The staff at SearchDataCenter.com recently split our blog Server Specs into three new blogs in order to narrow our focus on specific aspects of the data center industry:

Data Center Facilities Pro: A SearchDataCenter.com blog about data center facility management, engineering and design. This blog covers news, trends and tips on topics like data center cooling, data center backup power and data center energy efficiency.

Mainframe Propeller Head: A SearchDataCenter.com blog about the IBM mainframe and its alternatives. This blog will cover news, trends and tips on topics like the System z hardware, the z/OS, z/VM and z/VSE operating systems, mainframe jobs and software licensing costs.

Server Farming: This blog serves as forum to discuss the latest in server hardware, systems management, Unix-Linux-Wintel operating systems and large distributed computing systems.

Please bookmark the new blogs. Server Specs will remain online in archive mode. Thanks for reading.

I noticed a common theme at the string of computing conferences I’ve attended in the past couple of months: The future of the data center is going to be cloud computing, and resistance is futile.

I heard this from VMware Inc.’s President and Chief Executive Officer Diane Greene during her keynote at the JP Morgan Technology Conference in Boston in May, and the point was driven into the ground during the Enterprise 2.0 Conference there in June. I heard these predictions repeated during the annual Red Hat Summit and the USENIX 08 conferences, also held in Red Sox Nation last month.

Major league players in the data center space like VMware Inc. are putting their efforts into cloud computing because of predictions that it will eventually be the mainstream way information is handled and software vendors are starting to introduce products to manage cloud computing environments.

David Patterson, a professor of computer science at U.C. Berkeley, said during his keynote speech at USENIX that cloud computing is part of the data center evolution already under way.

“In addition to the processor evolution [from single-core to dual- and now quad-core processors], on a larger scale, there are a number of changes happening in the data center; flash memory is replacing mechanical disks, we have software as a service, and utility computing [a.k.a. cloud computing] is being used to outsource the data center,” Patterson said.

The advantages of cloud computing are clear, he said.

“With cloud computing, you put $0 down for your own data center, and pay as you go, and there is no penalty for scale up, which happens instantly. It allows fast scale up with no dead or idle CPUs, and no provisioning is required,” Patterson said.

This is especially appealing to data centers that have maxed out their power resources, but need to increase their infrastructure.

Though cloud computing is considered an immature technology, it really isn’t. The chief architect of the Xen project, Ian Pratt, said during his session at USENIX, called Xen and the Art if Virtualization, that the folks at Cambridge University who started the XenoServer project with him back in 1999 were architecting it under the cloud computing concept.

Though their ideas about what the cloud would look like differ from what we see today, the concept was similar: Develop a public infrastructure for wide-area distributed computing that can be used by people across the world.

“We originally thought there would be data centers all over the world, and clients would be able to choose a location, perhaps close to another IP address they wanted to interact with,” Pratt said. “The other difference is, we thought the machines would be owned by many different merchants, and there would be a broker acting as a third party recommending the different vendors, and those brokers would take a fee.”

Instead, we have companies like Amazon.com, Google and Salesforce.com offering the complete cloud computing environments , but Pratt expects this to change.

“I think we will see cloud computing move in the direction where it will become more open instead of all of the hardware, software and networking being located at and owned by a Google or Amazon.”

Today, most cloud computing providers host x86-compatible applications on virtualized servers, and most support only the Linux OS, according to Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. To keep costs low, many cloud providers use a Xen-based hypervisor. Charges for usage are usually based on CPU hours, gigabits consumed and gigabits per second transferred rather than on a monthly service fee.

Specifically, Amazon charges 10 cents per compute hour used and 15 cents per gigabyte of storage. According to Forrester, that translates into about $70 to $150 per month for a fully utilized Amazon server, versus the average $400 a month that it costs an enterprise to run a server.

The benefits aside, IT pros are apprehensive about taking their mission critical apps out of their secure data centers and putting them into something as translucent sounding as cloud computing. This fear was quite evident during the Enterprise 2.0 conference event called “An Evening in the Clouds.” A panel of IT pros sat and listed to Google, Amazon and Salesforce as they fluffed cloud computing, and then they voiced their many concerns.

Is it secure? Is it reliable? Does it perform better than my existing data center?

The answer from all the cloud computing providers was, of course, a resounding “yes.”

But not all applications are available in the cloud, so it isn’t for every company. The cloud computing environment also lacks government standards, which makes some users nervous.

“I wouldn’t suggest moving all of your apps over to the cloud today, but hopefully one day all will be right in the world,” said Jeff Keltner, the business development manager at Google Apps.

Last week I attended a data center tour with Sun Microsystems’ Dean Nelson, Sr. Director of Global Data Center Design Services.

Nelson’s team consolidated four large Sun Microsystems campuses in California – consolidating over 200,000 square feet of data center down to 80,000 square feet, while still allowing capacity to grow.

This new data center, built into Sun’s existing office space in Santa Clara, is designed for modular growth and is very energy efficient (1.28 PUE in one of the rooms, according to Nelson)

In this first video, Nelson demonstrates the Starline Busway, a power component Nelson Describes as track lighting on steroids. These products allow Sun data center staffers to plug in anything from 120 single phase power to 100 amp 3 phase without an electrician, allowing for modular growth and flexibility. The busways also have IP connections that track power usage in real time.

In this second video, Nelson shows us the hot-aisle cold-aisle containment strategy Sun is using. It’s essentially a ceiling on the hot aisle that prevents hot return air from mixing with the cool intake air.

Data center power and cooling services companyAPC is offering a number of free online tools, called APC TradeOff Tools, that give IT pros a way to view how infrastructure changes effect costs and performance in the data center.

“The tools answer questions like, ‘what will the ROI be if I increase the water chiller temperatures?’ or ‘what do I need to do to hit my energy efficiency or carbon footprint target’?,” said Neil Rasmussen, senior vice president of innovation for APC.

The West Kingston, RI-based company’s new tools include the power efficiency calculator that allows IT managers to generate “what if” scenarios regarding virtualization, power sizing, efficiency, power density, and cooling decisions.

Another new tool is the Data Center Carbon Calculator, which allows users to input data about their infrastructure and see the impact any changes would have on data center efficiency, energy costs and carbon footprint.

“If a company makes a carbon efficiency pledge, they can use this tool to drill down into different ways to achieve that goal,” Rasmussen said.

The Data Center Capital Cost Calculator details the impact of physical infrastructure design changes on capital costs; the Virtualization Energy Cost Calculator shows the impact of server virtualization and data center design choices on energy and space savings; and the Data Center Power Sizing Calculator gives details about the impact of server and storage configurations on IT load capacity and required utility input power.

There is also the Data Center AC vs. DC Calculator, which compares the efficiency of each, and the Data Center InRow Containment Selector, which recommends cooling options based on the data center infrastructure.

All of the tools can be accessed here on APC’s website.

For data center managers looking for the best place to locate a data center, the price of power has been at the forefront of the discussion. Mega corporations are building data centers near dams to access three-cent per kWh utility rates, but fiber diversity is a growing concern, and is probably number two or three on the site selection criteria.

The Department of Homeland Security advises companies to seek diversity (i.e. multiple vendors) amongst fiber carriers, but the carriers don’t share maps — it’s part of their competitive advantage. And a lot of times, multiple carriers are in the same trench, which won’t provide resiliency in the event of a cable cut.

Also, with more companies locating data centers further outside city limits, out onto the prairies and Pacific Northwest, end users are running into latency tradeoffs. While some companies are dealing with latency problems with WAN optimization, others might only use the remote sites for disaster recovery or other instances where latency isn’t an issue.

Where do fiber diversity and latency issues rank in your data center site selection criteria? How are you working out fiber diversity with your developers and vendors? What are the tradeoffs you see? Please leave me your feedback in the comments.

For more info on site selection, check out the first two chapters of our Data Center Construction Runbook: Chapter one is data center site selection; Chapter two covers picking a data center design team.

Since the announcement by Microsoft at AFCOM that they would be using containers like Rackable’s Ice Cube in their new data centers, much attention has been focused on the container-based set-up. Sun led the way with their Blackbox, and now Dell is releasing their own containerized data center.

But not everyone in the world of data centers think that these boxes are the cat’s meow. I asked Pete Sacco, President of PTS Data Center Solutions, Inc. for his thoughts. He referred me to his blog post on the topic, “Reflections on the Data Center in a Box”, and shared some additional comments:

Many data center-in-a-box providers only offer a homogenous data processing environment, which for most users won’t fly. Even those that are equipment neutral are available but have not sold well (e.g., APC’s Data Center on Wheels). The facility limitation of a data center-in-a-box hamper their adaptation. Access to sufficient power and chilled water (a heat rejection source) has always been, and will remain a primary cost driver of data center development. Therefore, the savings are not as dramatic as portrayed. Besides, due to form-factor and other attributes they are a lower availability solution than a traditional brick-and-mortar data center. In my opinion, their use will be limited to large enterprise and fringe applications at best.

Sacco succinctly points out the criticisms that were levied at Microsoft’s adoption of the concept in Computer World’s article. But beyond Sacco’s points about cost and flexibility, the CW article also picked at specific design flaws that some interviewees perceived existed. These were responded to in a thorough post from Mike Manos.

With Dell jumping into the pool with Sun, Rackable, and Verari, and IBM planning a container using it’s iDataPlex server, one must ask the question: Are all these companies making the right move? Competition is key to a market economy, but is market saturation going to occur? If the uptake on containerized systems isn’t going to be widespread, are these companies taking too big a risk in developing their own container systems?

Ron Hughes, President of California Data Center Design Group pointed out that the container approach is in fact, nothing new:

They’ve been making these for at least 10 years. Like everything else, they have their place. In the right setting, for the right client, they can be very useful and they work very well. We typically see them as either a short term solution until a data center can be built, or as a permanent solution if building a data center is not an option. The upside is speed to market, potentially energy efficiency and portability. The downside is cost and capacity.

I’m not convinced that it will be a widespread solution due to the high cost and limited server capacity. The solutions also vary as to whether they require separate infrastructure support systems or not. I haven’t seen any cost comparison to a standard data center, but for a medium to large application, I doubt that it is cost competitive. It will be interesting to see how these play out long term.

For an end-user company like Microsoft that is in need of large amounts of servers, the plug-and-play and interchangeability of the containers is attractive. But for other data centers, this solution may cost too much or be too large for their limited needs.

What do you think? Are containers here to stay — are we looking at the future of data center technology? Or is it just one tool in the toolbox?

This week I sat down with Microsoft’s Senior Director of Data Center services, Michael Manos at the 2008 Uptime Symposium to talk about Scry, the company’s data center analytics tool that they touted at AFCOM. According to Manos, this tool allows him to look at his data centers’ energy use, carbon footprint, power bill and more — all at an incredibly granular level. It also allows him to slice and dice data to make decisions, for example Microsoft can look at the energy consumption of an individual product like Hotmail. The program is especially slick in that it ties into Microsoft’s CMDB and assett management tools. Microsoft has been touting this tool at various conferences throughout the past few months, but it’s not likely to become a commercial product for other companies since so much of the tool was built around Microsoft’s specific homegrown internal software. But the main point of Manos’s data center road show is to prove to people that it can be done. Microsoft is measuring and improving its energy efficiency in the data center and Manos is not waiting for someone to hand down the perfect metric or the perfect tool. Check out the video below, where Manos outlines how he uses Scry and in the second video he talks you through a 3-D rendering of the new containerized data center being built in Chicago.

Terry Rodgers, an associate partner at data center consultancy Syska Hennessy, recently wrote to us regarding our story on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling. He said that CFD modeling is too expensive to be used by data center managers simply to tell them that they should be following best practices on reducing bypass airflow.

“Why pay tens of thousands of dollars to find out that yes, you should follow accepted best practices?” he wrote. “CFD is not necessary to identify and seal cable cutouts, holes in the data center perimeter, use blanking panels in racks, and remove perf tiles from the hot aisle.”

He added that CFD isn’t even necessary to finding hot spots in the data center. “Just walk around and check and take a temperature sensor with you.”

The better strategy, he argued, is to correct all of those airflow issues that you can, and then use CFD modeling to help you rearrange server cabinets, for example, or determine whether your air conditioning units are providing the airflow pressure that they should.

“Another use for CFD is to validate design strategies before proceeding with costly construction,” he wrote. “But to tell me to seal cable cutouts???”

We agree. A CFD analysis can cost a pretty penny and should be used primarily to pick up the more nuanced cooling issues in your data center, the ones not easily seen with the naked eye. When half of your floor tile is gone to get some cables through it, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist analyzing complex algorithms to determine that you’ve got to fill them up. Thanks to Rodgers for writing in.

Google seems to be everywhere. But where does the omnipresent company actually exist? This topic has gained a lot of attention lately from this Google Data Center FAQ to the subsequent map put together by the folks at Pingdom. But why is the location of the super-secret-yet-ubiquitous Google getting such a large amount of attention?

Google’s data centers have had a lot of attention around the country. In Oregon, initial secrecy surrounding the company’s development of The Dalles facility was an object of a lot of public discussion, which resulted in the facility earning the moniker of “Voldemort” (a reference to the fact that the Harry Potter series character is most commonly referred to as “He Who Must Not Be Named,” and that local officials couldn’t say the “G” word while the facility was under construction). But Google let up a bit and put on a more public face in 2007, including a site tour by local reporters from The Dalles Chronicle. Google had changed its tune on keeping the activities on site “super secret” after a public backlash concerning the 15-year tax break the company received from the State of Oregon, and power consumption concerns. Indeed, the energy consumption of the company’s data centers has attracted national media attention, beyond IT-focused outlets. As the company has grown in power over the past ten years, it has increasingly attracted attention, first with its quirky dot-com work environments and employees (including Google bean-bag chairs that grace the Googleplex), to controversy over acceptance of Chinese government restrictions over search-engine deployment.

But the company hasn’t turned to total transparency with all of their locations, and thus, members of the IT community still get excited when they can learn one more “secret” about where the company actually exists.

So the question that’s nagging me is, what can everyone else learn from Google’s experience? Secrecy is good for business, but up until what point? I come to TechTarget with a background in journalism and public affairs, so this question is not unfamiliar to me. Many companies rely on keeping their activities and intellectual property secured, it’s common in business. But, is Google being too extreme? Do their data center facility locations really need to be kept on the “down-low”? And why do datacenter insiders care?

I asked this question to Robert Cringley, of I, Cringley. And he gave me some interesting insight into the big-picture as it were.

“Google wants a peering relationship with every broadband ISP of substance,” explained Cringley. So, by having data centers located in proximity to ISPs, the ISPs and end-users benefit through high-speed connections at low cost. However, the self-serving part is that this relationship makes everyone more dependant on Google for everything (storage, search, carriage, etc.). “It’s all aimed at the ultimate replacement by Google of current audio and video distribution networks. Look 5-10 years out. That’s why geographic distribution is so important, because they really need to have a copy of the Google data set one hop from every broadband ISP.”

What do you think?

Last year we wrote about the IT-facilities gap. What is it? A lack of communication between IT workers and facilities employees, which can often lead to mismatched timelines that cause a data center to run out of space and power while servers are still waiting on the loading dock.

Oftentimes it comes down to the refresh rate. The IT refresh rate is usually only a few years — that’s when servers start being replaced. In larger organizations, new servers are coming in all the time, sometimes dozens or hundreds every day. Meanwhile, it can take years to plan, permit and build a new data center facility. And so data center capacity planning becomes key.

According to a user survey this year by The Uptime Institute, relations between IT and facilities folks seem to be improving. More than 57% of respondents said communication between IT and facilities were good or excellent, a number that Institute founder and executive director Ken Brill didn’t foresee.

“These results paint a rosier than expected picture of IT/Facilities relations,” Brill wrote in a report on energy efficiency strategies. “It may be that businesses are being forced by the changing economics of the data center to forge more productive relationships between these departments.”

But what kind of data centers responded to this survey? About one-third had data center floor space exceeding 30,000 square feet. So many of them are large organizations that may be more advanced in their data center development. Where the IT-facilities gap probably exists just as strongly is in smaller companies where the facilities guy focuses on the entire company and all its office buildings, and not just the data center.

Brill realizes there is still a ways to go, writing that “it is clear a large number of organizations still need to build bridges between the Facilities and IT departments in order to approach data center energy consumption holistically.”