TDS Blog

Data Center Q&A with Tim Schutt, TDS Principal

Recently, Steve Gunderson, TDS Principal, and VP of Sales, interviewed Tim Schutt, also a TDS Principal, and the leader of our Data Center Relocation practice.  During their conversation Tim explored many of the questions he often hears from prospective relocation clients.  Some of the questions he addressed include:

• Should I do a single move, or multiple moves? 

• What can be moved together?

• Can I move everything in a cabinet all at once? 

• How will my application perform when I move to the new environment?

Tim also provided some tips for organizations about to embark on a data center relocation, foremost of which was that unless you have significant experience managing these kinds of moves you're going to be better off, and save money, by hiring a pro to help.  He opined that, "customers know their environment best, but for certain specialized aspects of relocation you need to get the right resources,for example: understanding insurance, building run books, creating the move plan, deciding who will be where and doing what on move day."

He went on to explain that, "even if you hire a company like TDS to help with your move, you still have a major role to play -- you know your environment best."

Tim also made suggestions for questions that he thinks customer should be asking him, and any other potential move providers, that he doesn't see very often, such as:

• How many moves have you done?

• Have you done moves similar to ours?

• Would we be able to meet the team before the move?

• How long would a move like this take? 

• Do you understand your allowable downtime?

• Ask about methodology and tools employed to minimize downtime.

• What is your strategy?

To listen to the entire podcast, which is just five minutes long, click here.

Boston Data Center Event - Markley Group - April 28, 2011

Markley Group and TDS have invited over six thousand attendees from New England to join us at this 2011 Data Center event at One Summer Street.  

Principal consultants from TDS will be on hand discuss:

• Hybrid enterprise computing - mixed conventional, virtual, cloud and SaaS
• Data center migrations - managing moves - physical, virtual and cloud
• Managing the hybrid enterprise computing environment
• Considerations for application migrations - cost and complexity

Date

    April 28, 2011
    Seminars and Networking Time:  8:30 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.
    Cocktail Reception: 3:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Managing the Hybrid Data Center

TDS Unified Monitoring Service

Before virtualization, understanding the inter-dependencies in a typical network environment was fairly straightforward.  A connected with B connected with C. 

With the proliferation of virtualization, compounded by clouds and SaaS applications, the challenge of maintaining continual visibility and control has put availability and performance of systems at risk.

 

While traditional monitoring tools provide availability and performance monitoring at the application, network and operating system layers,they do not provide sufficient visibility into virtualized and hybrid enterprise computing environments with multiple critical applications competing for shared resources.  There is a clear need for a more holistic  approach including unified monitoring, performance trending and unified alerting and event correlation.

TDS unified monitoring solves this need by providing a consolidated view of all internal and external services.  Built for complex, enterprise deployments, TDS tools provide visibility into both the end-to-end application environment and storage level to quickly detect and diagnose the root cause issues which are affecting service delivery.  Utilizing industry-standard monitoring tools, TDS provides a "single pane of glass" view of all internal and external services.

This unified approach identifies and isolates cross application impact (including network, storage, CPU,memory, etc.) that may not exist in the traditional environment, but do exist in a shared component, virtualized environment.

There are many considerations involved in managing a hybrid data center.  TDS unified monitoring addresses the need for a single, centralized view of overall data center performance and availability.

Openbravo 3.0 Demonstration

Openbravo 3.0 includes an advanced web interface that streamlines navigation, simplifies data entry and provides user dashboards and widgets. Click on the graphic below to view a demostration of the new look and features of 3.0:

2009/2010 AFCOM Data Center Trends Survey Results and Analysis

AFCOM recently suveyed 436 member data center sites on eight of the hottest topics ranging from Greening and Data Center Consolidation to Performance Monitoring and Cyber Terrorism. 

• Greening -

•  
  • 71% are actively engaged in greening
  • Power Recovery - 60% 
  • Cooling Recovery - 51%

 

• Expansion
  • 60.3% require additional data center capacity within five years

Please view the tabulated results and significant findings below:

Chasm Between IT and Facilities is Growing

Think IT and facilities operating in silos is last year's problem? In some cases, it may actually be getting worse.

Last year I wrote Four Reasons to Get Facilities and IT on the Same Page. At the time, I was surprised by how little IT leaders knew about their real data center costs, and I suggested that these leaders would do well to talk to their facilities people to understand better where their money was going. I even showed how IT could help facilities by understanding their problems. Since collaboration between IT and facilities can provide immediate financial benefits to the enterprise without layoffs or the risk of IT outages, there's a lot in it for both groups to work together.

At least one would think.

But when I bring the subject up, especially with the press, I find that most believe the problem has already been solved.  "IT and facilities operating in silos is last year's problem, right?"  Wrong.  When I work with real world customers, I realize that the situation is bad and maybe even getting worse.

Why is there this disconnect between perception and reality? Perhaps it's because when the press looks for a story, it needs real-life case studies to make the story compelling and believable.  And, of course, it is possible to find companies where, in fact, facilities and IT are on the same page. Naturally, they're willing to go public with their stories.  But nobody is all that interested in going on record to talk about how they've made mistakes, how IT and facilities don't work together, or how they're pouring money down the drain by having both IT and facilities operate in a vacuum.

Don't believe there's still a problem?  Here are some real life examples illustrating what can go wrong when facilities and IT don't collaborate:

• I saw a company purchase a building because it looked like an attractive value and, as a bonus, it already had a data center the company thought it could use.  Because the facilities group knew IT needed a new data center, it followed the realtor's recommendation and purchased the building at a bargain.  After learning that their new data center would require an additional $17 million in upgrades to make it usable for IT, plus another $500,000 a month in WAN charges, the company decided a collocation alternative would be a better approach.  In the end, the company avoided that $17 million upgrade but it also ended up with a building it didn't really need. This could have been avoided with closer collaboration between facilities and IT.

• I recently visited a 9,000 square foot data center where something was amiss.  IT had requested Tier 3 level (N+1) redundancy so the facility would be concurrently maintainable. Facilities actually delivered what they believed to be a full Tier 4 environment (2N) with no single point of failure.  Besides costing the company over $500,000 more than it should have, the center actually did have a single point of failure, meaning it wasn't even a Tier 3 data center.  Another investment of $150,000 was required to correct the problem. 

• I've recently seen over 100 cabinets at one location ejecting hot exhaust right into the intake of other systems.  Besides subjecting these systems to the risk of premature failure, this made it necessary to run the data center much cooler than it needed to be just to head off cooling-related problems. This unnecessarily raised the PUE, resulting in an electric bill that was 30 percent higher than it needed to be. By now everyone knows about hot aisle-cold aisle alignment, but many legacy data centers—such as this one—haven't been reconfigured to take advantage of efficiency improvements like that just because IT and facilities are not communicating and are instead holing up silently in their respective silos. 

I have other stories like this; I see them every day.

Let's face it. Facilities typically reports to the CFO's office and IT typically reports to the CIO and when the CFO and CIO get together they have better things to do than discuss PUE, power density, cooling, ultrasonic humidification and data center tier ratings (although I'm sure they have a chat or two about budgets).

CFOs and CIOs expect their respective teams to do the right thing. We all understand that.  But maybe these teams need some top-down guidance to help get them moving in the right direction, together.

So I open this blog up to learn about your own experiences with IT and facilities.  Have you had any great successes or horror stories you'd like to share?

As always, I welcome feedback, questions and comments.  And if you know of other companies effectively enabling cloud computing with an impact on the enterprise you believe similar to those listed above, I'd be interested in learning more. You may reach me at cioblog@transitionaldata.com.  

 

Boston Data Center Event - Markley Group - April 28, 2010

Markley Group Boston has invited over six thousand attendees from New England to their 2010 Data Center event at One Summer Street. TDS, Cisco, APC, Gilbane and some 60 other companies are sponsoring this event. 

Principal consultants from TDS will be on hand to discuss your IT and data center priorities as well as service providers and vendors in the following areas:

• Data Center Facilities: Critical Infrastructure
• IT Infrastructure
• IT Service Providers and Managed Operations
• Data Center Optimizations and Green Data Center Efficiency Improvements
• Service Providers and Network Access Companies
• Architects and Engineers

Event runs from 8:30 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. on April 28, 2010.

Seeing the Invisible Data Center with CFD Modeling Software

Computation Fluid Dynamics - Hot topic at Data Center World

Congrats to AFCOM for another fine event!  More than 800 IT and facilities attendees converged in Opryland last week to learn the latest best practices for data center design and operations. Most seemed very keen on improving data center efficiency.

And like usual, there were plenty of vendors hawking their wares to scratch that itch.  From floor fan tiles and cable racks - to containers and critical infrastructure, no stone seemed unturned anywhere there was a buck to be made.

So was it just me or did CFD modeling seem to take center stage at many of the vendor booths and presentations?  And for good reason I might add.  Computation Fluid Dynamics provides a visual illustration of your data center cooling system where you can see clear cause and effect of hot spots, inefficient design and suboptimal deployment. 

Sophisticated CFD modeling has been used by Fortune 100 companies to design products ranging from automobiles to hypersonic spacecraft, and has been more recently adapted to data center cooling and airflow analysis.  You can rotate a three dimensional rendering of your data center viewing it from all angles and are not limited to a fixed perspectives.

As you know, the main purpose of a data center cooling systems is to maintain equipment within acceptable operating temperature range. This helps to reduce downtime, extend equipment life and optimize energy costs associated with the air conditioning system.  Achieving this requires an adequate supply of cooling air as well as effective distribution of the airflow to the inlets of all the racks.

Recent studies have shown that although most Data Centers have over twice the cooling capacity required, they still experience "hot spots" throughout the data center. This is a result of poor airflow management.  And since airflow and pressure are invisible, it is difficult to develop a strategy for improving airflow management without the use of an airflow management modeling tool.

With CFD analysis, you can see these invisible temperature differences and airflow pathways. Here is a view that combines temperature and airflow in a single 3D perspective. Notice the red / hot IT racks and the cooler / blue CRACS.

 

CFD modeling also allows you to do "what if" planning if you want to optimize your current data center in concept, before physical implementation begins.  You may believe that ultrasonic humidification will allow you to cool more efficiently, but will it go far enough in power and cooling recovery to postpone a pending data center migration? 

And I caution you to keep in mind that while these tools do an excellent job in visualizing temperature and airflow, you still need to be diligent when factoring in power, efficiency and overall return on investment.  For example, if you improve the efficiency of your critical infrastructure by 50% (i.e. improving PUE from 3.0 to 2.0), will you be able to immediately apply the recovered power to IT systems?  

This partly depends on your infrastructure to deliver conditioned power - the load that can be sustained by your UPS and IT power distribution systems. But even if are not able to expand with this recovered power and cooling, you still will have reduced your data center electric bill by a whopping 33%!

As always, I welcome feedback, questions and comments.  And if you know of other companies effectively enabling cloud computing with an impact on the enterprise you believe similar to those listed above, I'd be interested in learning more.  You may reach me at mailto:cioblog@transitionaldata.com

 

 

 

Green Grid - Announces Global Agreement on PUE as Standard

Latest PUE Standards News from Green Grid

The Green Grid recently announced agreement by global world governments on using PUE as the primary measurement of data center efficiency:

"A group of global leaders met on February 2, 2010 to agree on data center energy efficiency measurements, metrics, and reporting conventions. Organizations represented were the U.S. Department of Energy's Save Now and Federal Energy Management Programs, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ENERGY STAR Program, European Commission JRC Code of Conduct, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan's Green IT Promotion Council, and The Green Grid."

 "The collective groups are in agreement on the following guiding principles, as an interim step toward the desired outcomes (1. b.). It is recommended that data centers begin to measure PUE according to these principles... "

 Here is the announcement from Green Grid:

Public Cloud Computing Shows Its Limits

Welcome to the hybrid world.

I've hardly been alone in my skepticism about cloud computing and my belief that public cloud computing for the enterprise is not ready for prime time.  But I’m sensing a general global warming on the subject. And if applied properly, I'm one of them.

Here’s what I said back in January 2009 in my top 5 predictions for 2009 (Hype Overload): "There will be a well publicized cloud computing disaster in 2009 – probably linked to security, reliability or service restoration delays."

Was I right? You be the judge.

• Google alone had 7 significant outages. Google outages damage cloud credibility (PC World).

• Amazon had at least 3 outages including taking down the Amazon retail site. Outage for Amazon web service (Data Center Knowledge).

• A Salesforce.com outage lasting nearly a day cut off access to critical business data for many of the company's customers on Tuesday in what appears to be Salesforce's most severe service disruption to date. Salesforce outage angers customers (cnet news).

• And of course security has been a concern. See The Cloud Security Survival Guide.

So there were over a dozen significant outages at Google, Amazon and Salesforce alone.  The only surprising thing here is the widespread numbness to these failures that helps keep the hype coming.

And why do people gloss over these disasters? It's because, in truth, very little serious, mission critical, life-threatening, or deep financial work is going on in public clouds.  So as long as nobody dies, loses millions, or breaches thousands or millions of personal records, these failures may be acceptable.  The key is using the public option for a suitable purpose.

Some things will continue to be best left outside the cloud.  The security issues alone are huge and may block deployment: PCI (payment card industry), HIPAA, information privacy laws like 201 CMR 17.00 in Massachusetts (and similar laws in other states) make it almost impossible to insure adequate security in the cloud.

These security concerns mean that it will be a long, long time before you see companies making a full transition to public cloud services. However, in the near term, these companies will continue to leverage stand-alone cloud applications where it makes sense (like Salesforce.com).  They will continue to develop their internal virtualized infrastructure to look more and more like a private cloud. But this approach is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Some vendors seem to get this evolutionary approach. They understand that the old must work with the new. They understand that applications and infrastructure are equally important to adopting cloud computing in the enterprise.  They also understand that with the cloud’s increased infrastructure flexibility comes complexity that must be managed and monitored in order to assure the highest availability of applications to the users. After all, that's the only true measure of success. 

So the companies to watch in 2010 that can enable these hybrid cloud/legacy applications include:

• Cisco, EMC and VMware which, through a joint venture called Acadia, have partnered to accelerate internal cloud development with unified management of the data center.

• Nimsoft, which has one of the most advanced platforms for monitoring and measuring end-to-end applications in a hybrid internal/public cloud environment. By tracking end-to-end application performance in addition to physical infrastructure Nimsoft enables application monitoring independent of the underlying infrastructure.

• IBM (with a good hybrid cloud vision) and Cordys, the latest Jan Baan company with a focus on enterprise cloud enablement.

As always, I welcome feedback, questions and comments.  And if you know of other companies effectively enabling cloud computing with an impact on the enterprise you believe similar to those listed above, I’d be interested in learning more. You may reach me at cioblog@transitionaldata.com.