Data Center Strategies

Create your own stimulus package.

The constant bombardment of gloom and doom about the economy can wear you down. With such negative vibes coming our way, it would be easy to put those IT storage projects on hold, hunker down and beautify the cabling on equipment racks. I have no doubt that many IT groups are meeting to cut spending and minimize expenses that are not critically needed. Those in the organization who are good at justifying what they have and need will fare well. The less forceful or articulate, no matter the intrinsic value of their cause will suffer. And so it will go for awhile.

But this downturn will not last.

The economy will turn around.

We will not end up living in our cars. To think otherwise is foolish.

There is talk in the stock market that for those with iron fortitude, some would say brass you know what's, now is an historic time to buy stocks. Warren Buffet thinks so. I'm not sure - don't take investment advice from me, I still work for a living - but it makes you think: is now a good time to be building out new storage infrastructure? Will pricing on storage infrastructure be lower than it is right now?

Being an optimist, my sense is that storage vendors are desperate to meet sales goals - even reduced sales goals. I hate to be a shark and kick good vendors when they are down but now may be a great time to buy new storage gear. Resetting those pricey service contracts may also be interesting. After all, unless you've completely lost hope, it can only be up from here, right?

Sooner or later the economy will start to grow again. That means storage vendors will be taking orders. Vendors who no doubt downsized, will be constrained by a lack of production capability. Once things turn around, prices will rise as demand rises. If not from a constrained production chain, then from the zillions of dollars that are being pumped into the financial system.

The value of a dollar for computer storage may be peaking now.

If you have any faith in your business and the continued need for storage in your data center, then the allocation of investment dollars to storage will be a good bet. Updating storage gear to leverage thin provisioning, improve power efficiencies or reduce data footprints with deduplication can justify an investment. For those driving costs down with server virtualization, updating the storage to go with it is inevitable.

It's hard not to imagine a business that doesn't think it will come out the other side of this economic crisis alive. And if the business is alive on the other side of this gulf, investing earlier in storage gear for a data center will have been a good bet for positioning the business for growth.

So, if you've got any cash left, or even if you don't - vendors may be willing to finance you - consider updating storage infrastructure now. Create a custom built stimulus package. Being ready to handle an improved business climate will pay off in the long run.

posted by Gene Ruth

Putting Your Data Center on a Diet

So Christmas is over and we are all looking somewhat ruefully at our waist lines and hoping to get back in shape before the summer rolls around. Data center operators have another problem, how to cut some of the fat out of their data centers and get their energy budget in shape for the new year. Just this week I was asked the question “How can I trim a million KW-hours energy consumption this year?” That sounds like a daunting, but worthy exercise, a million KW-hours sounds like a huge number, but at 8-cents a kilowatt-hour trimming 1 million kilowatt-hours would save $80,000 dollars in the first year (of course, price/KW-hour varies considerably by location, so your mileage may vary.)

The first point to note is that while the number seems huge, that simply reflects the size of the customer’s data center, the real question is “what changes will have the most impact on energy consumption?” So here’s some tips on how you can reduce energy consumption in the data center:

1. Reduce the amount of equipment in use: The quickest way to significant savings is to cut back the amount of equipment in use through technologies such as server virtualization. Let's assume that 1/3rd of the servers in a data center are suitable candidates for virtualization and that on average a 5:1 consolidation ratio is possible (and that’s a conservative estimate for the consolidation ratio.) A datacenter with a thousand servers would be able to virtualize 333 of them, replacing those 333 physical servers with just 67, a net reduction of  266 physical servers. Now lets assume that these original servers were 1U pizza-box servers each consuming 300 watts of power, and that the new servers are bigger (to accommodate the extra memory, processors etc) and consume 600 watts of power, the net power saving is almost 60 kilowatts. Such an approach would also reduce power consumption for cooling by a similar margin (assuming 1:1: ratio between power consumed by equipment and power consumed by cooling.) This step alone would save a million KW-hours, throw in some improved storage management practices and deduplication for data and the energy savings quickly pile up.
2. Get rid of old equipment: Some data centers continue to use equipment until it finally dies, that can mean servers that are 5 or even 10 years old (I've seen even worse cases). These servers are energy and space hogs and deliver very little work for the power consumed compared to a more modern system, especially if the more modern system is combined with server virtualization. 
3. Improve power distribution: This can take the form of a number of improvements and upgrades. For example old UPS equipment is substantially less efficient (i.e. wastes more energy) than modern UPS systems, replacing the old UPS could yield a 5-10% reduction in energy consumption. Also minimize the number of voltage conversions between the power as delivered by the utility and the power consumed by the equipment, i.e. bring high-voltage power as close to the racks as possible.  Data centers in the US still using 120V AC to power equipment in the racks, need to take a long hard look at switching to 240V AC, the equipment doesn’t care and it will save energy and simplify the wiring.
4. Cooling improvements: Air-side economizers can deliver big savings, especially in more temperate climates. Assume roughly half the energy consumed by the data center is used for cooling, and that the airside economizer can function for half the year, then potential savings in energy consumption are pretty obvious. Also improve hot-aisle/cold aisle separation or implement fully ducted hot-air removal from racks can increase cooling efficiency inside the data center.

The big lesson here is that the quickest payback for reducing energy consumption is to reduce the amount of equipment in the data center and opportunity presented by maturing server virtualization technology is too good to pass up! The downside is that to save money in the long term, you’ll have to spend some money in the short term.

Posted by: Nik Simpson

When Thin Provisioning Isn't

A few weeks ago, I wrote about thin provisioning and how it was becoming an increasingly common feature in storage. Well if you needed any more proof that "thin provisioning" of storage is the latest must have check box, then HP's announcement this week of Dynamic Capacity Management (DCM) for its new line of EVA storage arrays should put any doubts to rest. There's only one problem, Dynamic Capacity Management isn't thin provisioning, and to be fair to HP they don't call it thin provisioning in any of the materials I could find on their web site.

But a strange thing happened with coverage of the announcement, almost without exception DCM has been talked about as thin provisioning in web and print coverage. The only question is whether everybody briefed by HP were victims of a shared delusion or HP deliberately positioned it as thin provisioning in their briefings. Either way, calling DCM "thin provisioning" is at best being "economical with the truth."

So why isn't DCM true "thin provisioning?" Lets look at some of the key features of previously announced thin provisioning and compare them what DCM has to offer:

OS independent	Yes, all the thin provisioning systems announced to this point will work for any Fibre or iSCSI attached host.	Only works with Windows hosts and needs a host agent.
Non-disruptive	Thin provisioning is completely transparent to the host, as far as the host is concerned the LUN size never changes	DCM relies on the host being able to stretch a volume to use the additional space added to the LUN. This may or may not work depending on the application.
Fine grain allocation	Thin provisioning allocates storage in relatively small pieces (typically a few MBs at a time) so that physical storage is consumed slowly and efficiently as hosts write data.	Because of the potential for disruption, DCM will add large chunks of storage to minimize the number of allocation events that cause the OS to stretch a volume.

This combination of DCM deficiencies means that it fails to deliver on the promises of thin provisioning in just about every respect. Let's just look at an example of an application server adding 50GBs of new data every week. With DCM we might start with 200GBs of storage to contain the OS, application and initial data. With 50GBs of new data added each week, we'll exhaust that initial storage before the end of the first month, and then assuming we add storage in 200GB chunks we'll have go through the process about once month for as a long as the server is active. The following chart shows how that looks from an efficiency perspective:

Over the course of twenty four weeks, the volume will have been resized 6 times (increasing the size of chunk to reduce the number of resize events only makes things worse from an efficiency perspective), with a significant part of the capacity wasted until the host actually creates new data. The end result is that you are:

• Paying for storage long before you need it
• Paying to power and cool that storage when it's not actually doing useful work

A real thin provisioning systems will cause "allocated capacity" to closely track "required capacity" and the host will never have to stretch its volumes because with thin provisioning the volume size doesn't change, just the amount of physical allocated to the volume changes.

So the lesson here is simple, if you want a general, non-disruptive and efficient thin-provisioning implementation then look to HDS, 3PAR, Equalogic, DataCore or Network Appliance. If you are happy with all the shortcomings of DCM, then EVA arrays are a solution, but don't be fooled, it's not thin provisioning!

Is Green the new Blue?

With IBM's announcement on May 10th of its intention of dedicating 1 billion USD to the research of data center efficiency, and the fact that Dell is also leading the way (and has a green track record since 1998) with the Dell Energy Efficiency Research Center in Austin, Texas (http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/pressoffice/en/2006/2006_12_04_rr_000?c=us&l=en&s=corp) -- ones has to wonder, is green the new blue?

IBM and Dell are not the only global businesses to announce their environmentally-friendly intentions of late. Rupert Murdoch, Chief-Executive-Officer (CEO) of the News Corporation and best known as head of Fox, recently made known his intentions to reduce News Corp.'s emissions by 10 percent by the year 2012 (http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2007/05/09/murdoch/). Although no explicit mention is made in the article with reference to his companies' data centers, Mr. Murdoch is a very informed individual, and I am sure that he is aware one of the areas that is easiest to "go green" in is information technology (IT) infrastructure.

Not only are companies outside the scope of the IT sector, such as News Corp., recognizing the imperative to go green, but even utilities providers are seeing the (tinted) light. Pacific, Gas, and Electric (PG&E) of California announced Q4 2006 that they would be providing up to 4 million USD in incentives (per project site) to their customers who consolidated their data centers through virtualization (http://www.pge.com/news/news_releases/q4_2006/061108.html).

And while there may be several new companies jumping on the band-wagon of late, some global giants recognized the trend early on. Take Hewlett-Packard (HP) for example -- HP has been a supporter and provider of e-recycling programs as far back as 2003 and was recently named one of the 10 green giants by Fortune Magazine (http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0703/gallery.green_giants.fortune/10.html). It seems poetic then that the IT industry's eco-leader would announce a major initiative in March of this year to reduce its global energy consumption by a staggering 20% by the year 2010 (http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2007/070328a.html). Such a bold promise seems almost destined to be retracted, but if any company has the drive and technical know-how to see a major project through such as this one, it is the company that has blazed the trail towards a more green tomorrow from the beginning.

However, all this green goodwill begs the question -- why? Why have these billion-dollar businesses decided that being environmentally-conscious is part of their company vision. As one mysterious source once told two intrepid reporters, "follow the money." Independent hardware vendors (IHVs) such as IBM and Dell have customers who are faced with the situation of rising utilities prices, and if they do not provide energy-efficient solutions, someone else will. Being green has become a competitive edge. With its printer cartridge recycling program HP is adhering to the wisdom of a quiet little musical ensemble called "AC/DC" -- recycling "makes good, good sense." Especially if a cost analysis is performed and it is found that re-using old printer cartridges is more cost effective than manufacturing new ones. PG&E is providing consolidation incentives for two reasons -- one, if customers find that it is too expensive to house their data centers in California, then they will simply move their facilities to another location where utilities are less expensive. PG&E would rather pay customers up front to stay rather than lose them all together. The second reason is return on investment (ROI). The rate at which the demand for electricity is growing is too fast for PG&E to handle, and instead of building another generator to accommodate increased load, PG&E would rather see customers consolidate their data centers and in turn use less electricity. This is because PG&E has done the math and realizes that the ROI on a new generator would take 30-50 years to materialize and paying out incentives to existing customers so that they use less electricity is the quickest, and most cost effective, solution.

Finally, one last reason, and perhaps the most important, companies are "going green" is image. Greenpeace recently published a list of the top green companies in IT (http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/apple-guide-to-greener.pdf), and Apple was right at the bottom. Obviously this did not bode well for Apple's image, and they have been making great efforts of late to make several of their products more energy efficient and to reduce harmful emissions (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/agreenerapple/). Over the past few years the environment has received a tremendous amount of focus and concerned customers want to know if the businesses they buy from are helping or hurting the situation.

Peter Darbee of PG&E says that "The energy industry is on the brink of a revolution." (http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0703/gallery.green_giants.fortune/6.html). Mr. Darbee is correct, there is a revolution upon us, but it is not the energy industry that will play the part of the villagers storming the gates of King Louis XVI's palace. No, rather it is the energy companies, the IHVs, and other big business alike that are in fact sitting on the throne -- but in this interpretation the royalty are inviting the commoners inside the halls of the elite, asking them what can be done to help improve the situation. It is us, it is we, it is everyone working together in concert with one another that will help usher in a revolution that will leave the skies blue and everything between the earth and above, green.

posted by: Andrew Kutz