ms datacenters : Christian Belady

The Polarization of the Data Center Industry (at least for now): Part 1 of 2

msdcblog — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 04:01:00 GMT

By Christian Belady,

Principal Infrastructure Architect

Global Foundation Services, Microsoft Corporation

I read a lot about what others are doing in the industry, and a recent post by Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge caught my attention. It was titled “Gartner: Energy Woes to Worsen in 2010” and he posted a Graph from Gartner showing that only about 50 percent of the IT professionals are using some form of energy metrics in the data center.

At first I was not surprised, because as many of you heard me complain in the past, “this industry is moving too slow when it comes to efficiency”. Clearly, the adoption of efficiency metrics is quite low according to the graph. Less than 18 percent of those surveyed are using PUE/DCiE, less than 3 percent are using SPEC Power and perhaps 7 percent or so are using Energy Star. A little more than 20 percent are using other internal metrics…and I couldn’t help but wonder what they are. Additionally, why are the remaining 50 percent not measuring anything, particularly in a time when sustainability seems to be top of mind for everyone. Why do these folks seem to not care?

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that maybe the respondents should have been weighted by their relative data center sizes. I would argue that any company – where a bulk of their costs are driven by their IT operations (which by the way are likely to be huge operations such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Google, etc.) – are further to the left on the graph because it has such a large impact on profitability. Similarly, those who have either small operations or their IT costs are low relative to other costs are further to the right. So in essence, we have a polarization of the data center industry: the Leftists and the Rightists.

The leftists are made up of large internet businesses that live and die with online commerce and consumer services. These guys are obsessed with driving cost out of their operations, are willing to break the rules and standards, believe they can change trends, quickly adopt new ideas, and take risks to substantially change their TCO models for the better. Because of their size, they can also hire specialists to engineer and optimize their data centers to levels never seen before.

Conversely, the rightists are made up of the more traditional enterprises where the IT department is just a very small part of their cost structure. In these organizations, the IT department is just expected to be there. It’s a cost that people accept because it is small and as long as there are no issues everyone is happy. The motivation for the operation’s folks is to simply make sure nothing goes wrong. As a result, there are no incentives to improve efficiency (especially if there is a perceived risk) and their priority is uptime. As a result, there is no reason to go to outside air economization, there is no reason to add new processes to monitor and measure efficiency, and there is no reason to look at new data center architectures that could risk downtime. This all makes sense if you look at the following graphs in which I compare two hypothetical companies, one with most of their costs in IT Operations (Leftists) and one with only 10 percent revenue dollars are eaten up by IT operations costs (Rightists):

Click image to view larger

This shows me why it may be that companies are still not motivated to focus on efficiency. In the case of the Leftist company - spending resources for a 20 percent IT Operations improvement in efficiency would return an improvement of 160 percent in profitability. However, that same improvement in the IT Operations for the Rightist company only yields an improvement of 20 percent in profitability. In their case, it would make sense to focus on improving their other costs. So the reality is we can’t expect everyone to think efficiency is so important! Ultimately it will boil down to how sensitive a business is to the costs of its IT operations. So in the short term, there appears to be this polarization that has occurred. However, to Gartner’s point, this could all change if energy costs increase substantially or carbon taxes emerge. In addition, what would happen if the big online providers (Leftists) hyper-optimized their operations and can offer cloud services at a fraction of the cost of running IT Operations that the Rightists can do themselves? Would this make all of those who did not focus on efficiency move to the cloud to survive?

Gartner’s survey really has made me think about this. In fact, I hope that the next time Gartner runs this survey they also track the following:

1) What percentage of the costs are in IT Operations?

2) How would the business be impacted if IT costs would double or even triple?

Tune in tomorrow for my thoughts on this issue and the “inflection point for efficiency”.

\cb

Change is Driven by Competition and Constraints

msdcblog — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:34:00 GMT

I recently participated in a Podcast for InsideHPC.com with a discussion on “the differences on going green in general IT and going green in HPC” which John West put so eloquently (go to Episode 2: IT, HPC, and where the twain shall meet at http://tinyurl.com/m7ku4m). I found this to be an interesting discussion for several reasons.

First, as many of you know, I have been saying for over a decade now that efficient computing will be a differentiator. I believe this is true now more than ever before. In this economy, capital resources are constrained to levels organizations have never seen before. As I stated in the Podcast: that is where the opportunity lies. I incorrectly quoted my favorite inventor Thomas Edison as saying “Innovation only occurs with constraints.” What he really said was “Discontent is the first necessity of progress” and it was actually Mike Heffernan (High Tech Visionary) that stated “The absence of constraints is the death of creativity.” So what I said in the Podcast captures the intent for both of these visionaries. The constraints the economy has place on IT budgets has driven innovation through necessity. For enterprises and cloud services businesses such as ours, we have to drive costs down since margins are tighter than ever before. Similarly, HPC is facing less funding but its computation needs are exploding -- resulting in focus on efficiency and innovation to meet needs with smaller budgets. It’s really quite exciting to see businesses being more proactive in this climate.

Second, I have spoken about the fact that at Microsoft, as with our competitors, we are driving towards hyper-efficiency and moving away from acquiring general purpose servers. Clearly our business focus over the past couple of years for our business has been to reduce cost by right sizing to our needs. Anything that is not needed is stripped to improve efficiency and reduce cost. I did not think of this before, but Steve Cumings made the statement that HPC is requiring the same.

Finally, Pat Tiernen said something which I believe is very important. “If it will improve your business anyway, why not do it.” He is absolutely right. It’s astounding to me that organizations aren’t naturally trying to become more efficient just for the simple reason that it will drive costs down. Why is it that utility companies need to be giving incentives for people to save money? Look at PG&E, I simply applaud Mark Bramfitt for leading the charge in this space. He gives you money to save money. What a concept. J

So in the end, ultimately, the economic constraints put on us as an industry will finally provide the motivations to drive towards efficiency. It’s not about differentiation any more, it’s about survival. There is no stronger incentive than that.

Christian Belady, Principal Infrastructure Architect

Global Foundation Services

Microsoft’s Top 10 Business Practices for Environmentally Sustainable Data Centers (celebrating Earth Day)

msdcblog — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:00:00 GMT

How to Reduce Energy Consumption, Waste, and Costs while Increasing Efficiency and ROI

What does environmental sustainability mean to data centers, industry operators, and IT businesses? A lot of managers in these areas may barely notice the Earth Day global event on April 22 as they struggle to support their businesses in the face of budget cuts and uncertainty about the future. But the fact is, being “lean and green” is good for both the business and the environment, and organizations that focus their attentions accordingly will see clear benefits. Reducing energy use and waste improves a company’s bottom line and boosting the use of recycled materials is a proven way to demonstrate good corporate citizenship to your customers, employees, and the communities you do business in.

That said, with so much on the plates of data center and IT professionals these days it isn’t always easy to know where to begin in moving to greener and more efficient operations. With that in mind—along with Microsoft’s commitment to share best practices with the rest of the data center industry—we asked some of the senior members our Global Foundation Services’ Infrastructure Services team to send us their top ten best business practices for environmentally sustainable data centers and IT.

Their favorite practices are reflected in our new “Microsoft’s Top 10 Business Practices for Environmentally Sustainable Data Centers” paper.

You can explore other data center resources on our GFS web site here.

Microsoft announced in March 2009 that it is taking a proactive corporate approach to reduce our carbon emissions per unit of revenue by at least 30 percent below 2007 levels by 2012. The data centers managed by GFS are a significant component of Microsoft’s carbon footprint, and our organization plays a vital role in Microsoft’s efforts to meet this corporate goal.

As you’ll read in the list of best practices we’ve compiled, companies can make major gains in energy efficiency by increasing server utilization and moving to virtualization, plus you can employ a wide range of smaller initiatives that collectively add up to significant gains. Microsoft has been using these practices for several years now and found that in addition to helping us protect the environment, they make best use of our resources and help us stay tightly aligned with our core strategies and goals. We hope they work for you as well.

Below is an overview of the best practices list.

1. Provide incentives that support your primary goals.

2. Focus on effective resource utilization.

3. Use virtualization to improve server utilization and increase operational efficiency.

4. Drive quality up through compliance.

5. Embrace change management.

6. Invest in understanding your application workload and behavior.

7. Right-size your server platforms to meet your application requirements.

8. Evaluate and test servers for performance, power, and total cost of ownership.

9. Converge on as small a number of stock-keeping units (SKUs) as you can.

10. Take advantage of competitive bids from multiple vendors to foster innovation and reduce costs.

Beyond the business practices listed above, Microsoft’s data center team is taking significant steps in four areas important to environmental sustainability:

· Using recycled resources whenever practical: The Microsoft data center in San Antonio, Texas, for example, uses approximately eight million gallons of recycled water a month from the city’s waste water system during peak cooling months.

· Using renewable resources whenever available: In the process we have developed for deciding where to build our data center facilities, renewable energy sources play a key role. For instance, the Microsoft data center in Quincy, Washington, uses 100 percent renewable hydropower from the Columbia Basin River. The San Antonio facility obtains part of its electricity from wind power. And the company’s Dublin, Ireland, data center will use outside air for cooling, thus reducing the need for energy-intensive coolers.

· Reducing waste in operations: One example of Microsoft’s focus on reducing waste is the company’s transition to using standard shipping containers to house thousands of servers apiece. Ordering servers by the truckload eliminates the need for large amounts of packaging and other materials previously required when servers were delivered individually or in racks.

· Actively participating in industry environmental groups: Microsoft plays leadership roles in Climate Savers Computing Initiative and The Green Grid—industry organizations focused on improving computer systems and data center energy efficiency and establishing a standard methodology for measuring Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) accurately and consistently. We also feel it’s important for us to openly share information and best practices around data center energy efficiency, because we believe the data center industry needs to work together to make dramatic gains toward environmental sustainability.

The teams that contributed to this white paper are represented by our power and cooling architect Christian Belady, our distinguished engineer Dileep Bhandarkar, our Data Center Services director Daniel Costello (“the father” of our Generation 4 modular data center vision and the leader of the team of engineers that created it), our Data Center Software Services general manager Jawaid Ekram, and myself.

Their backgrounds include expertise in data center electrical and mechanical engineering, power and cooling architecture and design, research and development, and business operations and administration. It has been my distinct pleasure to work with and lead these subject matter experts and to share their thoughts with the industry via our blogs and participation in industry events.

Arne

Arne Josefsberg,

General Manager of Infrastructure Services

Global Foundation Services

Microsoft's Generation 4 Data Center Vision - the Architects' Perspective

msdcblog — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:44:00 GMT

Microsoft's Generation 4 Data Center Vision - the Architects' Perspective

By David Gauthier, Data Center Infrastructure Architect and Christian Belady, Principal Power and Cooling Architect, Microsoft Corp.

On Tuesday, December 2, our Global Foundation Services team went public with our Generation 4 Modular Data Center Vision and over the past week a lot of great discussions and questions have been posed from our industry colleagues. Today, we wanted to address some of those questions and share more insight on our Gen 4 plan via a video interview we did with Adam Bomb, a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft's TechNet Edge.

Some people got the impression that this announcement was solely about a containerized server room rather than a re-thinking of the entire infrastructure. The goal of Gen 4 is to modularize not only the server and storage components, which a number of companies are already doing, but also to modularize the infrastructure, namely the electrical and mechanical systems. The real innovation is around the commonality, manufacturing, supply chain and integration of these modules to provide a plug-and-play infrastructure along with modularized server environments. In addition, it is focused on scaling the infrastructure with the business demands, smoothing capital investment, and driving costs down as shown by the following chart.

While we expect these modular innovations to reduce capital investments by 20%-40% or more depending on class, we also expect considerable reductions in operating expenses related to electricity and water consumption. Designing from the start for environmental sustainability has allowed us to focus on using less construction material up front, less energy and water during operation, and also allows us to recycle and reuse components at the end of their useful life. No longer will we be governed by the initial decisions made when constructing the facility. We will have almost unlimited use and re-use of the facility and site. We will also be able to use power in an ultra-fluid fashion moving load from critical to non-critical as use and capacity requirements dictate.

More importantly, any IT or infrastructure vendor's products that meet our specs can be used interchangeably, thus providing a means for global sourcing and a competitive and innovative supplier landscape. As our team has already discussed pretty thoroughly, Microsoft is already reaping some of the benefits of modularity with server containers and we are confident that further modularization will afford us additional benefits when applied to the 'back of house'.

Some people have questioned whether an open air facility is as safe against natural disasters as a traditional concrete and steel structure. We believe that it can be and we are currently taking these factors into account as part of our heat map criteria site selection activities. Of course, we also expect that our modular approach affords tremendous flexibility in addressing site specific conditions as needed. Another significant benefit modularity offers is a smaller system failure zone versus a traditional data center. For example, a fire in a data center could bring the whole facility down in traditional construction (or have the fire department activate the emergency power off). Alternatively, in a modularized data center the fire could actually be isolated to only a subset of modules and thus provide greater resiliency.

We recognize that these types of architectures may not work for every application or every data center provider out there. We're not saying this will be the right way or the wrong way, just our way - and it may not be for everyone. We are confident about this direction meeting the needs of our data center environment and we hope that it sets the stage for continued healthy and dynamic dialog and sharing in this industry.

For more background information on our modular data center vision, please visit the December 2^nd blog of "Our Vision for Generation 4 Modular Data Centers - One way of getting it just right...," as well as the Gen 4 video posted at Soapbox.

cb/dg

Our Vision for Generation 4 Modular Data Centers – One way of Getting it just right . . .

msdcblog — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 05:13:00 GMT

The following posting originally appeared on Michael Manos' Loose Bolts blog.

Data Centers are a hot topic these days. No matter where you look, this once obscure aspect of infrastructure is getting a lot of attention. For years, there have been cost pressures on IT operations and this, when the need for modern capacity is greater than ever, has thrust data centers into the spotlight. Server and rack density continues to rise, placing DC professionals and businesses in tighter and tougher situations while they struggle to manage their IT environments. And now hyper-scale cloud infrastructure is taking traditional technologies to limits never explored before and focusing the imagination of the IT industry on new possibilities.

At Microsoft, we have focused a lot of thought and research around how to best operate and maintain our global infrastructure and we want to share those learnings. While obviously there are some aspects that we keep to ourselves, we have shared how we operate facilities daily, our technologies and methodologies, and, most importantly, how we monitor and manage our facilities. Whether it’s speaking at industry events, inviting customers to our “Microsoft data center conferences” held in our data centers, or through other media like blogging and white papers, we believe sharing best practices is paramount and will drive the industry forward. So in that vein, we have some interesting news to share.

Today we are sharing our Generation 4 Modular Data Center plan. This is our vision and will be the foundation of our cloud data center infrastructure in the next five years. We believe it is one of the most revolutionary changes to happen to data centers in the last 30 years. Joining me, in writing this blog are Daniel Costello, my director of Data Center Research and Engineering and Christian Belady, principal power and cooling architect. I feel their voices will add significant value to driving understanding around the many benefits included in this new design paradigm.

Our “Gen 4” modular data centers will take the flexibility of containerized servers—like those in our Chicago data center—and apply it across the entire facility. So what do we mean by modular? Think of it like “building blocks”, where the data center will be composed of modular units of prefabricated mechanical, electrical, security components, etc., in addition to containerized servers.

Was there a key driver for the Generation 4 Data Center?

If we were to summarize the promise of our Gen 4 design into a single sentence it would be something like this: “A highly modular, scalable, efficient, just-in-time data center capacity program that can be delivered anywhere in the world very quickly and cheaply, while allowing for continued growth as required.” Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, keep in mind that these concepts have been in initial development and prototyping for over a year and are based on cumulative knowledge of previous facility generations and the advances we have made since we began our investments in earnest on this new design.

One of the biggest challenges we’ve had at Microsoft is something Mike likes to call the ‘Goldilock’s Problem’. In a nutshell, the problem can be stated as:

The worst thing we can do in delivering facilities for the business is not have enough capacity online, thus limiting the growth of our products and services.

The second worst thing we can do in delivering facilities for the business is to have too much capacity online.

This has led to a focus on smart, intelligent growth for the business — refining our overall demand picture. It can’t be too hot. It can’t be too cold. It has to be ‘Just Right!’ The capital dollars of investment are too large to make without long term planning. As we struggled to master these interesting challenges, we had to ensure that our technological plan also included solutions for the business and operational challenges we faced as well.

So let’s take a high level look at our Generation 4 design

Are you ready for some great visuals? Click here for the Microsoft 4th Gen Video. It’s a concept video that came out of my Data Center Research and Engineering team, under Daniel Costello, that will give you a view into what we think is the future.

From a configuration, construct-ability and time to market perspective, our primary goals and objectives are to modularize the whole data center. Not just the server side (like the Chicago facility), but the mechanical and electrical space as well. This means using the same kind of parts in pre-manufactured modules, the ability to use containers, skids, or rack-based deployments and the ability to tailor the Redundancy and Reliability requirements to the application at a very specific level.

Our goals from a cost perspective were simple in concept but tough to deliver. First and foremost, we had to reduce the capital cost per critical Mega Watt by the class of use. Some applications can run with N-level redundancy in the infrastructure, others require a little more infrastructure for support. These different classes of infrastructure requirements meant that optimizing for all cost classes was paramount. At Microsoft, we are not a one trick pony and have many Online products and services (240+) that require different levels of operational support. We understand that and ensured that we addressed it in our design which will allow us to reduce capital costs by 20%-40% or greater depending upon class.

For example, non-critical or geo redundant applications have low hardware reliability requirements on a location basis. As a result, Gen 4 can be configured to provide stripped down, low-cost infrastructure with little or no redundancy and/or temperature control. Let’s say an Online service team decides that due to the dramatically lower cost, they will simply use uncontrolled outside air with temperatures ranging 10-35 C and 20-80% RH. The reality is we are already spec-ing this for all of our servers today and working with server vendors to broaden that range even further as Gen 4 becomes a reality. For this class of infrastructure, we eliminate generators, chillers, UPSs, and possibly lower costs relative to traditional infrastructure.

Applications that demand higher level of redundancy or temperature control will use configurations of Gen 4 to meet those needs, however, they will also cost more (but still less than traditional data centers). We see this cost difference driving engineering behavioral change in that we predict more applications will drive towards Geo redundancy to lower costs.

Another cool thing about Gen 4 is that it allows us to deploy capacity when our demand dictates it. Once finalized, we will no longer need to make large upfront investments. Imagine driving capital costs more closely in-line with actual demand, thus greatly reducing time-to-market and adding the capacity Online inherent in the design. Also reduced is the amount of construction labor required to put these “building blocks” together. Since the entire platform requires pre-manufacture of its core components, on-site construction costs are lowered. This allows us to maximize our return on invested capital.

In our design process, we questioned everything. You may notice there is no roof and some might be uncomfortable with this. We explored the need of one and throughout our research we got some surprising (positive) results that showed one wasn’t needed.

In short, we are striving to bring Henry Ford’s Model T factory to the data center. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Model_T. Gen 4 will move data centers from a custom design and build model to a commoditized manufacturing approach. We intend to have our components built in factories and then assemble them in one location (the data center site) very quickly. Think about how a computer, car or plane is built today. Components are manufactured by different companies all over the world to a predefined spec and then integrated in one location based on demands and feature requirements. And just like Henry Ford’s assembly line drove the cost of building and the time-to-market down dramatically for the automobile industry, we expect Gen 4 to do the same for data centers. Everything will be pre-manufactured and assembled on the pad.

And did we mention that this platform will be, overall, incredibly energy efficient? From a total energy perspective not only will we have remarkable PUE values, but the total cost of energy going into the facility will be greatly reduced as well. How much energy goes into making concrete? Will we need as much of it? How much energy goes into the fuel of the construction vehicles? This will also be greatly reduced! A key driver is our goal to achieve an average PUE at or below 1.125 by 2012 across our data centers. More than that, we are on a mission to reduce the overall amount of copper and water used in these facilities. We believe these will be the next areas of industry attention when and if the energy problem is solved. So we are asking today…“how can we build a data center with less building”?

We have talked openly and publicly about building chiller-less data centers and running our facilities using aggressive outside economization. Our sincerest hope is that Gen 4 will completely eliminate the use of water. Today’s data centers use massive amounts of water and we see water as the next scarce resource and have decided to take a proactive stance on making water conservation part of our plan.

By sharing this with the industry, we believe everyone can benefit from our methodology. While this concept and approach may be intimidating (or downright frightening) to some in the industry, disclosure ultimately is better for all of us.

Gen 4 design (even more than just containers), could reduce the ‘religious’ debates in our industry. With the central spine infrastructure in place, containers or pre-manufactured server halls can be either AC or DC, air-side economized or water-side economized, or not economized at all (though the sanity of that might be questioned). Gen 4 will allow us to decommission, repair and upgrade quickly because everything is modular. No longer will we be governed by the initial decisions made when constructing the facility. We will have almost unlimited use and re-use of the facility and site. We will also be able to use power in an ultra-fluid fashion moving load from critical to non-critical as use and capacity requirements dictate.

Finally, we believe this is a big game changer. Gen 4 will provide a standard platform that our industry can innovate around. For example, all modules in our Gen 4 will have common interfaces clearly defined by our specs and any vendor that meets these specifications will be able to plug into our infrastructure. Whether you are a computer vendor, UPS vendor, generator vendor, etc., you will be able to plug and play into our infrastructure. This means we can also source anyone, anywhere on the globe to minimize costs and maximize performance. We want to help motivate the industry to further innovate—with innovations from which everyone can reap the benefits.

To summarize, the key characteristics of our Generation 4 data centers are:

Scalable
Plug-and-play spine infrastructure
Factory pre-assembled: Pre-Assembled Containers (PACs) & Pre-Manufactured Buildings (PMBs)
Rapid deployment
De-mountable
Reduce TTM
Reduced construction
Sustainable measures
Map applications to DC Class

We hope you join us on this incredible journey of change and innovation!

Long hours of research and engineering time are invested into this process. There are still some long days and nights ahead, but the vision is clear. Rest assured however, that we as refine Generation 4, the team will soon be looking to Generation 5 (even if it is a bit farther out). There is always room to get better.

So if you happen to come across Goldilocks in the forest, and you are curious as to why she is smiling you will know that she feels very good about getting very close to ‘JUST RIGHT’.

Generations of Evolution – some background on our data center designs

We thought you might be interested in understanding what happened in the first three generations of our data center designs. When Ray Ozzie wrote his Software plus Services memo it posed a very interesting challenge to us. The winds of change were at ‘tornado’ proportions. That “plus Services” tag had some significant (and unstated) challenges inherent to it. The first was that Microsoft was going to evolve even further into an operations company. While we had been running large scale Internet services since 1995, this development lead us to an entirely new level. Additionally, these “services” would span across both Internet and Enterprise businesses. To those of you who have to operate “stuff”, you know that these are two very different worlds in operational models and challenges. It also meant that, to achieve the same level of reliability and performance required our infrastructure was going to have to scale globally and in a significant way.

It was that intense atmosphere of change that we first started re-evaluating data center technology and processes in general and our ideas began to reach farther than what was accepted by the industry at large. This was the era of Generation 1. As we look at where most of the world’s data centers are today (and where our facilities were), it represented all the known learning and design requirements that had been in place since IBM built the first purpose-built computer room. These facilities focused more around uptime, reliability and redundancy. Big infrastructure was held accountable to solve all potential environmental shortfalls. This is where the majority of infrastructure in the industry still is today.

We soon realized that traditional data centers were quickly becoming outdated. They were not keeping up with the demands of what was happening technologically and environmentally. That’s when we kicked off our Generation 2 design. Gen 2 facilities started taking into account sustainability, energy efficiency, and really looking at the total cost of energy and operations. No longer did we view data centers just for the upfront capital costs, but we took a hard look at the facility over the course of its life. Our Quincy, Washington and San Antonio, Texas facilities are examples of our Gen 2 data centers where we explored and implemented new ways to lessen the impact on the environment. These facilities are considered two leading industry examples, based on their energy efficiency and ability to run and operate at new levels of scale and performance by leveraging clean hydro power (Quincy) and recycled waste water (San Antonio) to cool the facility during peak cooling months.

As we were delivering our Gen 2 facilities into steel and concrete, our Generation 3 facilities were rapidly driving the evolution of the program. The key concepts for our Gen 3 design are increased modularity and greater concentration around energy efficiency and scale. The Gen 3 facility will be best represented by the Chicago, Illinois facility currently under construction. This facility will seem very foreign compared to the traditional data center concepts most of the industry is comfortable with. In fact, if you ever sit around in our container hanger in Chicago it will look incredibly different from a traditional raised-floor data center. We anticipate this modularization will drive huge efficiencies in terms of cost and operations for our business. We will also introduce significant changes in the environmental systems used to run our facilities. These concepts and processes (where applicable) will help us gain even greater efficiencies in our existing footprint, allowing us to further maximize infrastructure investments.

This is definitely a journey, not a destination industry. In fact, our Generation 4 design has been under heavy engineering for viability and cost for over a year. While the demand of our commercial growth required us to make investments as we grew, we treated each step in the learning as a process for further innovation in data centers. The design for our future Gen 4 facilities enabled us to make visionary advances that addressed the challenges of building, running, and operating facilities all in one concerted effort.

/Mm/Dc/Cb

Green Grid Data Center Indicator + CADE = Something useful!

msdcblog — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:36:00 GMT

The following posting originally appeared on Michael Manos' Loose Bolts blog.

There are times when two concepts merge and the result makes something better than the whole. It is not unlike the old television commercial where two people collide into each other. One eating a chocolate bar, the other a vat of peanut butter. The resulting lines are television gold:

“Your chocolate is in my peanut butter!”

“Your peanut butter is on my chocolate!”

“HEY!” (in unison with smiles)

I have been anxiously awaiting for the Green Grid to publish their work on the Data Center Indicator tool. My good friend Christian Belady and the incredible folks in the Technical workgroups came up with something that made me smile and gave CADE a way to be a viable metric.

The Data Center Indicator Tool gives you a visual representation across all factors important to operating and measuring a data center. Its no secret that I get quite passionate about the need to measure your data center. The lack of strict and rigorous uniform measurement across the data center industry is one of the biggest tragedies we are waiting to inflict upon ourselves.

This tool is not necessarily for beginners as it assumes you have a good set of data and active measurement already in place. However, in terms of quickly identifying trends and understanding your environment, I find it quite unique and interesting. In fact, many of the same factors represented are rolled up into the CADE metric.

The white paper which has been published on the Green Grid Site (White Paper #15) Is a great way to have a holistic view at your environment over time and is even suitable for executives not familiar with the intricacies of Data Center or Mission Critical environment facilities. If one takes the rolled up percentage in CADE and combines it with this type of Graph you have a great KPI, and a mechanism which makes the information actionable. That dear readers is what any facilities manager can use.

-Mm