Eaton, one of the big data center UPS manufacturers, is offering a free handbook on uninterruptible power supply (UPS) batteries. Most people know that the most vulnerable part of a UPS are the batteries. Knowing how charged they are and how much juice they have left can mean the difference between having enough through time to get the generators started, and leaving your customers without a data center.

I ordered one. I can always learn more about UPS’s and their batteries. According to Eaton, the guide “covers characteristics, performance and maintenance of UPS battery types along with a comprehensive glossary of battery terms.” Sounds good to me. And since I already get plenty of emails from Eaton for all their products, I didn’t care about putting my information in there. They can only send me so many emails, right?

In June, Chris Johnston, Senior VP and Critcal Facilities Chief Engineer at Syska Hennessy Group wrote a Tip for SearchDataCenter.com, “Uninterruptable power supply load bus synchronization: Yes or no?”. We asked for reader feedback, and heard from Brad Walter, Director of Applications and System Development at Active Power, who shared this story:

The one issue that this article did not address is static transfer switch (STS) alarms. I have a customer who claims that even the STS with asynchronous transfer capability alarms when the phase angle between the two sources drifts beyond a certain limit (say 15 degrees), and that a new instance of the alarm is generated every time the two sources drift out of synch. This would not only be annoying to data center operators but significant time would be wasted in re-setting alarms, and even more importantly, frequent false alarms tend to make people ignore alarms that require attention. Have you seen the same issue, or is this customer either not actually using asynchronous transfer STS as he claims, or has he failed to set up alarm features on his switches correctly for asynchronous transfer operation?

Chris provided this feedback for Brad:

Thanks for your question, Brad. I agree that frequent nuisance alarms are annoying and a potential source of unintended downtime. Repetitive nuisance alarms can obscure our perception of a real problem when it occurs. Human nature is to be lulled into being “asleep at the switch.”

Not knowing any specifics about your customer’s situation, I suspect that the alarm features on the STS may not be set correctly to eliminate nuisance alarms. If synchronization between the two STS sources is unnecessary, then the need for an “out of synch” alarm is unnecessary, regardless of the phase angle between the two sources. I suggest that your customer contact the STS manufacturer.

This lead us to wonder, is this a “Picnic” type problem (problem in chair not in computer) or is this a problem with a certain STS?

I called Brad to follow up, and to get a little edification about how these switches are supposed to work so that I could better understand the problem. Brad kindly talked to me for about 30 minutes, giving me a crash course in Electrical Engineering 101 and a refresher on trigonometry.

He explained that in a large data center with many of these switches and alarms, that the headache from them all going off could be enormous. The particular model involved has software in the switch that is supposed to be able to take care of any out of phase problems, keeping the downstream equipment safe. If the software is working as advertised, there would be no need for an out of phase alarm at all. But for whatever reason, it has an alarm, and it’s going off — all of them, at each UPS in the data center.

Brad declined to point a finger the switch manufacturer specifically (a perfectly sane response), but shared that it was one of the big players in this space: Cyberex, Liebert, PDI, or LayerZero.

Without other stories of the same problem, it’s harder to make a case out of this and ask the manufacturers tough questions. So, this is a bit of a fishing expedition: Have you experienced a similar problem with your STS? If so, did you resolve it? How? Which model STS had this problem?

If you represent any of the four STS manufacturers, are you willing to say that this problem could not happen with your equipment? Or, could it, and what should the end-user do about it?

In the category of data center jobs, even Google is out there aggressively looking for people. As we have reported before, it’s hard to find good data center leaders out there. Being a data center manager requires a mix of IT know-how with facility engineering knowledge that, frankly, not many people out there have.

Even Google is apparently having difficulty finding the right people. Shikha Wadhwa, who does engineering leadership staffing for the Mountain View, Calif. Web search giant, sent us an email looking to promote its data center openings, and in particular, “Datacenter Facilities Leadership Positions.” From the note:

Google is Hiring!

Google is looking for highly motivated individuals to provide leadership and oversight of our state-of-the-art datacenter facilities. Our datacenters are industry-leading examples of innovative capital- and energy-efficient designs in action. We are looking for people to provide leadership in areas spanning Data Center Facilities Engineering, Operations, Construction Services, Project Management and R&D.

The full Google job listing adds that they’re looking for a bachelor’s or master’s in a technical field and at least 10 years experience managing a mission-critical facility.

Working at Google has become something of an enigma, with articles devoted solely to describing how to get hired at Google. But with comments in the email to us such as “If you or someone else you know is interested in finding out more, we would love to hear from you!” and promising that they’ll “circle back with you asap!” it’s obvious they’re looking hard for qualified data center types.

Google was one of Fortune’s 100 best companies to work for in 2007, although you should have doubts if you think the Google day care is all it’s cracked up to be.

In a response to rising commodity costs, Emerson Network Power announced today that it would increase prices on its Liebert and Knurr brand products.

The increase averages 5% and is the result of “significant cost increases in many of the materials used in the products we manufacture,” according to a statement from Chuck Spears, the president of Liebert North America.

In a downturn economy, the upped prices tend to end up on the user’s balance sheet. Let us know if you’ve received similar notifications from other vendors.

Oracle too: A reader pointed out to me that Oracle recently increased their software licensing costs, in some cases by as much as 15 percent. Why? According to Forrester analyst Ray Wang, it’s due to the devaluation of the U.S. dollar.

Around the blogosphere, people are commenting on the definition of cloud computing. As we’ve noted, cloud computing is here to stay, and resistance is futile. And with $100 billion at stake (according to a Merrill Lynch research note), investors see the cloud as a promising business tool for the future. In fact, multiple analysis groups have devoted time to looking at the economics of the cloud, including Deutsche Bank, which released a report on SaaS and Cloud. Forrester Research analyst James Staten says that there are plenty of reasons to stick your head in the cloud.

So I’ve been reading my cloud feeds and have assembled some discussions on sharpening the edges on the fuzzy terminology of “cloud computing.”

Bob Plankers shared his friend Terry’s take on what cloud computing is:

To hell with cloud computing. Clouds are puffy crap that float lazily by. Is that what you want out of your service provider? Just floating by without a care in the world?

And John M. Willis asks if Guitar Hero is a cloud?

As the cloud-o-sphere tries to define this “cloud” thing, myself included, it seems like the list of who is a cloud just keeps getting longer and longer. I originally thought the Forrester 11 list was a little to long when it included SalesForce.com and Akamai as cloud providers. The general consensus seems to be, if you are a SaaS, PaaS, or a IaaS you are probably a cloud and this makes the list even longer.

Willis expounds on the aaS point with a bit of humor. He recently shared a discussion from an Awesome meeting, in which attendees asked “Does a cloud have to have an API to be a cloud?”.

If you’re stuck on what the difference is between a grid and cloud, Michael at Apistry provided useful definitions in an April post. Vontlin at cloudfunnel.com also provided a simple definition of SaaS and Cloud computing for newbies.
Michael Cote at RedMonk shared his experience at Cloud Conference week, including these two “anti-Cloud” definitions:

• “Cloud Computing means nothing and is, worse, fad-talk.” Indeed! As with all new technologies that come along, iterating through the journey to meaning is about 2/3 the point. Remember “blogs,” “Web 2.0″? We’re still chunking up on “Enterprise 2.0,” but we know it’s better than spending time thinking about “Enterprise 1.0.”
• “I knew grid computing, and you my friend are no grid computing.” There’s a Darwinian evolution of the exact definition of cloud computing running around. We’re about a country mile away from “knowing when I see it,” which is excellent progress. The cloud to everyone’s silver lining has enough material to write a 3-volume desktop reference at this point.

With all the hype and financial motivation, it’s not too surprising that vendor 3Tera is pushing toward a cloud computing standard. The company has received enough feedback that they’ve explained their thoughts on the usefulness of a standard, of course deemphasizing the profit motive that seemed obvious to a few.

What do you think? Still unclear or is it becoming more firm in your mind what this whole “cloud thing” means?

Photo credit: Benjamin Earwicker, “Storm Clouds 2″ posted at www.sxc.hu

It comes from IT Jungle: “IBM v PSI: The Operation Was a Success, But the Patient Died“

This, I think, is a pretty good summation of IBM’s purchase of plug-compatible mainframe company Platform Solutions Inc. (PSI), which was previously suing Big Blue.

There are plenty of ways to start measuring your data center’s Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE, which is a comparison of the total facility power to the IT load. But in recent months Microsoft has opened the curtains on its own operations, thanks largely in part to two data center pros there, Michael Manos and Christian Belady.

Back in April, Manos spoke to us about Microsoft’s data center strategy. It was one of the first times the Redmond, Wash. The next month, Manos showed us a demo of Scry (video here), the tool the company uses to measure everything in their data centers.

Now Manos and Belady have written a series of three lengthy blog posts on PUE, why it’s important, and how to go about measuring it. For those of you out there still a little daunted by the task of measuring key analytics in your data center facilities, this could give you a good start.

Last week, when reporting on the IBM takeover of PSI, I was able to talk to Ron Avery, the operating systems manager in Polk County, Iowa. In addition to asking him about his thoughts on the purchase — Polk County owns a T3 server, which licenses technology from PSI — I was curious how they weathered the floods that ravaged the state last month.

He said they had to move several outlying offices, but the main data center never went down. Being on the third floor helped, he said, although the floodwaters never quite touched the administration building that the data center sits in.

“The river was within inches,” Avery said, referring to the Des Moines River, a tributary of the Mississippi. “The good Lord smiled on us and we didn’t have to fight that battle.”

He added that the main data center never went down. It ran on an external generator for 13 hours and then transitioned back to street power when that returned.

Flooding in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, which are about 100 miles east of Des Moines, was much worse than in Des Moines. The picture above is of Cedar Rapids.

On May 31, an explosion at Web hosting company The Planet affected about 7,500 customers, 2,600 of which experienced downtime for at least 3-4 days.

Between June 8 and July 8, The Planet gained about 3,500 new customers, according to Netcraft, which was the third-highest gain of the 50 hosters that Netcraft tracks.

So what gives?

I came across this little tidbit via Rich Miller, who wrote about Web hosters’ uptime over at Data Center Knowledge. That got me poking around the Netcraft Web site, where I found the section about “Sites on the Move.” Seeing as we had covered the electrical explosion at The Planet, I was curious how many customers they lost in the aftermath. They did lose quite a few — almost 900 — but their net change in customers was around 3,400 on the positive side, something I certainly wasn’t expecting.

A couple possible explanations. Management at The Planet kept an open dialog throughout all the downtime, which for some customers was almost a week. Doug Erwin, the company’s CEO, did two or three podcasts that they posted on The Planet’s Web site, detailing the reasons for the outage and any updates on what the company was doing to fix the problem. And one of The Planet’s message boards was dedicated to updates on the problem, which were quite frequent shortly after the explosion, and then waning off as more customers got back online.

Another, possibly simpler explanation? Many of The Planet’s customers are just looking to get their personal Web sites or some simple business Web sites online. As a result, they don’t do much research into the Web hoster of choice, and it’s fair to say that many of the 3,500 new customers probably didn’t even know about the explosion.

With the upcoming holiday sure to brighten the skies across the U.S. with colorful flashes of light, I thought it would be a good time to share some of the advancements in Flash-memory based storage devices. Solid-state drives (SSD) can help bridge the server and storage performance gap and decrease data center power requirements. A few weeks ago, at Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Technology Forum, a relatively new entrant into the field, Fusion io announced that is adapting Fusion-io’s ioMemory architecture to HP’s enterprise-class servers, including the HP BladeSystem c-Class system.

“Adapting this technology specifically for HP servers offers radical increases in associated performance for a broad range of applications and workloads and can dramatically improve the effectiveness of data center architectures,” said Fusion-io CEO Don Basile. “With our ioMemory architecture, we’re getting more than 200,000 IOPS [I/O operations per second] within HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades today.”

When I met with Basile for a mere 30 minutes, he shared an intense amount of information, including a variety of statistics that illustrate the power of the technology. The ioMemory technology is still costly enough that it’s not ideal for long-term archival storage, but the speed that it provides makes it valuable in the active data requirement area. Basile explained that the technology is capable of 3.2 GB/s of sustained bandwidth, with extremely low latency (50 microseconds). In terms of I/O, a traditional enterprise application server that is I/O-intensive may cost $15 to $20 per I/O versus $0.15 per I/O using the Fusion-io system.

In addition, Basile explained that all this speed is possible with less energy expenditure and less heat than a typical storage area network (SAN). Heat and power are reduced because of the lack of mechanical heat that would otherwise be generated by spinning disks. In addition to using less than 1% of the power required by a typical SAN, the footprint is minimal: 16 ioMemory cards can fit into 10U without any oversubscription. Basile noted that consumer electronics such as the iPhone have helped lower the cost of silicone chips.

HP is not alone in integrating SSD technology. Earlier this year EMC announced that it had added SSD in its enterprise Symmetrix system, and more recently rumors have circulated that the company will add it to the Clariion storage array. Sun has also announced that it will release a new version of the Solaris operating system designed to integrate flash and traditional disk-drive storage. And Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz says that it’s not just a flash in the pan. Sun’s Adam Leventhal has also produced an informative technical article outlining the technology and its optimized uses.

In the age of increasing energy costs, efficiencies in data centers are welcome, and the Flash technology is likely to play a key role in the data center of the future. If you’re interested in the topic, check out the Flash Memory Summit in August.