Data Center Pulse: An exclusive group of global datacenter owners, operators and users. The goal of this community is to track the pulse of the industry and influence the future of the datacenter through discussion and debate.

Your Next Data Center - Can You Say "Cookie Cutter"

"Cookie Cutter Data Center", blasphemy I say, "I can build a better data center than anyone else, I'll build it myself"! All of us who have grown up as IT folks harbor that feeling of "we can do it better ourselves".

Death To The Datacenter!


Last month, we killed our first eBay data center. Don’t worry, it had it coming...

 

I arrived early at the eBay San Jose campus as the rain continued to drench northern California. I joined a group of lively eBay employees from technology operations, product development and IT on a bus headed to Sacramento. We were on a journey to put our oldest data center to rest. This journey had started over a year and a half earlier, long before I had joined eBay. At that time, an aggressive plan was put into motion. The goal was to consolidate the data center portfolio to decrease costs, increase our availability and take eBay to the next level of Operational agility. It was a lofty goal.

eBay, like many of the rising star Silicon Valley companies, had been in constant react mode to keep up with demand. They had amassed a data center portfolio that spanned three states and in twelve different data center sites. Eight years earlier, the Sacramento data center (SMF) was the first to be brought online as a disaster recovery location and it was supposed to be temporary. It quickly expanded to become much more than that. When the idea of shutting it down was raised, the feeling was it was too big a task, too complex and too costly to execute. It would be like rebuilding the engine of a jumbo jet while you were in flight.

DCP Establishes Collaborative Relationship with The Green Grid



PRESS RELEASE

Data Center Pulse Establishes Collaborative Relationship with The Green Grid

Data Center Pulse continues toward their goal of influencing the datacenter industry through their exclusive, global end user community.

UNION CITY, CA, January 15, 2010 - Today, Data Center Pulse entered into an agreement with The Green Grid to further enhance their ability to influence the industry via collaboration on Data Center challenges.

The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to developing and promoting energy efficiency for data centers and business computing systems. They have amassed a rich mixture of manufacturers, service providers, and end user members representing over 175 global companies.

Data Center Pulse is a global end user community of Data Center owners and operators focused on influencing the industry through the eyes of the customer. DCP is an exclusive end-user only group with over 1350 members in 55 countries touching over 100 industries. They have the ability to reach a significant population of Data Center customers ranging from single rack to some of the largest Data Centers in the world.

This new relationship will enable The Green Grid to quickly and effectively reach a significant end user population to help validate and direct their overall efficiency and standards work. It will also allow Data Center Pulse members to have a direct conduit into the important work that The Green Grid is leading.

"This relationship allows Data Center Pulse to continue on their mission to influence the industry through the consumers of Data Center products and services while maintaining the anonymity of our members.", said Dean Nelson Chairman and co-founder of DCP. "Our focus is to drive efficiency and performance gains in the Data Center because we are the customers. This relationship will accelerate that agenda, ultimately helping Data Center users and the industry as a whole."

"We are pleased to build the relationship with Data Center Pulse." said Kathrin Winkler, a director of The Green Grid. "When we started exploring the opportunities, we realized that our efforts were complimentary. We expect our relationship to accelerate the work each organization is pursuing and also to strengthen our output with a larger audience of end users participating and validating our energy efficiency efforts."

The Green Grid has an established Advisory Council (AC) made up of end users from eight of their primary member companies. This includes AT&T, eBay, Strato, Tokyo Electric Power Company, ADP, Nationwide, Walt Disney and Verizon. It was established to advise the board of directors on direction and strategy, to actively participate in technical committees, drive greater awareness of the Green Grid within the community, and guide and shape published materials and processes as one unified voice.

"The Advisory Council will be the conduit for the Data Center Pulse relationship", said Jeannie Diefenderfer, AC Chair, "This relationship greatly augments our reach to end users, including non-green grid members. It will help us deliver on the AC charter."

For more information email info@datacenterpulse.org.

  • To learn about becoming a member of Data Center Pulse  (Click Here)
  • To learn about becoming a member of The Green Grid  (Click Here)



The Top Ten


What are the Top Ten challenges/requests for datacenter end-users?

Our goal is to holistically improve the focus and efforts of the industry by providing ongoing visibility into the top end-user challenges. We took an initial global pulse during our summit in February and provided that reading back to the industry for consumption and contemplation. This November we provided the first update of these top challenges giving a current state of the data center.



    The Top Ten Update


  1. Industry Alignment
  2. Goal: Establish a global consortium that acts as an independent, neutral, non-profit organization of customers representing the voice of the customer. Create further alignment between the different audiences (customers, vendors, academia, government, industry groups).

    • Update: Successfully partnered with 7x24 to conduct DCP session at fall conference in Phoenix, AZ.
    • Continuing to explore DCP alignment opportunities with numerous industry organizations, Academia, Research, Regulatory, Government and others –Example: 7x24 inc/local, The Green Grid, Data Center Dynamics, CFRT, SVLG, DOE, EPA, LBNL, and others
  3. Standardized Stack Framework
  4. Goal: Provide a common framework to describe, communicate, and innovate data center thinking between Owner/Operators peers and the Industry.

    • Update: Draft 2 released and under review with end users and industry representatives.
    • Continue dialog and showcase adoption/use of framework in production data centers.
    • Inclusion of stack framework in industry work.
  5. IT Equipment Power Options (New)
  6. Goal: Dramatic increases server and power path efficiency

    • 230-277V & 400-480V auto sensing power supply offerings. Enables global usage at higher voltage and removes transformer losses.
    • Localized IT equipment battery options to eliminate need of expensive UPS installations without sacrificing availability.
    • Unified mother board voltage options
    • Servers should be at the same price point or lower than today
  7. Wire-line Power Network (New)
  8. Goal: Common communication mechanism to monitor all layers of the power delivery system

    • Discovery: Traceroute to validate power pathways from power supply to utility.
    • Metering: Enabling measurement and validation of readings at all levels of distribution and consumption points.
    • Asset Management: Intelligence from PS to dynamically identify physical assets in rack footprints through power network
    • Smart Grid: Extend the smart grid to the server level.
  9. Liquid Cooled IT Equipment (New)
  10. Goal: Increase IT work performance and cooling system efficiency by tuning data center cooling to the hottest components, rather than inefficiently trying to manage air to servers.

    • Update: Migrated from standard cooling interface request to proof of concept of air vs. liquid cooling
    • Not going after PUE, density or efficiency individually –addressing compute performance limits, capital and efficiency optimization and holistic datacenter TCO (facilities & IT)
    • Reduce complexity of support (backend) infrastructure
    • Enable year-round free cooling in >85% of global locations
    • Increase the amount of IT work done per watt.
    • POC: Liquid cooled data center project –Chill Off 3
  11. Simple Top Level Efficiency Metric
  12. Goal: Create a truly inclusive top-level metric that would enable performance comparisons of peer datacenters or industries (e.g. Miles per Gallon (MPG) for cars).

    • Update: No movement in top level metric –focusing on stack framework first.
    • Risk: DOE could impose a metric that does not represent the diverse realities of the data center industry
    • Proposal: A Data Center carbon in -carbon out metric that incorporates all point metrics (PUE, useful work, etc)
  13. Independent Data Center Repository
  14. Goal: A neutral location to house and present data center resource content and voluntary end-user environment reporting.

    • Update: datacenterpulse.org website engine built and capable of becoming the repository.
    • Exploring voluntary member datacenter automated self reporting of telemetry data
    • Exploring potential link to Green Grid PUE repository
  15. Certification
  16. Goal: Establish people, operations, and infrastructure certifications to drive continual industry improvements and controls.

    • Update: DOE Certified Data Center Efficiency Professional (DCEP) -People, not facilities.
    • Needed: Data Center Certification -requires framework (stack) to be defined and implemented to standardize approach
  17. More Products with Modularity
  18. Goal: Enable pro-active, simple expansion or contraction of datacenter capacity without risk or reduction of design availabilities.

    • Update: Not seeing any significant increase in modular product offerings or end user implementations
    • Both vendors and end users need to elevate the discussions to implement current modular solutions to enable future modular products.
  19. Update Tiers to Represent Current Data Center Environments
  20. Goal: Develop 'tier levels' to provide meaningful context and semantics holistically to data center environments. Today tier level definitions are not keeping pace with changes in the datacenter and the ordering of levels are flipped back and forth between IT & Facilities definitions.

    • Update: Tier levels becoming more rigid/proprietary without including new user requirements
    • Include IT system design implications on availability
    • Include modularity: scalable infrastructure
    • Include multi-tier environments
    • Include Mid-tier definitions
    • Risk: Users may move from using tier definitions for their business. Can become irrelevant. 451 group, be aware!

Leveraging the Cloud for Green IT

Optimal Innovations has release a new whitepaper on Leveraging the Cloud for Green IT: Predicting the Energy, Cost and Performance of Cloud Computing. This paper presents an interesting quantitative methodology for evaluating the impact of leveraging the Cloud.

Abstract: Cloud computing is maturing, becoming a viable alternative to classic on-premise IT. Cloud facilitates scalability, promising lower fixed and variable costs while supporting enterprise growth. The scalability benefits and cost savings can be achieved through on-demand infrastructure provisioning and reduced on-premise energy consumption. The benefits are compelling; however, a quantitative analysis is required. This paper describes and demonstrates a methodology for predicting performance, energy and cost for expanding on-premise IT into the Cloud.

     Leveraging the Cloud for Green IT

U.S. Data Centers - Save Energy Now

In conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Data Center Pulse is pushing for immediate data center energy conservation and reform. Below is a new presentation from the DOE geared towards executives to get an impacting message across about this critical subject.

U.S. Data Centers - Save Energy Now

Save Energy Now is a national initiative of the DOE Industrial Technologies Program (ITP). Through Save Energy Now, the DOE aims to reduce energy use in U.S. data centers 10% by 2011 by providing energy efficiency resources, services, and tools, and actively targeting energy savings potential in four main data center areas:

  • Power Conversion & Distribution
  • Server Load/Computing Operations
  • Cooling Equipment
  • Alternative Power Generation

Data center power and cooling infrastructure worldwide wastes more than 60 million megawatt hours per year of electricity that does no useful work powering IT equipment. This represents an enormous financial burden on industry and is a significant public policy environmental issue. -Neil Rasmussen, Founder of American Power Conversion

Customer Access Program (CAP)



SUMMARY

Data Center Pulse Inc. (DCP), is offering a new innovative and timely Customer Access Program (CAP). CAP gives vendors unprecedented access to the community of datacenter decision makers and influencers while maintaining the anonymity of the members themselves Companies who seek to sell products and services for datacenters can purchase time to present to this select group of datacenter end users/influencers. The presenters can share new product information, do market research, qualify new product(s), market(s) and/or even check their own company’s strategic direction with respect to datacenters. The presentations are given through a highly interactive web interface and are archived for DCP members who cannot attend during scheduled presentation(s).

“This program gives product and service companies direct access to data center decision makers while protecting the anonymity of our end users.”, said Richard Donaldson, Vice President and founding board member of Data Center Pulse. “Historically, vendors go to trade shows with the expectation that <10% of attendees are their target audience. Through our CAP program, vendors will be presenting to 100% of their intended audience. The vendors maximize their reach, DCP members maintain anonymity and gain access to cutting edge solutions and information; it’s a win-win for all involved.”

The CAP program includes pre-presentation surveying to help target the content. Presenters will be able to initiate poll questions and conduct an interactive Q&A session during their web presentation. The presentation audio and screen capture is recorded and posted as content for internal use within datacenterpulse.org. Following the presentation, the presenters will have up to two days of Q&A discussion forums via the datacenterpulse.org portal. All current and future DCP members will have access to the presentation, survey results and Q&A threads. In addition, DCP members will then be able to rank the quality of this content and provide comments. In this model, highly ranked content automatically floats to the top of the dynamic page generation. This viral approach extends the life of presentation content by allowing it to be discussed and shared with the entire DCP community based on usefulness.

In an effort to level the playing field, DCP has set the pricing for this program based on company revenue. The goal is to foster innovation and encourage start up companies and others to leverage this interface as more than just a sales tool, it should be a springboard for innovation.

The CAP program is scheduled for release late fall of 2009


PRE-PRESENTATION

The presenting company will have access to the qualified user base to execute a survey to help prepare content tailored to this audience. No user names or companies will be shared during this activity. All users will be anonymous to ensure their anonymity.

There will also be a dry run prior to the actual presentation so all involved are aware of the mechanics and interface they will use to present. The presentation should be in power point format or acrobat. The presenting company will control their slides through the web interface. This pre-presentation session will ensure everyone is familiar and comfortable with the process and interface before they go live.

PRESENTATION

The presenting company will up to one hour to complete the presentation, real time polls and Q&A. This time will be strictly enforced, so please plan to deliver your message in a maximum of 45 minutes to allow for real time Q&A. If the overall presentation exceeds one hour additional fees may apply.

Only Data Center Pulse members and presenting company representatives will be attending these web presentations. We suggest that you limit the number of speakers to optimize the hour. The presentation audio and the corresponding slides will be recorded into video format. This video will then be posted in the Data Center Pulse portal for current and new members to access. The video will be tagged with the appropriate content type and key words for dynamic population in datacenterpulse.org.

POST-PRESENTATION

The presenting company will have access to a Q&A section through the Data Center Pulse portal for two days following the presentation. Q&A forums will be enabled for both DCP members and participating company representatives. The content of these discussions can be exported for participating company use. The portal
access will be disabled after 48 hours. All users participating in these forums will be anonymous unless they chose to have their information shared with the participating company.

QUALIFICATION

All presentations must have a minimum of 15 interested DCP members to be scheduled.

For more information, please email cap@datacenterpulse.org


About Data Center Pulse: Data Center Pulse (DCP) is a growing, non-profit, datacenter industry community founded on the principles of sharing best practices amongst its exclusive membership. Founded in late 2008, DCP is quickly becoming an industry nexus for the explosive datacenter industry’s operators and influencers. DCP’s mission is to align end users to share information thereby influencing the industry by defining, adopting and driving best practices and next generation solutions. The DCP members are the individuals that evaluate, recommend and purchase the products and services for the datacenter. They represent billions of dollars of annual purchases that drive the IT economy.



Standardized Data Center Stack Framework



Standardized Data Center Stack Framework Proposal: Driving for a standard to unite owners and operators in how they design, discuss, measure and compare their datacenters regardless of location, industry or function.

When you think about a data center, what do you picture? Almost any aspect could be imagined: mechanical & electrical systems, network infrastructure, storage, compute environments, virtualization, applications, security, cloud, grid, fabric, unified computing, open source, etc. Then picture again, how these items incorporate into areas of efficiency, sustainability, or even a total carbon footprint. Quickly the view of a data center becomes significantly complex, leading to challenges like answering the question of how efficient a data center is to company executives. Where does someone start to measure for these types of complexities? Are the right technologies to do so currently in place? Which metrics should be used for a particular industry and data center design? Data Center professionals all over the world are asking the same questions and feeling the same pressures. You are not alone.

Data centers are changing at a rapid pace; more than any other point in history. Yet with all the change, data center facilities, and IT professionals face numerous challenges in unifying their peers to solve problems for their companies. Sometimes you may feel like you are talking different languages or living on different planets. What do virtual computers and three-phase power have in common anyhow? Has your IT department ever come to you asking for more power without considering that additional cooling is required? Do you have hot spots in places you never expected to have servers? Has virtualization changed your network architecture? Your security protocols? What exactly does cloud computing mean to my data center? Is cloud computing being performed in your data center already? More importantly, how do I align the different data center disciplines to understand how new technologies will work together to solve data center problems?

The IT/Facilities gap is no longer a new topic of discussion. Almost any data center trade show will have at least one session about the infamous gap, but what tools do you have to close the gap? With ever increasing densities, weary data center professionals still have to keep the data center operating, while facing additional challenges relating to power efficiencies and interdepartmental communication.

To compound the problem, ‘green’ has become the new buzzword in almost every facet of our lives. Data centers are no exception to green marketing and are sometimes considered easy targets due to large, concentrated power and water consumption. New green solutions sometimes are not so green due to limited understanding of data center complexities. New green technologies may disrupt cost saving and efficient technologies already in use. Corporations are trying to calculate their carbon footprint, put goals in place to reduce it and may face pressure to apply a new solution without understanding the entire data center picture. Various government bodies around the world have seen the increase in data center power consumption and realize it is only trending up. It is only a matter of time before regulations are put in place, which will cause data center operators to comply with new rules, possibly beyond what a data center was originally designed for.

But we all know that the most visible pressure is that costs are rising. The uncertainty of the economy has everyone looking for ways to cut and optimize data centers further than ever before. Data centers have reached the CFO's radar and are under never ending scrutiny to cut capital investments and operating expenses. So what are data center owners and operators supposed to do? Invent their own standards? Metrics? Framework? Which industry standards and metrics apply to your data center and will they help you show results to your CFO? There has to be a better way. We need to unite as an end user community to create a common voice and attack this problem together.

Enter Data Center Pulse. In September of 2008, this new data center end user community was formed with one simple goal - influence the industry through end users. The DCP membership currently stands at 1067 data center owners and operators representing over 600 companies in 45 countries and almost every industry in the world. DCP members are the customer. They are the people that make the billions in annual purchasing decisions that drive the IT economy.

In February of 2009, Data Center Pulse (DCP) held a summit in Santa Clara, CA to tackle some of the biggest challenges our community was facing. Power, Metrics, Industry Alignment, Server Efficiency, Metrics, and Cloud Computing. Leaders from DCP drove each individual track. Findings from each track were presented to the industry the next day. Through the process, it became clear that a key component was missing. There was a lack of common framework to address all aspects of the data center - i.e. there are common building blocks that make up every data center in the world regardless of country, business, or function.

At the summit, the ‘cloud computing’ track was tasked with trying to understand the data center interdependencies from top to bottom. By doing so, users could analyze the potential outsourcing to a cloud technology solution. From these open questions, discussions and uncertain future technologies one data center operator, from a major financial institution, shared his view on the interdependencies of data centers. This view was a stack of building blocks; the fundamental ingredients, that make up a data center. All of the track leaders and participants realized that everything fits into one or more of these major building blocks. Blocks have interdependencies and turning a knob in one will affect something in another. We agreed that this stack framework should be developed as a common approach to unite users and providers on how to address the data center machine.

The Data Center Pulse Stack grew from this original proposal by including input from other data center operators. The DCP Stack graphic represents the first draft of this stack framework.

DCP-Stack Version 1.2

CLICK TO ENLARGE

The development continues, but the objective is simple - provide one common framework that will describe any data center, anywhere, doing anything. The discussions are framed around simple questions: Where is the data center? What feeds it? How is it designed? And, what does it do? By addressing each of these questions individual productivity metrics can be broken down into their respective blocks, which enables every data center to measure them the same way. Additional input included adding a baseline and carbon score in which provide a common way to answer "What feeds it?” Everyone needs power and a data center’s carbon score can be calculated. The next step is to apply industry established metrics for each block that is running in the data center. For example, PUE for the MEP layer. The platform layer would have one or more productivity metrics for useful work. Each of the metrics is then rolled up into a top-level efficiency metric that calculates your carbon score out. In essence, the carbon score in, the work performed inside the data center (all layers) and then the carbon score out. Similar to vehicle horsepower ratings, fuel efficiency, and a smog check, the DCP stack allows any data center to be compared with a simple, certified method of measurement that peers, industry manufactures, and company agree upon.

So what does this have to do with answering: What does three-phase power have to do with virtualization? Using the DCP stack like a map, all changes in the data center can be traced and used to identify interdependencies. Three-phase power is often needed for new servers that leverage virtualization (Server/MEP). The new server came with a new Storage Area Network (SAN) switch and storage array (Storage/Network). All the new IT equipment needed more cooling so it had to be placed in an area that can handle more floor tiles(Physical/Spatial/MEP). After installing the new servers, SAN switch, and Storage array 10x more work can be performed than with old equipment but the cooling is less efficient and the new IT equipment uses more power. The individual layer metrics changed, but the top-level efficiency score went up improving the carbon score as well. Consider that even though the cooling metric is less efficient compared to other data center certified scores, what is done in the data center may make the overall score better than a peer’s score.

Members of Data Center Pulse believe the best way to describe, communication, and innovate data center thinking between peers and the industry is through the use of a common data center stack framework. Do you agree? Do you disagree? What would you do? We would like to know. We would like everyone to participate in building this common framework. You can participate in this development by sending email to stack@datacenterpulse.org.

The stack framework can be found at HERE. Watch the website and the DCP YouTube channel for more updates on the stack development.



Episode 15 - The Stack

In this episode, Dean Nelson talks with Jeremy Rodriguez, the Co-Chair of the Data Center Pulse Technical Advisory Board (TAB), about the development of the Stack Framework. The Stack is an output of the DCP Summit in February, 2009. It is a common and holistic way to look at the all layers of the datacenter stack, their dependencies on each other and their impact on the overall datacenter efficiency. The ultimate goal is for DCP users to define and adopt a standard way of defining and measuring all components of the datacenter. The development work is underway with a target of adoption by January 1, 2010.

Data Center Pulse Rapid Growth Reaches 1,000 Member Milestone



PRESS RELEASE

UNION CITY, CA, June 26, 2009 – Data Center Pulse Inc. (DCP), a newly formed datacenter industry organization, today announced that it has enrolled its 1,000th member. This major milestone has been reached in just under 9 months, bringing the DCP community into 45 countries representing over 600 companies in virtually every market segment both public and private.

“We knew that there was a gap in the industry, but we were surprised at how quickly the membership grew”, says Dean Nelson, co-founder and Chairman of DCP. “Our goal was simple; to create a place that datacenter industry operators could gather to share ideas on best practices and ultimately influence the industry. With the myriad of pressures we are all facing; rising costs, density increases, complexity and new ecological scrutiny; we knew that a collaborative community could prove to be very beneficial.”

Data Center Pulse Inc. is an exclusive group of datacenter owners and operators influencing the industry through end users. DCP was formed September 13, 2008 on LinkedIn and in just nine short months they have attracted members ranging from some of the most innovative startups to many of the largest companies in the world.

DCP Members must participate, or be responsible for, one or more of the following within their own company: Data Center Strategy, Architecture/Design, Operations, Efficiency, Sustainability or Use. DCP does not allow members with primary jobs in sales, marketing, PR, consulting or business development.

The DCP members are the individuals that evaluate, recommend and purchase the products and services for the datacenter. They represent billions of dollars of annual purchases that drive the IT economy. They are the datacenter customers.

About Data Center Pulse: Data Center Pulse (DCP) is a growing, non-profit, datacenter industry organization founded on the principles of sharing best practices amongst its exclusive membership. Founded in late 2008, DCP has quickly become an industry nexus for the explosive datacenter industry’s operators and influencers. DCP’s mission is to align end users to share information thereby influencing the industry by defining, adopting and driving energy efficiency and best practices. The DCP members are the individuals that evaluate, recommend and purchase the products and services for the datacenter. They represent billions of dollars of annual purchases that drive the IT economy.

     End-Users can join DCP HERE
     Non End-Users can join DCP Industry HERE



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