GigaOM » Data Centers

CoolEmAll project tests tools for energy-efficient data center design

David Meyer — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:01:43 +0000

A project called CoolEmAll has revealed prototype tools to aid the design of energy-efficient data centers. The European Commission-funded scheme wants data center designers and operators to test these tools ahead of a full release next year.

CoolEmAll hopes to come up with a simulation, visualization and decision support (SVD) toolkit, which could be used to simulate data centers while taking various factors into account. These include the types of applications that are being run, different hardware configurations, the intensity of workloads and specific management policies, as well as airflow. This would be represented through dashboards and 3D visualizations.

The project, which got funding as part of the Commission’s high-performance computing (HPC) drive, also aims to create a set of hardware and thermodynamic models that can be plugged into these simulations. These so-called Data Center Efficiency Building Blocks (DEBBs) will be made available in an open repository.

The analyst house 451 Research is taking part in the project. According to 451 analyst Andrew Donoghue:

“Factors such as rising fuel prices, stricter environmental legislation and constrained credit amid the financial crisis are contributing to higher capital and operational costs for data centre owners and operators. The tools and research that will result from the CoolEmAll project will help the data centre industry to meet some of these challenges, and develop more efficient and sustainable facilities.”

The prototype tools can be downloaded now. CoolEmAll is looking for people to test them, and also to potentially work with the consortium if they have something to offer.

In the meantime, here’s a video demonstrating the user interface for CoolEmAll’s under-construction Module Operation Platform:

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How robots can do more in data centers and lower the costs of operating the cloud

Jordan Novet — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:58:26 +0000

Machines are giving us better and better suggestions for things to read, restaurants to eat at and people to date. Behind the curtains, some of the ways these services are being delivered are also being automated.

An article out Wednesday from Data Center Knowledge envisions the next few steps for automating operations inside the data centers. Robots can move literally higher up the stack than humans and still be safe, which means data center builders can build vertically instead of horizontally. That could bring better use of data center floor space.

If robots do all the work on the floor, lights might become unnecessary, and poof: just like that, a line item can be nixed from the budget. Deploying robots could also lead to less downtime, as they could act with more certainty than people when it comes to replacing a server or another hardware component.

Using robots to grab equipment is “becoming quite feasible,” and Google does it to get backup storage tapes, according to the article. Most gear isn’t really made for machines to handle, though, so this area might be in need of tinkering before it can get widely adopted.

The article also makes mention of unmanned data centers, including one operated by AOL. Apple revealed plans last year to build one of these facilities in Prineville, Ore., before saying it would expand the site to add data centers where some people would work. As more companies move in that direction, prices will drop, leading to further market penetration.

Despite this, the article suggests that data centers will still need administrators, so not everyone working inside data centers will lose their jobs as this wave of automation carries through — for now.

Meanwhile, data center admins can also optimize their facilities by changing out hardware and software to match use cases. Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, will talk about his vision for the software-defined data center, and Andrew Feldman, general manager and corporate vice president of AMD, will talk about how companies can do these things at GigaOM’s Structure Conference in San Francisco on June 19.

With these sorts of upgrades, while the initial capital expenditures might be high, they could bring operating expenses down for public, private and hybrid cloud providers, resulting in price drops for customers in time.

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Data center space in parts of New Jersey is 4 times the cost of space in Manhattan

Jordan Novet — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:37:00 +0000

Companies want to pay $600 or more per square foot to locate their gear close to high-priority data centers in New Jersey that host the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange, a rate four times the cost of square footage across the river in Manhattan, according to the New York Times, which covered the price differential as part of a story on Equinix and other data center operators.

The story shows that, like in all real estate, finding a home for your servers is all about location, location, location. In this case, it’s not school districts or an urban core drawing customers — it’s proximity to data. As we’ve explained, there are benefits to locating auxiliary data and services in close proximity to big repositories of financial data. It can keep latency (and bandwidth costs) low, while making big-money trades as speedy as possible and rapid data analytics as close to real time as can be.

The law of data gravity at work in New Jersey, where major data center construction and expansion has been forecast, has also played out to some extent in northern Virginia, where Amazon Web Services’ US East infrastructure runs, as well as in New York, even with the superstorm Sandy.

Beyond reporting the New Jersey phenomenon, the Times shows that the circumstances are ripe for data center operators such as Digital Realty Trust and Equinix to function as quasi-utilities, even though they are not regulated as utilities. They negotiate power deals with utilities and then resell power to customers that want to run servers inside the data centers. And the data center companies can post robust profits when customers agree to pay for, say, double the amount of power they typically use.

As much as those profits might bode well for Equinix and their ilk, power could turn out to be an issue. Energy costs could increase, and outages can happen, but also, as the article points out, demand for power, in New Jersey and elsewhere, could keep increasing beyond the capacity of the data centers, which means that the data center companies might not be able to use their facilities completely effectively.

It could be that data gravity begets data center construction. If that’s the case, places such as New Jersey could see data center construction for years to come.

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Twitter reportedly plans to expand Sacramento data center space

Jordan Novet — Sat, 11 May 2013 01:40:32 +0000

Twitter is leasing more data center space at RagingWire’s 500,000-square-foot campus in Sacramento, Data Center Knowledge reported Friday, attributing its report to “industry sources.” There’s no square-footage figure available, but power use for the expansion is pegged at “more than 20 megawatts.” And so the mystery about Twitter’s infrastructure continues.

The reported expansion comes on top of Twitter’s existing infrastructure footprint, which apparently includes space at the Sacramento facility and might also include space at the data center custom-built for Twitter, which the company moved into in 2011. At that time, former Twitter vice president of engineering Michael Abbott wrote that the social network had arrived at its “final nesting ground.” But it seems that nesting ground was not big enough.

Like Facebook, Twitter is not a site for flat traffic. The infrastructure needs to accommodate traffic spikes — think of how people clung to Twitter during Hurricane Sandy — and having more space can keep Twitter ahead in those types of situations.

Keeping latency low as monthly active user count increases — it was at more than 200 million in December, up from 100 million in September 2011 — is likely a high priority, too.

More data center space also makes for better backup capability. Remember when Sandy proved the importance of being ready for disasters with flooding and power outages on the East Coast? A bigger footprint for Twitter translates into lower likelihood of a fail whale.

Twitter’s infrastructure expansion comes following news of other webscale players bumping up their respective footprints. Facebook reportedly will build a new data center in Altoona, Iowa, with the first phase measuring 476,000 square feet and costing $300 million. Also in Iowa, Google said it would expand its data center in the city of Council Bluffs, and Data Center Knowledge reported last month that LinkedIn is expanding its data center space, too.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

The company is worthy of merit for talking about its features in public and open-sourcing many of them, although it has been cagey about disclosing information about its infrastructure and the causes of service disruptions. We know very little about Twitter’s infrastructure, in contrast to Facebook and Google’s installations. In the past it was unclear where the custom-built data center was, as the plan in 2010 was for the Salt Lake City area, but then it was reported that Twitter was actually moving servers to Sacramento. Twitter’s status in Atlanta is another unsolved mystery.

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Data center rivals Facebook and Google pump $700M in new construction into Iowa

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:09:12 +0000

Data center nerds got two big announcements today with both Google and Facebook announcing big projects. Facebook’s new data center construction in Iowa is the fourth data center for the search giant, while Google’s Iowa expansion carriers a higher price tag. But the dueling news releases also highlight a growing infrastructure rivalry between these web giants.

Facebook formally announced the construction of a new data center in Altoona, Iowa. Construction on the first phase will begin this summer and your Facebook likes and photos will start traveling over the data center in late 2014 according to Tom Furlong, vice president of site operations at Facebook.

He said that while newspaper reports placed the value of the center at $1 billion to $1.5 billion, he’s unsure where those figures came from. This first phase will cost $300 million and result in a 476,000 square-foot data center. That square footage includes both offices and floor space. Like Facebook’s data center in Lulea, Sweden the hardware inside will be built for Facebook to its Open Compute standards.

Facebook’s data center in Prineville, Ore.

When I asked Furlong if the Altoona data center would be built for disaster recovery purposes — as some of my sources had suggested — he told me, “we’re in the N+1 mode,” meaning he was building out capacity beyond what he needs to serve customers. While Furlong was clear that the data center would be more than just a failover site for Facebook’s Prineville, Ore.; Forest City, N.C.; Lulea, Sweden or leased data center space, it would represent excess capacity that could still support traffic from other sites if a region failed.

He also alluded to mechanical, electrical and networking improvements, but other than saying that servers handling similar products would be grouped together he declined to get specific. But I’m hoping his boss, Jay Parikh, the VP of infrastructure engineering at Facebook who is speaking at Structure in June will share the details.

On the capital investment side, Facebook said in its 10-K filing that it planned to spend $1.8 billion in capital expenditures in 2013. When asked if this data represented a large chunk of that, Furlong said it didn’t. AND at $300 million it probably wouldn’t, especially if servers and gear wouldn’t make it into the data center until 2014 as Furlong suggested.

But wait, there’s more!

But in a curious bit of timing, Google today said it would expand its Iowa data center operations in (relatively) nearby Council Bluff, Iowa. The search giant will spend $400 million building out its existing data center operations, bringing its total spent in the area to $1.5 billion. The data center houses computer systems and associated components that support services such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps and Google+.

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In the data center world, the growing rivalry between Google and Facebook is common — if quietly addresses –knowledge, which is why the timing of Google’s announcement seems designed to steal Facebook’s thunder. However, Google’s spokeswoman attributed the timing to an Iowa Economic Development Board meeting held this morning, where the board approved incentives for both Facebook and Google.

However, it’s no secret that Facebook has been stealing pages from Google’s book and is also pushing for more openness than it’s famously “open” rival. Facebook’s Open Compute project announced in April 2011 clearly found inspiration in Google’s own efforts to build its own hardware to maximize efficiency. With Open Compute, Facebook took Google’s basic idea and opened it up to masses after putting considerable engineering talent behind it.

That’s only one example. Facebook has also been open about how it builds and operates its data centers, which has led to many of those in the industry to start releasing their own data. For example, after Google published a blog post last year noting the power usage effectiveness ratio for its data centers, Facebook countered with an email indicating the differences between its calculations and Google’s. Microsoft also was quick to respond with details on its own PUE calculations.

Facebook’s Forest City, North Carolina data center.

That type of data has now become a PR battleground for many of these companies. And while it’s a game Google seems reluctant to play, it’s one that it has resigned itself to. Industry insiders note that Google is opening up as Facebook pushes the envelope on transparency.

The search giant’s appearance and presentation last November at an industry conference that shared seven years of knowledge gained at Google, plus its invitation of a CBS news crew to tour its data center in North Carolina (where Apple and Facebook both have data centers and our own Katie Fehrenbacher was yelled at for snapping a picture) are a few examples.

These steps are unheard of for the search giant, which is famous for holding its infrastructure details close to the vest. In the CBS video, Google’s infrastructure czar Urs Hölzle said that the tour granted to the CBS crew is the only time he’ll allow cameras into the data center. Google once asked me to avoid using a picture of a slide I had taken at a conference that showed a switch it had designed. I didn’t run the picture, but that was because it was blurry.

So as Facebook pushes Google, perhaps Google is now pushing back a bit today with its own Iowa news. Google’s is a bigger project announcement, coming the same day after Facebook’s might just be a coincidence enabled by incentive packages, or it might be an attempt to steal Facebook’s thunder.

Regardless, two web giants striving to make computing faster, more efficient and in Facebook’s case, more open, is a good thing: both for Iowa and for the rest of us.

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Google’s infrastructure spending spree continues; $1.2B in Q1

Derrick Harris — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:37:34 +0000

Google has stepped up its infrastructure spending once again, to the tune of $1.2 billion in the first quarter, according to its earnings report released on Thursday. That’s a 20 percent quarter-over-quarter increase, and the previous quarter’s $1.02 billion represented Google’s second-biggest quarterly investment ever.

There’s not much to say about this uptick in spending that hasn’t been said before. Essentially, Google has to keep on spending to keep its services running as well as possible and as efficiently as possible. Competing against Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft in everything from search to mobile to cloud computing costs a boatload of cash. Rolling out Google Fiber — soon to be in three cities — certainly isn’t cheap, either.

Apples-to-apples comparisons can be tough, because everyone’s businesses are different and decisions to build or buy new gear can affect expenditures, as can massive new headquarters. But here goes: In its fiscal third quarter earnings announced on Thursday, Microsoft claims it spent $930 million. Facebook, Apple and Amazon have not yet released their latest earnings, although both Apple and Amazon spent more than $2 billion on “property and equipment” in the previous quarter. Facebook spent $198 million and another $89 million leasing property and equipment.

This quarter’s $1.2 billion also represents a nearly 2x increase over last year’s first quarter infrastructure spending for Google.

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Facebook throws down efficiency gauntlet with real-time data and open-source dashboards

Jordan Novet — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:00:44 +0000

When I first visited Facebook’s data center in Prineville, Ore., in 2011, I felt privileged to spot some figures on the facility’s power-usage effectiveness (PUE) on a screen affixed to a wall. The PUE number, which gives a sense of how much of the energy gets consumed by computing gear, wasn’t exactly what some reporters wanted to know — total number of megawatts would have been better than PUE, and that sort of information came later — but it was a start toward transparency. Now, the PUE data won’t be such a big deal to catch a glimpse of anymore.

The social-networking giant is giving the general public access to near-real-time dashboards on PUE and another key measurement, water-usage effectiveness (WUE), alongside humidity and temperature data for its data centers in Prineville and in Forest City, N.C. Previously, the PUE and WUE figures were released quarterly. The new dashboards show data down to the minute, albeit with a two and a half hour lag. In the future, Facebook will also post a PUE and WUE dashboard for the data center it’s building in Luleå, Sweden.

The facilities are still under construction, and, as a result, the data in the two dashboards can have abnormalities, but it should become more stable over time. The company detailed its plans in a Thursday blog post on the Open Compute Project site.

Facebook’s Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) and Water Usage Efficiency (WUE) dashboard

Facebook’s Power Use Efficiency (PUE) and Water Use Efficiency (WUE) dashboard

To prod other companies operating data centers to share more up-to-date power- and water-usage data, Facebook will open-source the code for the dashboards. Similar data from other companies could make Facebook look good, as Facebook (along with Google) is on the leading edge when it comes to PUE. A self-benchmarking guide on high-tech buildings from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory puts the standard data-center PUE at 2.0, a good one at 1.4 and a better one at 1.1. The PUE at Facebook’s data center in Prineville fluctuated between 1.06 and 1.08 on Thursday, and at the Forest City data center the PUE was between 1.08 and 1.1.

eBay, for its part, has released a dashboard showing PUE and WUE as well as other measurements, such as the number of checkout transactions per kilowatt-hour.

Innovations in hardware and software at Facebook’s data centers make lower energy use possible. Whether Facebook will be able to squeeze even more computing power out of its energy and water consumption is an interesting question, and now that more current data is being shared, it’s worth asking what innovations will come in the future. If Yahoo, Microsoft and others follow suit, the pressure will be on for data centers across the board to become more transparent. Those efforts could help data center operators respond to notions that data centers waste energy.

This post was updated at 5:24 p.m. to include federal benchmarking figures for power-usage efficiency (PUE) and current Facebook figures.

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Building energy management systems: overview and forecast

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 17:46:16 +0000

Although there has been a focus on energy efficiency in commercial buildings for some years, the BEMS market can still be considered nascent. The landscape of new entrants, new technologies, and new methodologies is expanding rapidly, and even well-established market leaders are finding new ways to present and market their businesses.

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Private cloud mania drives data center expansion, survey says

Jordan Novet — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 18:45:06 +0000

Lots of large companies in North America are expanding their data centers this year or next, and the desire to run internal private clouds is a major motivating factor, according to the results of a new survey of IT decision makers. Despite all the flak private clouds have taken, it’s clear they have a piece of the cloud market, and that piece appears to be growing.

Of the 300 IT executives surveyed, 98 percent expect to expand their data centers in 2013 or 2014, and 61 percent cited establishing internal clouds as an extremely important reason, according to the study, commissioned by data center builder Digital Realty Trust and conducted by Campos Research and Analysis. Better security, energy efficiency and new applications and services are among the other stated reasons for expansion.

The hankering for private clouds is fascinating. It shows that objections to the concept could be fading. Critics say private cloud can’t replicate the cost savings that can derive from going with massively scaled shared-resource public clouds exemplified by Amazon Web Services. Others see private cloud deployments as unduly influenced by vendors trying to parlay their dominance in the current server and software realm into cloud. But, then again, regulatory or compliance concerns still rule out the use of public clouds, as GigaOM Research analyst David Linthicum wrote in February (subscription required).

The wider availability of the OpenStack cloud platform has surely made a difference in the rise of private clouds. It’s helped plenty of companies build private clouds, including eBay, Intel and Yahoo. That trend could keep up, but so could the rise in the adoption of public clouds.

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Caves, ships and aging gasometers: 3 unlikely homes for data centers

Jordan Novet — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:29:29 +0000

Add gasometers to the list of strange places for data centers.

A gasometer — a place to store different kinds of gases — in Stockholm has sat unused for decades, and now a Swedish cloud service provider has put forth a couple of proposals for turn the facility into a data center, the Royal Pingdom blog reported Thursday.

The structure was built in 1893 as part of a coal gas plant. Another gasometer was built right next to it 1900. The city of Stockholm is requesting that the public have access to at least part of the data center that’s being proposed for the 1893 gasometer. One proposal would make the data center look a bit like a panopticon, except instead of people the building has floors and rows chock full of server racks. The other proposal puts forward barracks-like structures to store the server racks, alongside lots of open space.

Gasometer data center proposal from industrial design firm Splitvision

Gasometer proposal from architect Albert France-Lanord

Aging 19th-century buildings aren’t the only odd places to get a 21st century makeover. Data center providers in Hong Kong are going underground in their hunt for space. Just a couple of weeks ago came news of the Hong Kong government’s apparent interest in building out rock caverns for data centers. Earlier, Wikileaks went underground when it located its servers in an nuclear weapon-proof bunker in Stockholm. Incidentally, the company Wikileaks worked with to get its data center going, Bahnhof, is the same one that’s proposing the gasometer data center.

Then there was Google’s plan to build out floating data centers and use waves as an energy source. As far as we know, the concept has not led to an actual floating data center yet.

Other places where site selectors might want to look: abandoned coal mines, mountains, chapels and outer space. And don’t forget about our houses.

While the United States government is consolidating its IT footprint to become more efficient, companies are moving more toward cloud computing. And as that happens, more companies will want to run data centers to host those services. It can be cheaper to set up data centers in existing structures, and that’s why it shouldn’t be surprising to see people dreaming up data centers inside more and more places, all weirdness aside.

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