Comments on: Google Gets Shifty With Its Data Center Operations

By: AT&T Dials Up a Computing Cloud – GigaOM

AT&T Dials Up a Computing Cloud – GigaOM — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:07:56 +0000

[...] needs. AT&T’s eventual goal (a common one in the industry) is to enable customers to move their computing around the world either following demand, lower power prices or whatever makes sense for the customer. AT&T may [...]

By: A Few “Techie” Links of Interest, 21 July 2009

A Few “Techie” Links of Interest, 21 July 2009 — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:33:36 +0000

[...] talks about how Google can shift operations from one data center to another half-way around the globe, during [...]

By: Hari Balakrishnan

Hari Balakrishnan — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:25:31 +0000

Apologies in advance for the shameless self-promotion. We have recently looked at this idea in a research project at MIT, done with some collaborators from Akamai. Our recent paper analyzes such strategies from the standpoint of electricity cost savings. The paper, titled “Cutting the Electric Bill for Internet-Scale Systems”, will appear at the SIGCOMM networking conference. The paper is at http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/papers/index.php?detail=190 for those of you who want to see some analysis (there are definitely some idealizations and assumptions, but we believe that the analysis is generally sound). The paper also contains a number of useful references.

The abstract of the paper is as follows: Energy expenses are becoming an increasingly important fraction of data center operating costs. At the same time, the energy expense per unit of computation can vary significantly
between two different locations. In this paper, we characterize the variation due to fluctuating electricity
prices and argue that existing distributed systems should be able to exploit this variation for significant economic gains. Electricity prices exhibit both temporal and geographic variation, due to regional demand differences, transmission inefficiencies, and generation diversity. Starting with historical electricity prices for twenty nine locations in the US, and network traffic data collected on Akamai’s CDN, we use simulation to quantify the possible economic gains for a realistic workload. Our results imply that existing systems may be able to save millions of dollars a year in electricity costs by being cognizant of locational computation cost differences.

By: Eideard

Eideard — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:49:21 +0000

The core problem with that analysis was that it was based on how Microsoft would go about accomplishing that. Then.

By: Dan Creswell

Dan Creswell — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:07:42 +0000

IMHO Google are already well advanced in handling these issues as they’re closely related to general failure handling/loss of a data-centre. Many useful details can be found in the papers they already publish but the recent problem around AppEngine and the associated post-mortem reveals quite a lot more:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/msg/ba95ded980c8c179?pli=1

By: Sujit Mohanty

Sujit Mohanty — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:09:11 +0000

Cassatt did this as their sole focus, and still they never got it right. In internal data centers and hybrid private / public cloud models, the biggest headache is automation that can handle the underlying infrastructure. Its a much more difficult task than it seems to the casual observer. We’re about two years out before major companies have fully deployed solutions attacking this problem, and at that point we probably would have barely tapped the surface.

By: Darren

Darren — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:44:02 +0000

@vijay you should post a link to that paper

By: vijaygill

vijaygill — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 20:57:34 +0000

I believe that the cost structure of this is worth analyzing – Microsoft has a good paper on this, basically the summary is that unless you need to touch the data with more than a few hundred thousand cycles worth of CPU, it is not worth it to move the data. You can trade off data transport cost, cpu cycle, environmentals.
So it is not quite as simple as follow the moon above.

/vijay

By: Greg Stein

Greg Stein — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 20:46:33 +0000

Regarding the “lots of bandwitdh needed” … remember Google buying up all that dark fiber years ago? :-)

By: Jeffrey

Jeffrey — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:37:25 +0000

Yeah, it’s easier to move solar power around than would be to move cold air around.