Gartner on Extreme Data Centers

December 14, 2010

One of the best sessions I went to at the Gartner Data Center conference last week, was entitled Extreme Data Centers – Attaining Massive scalability – in the minimum space at the lowest cost.

The talk was given by David Cappuccio who is a managing vice president and chief of research for the Infrastructure teams with Gartner, responsible for research in data center futures, servers, power/cooling, green IT, enterprise management and IT operations.

Dell's Modular Data center, mentioned in David's talk, a few days before it went live at Tier 5 in Australia.

Here are my notes from the talk:

The Extreme Data Center definition

  • Designed for efficiency first
  • Designed for optimal performance per kilowatt and or per square foot
  • They leverage new design principles to attain the biggest benefit

An example he then gave was supporting 2,107 servers, 18,300 images and 19 petabytes of storage in 2,600 sq. feet of IT space

New data centers are designed around efficiency

  • In power utilization
  • In space allocation
  • In capital expenditures

Three ways to solve your problem

  • Build your own datacenter from the ground up — greatest control but most expensive
  • Retrofit what you have to extend its life – greatest potential risk but least expensive
  • Use modular ideas to build and expand later
    • Reduce capital upfront costs
    • Simple growth when needed
    • Can use existing land or building

Emerging Design trends

  • Build small, build often
  • Build for density
  • Scale vertically and then horizontally
  • Build and rebuild pods (or sections of your data center)
  • Build density zones (group your systems by how dense they are – high, medium or low– and then match the power and cooling at the zone level.  Density is usually based on the workload mix)
  • Consider multi tiered designs (all apps aren’t created equal)
  • Use free air and reuse heat
  • Design for the unknown

Modular Designs for sustained growth/The evolution of pre-built solutions

  • David felt this approach was a really good idea and made sense
  • He felt the drawback was that there weren’t any reference accounts: he mentioned HP at Purdue and “some company down in Australia” (which dear readers is the Dell MDC down at Tier5, pictured above).
  • He cited Azure as the poster child for containers
  • Besides citing Sun’s “Black Box” as the granddaddy of all these, the pre-built solutions he mentioned were:
    • HP Flexible data center
    • IBM scalable modular datacenter
    • I/O anywhere
    • Dell Modular Data center

Energy consumption and efficiency

  • PUE, DCiE are defacto standards – use them
  • But PUE is not the goal – it’s the beginning
  • PPE: performance and capacity per kilowatt are key

Three examples of some cool new designs

  • Yahoo Computing coop: outside air cooled, minimal fans no chillers and a PUE of 1.08
  • Microsoft containers:  8×40 feet versions, 8-12 weeks for delivery, 2K servers per container
  • Net App: Slab-based w/overhead air design: first energy star rated data center, 25 megawatts

Stay tuned for more

The extreme data center space is an “extremely” hot one.  Watch this space to learn more about how Dell plays here going forward. :)

Pau for now…

Extra-credit reading:

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Posted by Barton George

The Data Center ecosystem of players

December 12, 2010

As I mentioned in a recent entry, last week I attended the Gartner Data Center conference where I learned a ton.  One of the folks I learned a lot from was Dave Ohara who consults in the data center arena.  Dave is uber connected in this space and pens the blog, Green (low carbon) Data Center blog.  Dave provided a bunch of introductions while I was there and sat down with me to do the following short video on the ecosystem of data center players.

Some of the ground that Dave covers:

  • What he covers in his blog Green Data Center
  • How do you go about building a data center and who are the players in each phase e.g site selection -> architecture/engineering design -> construction…
  • What are some of the key disruptions coming to this long standing industry e.g. cloud, Google

Pau for now…

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Dell opens its Social Media Command Center

December 8, 2010

This afternoon, Michael Dell himself came to open Dell’s brand new Social Media Listening Command Center.  Customers, press and a bunch of us involved in social media at Dell were invited to attend.

To get a good feel for today’s event check out this quick montage of the goings on, including Michael’s remarks and the cutting of the virtual ribbon (FYI on either side of Michael are Dell’s CMO Karen Quintos and VP of Social media, Manish Mehta).

What’s the big idea

Taking a step back, there are three main reasons for a business to leverage social media (the following is based on a conversation I had with the VAR guy who in turn wrote my ramblings up into something coherent):

  1. Monitor & Respond: You need to protect your brand. By monitoring FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs (through Google Alerts), you can defend your brand, answer questions and stop misinformation about your company before it goes viral across the web.
  2. Educate and Inform: This is where you take the time to tell customers more about your services, expertise or unique selling proposition. Generally speaking, this involves speaking to established customers or speaking to customers who have needs for your services.
  3. Establish Thought Leadership: This is how you pull new people into the sales funnel. Perhaps a local business owner didn’t realize (A) they had a pain point and (B) you have the skills to solve that pain point. Through pro-active communications, you’re able to describe your expertise and create sales opportunities that otherwise may not have materialized.

While Dell participates in all three of the buckets above, the command center is primarliy focused on bucket 1.

Monitoring and Responding

As reported today in Mashable,  “The center will track on average more than 22,000 daily topic posts related to Dell, as well as mentions of Dell on Twitter. The information can be sliced and diced based on topics and subjects of conversation, sentiment, share of voice, geography and trends.”

VP of Social Media Manish Mehta explained the center’s purpose back in October in a comment on a blog post by Altimeter’s Industry Analyst Jeremiah Owyang:

“Our new ‘Ground Control’ is about tracking the largest number [of] possible conversations across the web and making sure we ‘internalize’ that feedback — good and bad…

“Dell’s Ground Control is also about getting that information to the right people wherever they are in the Dell organization, globally and functionally. It’s also about tracking what you might call the ‘long tail’… those smaller matters that might not bubble to the surface today, but are out there… and deserve to be heard. We want to ‘hear’ them too — contrary to the scenarios about ’squeaky wheels getting grease.’”

Don’t touch that dial

I am very excited by the momentum I’ve seen in the social media space at Dell since I joined a little over a year ago.  Things are really picking up.  Stay tuned for more!

Pau for now…

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Welcome to the Wild and Wacky World of Data Centers

December 8, 2010

I got back last night from the Gartner Data Center conference in Las Vegas which runs through the end of this week.  Although one of the biggest topics of conversation was cloud computing, I was most interested in learning about what’s happening more generally in the world of data centers.  I’m pretty up to speed on the cloud yet the intricacies of the data center are still new to me.

A couple of great presentations

There was a great presentation yesterday morning from Ebay’s VP of technical operations, Mazen  Rawashdeh, talking about their “Northstar” project and how they have completely  redesigned their data center strategy to support the business (I hope to do a short post on that soon).   The other presentation that I found very educational was “Extreme Data Centers – Attaining Massive scalability” by Gartner’s David Cappuccio (something else I hope to do a post about).

Learning from those in the know

The other way I got up to speed about the wild world of data centers is by talking with a couple of the folks who cover the field.  The first person I met with was Rich Miller, founder of Data Center Knowledge.  Here is what Rich had to say:

Some of the ground Rich covers:

  • How the interest in data centers seems to grow every year
  • What are the current hot topics that he see’s
    • Energy and efficiency
    • Data center design and thinking outside the box
    • Some of the funkier designs people are coming up with

If you’re interested in data centers, stay tuned for a few more entries based on the Gartner Data Center conference.

Pau for now…

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Michael Dell on Evolutionary & Revolutionary IT paths

December 1, 2010

Michael Dell recently gave the keynote at the Gartner Symposium in Cannes.  One of the topics he discussed was the two IT paths available: evolutionary and revolutionary.

Taking it higher

What I find interesting is that while we at Dell have been talking about evolutionary and revolutionary paths to the cloud, Michael re-labels the discussion in terms of IT paths.  I like this up-leveling since it presupposes a cloudy future while at the same time providing a broader context.

Also in this short video, Michael gives a shout out for Dell’s Virtual Integrated System which fits perfectly with the evolutionary angle and he mentions the Modular Data Center that our group is responsible for when talking about the revolutionary angle.

You say you want an Evo/Revolution

In case you’re wondering, here’s how we define these two paths:

  • The evolutionary approach is when you take existing enterprise applications and systems, that were never intended to be used in a scaled out-environment, and through virtualization you retrofit them for a cloud environment.
  • In a revolutionary approach you develop cloud native apps which are designed, from the start, to be used in the cloud and a highly scaled-out environment. The systems that support this model are ultra-dense and efficient.  For this to be practical you need the luxury of a Greenfield environment.

Pau for now…

Extra-credit reading:

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