rift between Facilities & IT Operations, and (2) that efficiencies still stink, and (3) data centers will still grow, as will the energy problem.

A Special PodCast on Active Power Management

Last week I teamed-up with our partner BearingPoint to record a brief overview of Active Power Management: Your On-Ramp to Utility Computing. BearingPoint's Managing Director of Financial Services Infrastructure Solutions joined me to discuss what is meant by Utility Computing. We covered how BearingPoint is organized to help customers implement this type of solution, how it changes the economics and operations of computing, and simple places to start for any medium-to-large enterprise.

One of the best places to begin using automation to optimize IT resource consumption is Active Power Management, i.e. applying policy and software-aware power control, all in a platform-agnostic power optimization scheme. Why ARE your idle machines on if they're not being used?

BTW, there are some other great technology-related BearingPoint Podcasts here too.

The Next Big Thing in data center efficiency: Active Power Management

Tuesday will be a "D'oh" moment for anyone who runs a Data Center and cares about electricity operating costs.

Even the EPA missed this one in their recent Report on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency.

It's Active Power Management: That is, safely and intelligently powering-down unused and/or idle servers, and re-powering them when needed. It's a huge (and obvious) move when you consider that the average server burns-up more than half of its fully-loaded rated power when it's just sitting doing nothing.

Reams have already been written about energy-efficient servers, DC power distribution, improved cooling systems, hot/cold aisles, and of course server consolidation. But they've all missed-the-boat -- until today. And the solution is surprisingly simple.

Regardless of the type of server and type of software, this technology is non-disruptive to the data center. It's also the moral-equivalent to turning off the lights in a room that you're not using. Think of the Thousands of servers that sit idle most of the time in Development/Test, or in a "warm" failover facility.

What's the secret sauce?

• It's the ability to gracefully shut-down software prior to turning off the box, and then ensuring re-start when the box is needed again.
  
• It's the ability to set policies around application importance and interrelationships, and to be able to communicate directly with the software during a power-cycle.
  
• It's the ability to do all of this from a hardware- and software-neutral perspective
• And, it's the ability to do this in a way that will please both IT and facilities
  

The singular superstition about turning-off servers is why data centers have kept every single server in their inventory on all of the time. Until now.

All made possible with Cassatt's leading ability to apply sophisticated optimization technology to any problem in the data center. And don't just believe me. Look at what PG&E, Brocade, and IDC are saying. This should help raise-the-bar for energy-efficiency best-practices in the data center.

Watch this webinar: Leveraging Utility Computing - BearingPoint, & Cassatt

I certainly have to highly-recommend this upcoming CIO-magazine sponsored webinar: Utility Computing: How to Leverage Industry Advances to Optimize Data Center Economics. It's scheduled for September 19, 2:00 PM EDT.

Along with BearingPoint,m I'll be discussing (yes, live and in-person!) what we mean by utility computing, and how the technologies that make "utility computing" possible are available today.

It's more than virtualization. It's about intelligently pooling all HW resources you own today to radically cut operational and capital costs -- and attain a level of agility that current HW/SW models inherently block.

As I've said before, CIOs are doing this already, you just don't know it. Look at Amazon's EC2. Look at Google's infrastructure. Look at Sun's Grid system. It's possible to do with the IT infrastructure you have sitting in your data center today.

What could you do if your total operational cost basis (fully-loaded, everything) was $0.10 per instance-hour for all of your compute services?