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August 27 is Power IT Down Day

Joe Polastre — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:25:26 -0400

August 27 is Power IT Down Day

To raise awareness of the impact of IT energy consumption, Friday August 27 is "Power IT Down Day". The idea is this -- turn off your laptops, desktops, monitors, printers, and anything you're not using for the weekend.

To do my own part, I have installed a TED monitoring device at my home in San Francisco (since PG&E has decided that Silver Spring's technology is not able to handle the density and elevation changes in San Francisco, as told by a PG&E representative in a recent SVLG meeting). I used this data to decide what to turn off and its impact when I go out of town. I found that I can unplug my printer, turn off my thermostat, and power down everything around the TV except for the DVR. I even unplug the microwave and toaster. The impact has been about a 50% lower energy use during periods that I'm not home.

The same idea holds for the office -- people tend to work 8ish hours per day (unless they're in a startup!) and not on weekends. By powering down for the weekend, we can make a big impact. Now the question is when will we start shutting down our servers when they're not in use?

Are Data Centers complying with Executive Order 13514?

Joe Polastre — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:19:57 -0400

Are Data Centers complying with Executive Order 13514?

In October, 2009, President Obama issued an Executive Order (EO 13514) that set federal energy efficiency standards. EO 13514 superceeds the previous executive order put in place by President Bush (EO 13423) from 2007. While the previous order required the government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3% per year, totaling at least a 30% reduction by 2015 from 2003 levels, Obama's order actually lets each department set their own goal. EO 13514, in contrast to EO 13423, is much more specific about the improvements that have to be made in transportation fleets, building design, etc. Just to be clear, this order only applies to federal government and their respective organizations, not the country at large. You can think of it as a government-specific climate bill.

What's more important, is that EO 13514 has specific language about data centers. Federal organizations must "implement best management practices for energy-efficient management of servers and Federal data centers." The goal is to bring the Federal government in line with commercial best practices. The government has thus set some very generic "Guiding Principals", and then it is up to each of the organizations to meet their stated GHG goals for Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3 emissions. Let's take a look at what some of the government organizations have done to comply with EO 13514.

Monitoring is not Management

Joe Polastre — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:01:01 -0400

Monitoring is not Management

There's been a lot of discussion recently about the difference between monitoring and management. This week, I received an email with the title "Revolutionizing Energy Management". Interesting, I wonder what management solution this company provides for energy. The content of the email went on to talk about a brand new meter that provides real time power load information. While I'm sure this company's meter is very innovative (names purposely omitted to protect the innocent), it was clear that this company did not understand what the word "management" even means.

I'd like to point out the difference between management and monitoring. There are a LOT of tools for monitoring but much fewer for management.

Monitoring is the process of being aware of the state of a system. It involves observing the current situation and typically necessitates a measuring device or meter. Monitoring typically results in a large set of data, un-correlated and un-analyzed. The data is not tied to your business objectives but is just data, it is that simple. It is up to you, as the human, to figure out what all this data means.

Management, in contrast, is the act of getting a system to deliver a desired goal/objective. It involves managing and allocating resources, organizing resources to execute a task, designing and re-designing systems, and optimizing a system to produce useful outcomes. Monitoring is a key component to management; after all you need credible information to make decisions.

Award for Innovation in Data Centres!

Joe Polastre — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:45:53 -0400

Award for Innovation in Data Centres!

I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at this year's Data Centres Europe (DCE) conference, held in June in Sophia Antipolis, France by BroadGroup. It was delayed due to the ash cloud mess back in April, when I had planned to originally attend but ended up stuck in London instead. The event was well attended despite being rescheduled, although the weather in Côte d'Azur was a bit warmer than the organizers had anticipated.

At DCE, I was honored in two ways that I want to share with you. The first is with an award! The annual Data Centres Europe awards are given out in a number of categories to recognize innovative data centre design. With a panel of judges consisting of end users and analysts, I was surprised and excited to hear them announce that I am the recipient of the European CTO Award for Innovation in Data Centres! In the introduction of the award, the judges introduced me and Sentilla with these nice words:

Test Your Luck at Jeopardy

Joe Polastre — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 23:44:16 -0400

Test Your Luck at Jeopardy

I wrote earlier about IBM's high density Blue Gene/P data center that is a state of the art HPC system fitting tons of computing power into a small space. It pushes the envelope in a number of ways, including how to keep it cool, and how to provide enough power at such high density.

This weekend, the New York Times Magazine profiled Watson, the system running on the Blue Gene/P cluster at the T.J. Watson Research Center in order to take on humans at Jeopardy! The article is lengthy, but the video is equally entertaining.

IBM has their own website too that explains Watson.

Vote for Sentilla at VMWorld

Joe Polastre — Sat, 22 May 2010 16:16:18 -0400

Vote for Sentilla at VMWorld

Sentilla has been selected as a finalist to present at VMWorld 2010 in San Francisco. We need your help! Please VOTE for us by going to the VMWorld Private Cloud and Management page, then search for Sentilla (about 2/3rds down the page) and click Vote.

This session will talk about how management tools can ease the chaos and indirection brought on by virtualization, and using energy monitoring and management, you can directly identify the biggest bang for your buck when rolling out a virtualization strategy.

Top 5 Myths about Google's Data Centers

Joe Polastre — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:15:55 -0400

Top 5 Myths about Google's Data Centers

This blog entry first appeared as a contributed news article at ZDNet. The version posted here includes additional pictures and links to various related topics in line with the post, to provide greater context and justification for the claims made about Google's data centers.

Sustainability in a Ash Covered Reality

Joe Polastre — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:26:55 -0400

Sustainability in a Ash Covered Reality

Note: this post has nothing to do with data centers.

Like thousands of other people, I'm "stranded" in London trying to figure out when I'll get back to San Francisco.

I've been annoyed by the way this "crisis" has been described to the rest of the world. Yes, a volcano is errupting. And yes, it will continue to do so for a while. Some flights will be able to leave, but many others will continue to be grounded for some time. In the past few days, I've been able to explore the UK, meet new friends, hang out with old friends, and work from a new country with a completely new set of customs. I see this as opportunity, not as failure.

While I sit in the hotel room, I see on BBC news that the flower growers in Africa are "distressed". Really? Every day, including today, I walk by flower stands that have roses, tulips, etc, that are just about to bud and look fantastic. Maybe, eventually, we won't be able to get a supply of fresh flowers, but is that really what will bring down the economy? Look at the news media's enthusiasm for fresh fruits from Kenya. Can we not find any fresh flowers, fruits, or produce from within the UK?

1MW data center in 2000 square feet

Joe Polastre — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:53:09 -0400

1MW data center in 2000 square feet

Warning: This post has all kinds of unconfirmed rumors, but is indicative of where the future of high performance computing is going, at least according to IBM.

I had the pleasure of getting to see the Blue Gene installation at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center, which gives us a glimpse at the future of High Performance Computing (HPC). While IBM's webpage about Blue Gene is a bit out of date, it gives you a glimpse into what's running there. Installed in 2005, it has been upgraded a number of times since then with new HPC technology. Wikipedia has some more technical insight into the evolution of Blue Gene.

One of the things about Blue Gene is how much power it consumes, how much computing power is packed into a small space, and how it is cooled. The current Blue Gene models (the big black row boxes with a slant) make up the majority of the Blue Gene data center. This new "Blue Gene/P configuration" hosts 4096 processors per rack. The rack uses contained cooling with water-filled radiators cooling the hot air exhaust. The entire system fits in the alien-pod-shaped row container.

Why PUE is not enough: Data Center World presentation

Joe Polastre — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:20:23 -0500

Why PUE is not enough: Data Center World presentation

At AFCOM's Data Center World in Nashville, I presented "Why PUE is not enough: How to measure TRUE success in the data center". In this talk, I discuss a number of different metrics that merge IT performance with consumed resources (energy, cooling, and space). Also considered is how to carefully choose metrics, so that you use the right metrics to gauge your performance and progress, whether in application performance, IT utilization, energy footprint, or available capacity. I really enjoyed the talk and had a great interactive audience (sorry that you can't always hear the audience questions in the recording). I look forward to being invited back to present follow on educational sessions at future AFCOM conferences (such as DCW in October in Las Vegas). I had a fun time putting together this particular talk, which is different in a number of ways than the talks I gave earlier this year at Data Centre World in London, and the GSMI Green Data Center Conference in San Diego.

If you have any questions or feedback on the talk, please leave them in the comments. And to Google and Facebook, I really wasn't trying to pick on you!