May 09, 2008

Google's Eric Schmidt on Cloud Computing

Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke recently at IBM's Business Partner Leadership Conference in LA.  Lots of cogent commentary for businesses and consumers about globalization, the changing nature and scale of the web, the myriad of access devices, and the resulting necessity of cloud computing architectures.  As Schmidt said, "It's the story of our lifetime."

Data centers in a box? Skeptics abound.

Microsoft's Mike Manos delivered a keynote at the recent Data Center World spring conference.  Microsoft and Sun are both proponents of packing thousands of servers into "plug and play" 40-foot shipping containers.  Computerworld asked several industry experts what they think of this approach and Manos responds in an article titled
6 reasons why Microsoft's container-based approach to data centers won't work.

April 23, 2008

Web 2.0 Companies - Meet iDataPlex

The Wall Street Journal reports that a new class of servers from IBM called iDataPlex,  designed specifically for the kinds of mega Intel-rack data centers used by Web 2.0 companies, can substantially reduce server costs and deliver more computing capability is less space and with less power required.

The iDataPlex system more than doubles the number of systems that can run in a single IBM rack, uses 40 percent less power while increasing the amount of computing capacity by a factor of five, can be outfitted with a liquid cooled wall on the back of the system to run at "room temperature" with no air conditioning required, and uses industry standard components as well as open source software such as Linux to lower costs.

Early testers include Yahoo Inc.  "Yahoo! relies on ingenuity and technology to reduce our dependence upon energy. Many of our data centers utilize 'green energy' such as passive cooling to reduce our impact," said Laurie Mann, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations, Yahoo!. "We continue to look for ways to maximize our resources. Yahoo! appreciates the direction IBM is moving in with iDataPlex and its commitment to drive greater power efficiency and density in the datacenter."

April 22, 2008

Innovating on Earth Day

IBM recently challenged its employees to participate in a video contest about ways they're innovating with clients, in the workplace and in their homes and communities on the issues of energy and the environment.  Hundreds of videos from 27 countries were submitted.  Here's the winner.  Ten second-prize winners are also posted on YouTube.

April 20, 2008

Virtualization Strategy

With all due credit to Scott Adams.

April 09, 2008

Back to the Future

Remember water-cooled mainframes?  Well, water is still among the best ways to cool large systems.  But now it makes more sense to cool systems with water as close to the heat as possible.  IBM has just announced a new Power Systems UNIX server, the Power 575, nicknamed "Hydro-Cluster," that pipes water to the chip itself, vastly reducing power and cooling requirements.

According to CNET, "A substantial part of the decrease in power consumption is due to a water cooling system that brings in chilled water from the outside, runs it through copper plates located above individual processors to absorb heat, and then draws the water out so it can expel the heat outside of the computer.

By getting rid of heat in this manner, the air conditioning requirements are greatly reduced for the "hydro cluster" 575. Air conditioning can account for roughly half of the power consumed by data centers. Conversely, instead of cutting electricity consumption, IBM, or one of its customers, could squeeze in more computing power into the same room and keep the air conditioning constant."

The new POWER6 "Hydro-Cluster" supercomputer, the Power 575, is designed to solve challenging problems in fields such as energy, aerospace and weather modeling. The  system is another breakthrough in green IT.  In addition to its advance water-cooling, it packs 448 processor cores per rack and delivers nearly five times the performance and more than three times the energy efficiency of its predecessor, IBM's POWER5+™ processor-based p575 supercomputer.

April 04, 2008

Build a Data Center, Heat the Town Pool

That's what a new data center in Zurich, Switzerland will do with its 2,800 megawatts of excess heat - keep swimmers warm by reusing about 90 percent of the electricity needed to run the data center by reclaiming the heat produced, and save 130 tons of CO2 emissions in the process.  This is one of the three latest green data center projects that IBM is building as part of its Project Big Green initiative.

The other two data centers are being built for kika/Leiner, a green furniture company in St. Polten, Austria; and Telecom Egypt in Cairo.

kika/Leiner's data center is a free-standing cube with about 1,000 square feet of IT space that fulfills all state-of-the-art technical security requirements of a data center. It is locked, has no windows, is equipped with an automatic fire-extinguishing system, and is protected against flooding. The data center does not contain any working space and entrance is restricted. Free cooling will be used in cold months, meaning the air conditioning for the data center will come directly from the cold outside air. Only on warm days will the data center be automatically cooled.

The data center features racks with the newest IBM BladeCenter technology. IBM BladeCenter integrates servers, networks, storage and business applications in highly efficient one-inch systems that sit in a rack like books in a shelf.  Hot air is reduced to room temperature by water-cooled heat exchangers attached to the BladeCenter racks. The high density area covers about a third of the data center IT space and, if required, can be extended. Another third of the data center is space for conventional computing servers with low heat emissions. The last third will remain empty for future expansion.

With more than 10 million customers, Telecom Egypt is the country's largest telecom company.  According to Khaled Marmoush, it's CIO, "Telecom Egypt was convinced that IBM was the best choice because of IBM's standards and methodologies and the experience of the IBM team who worked as a trusted consultant.  IBM provided not only the information about data centers that Telecom Egypt was looking for, but also the technologies and services that are used in today's data centers."

March 31, 2008

"It's Too Darned Hot"

More expensive electricity, less access to power, cooling challenges, growing data center demands and innovative solutions.  All of these topics are covered in an overview article by Steve Hamm in the March 20 issue of BusinessWeek, titled "It's Too Darned Hot," which reports on data center advances by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Pacific Gas & Electric, Verizon, Sun and IBM.

There's also a fascinating sidebar story by Hamm titled "IBM: Better Chilling Through Biochemistry" that explains how IBM researcher Bruno Michel in Zurich has developed new ways to cool chips with water shot through thousands of nozzles, much like capillaries in the human body.

In the Alps: Michel of IBM devised a way to cool chips with water jets.

Hamm reports, "IBM researcher Michel is focusing on a seldom-trod territory—where biology and physics meet. Michel, who has a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Zurich, is designing devices that he expects will one day cool chips with a system modeled after the human body. While the processors in server computers are typically cooled with air, these chips are chilled with a liquid delivered through a system similar to the body's capillaries. One of Michel's inventions is a metal cap that fits over a processor and sprays jets of water out of some 50,000 nozzles into microscopic channels etched in the metal. The channels circulate the liquid efficiently and cut the amount of energy required to pump the water."

March 25, 2008

Green your data center and get payback in two years or less

The March issue of Green Business magazine reports in an article title "Get Tech Smart" on the fast ROI from green IT. 

Key excerpts . . .

In the drive to promote energy efficiency and to improve their own bottom lines through innovation and “green” marketing, IT companies are pushing a more environmentally friendly approach to computing, and they’re doing their best to walk the talk as well. The critical hot spot for all this activity is the data centre...“If this room was a data centre, you’d typically be using 10 to 30 times the amount of energy it’s using as an office,” notes Steve Sams, vice-president of global site and facilities services at IBM Corp...
    The statistics vary depending on who you talk to, but everyone agrees that data centres are energy hogs. The problem, according to Sams, is that many businesses are operating without the facts. “If companies consider their data centre as a car, they don’t actually know if their data centre is a Toyota Prius data centre or a Humvee data centre. They don’t know how many miles per gallon that data centre is getting.”...Sams agrees...most CIOs aren’t responsible for their energy bills. “They may only be paying for a tiny fraction of their energy use because they are charged the same amount per square foot as office space,” he says. “Few have looked at their energy bills either, so they lack the facts to make real business decisions.”
    Another challenge Sams points to is clients not understanding the payback. “These aren’t six, 12 or 20-year payback periods,” he stresses. “What we’re finding is that significant improvement is available in all data centres we looked at with payback periods of two years or less. And we typically find that customers are discovering savings in the 20-55 per cent range.”...IBM has done something similar, rationalizing its internal data centre infrastructure in the past decade from 155 host data centres and 31 networks down to one network and 7 data centres. This is saving them $1.5 billion a year in operating costs. The process itself proves a point for the companies’ customers...As Steve Sams notes, there are other tools coming to the market that could take data centre management to a new level by offering greater automation controls for energy use. “Start taking advantage of these so you can set a policy around service levels and energy management, and let the tools start saving you money by automating what it is capable of — moving workloads around, turning off servers that don’t need to be used as part of active energy management.”

March 20, 2008

New Cloud Computing Center in Dublin

NetworkWorld reports on the opening of a new IBM "cloud computing" data center in Dublin. 

One of the Dublin center's first offerings for clients, called IBM Idea Factory for Cloud Computing, is a new service delivered directly to clients over a cloud computing environment. Using Web 2.0 technology, it allows communities of business professionals to be assembled into social networks to facilitate the development of new business ideas. IBM Idea Factory for Cloud Computing captures business processes -- from their beginnings as ideas to commercialization -- speeding up brainstorming among employees, partners, software developers and other third party participants.

Cloud computing is an information technology (IT) infrastructure in which dynamically shared computing resources are virtualized and accessed as a service. Cloud computing replaces the traditional data center model in which companies own and manage their own stand alone hardware and software systems. Cloud computing is an attractive proposition for small to large-sized companies. It also is a green technology model that reduces energy consumption by improving IT resource utilization, therefore requiring fewer servers to handle equivalent workloads.