Your Data Center Hosting Provider is Stealing Your Money

Well, stealing is a strong word. What is happening however is that traditional data center hosting providers are getting in the way of thousands of small to medium sized businesses as it relates to realizing the true energy based cost savings associated with virtualization. Virtualization has changed many aspects of the traditional IT infrastructure and fostered innovations in all areas of traditional infrastructure service provision. What has not kept pace is innovation and investment on the part of data center hosting providers in facilities infrastructure geared towards delivering services such as power and cooling in a fashion that is aligned with the new realities of virtualized IT computing loads. This is directly limiting the ability of small to midsized companies who host their IT environment in these data centers to fully realize the total energy savings that virtualization can provide. In the following paragraphs I will provide a summary of APC white Paper 118 which does an excellent job of explaining how the total energy savings from virtualization is dependent on a realignment of data center infrastructure to meet the needs of a reduced and consolidated IT load. I will point out exactly where small to midsized organizations hosting there IT load in traditional hosting providers facilities are leaving money on the table as a result of their hosting providers in-action.

The following diagram demonstrates the primary sources of energy consumption in a data center. The support power represents energy that is lost due to the inefficiency of data center physical infrastructure such as power and cooling systems. This is energy that is consumed in the operation of the equipment itself rather than being transferred to the IT load and being used for useful computing work.



After you virtualize your server environment, your IT load will decrease. This decrease will make the PUE of the data center worse due to inefficiencies caused by a physical infrastructure continuing to operate at what is now over capacity for the new virtualized IT load.



So while a decrease in energy cost due to IT load consolidation and virtualization is certainly positive, it is only a fraction of the overall savings possible. The total energy savings made possible by virtualization can only be achieved if the data center physical infrastructure is re-architected to be more allinged with the new realities of virtualized IT loads.



Specific recommendations for changes to data center physical infrastructure to achieve a closer alignment of physical infrastructure services with virtual IT loads can be found in APC white paper 126.

In all fairness to hosting providers, realizing some of the efficiency gains of re-architecting physical infrastructure is a true challenge in an environment inherently designed to provide shared service across many organizations with unique IT loads, peak demand periods and degrees of virtualization and consolidation. Looking from the point of view of a mid-sized IT organization that has diligently virtualized and reduced IT load requirements only to find themselves “trapped” by existing power circuit contracts or by an inflexible hosting provider who has not invested in physical infrastructure innovation reveals a logical degree of frustration. In any market such as data center hosting where the barrier to entry is high due to large capital expenditure requirements, innovation by market leaders tends to be slow. What is needed is a new type of hosting provider built from the ground up to provide modern, flexible solutions such as “pay by the drink” for power services and individualized cooling solutions through innovations like row based cooling while maintaining independence from the overall environment of the data center.



Should traditional hosting providers fail to make these innovations then no doubt, a new breed of more agile competitors, unburdened by large historical capital investments in dated infrastructure will emerge and force fundamental change in the hosting industry. Mid-sized customers may also find the additional value hosting services provide such as physical security to longer be enough to prevent them from investing in their own facilities where they can innovate themselves and keep all the gains. Virtualization has changed almost everything with respect to IT infrastructure service delivery, it is time for hosting providers to catch up.

You Don't Have to be a Giant to be Green

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend SAP Virtualization Week at the SAP Co-Innovation Labs in Palo Alto, California. The conference consisted of three tracks: Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Green IT. Lots of thought provoking material was presented by SAP, consulting partners and customers. When I attend these type of events I look hard to find a few practical take aways that could be put in place immediately. Of course these sessions help frame my thinking on long-term strategies around SAP virtualization and Data Center design, but what can I go home with and ask my team about next week? One of those take away points for me last week was this: You don’t have to be a giant to be green.

At surface level Green IT seems like a concept relative only to the largest of IT organizations. Organizations such as Intel and Colgate-Palmolive who can tell stories of collapsing 50 or 60 global data centers down to one facility certainly have a green story to tell. Organizations such as NetApp who have pioneered efficient data center designs can go to conferences to show how they received a million dollars in rebates from their energy provider. These are great stories, but as I sat through the first couple of these last week sipping Starbucks coffee I was thinking to myself “This is awesome, but what can I do, how is this relative to me?” How can a < $1 Billion enterprise who leverages a colocation service for data center space devise a green IT strategy? What about very small organizations who have all of their servers hosted at their own facility, all in one rack that sits in a locked (or sometimes not) closet that is doubling as storage and data center space? As the week went on I managed to pick up several practical action items that can be leveraged by smaller IT shops to build a green story. While in smaller IT shops the savings may not be as dramatic and jaw dropping as global IT operations, keep in mind all things are relative. If you can show where you started and demonstrate a thoughtful effort that created a tangible reduction in energy consumption and thus cost then you have executed a successful green IT strategy. It may not be enough to save the planet, but it is your part and shows that you are doing all you can to be a good steward of your organizations IT operations.

Know Where You Are

Your tangible achievements with Green IT thinking will be measured in percentage points. For example, a 10% reduction in power consumption, a 2% reduction in utility costs etc.. Obviously, to show these numbers you have to know what you are consuming today. Even if you have a single rack of servers sitting in a closet, do you know how much power they are consuming? Do you know how much you are paying monthly in energy costs to run the equipment you have? The answer to these types of questions becomes slightly more challenging for mid-sized IT shops leveraging colocation providers for data center space. Do you know exactly how many power circuits and what type (120/280V, 20A/30A) are provisioned to your space? Do you know the current draw on those circuits? In a colocation environment, a very practical first step is to install intelligent Rack Distribution Units (RDU’s). There are lots of vendors who offer these, see this one from APC as an example. Intelligent RDU’s will give you the data you need to establish your baseline. Most of these devices provide an HTTP interface that gives you basic statistics and reporting. You don’t need anything fancy, just a browser and a spreadsheet. Get a total average draw for all of your equipment over a length of time long enough to cover any major fluctuations that may occur in your computing environment.

How Redundant Do You Need To Be?

In a typical server deployment, redundancy is built into the design. We expect a certain degree of equipment failure so we account for that in our capacity planning and design efforts. So ask yourself this, how much redundancy is enough? This has a direct impact on green IT thinking. Most servers have redundant dual power supplies. Think of the environments you have with redundancy built in so that if you lose a single server you will have no downtime. Now ask, why do each of those servers have TWO power supplies plugged in to prevent it from failing in the event a power supply goes bad or you have a problem with an electrical circuit? Doesn’t your design accommodate for losing a server anyway? The real answer to this sort of question is that you plug in both power supplies on each and every server even in a redundant server arrangement because that is how you have always done it. Challenge the notion that this is necessary. You may find that with this simple thought process you cut out 50% of your power consumption in certain environments. Also, categorize your systems into different classes of criticality. This is a natural exercise for disaster recovery planning but is not often thought of when planning for power design. If an application running on a server can be down for a defined period of time with no serious impact to your business, maybe you don’t need to plug in both power supplies and provide redundancy at the power level. Again, challenge the assumption that just because a piece of gear has two power supplies that they MUST both be in use.

Buy Green

Pat of knowing where you are in terms of your level of green IT operations is knowing where your vendors and partners stand. Make energy efficiency a part of your purchasing decisions when it comes to IT equipment and service. As you are gathering quotes for hardware, ask your vendor to provide you with energy rating information for the equipment along with the price. With respect to service such as consulting, ask your provider what they are doing to reduce their carbon footprint and provide services in a green way. For example, how much of the work can be done remotely versus onsite? This not only has a practical implication from a green mindset, it also reduced T&E expense. If you leverage a collocation provider for data center space, insist that your provider be able to tell you the PUE of their facility. Remember, you are paying your provider their cost plus margin. If their operations are not ran efficiently then their costs will be higher and you will pay the price. Leverage the information you are gathering from your intelligent RDU’s to renegotiate the way you are buying power in your colocation space. For example, many colocation providers charge you “by the circuit” for power. Their price often includes their cost for delivering you the energy on that circuit plus their cost for removing the heat generated by the consumption of that energy. If you can tangibly show that you are only consuming a fraction of the energy provided over a circuit and thus generating less than a 1:1 ratio of heat to circuit capacity then you have a strong case to moving to a “pay by the drink” model for power. Your case here is that you should be paying in a manner that covers your providers OPEX, not their CAPEX. Your providers true operational cost to remove heat from the data center is a function of how much heat you actually generate plus how efficient they are at removing it.

These are just a few practical suggestions. All of these things can be done on a modest IT budget. The key is to understand where you are starting from, take tangible steps based on that knowledge and measure your change. Again, success is measured in percentage points, not raw numbers. As manager for a small or mid-sized IT shop, you won’t put up numbers the likes of what you will see from global, Fortune 500 IT shops. Success is demonstrating that you are aware of the need to be a good steward of your organizations IT operations relative to its environmental impact, measuring the results of your efforts and arming your organization with your numbers to add to its overall sustainability efforts. Oh yea, you will likely save money too.

Zen and the Art of Converged and Efficient Data Centers

What a few weeks it has been. Over the last month I have been fortunate enough to meet with the CTO from Frito-Lay, the CTO from NetApp, attend a joint SAP and NetApp executive briefing at SAP’s North American HQ in Philadelphia and tour two world class IT support centers (PepsiCo in Dallas and Dimension Data in Boston). I have spent days pouring through technical documentation geared towards architecting my organizations next generation data center centered around 10GB Ethernet, Virtualization, Blade Systems and efficient energy practices. So this post is probably as much for myself as anyone else, meant to simply document of few of the key learning’s I have taken away from the flurry of activity over the last few weeks. Hey, maybe someone else will find it interesting too?

PUE & The Green Grid

In a one on one conversation with Dave Robbins, the CTO of NetApp Information Technology, he asked what my data center space providers PUE is. My response was an inquisitive, what? PUE stands for Power Use Efficiency and is a measure of how effectively a data center is using its energy resources. Essentially, PUE is the amount of electricity used by a data center for cooling and mechanics divided by the actual IT load. Efficient Data Centers run at around 1.6. The concept of PUE and its measurement was created by an organization known as The Green Grid and you can find all kinds of great resources at their web site. This is an excellent tool for you to use when negotiating power costs with a Hosting provider. You should know their PUE and insist that you will not pay for their inefficacy. You can also find a cool tool for PUE calcualtion at 42U.com.

It is Time to Converge

The introduction of 10GB Ethernet in Data Centers (and perhaps even more important, lossless Ethernet) has truly created an opportunity to collapse Ethernet and Fiber Channel networks in the Data Center backbone, cutting huge costs in Fiber Channel infrastructure. 10 GB Ethernet and Lossless Ethernet serve as enablers for protocols such as FCoE and FIP which allow Fiber Channel frames to be encapsulated and carried across Ethernet backbones. There are a few watch outs when adopting FCoE that you need to be aware of. First, make sure your storage vendor has a CNA (Converged Network Adapter) that supports BOTH FCoE and other IP based traffic. Some of the early “converged” adapters only support FCoE, not much real convergence there. Put some effort in understanding Cisco’s current support of FCoE and Fiber Channel Initialization Protocol (FIP) in their Nexus line of switches. You will find some good resources here. The details of this are too complex for me to go into here but suffice it to say, you need to think long and hard about your data center switch layout in order to get full FCoE support across your 10GB backbone. Also, remember that lossless Ethernet or data center bridging are keys to FCoE success but are fairly new. So, when you hear people tell you they knew someone who tried FCoE a couple of years ago but found it lacking, take it with a grain of salt.


The FUD around Cisco UCS

Let me get one thing out of the way upfront, the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) is sexy. Cisco’s tight relationship with VMware, stateless computing and a seemingly end to end vision for the data center combine for a powerful allure. Competitors such as IBM and HP are quick to point out that their blade center products perform the same functions as Cisco’s UCS but with a proven track record. In general, these claims are true. I have been exposed to some competitive claims against the UCS that where simply meant to plant the seed of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) in the mind of technology managers. What if Cisco changes their Chassis design, is your blade investment covered? UCS is meant for VMware only (not true). The list goes on. I have been heavily comparing the Cisco UCS to IBM’s H series Blade Center. I had originally convinced myself that the difference between these two offerings was all about the network. Cisco’s UCS does offer some interesting ways to scale across chassis and provides some great management tools. For a mid-sized organization, the ability to scale across chassis becomes less important however when you can get a concentrated amount of compute power inside one or maybe two chassis. Some new technology coming from IBM in the form of their MAX5 blades is going to allow for some massive compute power inside a two socket blade. If you are a large organization planning on adding many UCS chassis, the networking innovations in the UCS likely will fit your needs well. For a mid-sized company, consider getting more compute power inside fewer chassis by using some hefty blades. This not only reduces your need to scale across many chassis, it also helps lower your VMware costs. VMware is licensed by the socket so fewer sockets with more cores on blades with higher memory capabilities ultimately drives down your VMware licensing needs. Also, before you completely convince yourself that the Cisco UCS has a strong hold on the networking space in the data center, spend some time understanding IBM’s Virtual Fabric technology. This offers similar features to the VIC cards in the Cisco UCS. The point is this, don’t be immediately sucked in by the sexy UCS. Cisco has come to the blade market with some cool innovation and in some circumstances, it will be exactly what you need. Make the investment in time to really understanding competing products. Avoid FUD in all directions.