Hot, cramped times ahead for datacenters
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(InfoWorld) - The forecast for datacenters isn't good for the short term: they're going to get hotter and a lot more cramped, according to Gartner analysts. Increasing use of cheaper x86 chip-based servers has presented problems for datacenters, most of which haven't been redesigned since the last tech boom went bust six years ago, said Rakesh Kumar, a Gartner research vice president. He spoke Monday during a presentation at Gartner's Data Center Technology Summit in London. The number of server racks is increasing. Consequently, the amount of floor space in datacenters is decreasing, but their power and cooling requirements are rising. More attention is being focused on theÂ environmental impacts of running high-energy datacentersÂ and moves by governments toward new legislation. "It will come down to a balance between the power, the cooling and the floor space," Kumar said. "What that means is legacy datacenters are obsolete." Gartner predicts that within 12 to 18 months organizations will have to make major changes to accommodate the heating and cooling challenges that come with more processing power. Four years ago, a stand-alone server in a rack used 2 kilowatts of electricity. Today, a standard rack filled with between 50 percent to 80 percent of blade servers consume between 15 kilowatts and 30 kilowatts per rack, Kumar said. The cooling statistics complicate the power picture. It takes between 1.2 to 1.3 times the amount of energy a server consumes to cool it, Kumar said. IT managers frequently can't fill an entire rack because of the heat generated by the servers. Floor cooling, where cool air is circulated under server racks, and air conditioning -- aren't going to work anymore because the heat is too great, Kumar said. What's more, the cool space beneath the servers in legacy datacenters becomes clogged with cables and wires and occasionally, other odd things that interfere. "They're thinking 'Hey, there's space under here. I'll keep my beer in there,'" said Peter Hannaford, of American Power Conversion, which makes server cooling equipment. "We found this guy who had a Christmas tree under there." All of these obstacles contribute to higher energy costs. Gartner estimates that electricity costs could go from 10 percent or less of IT budgets to 20 percent to 30 percent if left unchecked, Kumar said. Electricity costs have risen over the last year and will likely continue to rise, although the peak is unknown. Fortunately, everyone from chip vendors to servers vendors and software makers have a stake in reducing energy and heat, Kumar said. The problem could ultimately limit the growth of IT. A huge amount of investment is being made in finding solutions, either through new products or through new datacenter designs. Governments also are paying increased attention to IT. It's possible high-energy users could see higher taxes, or that ill-fitting legislation could be implemented, spurred by public demand for greener IT, said Steve Prentice, vice president and chief of research for Gartner. "They [the government] will rush something in that apparently does the job but does not address all the issues," Prentice said. "We think it's better to self-regulate."
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When the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) wanted to increase its computing capacity last year it considered a satellite datacenter or an extension to the existing building, but in the end it chose a faster and more novel approach: it ordered a datacenter in a box.The center, which does high-energy physics research for the U.S. Department of Energy, was one of the first customers for&#160;Sun Microsystems&#39; Project Blackbox, which takes standard shipping containers 20 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet (6.1m x 2.4m x 2.4m) and turns them into mini datacenters that can be delivered and operational in a few weeks, according to Sun.SLAC&#39;s Blackbox was delivered in July last year and was up and running by September. Aside from a few challenges -- like figuring out how to service the unit when it&#39;s raining -- the center is pleased with its choice and in the process of installing a second unit.It is one of four customers that Sun identified Tuesday to illustrate momentum for Project Blackbox. It also renamed the product the Sun Modular Datacenter, or Sun MD. The boxes start at $559,000 without the &quot;payload,&quot; or the computers inside, and Sun will ship them around the world for an extra fee. Delivery to Amsterdam by air, for example, costs about $15,000.SLAC turned to Project Blackbox because it needed to expand its compute capacity fairly quickly. &quot;The datacenter here was at its capacity, especially in terms of the electrical service to the building and the amount of heat we could take back out. And the experiments needed their next year&#39;s worth of computing,&quot; said Chuck Boeheim, SLAC&#39;s assistant director of computing services.Modifying its existing datacenter to accommodate another major electrical feed and &quot;chiller plant&quot; would have taken one to two years and cost several million dollars. &quot;We also looked at doing a satellite datacenter in a smaller building, but with the approvals and lead time that was a couple of years out as well. Blackbox was something we could do very quickly,&quot; Boeheim said.The raw shipping containers are customized by a subcontractor, and Sun typically installs the payload before delivery. SLAC&#39;s Blackbox arrived on a flat-bed truck last July, fitted with 252 Sun Fire X2200 rack-mount servers, the same type it uses in its datacenter. Sun had also wired the servers to a Cisco Catalyst 6509 switch that SLAC provided before delivery.Boeheim described the process in a white paper on his Web site, along with photos and time-lapse videos that show the box being hoisted into place by a crane.Customers can put other vendors&#39; hardware in the unit, but not all equipment will fit. SLAC bought some Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers that it wanted to put in its second Blackbox, but they were too long for the server racks. Instead it will move some existing Sun servers to the box from its datacenter, and put the Dell machines inside the building instead.The computing center already had a 4-megawatt substation serving its area of the site. &quot;So it was a fairly simple matter to put a 220-kilowatt power pane on the outside of that and bring up a fairly standard chiller unit and put that on a concrete pad next to the Blackbox. Both of those things could just be fork-lifted in and connected up,&quot; Boeheim said.SLAC wanted to do a rigorous installation that would last several years, so it spent a few weeks getting the unit hooked up. It had to reconnect about half the power cords which had shaken loose during the truck ride. Aside from that the installation went smoothly and the machines were turned on for batch work Sept. 25, about two months after delivery. The 60-ton chiller and the outside power unit were also delivered in that time.Servicing the unit has presented some challenges. &quot;We&#39;re trying to figure out how to do it on a day like today when it&#39;s pouring with rain,&quot; Boeheim said recently. &quot;The wind doesn&#39;t have to be blowing very hard for the rain to blow in the end, and you pretty much have to open both ends of the box to service it,&quot;It&#39;s quite cramped in the box, he said, and both ends need to be open so that a person can maneuver when a server rack is slid out into the narrow central aisle.&quot;Our stance right now is to wait for a clear day to open it up,&quot; he said. Two people are needed to service the box in case one gets trapped inside or injured, he wrote in the white paper on his Web site. SLAC put a phone in the box in case someone gets locked in.The first Blackbox gave the center a roughly 25 percent boost in computing capacity, and the servers have been running as smoothly as their counterparts inside the datacenter, Boeheim said. &quot;Once we got them turned on they just ran. We went a full 30 days not even opening the thing.&quot; He put rack servers in the box rather than storage gear, because storage gear tends to need servicing more often, he said.Sun&#39;s Blackbox won&#39;t be for everyone. Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island, New York, considered a Blackbox but decided on a new wing for its datacenter instead, Boeheim said. SLAC&#39;s experience may have been easier than that of an average business because it is a federal government site located on county land. A business in a city may need more planning permissions and permits.A few other companies offer comparable products, such as the Ice Cube from Rackable Systems, and the Infrastructure Express from American Power Conversion.Sun said it is happy with the&#160;momentum for Blackbox, although it wouldn&#39;t say how many customers it has. The other three it named are Hansen Transmissions, a Belgian industrial manufacturer that is using one at a new plant in India; Mobile TeleSystems, Russia&#39;s largest mobile operator; and the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands.Most of the customers had no room to add capacity in their datacenters, said Darlene Yaplee, vice president for integrated platforms in Sun&#39;s systems marketing group. &quot;Half the customers are using it while they build extra datacenter capacity, and then it will remain for disaster recovery,&quot; she said.The next size up in standard shipping containers is 40 feet long. &quot;We could do 40 feet technically, but most people have been happy with 20 feet,&quot; Yaplee said. Boeheim said he&#39;d probably choose a wider box rather than a longer one, which would accommodate his Dell 1950 servers.
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PowerEdge gets its Energy Smarts Dell today entered the green data center wars with a pair of PowerEdge servers tweaked for improved performance per watt.â¦
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Data center managers are eyeing energy alternatives such as fuel cells and flywheels, although the technologies are immature.
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A roundtable about data-center efficiency held last week in Austin reinforced the need for metrics, assessments and other tools.
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An AMD study has revealed changes in global data center energy use.
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Datacenter design is undergoing a significant transformation. The fundamentals of the datacenter -- servers, cooling systems, UPSes -- remain the same, but their implementations are rapidly changing, thanks in large part to the one variable cost in the server room: energy.
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The costs involved in running a data center now represent a large chunk of IT's total budget.
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The trials and tribulations of application dependency in a virtualized, hosted world.
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By Brier Dudley, Seattle Times  Feb. 19--I saw some amazing data centers in Redmond last week.   They were reliable, powerful, resilient and fault-tolerant.
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(Source: MessageLabs)Administrators struggle with ever increasing complexity in the data center. Join Brian Babineau, Enterprise Strategy Group and Anne O'Neill, Symantec Corporation for an evaluation of these options and the discussion of Veritas Server Foundation from Symantec, a novel approach to Data Center Automation that embodies Symantec's vision for a solution to DCA that is both complete and simple. We invite you to register now for full access to this online broadcast.
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Dueling chipmakers try to steer attention to tomorrow's battleground for quad-core server processors.
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(Source: Liebert)  High-density servers are accelerating the demand for increased power and cooling capacity in the data center. Dell and Emerson Network Power have joined to devise four scenarios that address customer problems by utilizing Dell Energy Smart servers and Liebert cooling. These scenarios have shown such results as, up to a 250% performance gain with no increase in facility power requirements.
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Much of the technology being showcased at this week's SC2004 supercomputing conference could eventually make its way into corporate IT data centers, say supercomputing backers.
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A good architecture should be able to adapt to accommodate evolutionary technological enhancements, but when the fundamental characteristics of a key component change significantly, the system equilibrium can be disrupted and must be re-architected to re-establish balance. But with the ever-growing adoption of server virtualization, the equilibrium between processor and I/O resources is now being disrupted.
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The promise of desktop virtualization technology is to centralize applications at the datacenter to make them easier to manage and provision -- stretching hardware resources and keeping nagging software conflicts to a minimum in the bargain.
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Company says laptop-like technology will be useful in server systems, where it can help companies save on electricity and cooling costs in data centers.