A recent USA Congressional survey stated that power companies are targeted by cyber attacks 10.000x per month.

After the 2010 discovery of the Stuxnet virus the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) established both mandatory standards and voluntary measures to protect against such cyber attacks, but most utility providers haven't implemented NERC's voluntary recommendations.

Stuxnet hit the (IT) newspaper front-pages around September 2010, when Symantec announced the discovery. It represented one of the most advanced and sophisticated viruses ever found. One that targeted specific PLC devices in nuclear facilities in Iran:

Stuxnet is a threat that was primarily written to target an industrial control system or set of similar systems. Industrial control systems are used in gas pipelines and power plants. Its final goal is to reprogram industrial control systems (ICS) by modifying code on programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to make them work in a manner the attacker intended and to hide those changes from the operator of the equipment.

DatacenterKnowledge picked up on it in 2011, asking ‘is your datacenter ready for stuxnet?’

After this article the datacenter industry didn’t seem to worry much about the subject. Most of us deemed the chance of being hacked with a highly sophisticated virus ,attacking our specific PLC’s or facility controls, very low.

Recently security company Cylance published the results of a successful hack attempt on a BMS system located at a Google office building. This successful hack attempt shows a far greater threat for our datacenter control systems.

I jumped on my data center the other day and rode into town for a beer at the local saloon. I tell you, these data centers keep getting bigger and faster every year. Did I confuse you? What does a data center mean to you? Is it some converged infrastructure with virtualization on it or is it a container with some racks of computers?

Why am I Bothered?

For some time the Datacenter Pulse top 10 has featured an item called ‘ Converged Infrastructure Intelligence‘. The 2012 presentation mentioned:

Treat the DC infrastructure as an IT system;

- Converge in the infrastructure instrumentation and control systems

- Connect it into the IT systems for ultimate control

Standardize connections and protocols to connect components

With datacenter infrastructure becoming a more complex system and the need for better efficiency within the whole datacenter stack, the need arises to integrate layers of the stack and make them ‘talk’ to each other.

This is shown in the DCP Stack framework with the need for ‘integrated control systems’; going up from the (facility) real-estate layer to the (IT) platform layer.

So if we have the ‘integrated control systems’, what would we be able to do?

Saying a modern server uses too much power is like saying a train uses more power than a horse drawn wagon. Of course it does, but it also does way more work. Let's not forget what's important to the question of cost and that is simply how much work is the server performing?