April 30, 2007

Power & Cooling – More Ways to Skin the Cat

By now it’s more than clear that power and cooling are one of (if not THE) top concern for data center architects and many CIOs today. Simple data points show that power consumption by servers in data centers has doubled from 2003 (5.6 million) to 2005 (10.3 million). The power needed for these servers and associated infrastructure would require 5 power plants at 1000 megawatts output each to support this load.

That was two years ago…

Certainly servers are the primary culprit for data center power consumption – and a major area for vendor focus in power reduction. (See the research report from Jonathan Koomey of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab http://enterprise.amd.com/Downloads/svrpwrusecompletefinal.pdf). What is not as clear to many data center, storage and network IT professionals is that nearly *all* aspects of data center infrastructure can be optimized for power consumption, as well as lower resulting TCO.

Storage and SAN virtualization has grown significantly over the last 2-3 years, and can provide major power savings. See Enterprise Strategy Group’s recent research report on the benefits of SAN switch virtualization http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns674/networking_solutions_sub_solution_home.html

Newer yet is the idea of virtualized appliances, be they network components, security systems, or other devices. While server virtualization is now widely known and increasingly deployed, very few data center networks today leverage virtualization to get more use of fixed infrastructure – short of virtual LANS (VLAN) and virtual private networks (VPN), which are 10+ year old technologies.

Today, vendors like Cisco are taking virtualization to new levels across the entire set of infrastructure in the data center: storage switches/directors (MDS), application networking (ACE), and security (firewall module for Catalyst). The benefits of virtualization are real and multi-reaching: capex savings, faster and less time-consuming operations, and visibly lower power and cooling.

For example on power and cooling, one Cisco ACE module can easily support 50 individual application instances (same app/multiple groups, or 50 different apps). The power/cooling advantages of virtualization for that scenario are pretty compelling: 220 watts/hour for an ACE module vs. 363 watts for a standalone load balancer or app switch. Multiply that out over four years, and you get 7.7 million watts used vs. 12.7 million. Now multiply 12.7 million by fifty point app switches and you’re looking at over 600 million watts vs. under 10 million! The resulting savings for this example is between $330,000 and $500,000+ depending on regional power rates. The same benefits can be seen if you deploy virtualized firewalls or storage switches.

So the next time your data center design team looks at virtualization, think beyond the virtual server, and think about the broader network and infrastructure. Your finance team, and power company, will definitely notice.

Posted by Mark Weiner at 03:27 PM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

April 27, 2007

File Networking on Friday

Am sitting in my office today recovering a bit from a head cold induced by a cruise ship in the Caribbean. These ships, while making an amenable focus on the eradication of germs and diseases by rampant hand washing and sanitizing stations, could still be known as the '100,000-ton Petrie Dishes of the Sea'. But I digress - this is a blog about data center technologies and today we are going to incite a bit of a conversation about file networking.

There is a new term getting bandied about -- one of the 'File Area Network'. This sounds marginally contrived since these systems run on top of traditional LAN technologies, but let's not debate too much the relative merits of weak taxonomy :) These file management systems and file virtualization systems allow for a single global namespace in the enterprise and probably more importantly, abstract the file naming and external volume association from the storage medium and device itself.

This allows the IT administrator to start provisioning storage resources based on policy rather than user preference and user selection. For example an enterprise could choose to have a file share that represented itself as the 'Z:' drive to an end-user. However, whatever files the end user copied to the Z: drive would actually be stored across 3 or 4 different storage targets based on metadata and user information relevant to the actual files being stored. For instance all MP3 and MP4 files could be stored on a low-cost medium, while anything with the words 'Company Confidential' coming from an end-user in the Finance department could be stored on a Tier-1 storage target while ensuring the data was encrypted in flight and at rest.

This is just a simple example of how file virtualization technologies could be used - there are many more. As you may have heard Cisco announced the acquisition of NeoPath a leader in this space and as we move forward with the productization of this technology into network transport platforms we are trying to get a feel for how you would use these capabilities and make them part of your operational procedures.

So how would you use file virtualization? What do you see as the major opportunity for the technology? What platforms should we integrate it into? What business problems will it help you solve?

Thank you

Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 04:52 PM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

April 05, 2007

Can you stick a Data Center in a box?

A couple of companies have recently come out with the proposal to squeeze Data Centers in a "box" (it's a box as big as a container, but the concept is no different.) As much as I appreciate the end goal of simplifying DC deployments and management, I am not quite sure that is the right way to go,... yet.

My first reaction to Sun's introduction of the BlackBox project was that it was a nice proof of concept, but not really something an enterprise could use today. But I did not discount Sun's proposal as Sun is a company that has been historically capable of being a few years ahead of the market. And when I say ahead of the market, I do not just mean ahead of the competition, but also ahead of customers and their ability to understand, purchase and use their products. I was thus very intrigued to see their announcement of Project BlackBox last fall, but I was not really convinced that customers would buy into that so easily.

Today, I saw the announcement that Rackable Systems is doing something similar. Of course there are still little information about this, but I am not sure about how a Company that has built their reputation and market presence mostly on low-power server architectures will be able to deliver on something so much bigger as an entire Data Center in a box, where you also have storage, networks, security services, scalability services, application optimization,...

This topic was recently discussed on ZDNet with rumors that Microsoft may be an early adopter of portable Data Centers:

Portable data centers: Will Microsoft prime the demand pump? by ZDNet's Larry Dignan -- Microsoft may be giving the nascent portable data center market a lift. Data Center Knowledge via Slashdot connects a few dots–including a some from ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley–to conclude that Microsoft may be an early adopter of the portable data centers championed by Sun (right), Rackable and others. These data center in a box concepts have [...]

Anyway, my point here is not so much to critique or applaud either Sun or Rackable, but really to ask my fellow bloggers their opinion on whether or not we are ready to put DCs in a box. I think it's clear that I am personally not convinced, but before telling you why, I will probably wait to see if anybody cares enough about this to even post a comment and then I will tell you more about my thoughts...

A wonderful and peaceful Spring break to all of the readers!

Posted by Dante Malagrino at 07:37 AM Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)