How Google designs data centers

The Frank Lloyd Wright of the Storageplex

Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t see his structures as empty buildings, but as holistic environments.  That’s why his designs often included not only the roof and walls but the chairs and tables as well.

Google is the Frank Lloyd Wright of data centers: they design their own storage systems that function as an integral part of the whole. 

You can see the power of this philosophy in their brutal efficiency.  Information Week points out that Google-designed data centers use nearly five times less energy than conventional data centers.  That correlates with the 4-to-1 ratio in cost per capacity that IDC found in comparing conventional data centers to Google-style “content depots”.

Google has uncharacteristically given us a peek behind the curtain to encourage sustainable energy practices. Sure, being eco-friendlier is good.  All the more so when it aligns with Capitalism.

How can conventional data centers compete without this approach?

Practical storage power efficiency for SMBs

Daniel Dern’s eight steps to less power in your SMB

Daniel Dern’s common-sense summary of what SMBs can do to reduce their storage energy costs and footprint rings true for companies of all sizes.  It’s uniquely practical – he avoids the “silver bullet” approach common to this topic.  Like most things, it takes a lot of little steps to make a big difference. 

His recommendations:

1. Store less data. Good luck!  But maybe growth can be slowed.

2. Use fewer disks.  Fill up the ones you have, and combine multiple disks into today’s high-capacity behemoths.

3. Turn off idle disks.  Like turning off the light when you leave a room, it’s a little added work that can add up to real savings. 

4. Use the right disks.  Match storage with the performance and recall demands of the data.

5. Use more efficient disks.  Converting to 2.5″ enterprise drives reduces power and speeds up I/Os. 

6. Use more efficient storage systems.  Some storage systems leverage disk-level energy efficiency features with system-level power savings.

7. Improve cooling.  Sometimes it’s as simple as keeping things in proper working order.

8. Exploit “Green” rebates. Get full credit for your efforts with Utility and government incentives.

Who’s got additional ideas to add to Daniel’s list?

IBM’s Info Infrastructure echoes EMC

Actually a good thing for IBM and their customers

IBM launched a major new storage initiative.  Byte and Switch summarized it succinctly. 

The message sounds a bit EMCish, specifically their Digital Universe from last year.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing, if IBM can execute in a unique way.  The issue is clearly universal.  If your competitor’s tapped into a core need,  sometimes it pays to swallow your pride and join the ride.  

The “Information Footprint” concept is a nice nod to Green without hitting us over the head with it.

I’m looking forward to see what IBM does with this over the next year or two.

UK Government paints IT bright green

Aggressive plan for carbon neutrality by 2012

(photo courtesy The Guardian)

The UK government is going beyond talk to action on greening their technology.  Tom Watson, the UK Minister of Transformational Government, has written a policy paper with pragmatic steps UK IT will take (and IT shops everywhere are likely to emulate) to materially reduce carbon footprint.  From page 5:

• Extending the lifecycle of all ICT purchases to their natural demise either caused by failure, inability to support the business objectives of the organization, excessive maintenance costs or excessive carbon footprint and energy consumption, as opposed to frequent automatic refresh and replacement programs.
• Reducing the overall number of PCs and laptops used by an organization to reach as close to a 1:1 ratio
• Implementing a range of active device power management actions
• Reducing the overall number of printers used by organizations and replace with multi-function devices ( i.e., better document management)
• Increasing average server capacity utilization to achieve a minimum of 50% where possible (to comply with the forthcoming European Code of Conduct for the operations of data centers)

 What does this mean for storage vendors and providers?

• Scalability and capacity become even more critical to extend storage system life
• Decoupling of personal content from PCs and laptops to expand multi-user system use
• Increased focus on idle power consumption and power-down modes
• Server virtualization, anyone? 

Taking “green” down to real-world actions in this way will drive real change in system providers.  Hats off to Tom Watson and his hands-on approach.

Disk drives aren’t green, but they enable it elsewhere

A lesson from light beer

Calling a disk drive “green” is like calling a light beer “healthy”.  In both cases, the means to achieve a goal are being confused with the goal itself.

Just as switching from regular to light beer might help someone (a little) improve their health, lower power disk drives can reduce the power consumption (and carbon footprint) of a datacenter, DVR or PC. 

Seagate gets this.  They don’t slap a big “Green” label on their drives.  Yet in general, Seagate’s products are the most power efficient at any specific performance/capacity point.  That means that using Seagate drives can result in the lowest overall power consumption for your system, whatever it may be.

Look beyond the label of your storage components when trying to configure the most power efficient solution. 

Agree or disagree?  Let’s discuss this further.

Interview with ESG analyst Mark Peters

Enterprise Strategy Group’s Mark Peters and I sat down in Minneapolis today and talked shop.  Besides having a cool Oxford-trained English accent, his views on the storage landscape rang true to me:

• The storage system market is out of balance right now, with several “big boys” (IBM, EMC et al) and dozens of “little guys” playing in the same sandbox. 
• This is not sustainable, and causing the industry mainstays to make unusually bold moves (witness EMC’s SSD and Mozy forays and IBM’s Diligent and XIV acquisitions)
• Xiotech and Atrato are exciting because they are promising clear, core benefits.   “Do you want maintenance-free storage, or storage that requires service visits/costs/risks?”
• Xiotech and Compellent are both based in Minnesota with common management roots, but seem to have staked out two distinct storage solution spaces.  More on this in another post.
• “Green” is overhyped.  Mostly storage companies mean “energy efficient”, and would do well to be clearer on this. 

Keep your eyes peeled for a new blog from Mark.  Not too surprising given ESG’s success with Steve’s IT Rants blog.  I hope Mark dives in.  His unique perspective would benefit many.

Turn off the lights for green storage

Common-sense storage innovations slash storage energy use

Xyratex has taken a second step into the lower-power storage arena with the OneStor SP1224s that uses 2.5″ SAS drives.  In February they added software to their RAID platform that allows OEMs to selectively spin down drives not in use.

Lisa Hart at Xyratex says “This is like having a light switch on your wall.” Exactly!  Everyone understands that leaving lights on in an empty room is a waste.  Storage is not so different: 

1. Use smaller drives.  The OneStor SP1224s provides double the performance & half the watts with high performance 2.5″ SAS drives instead of 3.5″ drives.  This is the equivalent of having a smaller room that gets plenty bright with a smaller bulb. 
2. Turn off drives when not in use.  MAID technology is going mainstream after pioneering efforts by Copan and others.  It’s not for every application, but hits the spot for many of today’s high-growth capacity apps.
3. Turn off parts of drives when not in use.  Seagate’s PowerTrim technology on Barracuda ES and Cheetah 15K 3.5″ drives takes the MAID approach to the drive level by selectively turning off the lights in some “rooms” of the drive’s electronics in a smart way that doesn’t impact performance. 

Expect to see more vendors applying smart power management at all leveles to make a big dent in data center Watts per terabyte (or petabyte!).

Comments please: who’s using MAID, PowerTrim or 2.5″ SAS today?  Who’s planning to?

Nortech goes vertical

Going beyond the obvious drives growth and profits 

 

I had a chance to talk with Nortech President David Bollig and Marketing VP Todd Swank at their Minnesota headquarters.  Nortech is a fast-growing, national custom system builder that’s succeeding with a focus on vertical markets – education, high performance computing, mobility and others. 

Highlights:

• “Green” solutions for education markets, as much for school infrastructure as lower electric bills
• The 80 Plus Initiative 
• Portable supercomputers – going beyond conventional solutions to create a profitable niche
• 400 TB servers in Milwaukee for the LIGO project
• The huge mobile opportunity beyond notebooks – supercomputers, digital signage and embedded PCs