Eng-Tips Whitepaper Library » Data Center

Our Panel’s Conclusion on DCIM Tools

Zen Kishimoto — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:23:48 +0000

Those who do not follow my blog may be confused without some background. Teladata is a consulting firm focusing on data center technologies. They saw a huge gap between IT and facilities that is making data center operation less efficient. That is well illustrated in my previous blog.

I had the opportunity to moderate a panel session at this conference to investigate the current status of data center infrastructure management (DCIM). For details of this session, see here.

These were the panelists:

Chuck Rego, Chief Architect, High Density Data Centers at Intel Corporation

Pam Brigham, Director, Global Technology at Equinix

Phil Reese, Research Computing Strategist at Stanford University

This blog is a summary of that session. (It is almost impossible to moderate a panel and take notes at the same time.) There are many ways you can structure a panel discussion. One extreme is for the moderator and panelists to share a common scenario, even down to the details of Q&A. Of course, the other extreme is to set a big theme and a direction for the discussion, and let the conversation take its own course.


		Data Center Projects: System Planning

I took the second approach, mainly because the panelists’ three data centers were drastically different, making it extremely difficult to ask each person the same question. On one end of the spectrum, Phil Reese has data centers for researchers at Stanford University and is starting to use a commercially available DCIM tool. On the other end, Pam Brigham’s company, Equinix, is in the colocation business worldwide, and she uses homegrown tools. Chuck Rego produces a set of DCIM tools at Intel and uses other commercially available tools.

Technical difficulties prevented my monologue slides from being included in the presentation. But I said the following in them:

DCIM tools are software and hardware tools used to design and operate data centers effectively. This definition may qualify almost any tool as a DCIM tool.
In general, a tool has only one function.
DCIM tools came out of the different needs and categories of data center operations. Therefore, there is no standard for sharing data and no common communications protocol.
Very little information about use is available.

There were no clear disagreements about this explanation. However, Chuck was a little skeptical about any tool being a DCIM one. I am not 100% sure, but I think I heard that energy management tools were not DCIM tools. I take a very liberal stance on the definition of DCIM. If we take the meaning of DCIM literally, any DCIM tool should directly touch the infrastructure. Energy management tools may not deal with the infrastructure directly but they do indirectly. If we draw a line to define what is a DCIM tool and what is not, it would be too cumbersome. I suggest putting everything into this category.

There were a few more topics discussed, although I am sure I forgot others:

Homegrown tools were developed when no tools were commercially available.
A dashboard display that integrates several tools’ results would be desirable.
Some kind of standards are necessary.

As for item #1, both Pam and Chuck said why they developed their own. Pam needed to provide some kind of automated way to let sales guys know what colocation space is available at which data center, with some detailed specifications. One such tool is web based and provides information instantly. When there is no tool commercially available, you need to develop your own. Pam said she had been looking into commercially available tools, but none of them satisfies her needs yet. A tool needs to be flexible and customizable because no two data centers are alike. A tool without any flexibility may apply to one data center but not to another, even though you own them both.

Chuck’s case is interesting. He developed several tools as a suite to meet his needs but ended up making them commercially available. So Intel eats its own dog food.

I think both Phil and Chuck brought up item #2. Phil is using SynapSense to monitor his data center. He also has some CFD tools. Down the line, he will need more tools. It would be very desirable if these tools were integrated with one display window, rather than multiple windows, to make it easier to grasp what’s happening at your data center.

Item #2 brings up item #3. To integrate tools together, we need a common platform for sharing data and a communications mechanism. But because each tool was developed to perform one function and one function only, this need was not taken into consideration. However, there is some movement in this direction. Future Facilities now teams up with other companies, including Intel, to integrate their tools together.

In summary, the DCIM segment is in its infancy. Its definition is not even agreed upon. There is going to be debate over whether a tool belongs to DCIM. That would confuse the market, but it is a process we need to go through to mature this segment. But one thing is clear. Someone with a lot of weight behind him should take the initiative to set the standards in this segment. Chuck, how about you?

Virtualization: Optimized Power and Cooling to Maximize Benefits

APC — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:00:08 +0000

Data centers are routinely and unknowingly missing a great portion of their entitlement from virtualization. Beyond virtualization’s undisputed IT benefits – from reduced rack footprint to disaster recovery – is the parallel story of a substantial benefit from optimizing the physical infrastructure that supports it. In particular, row-based cooling, correctly sized power and cooling, and real-time capacity management are essential elements in realizing virtualization’s full potential in cost reduction, efficiency, and reliability.

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BigData, Fujitsu’s Way

Zen Kishimoto — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:20:12 +0000

The recent Annual Fujitsu North America Technology Forum was Fujitsu Laboratories of America’s fifth such conference. This year’s theme was “From Sensor Networks to Human Networks: Turning Big Data into Actionable Wisdom.” In short, it was a one-day conference on Big Data.

Mr. Matsumoto passed the torch to Mr. Kimura (in the next picture), the new CEO of Fujitsu America Research Labs, who opened the conference.

Yasunori Kimura, new CEO of Fujitsu Laboratories of America.

The conference included very interesting information about Fujitsu itself and its take on Big Data. In addition, there were expert speakers in the Big Data segment. Fujitsu also exhibited 19 of their technologies at the conference. The agenda and other information are here. As in previous years, most presentations will be posted here.


		Virtualization and Cloud Computing: Optimized Power, Cooling, and Management Maximizes Benefits

There were several presentations from Fujitsu, but I show only the slides, with my comments, that I found most interesting. A complete set of slides will be sent to all the participants and will be posted here soon.

In this slide, three basic research areas are shown with the core strategic R&D expanded. Cloud fusion and next-generation green data centers are the most directly related to Big Data. By the way, I do not see much use of the term cloud fusion by others, except for Fujitsu. Looking at their explanation (the 11th slide in here), it seems to be similar to cloud federation, which includes multiple private and public clouds. Such a federation will make it easier for enterprises to use multiple kinds of public and private clouds on-premise, or it may pose extra problems, such as identity management and interoperability of virtual machines (VM).

In the next slide, Fujitsu showed where data are coming from to form Big Data.

Fujitsu is serious about riding the Big Data wave. Their specific project areas are in the next slide.

I bumped into Dave Ohara, who has been writing a lot on data centers.He is now into Big Data, and his report on it will come out soon and be available at GigaOM’s website (for a fee).

Unless I make an energy-related comment, this blog is not complete. The current focus on Big Data is pretty much on how to exploit it. It is important to utilize “data exhaust,” similar to exhaust from cars, and make good use of it. Even in this instance, a large amount of data is created 24×7 in almost every corner of the world. Much of it is created via machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions. Some of it is discarded as exhaust, without any processing, while some is stored and accumulated with very little processing. Only a small percentage of it gets processed to produce useful information to improve our lives and accelerate smarter use of energy, as by smart grid.

Come to think of it, this is very scary. Many kinds of waste, including garbage, as long as they’re biodegradable, go back to nature. Of course, some do not. GHG disappears from our sight quickly but accumulates high up in the atmosphere and impacts the earth. But unused but accumulated Big Data will never leave us unless we delete it. It usually takes energy to collect and store Big Data. I wonder whether this will become a problem sometime soon. There are certain aspects of Big Data we can control, but we cannot control all of them. Am I worried about something that will never happen?

Data Center Projects: System Planning

APC — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:20:00 +0000

System planning is the Achilles’ heel of a data center physical infrastructure project. Planning mistakes can magnify and propagate through later deployment phases, resulting in delays, cost overruns, wasted time, and ultimately a compromised system. Much of the trouble can be eliminated by viewing system planning as a data flow model, with an orderly sequence of tasks that progressively transform and refine information from initial concept to final design.

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DCIM Tools: Reality or Hype?

Zen Kishimoto — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:19:16 +0000

I have written about data center infrastructure management (DCIM) in past blogs:

As most people in the data center market know, both facilities and IT folks consider monitoring one of the most important elements in operating data centers. Smaller companies were the first to provide monitoring and reporting functions. Although this is not an exhaustive list, I had a chance to talk to some of these vendors and write about the meetings:

I understand their services and their usefulness. Some provide sensor hardware and software, but others provide only software. They all monitor, aggregate, and report several parameters relevant to data center operations, such as temperature, humidity, and power consumption. Some deal only with facilities equipment, and others handle data coming from both facilities and IT equipment. There are no standards by which to measure the data—no standard for frequency of measurement, data formats, or protocols. Each vendor has their set of customers, and they seem to be happy with the solutions they purchased.

Then there are Power Assure, Romonet, and Future Facilities. Power Assure does monitor, but that is not all. It also optimizes the use of power at your data center. Romonet is for capacity planning. Future Facilities provides an electronic version of a data center that you can play with before implementing your design physically. These three cannot be classified as monitoring and reporting vendors. But their functions are important to operating data centers, in addition to monitoring and reporting, so a new term has been introduced to describe a new segment, which is DCIM.

Clearly, DCIM should contain several categories of tools, including those for monitoring and reporting, capacity planning, and simulation. As I said before, this segment is in its infancy; there are no standards or actual-use information. Those who combat day-to-day operation problems would be confused about which tools to select. Do they want to buy one tool at a time or buy a suite of tools? But wait. There is no suite of tools yet, although Future Facilities (for example) has begun to partner with other DCIM vendors to share data.

If we were to develop a suite of tools or a framework or platform for DCIM tools, what would the requirements be? It would help if there were some information from actual use by someone other than the vendors. Because DCIM tools are at a very early stage, there is very little information about them.

To fill that gap, I put together a panel discussion on DCIM at Teladata’s Technology Conversion Conference to be held on February 2 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.The program is here.

Because the needs of operators can be quite different from one data center to another, we will have a good assortment of panelists from different environments:

Chuck Rego, Chief Architect, High Density Data Centers at Intel Corporation
Pam Brigham, Director, Global Technology at Equinix
Phil Reese, Research Computing Strategist at Stanford University

Chuck develops Intel’s DCIM tools for their own and partner use and use commerical ones as well, while Pam at Equinix has homegrown tools. Phil at Stanford is starting to use a commercial tool. I will ask them what problems they perceive as the most important to solve at their data centers and why they chose their solutions, whether their own or commercial tools. Are they quite happy with the tools they are using? If not, what is missing? What additional work is needed to make them work? Conversely, were there any extra benefits they did not expect in applying their DCIM tools?

If you are interested in the answers to these questions, join me and the panelists at the panel and other sessions at the conference.

Energy Efficiency at Data Centers, Vantage Way

Zen Kishimoto — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:30:40 +0000

The first of my 2012 interviews is with Greg Ness, Marketing Vice President, Vantage Data Centers. Until I saw him, I did not realize that I often used to read his blog. He also writes on data center and IT infrastructure here.

Greg Ness in the lobby of V3 Vantage Data Center.

Actually, this is not my first visit to their site. Back in November 2010, I attended a meeting there sponsored by Critical Facilities Roundtable. At that time, there were two buildings (V1 and V3) on campus that were owned by Intel and sold to Vantage just prior to the meeting. We had a meeting at V1 (well, actually before it became V1) and toured a partially completed V3 (yes, before it became V3). They added a brand-new building that is called V2, which was a large parking lot then. Right now, both V2 and V3 are ready for occupancy. V3 has three customers (one of them is Mozilla), and V2 is leased to a single unnamed customer. V1 is still undergoing renovation. The order of completion is V3, V2, V1.

All the specifications of each data center as well as their pictures can be found here:

But for busy readers, I summarized some basic information in the following table.

	V1	V2	V3
Status	Under construction	Completed & occupied	Completed & occupied
Structure	2 stories	1 story	1 story
IT load	22 MW	9 MW	6 MW
Power density	150–400 W/sq. ft.	200 W/sq. ft.	150 W/sq. ft.
Space	110K sq. ft.	45K sq. ft.	40K sq. ft.
Floor	Slab/raised floor	Slab	Raised floor

For more details, visit the respective pages. The total IT load of 37 MW is supported with a dedicated substation (50 MW) on campus.


		Learn How Cloud Connected Backup and Recovery Delivers a Command Performance

They also are building a data center in Quincy, WA, to exploit abundant and cheap hydropower, thanks to the Columbia River, as the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google did.

There are a lot of data centers in Santa Clara, mainly because of the:

Reliable power (good mix of green power) with a competitive pricing structure from Silicon Valley Power Company, owned by the city of Santa Clara.
Abundant fiber connections close to a NAP.
Nearby large businesses like Intel and Yahoo (Google, Apple, HP, Cisco, and Oracle are not far from Santa Clara) and technology startups.
Favorable weather for natural cooling, a.k.a. airside economizer.

I have visited data centers by Terremark, Digital Realty, and DuPont Fabros before, which are in the vicinity of the Vantage centers. They all cited the reasons above for selecting Santa Clara. They are alike in some ways and different in others.

Is it good to be in the data center business now, even in this time of recession? Absolutely! As you’ve probably heard from several sources, data centers are in high demand. At the first wave of the Internet, it was said that “if you build it, they will come.” At that time, “it” was fiber cable infrastructure. I will not be too far wrong if I apply the same quote to data centers.

Briefly, demand is high because:

Many more things are online (cloud, mobile, sensors, and EV)—the Internet of things.
Building and maintaining a data center is very expensive.
Construction takes a relatively long time (12 to18 months), which delays go-to-market timing.
Data centers require highly skilled experts to handle ever-increasing IT demands, but acquisition of such expertise is hard, time-consuming, and costly.

Vantage is on this wave.

The following is a summary of the visit and the discussion I had with Greg.

Several features differentiate Vantage from others. But one thing that stuck in my mind is LEED certification. They want to certify all four of their data centers as LEED Platinum. V3 has been awarded it already (see the sign next to Greg in the picture above), and V2 is prequalified as Platinum. Greg told me that they exceeded even the Platinum requirements, and the US Green Building Council (USGB) folks are considering incorporating the additional Vantage features into the certification.

At this time, there is no version of the LEED certification specifically for data centers, but it has become the de facto standard used in the data center market to brag on how green their data centers are. EPA has finally nailed down a version of Energy Star for data centers, which indicates a certain level of energy efficiency, but it has not caught on yet.

Speaking of catching on, PUE has caught on with almost everyone in the data center industry, but it has been misused to promote data centers too much. Power consumption by IT equipment can vary depending on where you measure—such places as UPS, PDU, or IT equipment. Also, PUE changes with the time of day as well as with the weather and the season. Many operators used to report their best PUE to claim how green they were. To correct this and standardize the way PUE is measured, Green Grid has issued a few papers on it. Most recently, they emphasized that PUE should be based on energy instead of power and that each PUE should be qualified depending on where power to IT equipment is measured. In my conversation with Greg, this new PUE was not mentioned. By the way, they measure the IT power consumption at the PDU, which is quite good because they do not have the means to get to their customers’ IT equipment. The PDUs are a demarcation between their responsibilities and their customers’. In this way, they can clearly see each responsibility and have a good basis for the PUE calculation.

As has been said in many places, PUE by itself should not be used as a marketing tool but rather to compare progress on your own data center energy efficiency. The PUE numbers for V3 and V2 are estimated to be between 1.10 and 1.30. V2’s number (which has not yet been announced) will be better primarily because it is a brand-new construction. You can design energy efficiency into a new data center from the ground up. In spite of heavy modifications, retrofitted buildings inherit the old shell and design and cannot be made to comply completely with your new energy efficient scheme.

Another differentiation is the reliability of power and cooling. With a few exceptions, they employed the 2N or mesh policy to guarantee reliability for such things as UPS and generators. A data center supports the nation’s information and trade infrastructure; it cannot fail and must have a high level of availability and reliability.

Greg, like Jim Trout, their CEO, said that Vantage comes close to Google, Microsoft, and Facebook in terms of energy efficiency. It is not fair to compare a wholesaler data center player like Vantage with them. It is like comparing the performance of an embedded system with a system that runs software developed independent of a hardware platform. Because you can control and tune both software and hardware in an embedded system, your performance is better than in a system consisting of independently built software and hardware. A data center operator cannot influence their tenants too much. However, in the case of their V2, Vantage worked closely with the single tenant, who signed a lease during construction, reflecting their IT requirements for energy efficiency. Of course, they could not dictate which IT equipment to use or its basic design, as Google and Facebook did to their internal IT group.

What about the downside of this? If the building was spec’d to a specific customer, it is great for that customer. But is it good for Vantage? What if the customer goes bankrupt or leaves for any other reason? Aren’t they stuck with a data center too tailored to be used by other clients?

The answer to this question is twofold:

If the building were designed to be super energy efficient, it would last 20 years rather than 5 to 10 years, which is typical of data centers in the past. No significant retrofitting would be required for the next customer.
If the customer goes under, it is likely that their IT equipment would be left there, and that might attract other customers.

Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tools are being talked about everywhere. For a wholesaler like Vantage, they only need to monitor and control the facilities side of the house and not IT. For that they use IBS. Incidentally, I will moderate a panel session, and one of the panelists is from Equinix, a colocation provider that does not need to measure IT equipment either. I wonder what she will say about it.

In V3, a raised floor with three separate caged areas is employed, instead of a slab floor. This allows customers to adjust airflow on the basis of their usage and configuration. However, the cold/hot isle configuration is pre-architected with the ceiling heat damper. So unless customers do not want to follow one of the best practices of energy efficiency, their rack configurations cannot be drastically different to exploit this preconfiguration. Each customer is allocated a single PDU, which allows up to 3 MW of power. As for cooling, both V2 and V3 employ airside economizer. In addition, V1 and V3 use chiller for cooling, but V2 does not. The customer in V2 does not want to use water and uses DX instead.

It is sometimes more profitable to conduct business at a higher level. So rather than competing at the infrastructure level, Vantage may want to provide a service like hosting private clouds. But I was told that they would strictly stay on their core of competency and the area of their strength, which is providing the best efficient mechanical and power support. Something like hosting private cloud is left to their alliance partners, like Telx. Incidentally, on this tour, I bumped into an old friend of mine who works at Telx and will try to get time with him to discuss their services.

What I liked most is that Greg wanted to make some of their ways of energy efficiency available by showing how they do it, so that the entire data center industry gets improved. The way things are going, more demand for data centers is expected, and this market is one of the rare segments that do not know what the recession means.

The Seven Types of Power Problems

APC — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:10:27 +0000

Many of the mysteries of equipment failure, downtime, software and data corruption, are often the result of a problematic supply of power. There is also a common problem with describing power problems in a standard way. This white paper will describe the most common types of power disturbances, what can cause them, what they can do to your critical equipment, and how to safeguard your equipment, using the IEEE standards for describing power quality problems.

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Japan Data Center Council Meeting in Osaka

Zen Kishimoto — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:28:16 +0000

Japan Data Center Council (JDCC) is an organization consisting of data center operators, IT and facilities equipment providers, and other data center service providers. They usually hold meetings, seminars, and workshops in Tokyo, but towards the end of the year they hold a workshop in Osaka. I gave a talk there on new trends in US data centers that attracted a good number of people.

Here’s a short summary of the workshop.

Like similar organizations in the United States, JDCC has several special interest groups, which they call working groups. Different groups focus on planning, market research, environmental policies, human resources, international competitiveness, environment and standards, facilities standards, security, and networking.

The first presentation was by Atsushi Yamanaka of IDC Frontier, a data center operator, who reported on power saving efforts in the Tokyo region. Such information will be useful for data center operators in the Osaka region because that area will probably experience the same hardship this winter that Tokyo did this summer.

Recall that Yamanaka and I presented the state of data centers in Japan in the aftermath of the major quake in March.

After the JDCC organizational introduction, Hiromasa Fuchi of NEC explained what NEC did to save power. He also referred to what JDCC published to help save power for its members.


		SolidWorks and Intel: Simulation-Driven Design

Following that, Kohsei Ichikawa of Kajima (the largest construction company in Japan) described some details of the March earthquake. He said that one high-rise (53 stories) building in downtown Tokyo shook continuously for 13 minutes, even though the actual earthquake lasted only 60 seconds or so. He also reviewed JDCC’s new requirements for earthquakes. Among the new findings in the aftermath of the disaster are that the power grid can go offline (its availability used to be as natural as air before the quake) and that in spite of preferred customer contracts to obtain fuel for emergency generators, the breakdown in the supply channel prevented the securing of sufficient fuel.

Fukuda of Mitsubishi Research Institute briefed us on what the Tokyo Metropolitan government is doing about GHG control as it relates to data center operations. Osaka does not have a similar law, and data center operators in Osaka could learn from this example.

Haruyoshi Yagi of Fujitsu talked about the environmental standards working group’s efforts to improve PUE, then Naohiro Masunaga of Nomura Research Institute discussed his working group’s findings after visiting data centers in Singapore and Malaysia.

Ogura of Hitachi reported what is needed to secure good people for data center operations in Japan. I then gave a talk on data center trends in the United States. My topics included DCIM tools, higher temperature in cooling, modularity, metrics, hardware/data center standards by the Open Compute Project, electricity distribution, and the impacts of cloud computing.

IT and Facilities Integration at Data Centers by Future Facilities

Zen Kishimoto — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:46:13 +0000

I met Sherman twice before.

Sherman Ikemoto

At that time, Future Facilities’ (FF) main focus was computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which was important then and still is today. But it was not interesting enough for me to write about it (sorry, Sherman). In 2011 FF came out with new positioning and a new set of functions, a virtual facility (with a suite of tools called 6SigmaDC), a digital replica of a real data center. The virtual facility can put together information on power, IT loads, and space, in addition to air flow, and create a mathematical model and run simulations on it without actually altering a data center.

I had an opportunity to listen to people who are using this product at the recent FF conference. As I listened to their talks and had a frank chat with Sherman, I began to think that this replica has good potential to solve a big problem of IT and facilities: disarray in managing high-power-density data centers.

This blog is a summary of my chat with Sherman and my thoughts triggered by it. FF did start its business with a focus on air flow (the term DCIM did not exist then anyway, although CFD is one of the DCIM categories). He said that earlier they were brought in by data center facilities folks to clean up the damage done by IT. The use of the word “damage” was interesting because as a former long-time IT guy, I never thought facilities people felt that way. Facilities people tailor air flow to IT needs at the beginning of IT deployment. But because the IT way is notoriously to change everything—including equipment, rack configurations, and rack layouts—often and on-the-fly, air flow customized before the changes no longer applies after the changes, and thus IT does damage to operations in the entire data center.


		CMMS Buyer’s Guide

After seeing this repeated again and again, Sherman and his folks realized it would be better to let IT and facilities folks work together to share air flow and other information to avoid the problem early on rather than fight with it later. Earlier in the conference, Hassan Moezzi, director of FF, said that air flow is the single most important factor in managing a data center because most data centers are cooled by air rather than liquid (such as water). By controlling air flow and optimizing its effect on cooling, most problems could be solved.

I think I knew this, but until it was put that way I did not fully appreciate it. Another thing I re-realized concerns IT and facilities integration. Since the beginning of my writing about the data center segment, many people have said that the difficulty of managing data centers is primarily IT and facilities’ differences in culture and lack of close collaboration. Some remedies were suggested, such as making both IT and facilities report to the same boss and/or letting IT be responsible for the power bill. Those are fine, but they are at too high a level. What can we actually do? Sherman and FF are advocating to create a digital replica (mathematical model) of a physical data center. The model is used to test multiple data center configurations to find the best before putting the real IT infrastructure in place. This makes sense. I have toured many newly constructed data centers. Standing in an empty floor, I often wondered how they would lay out IT equipment to manage the entire data center in an energy efficient way. They do not know in advance how the IT equipment will be laid out and how electric and mechanical systems can support it. Come to think of it, it is a scary thing.

Now my next questions. Developing a mathematical model is fine, if we are talking about new construction. Granted that many new data centers are popping up everywhere, including Silicon Valley, there are a far greater number of existing data centers. If the model cannot apply to existing ones, FF’s solution is very limited. But if it can, that means a great business opportunity. FF is often called in to find a solution for an existing data center that has extra capacity (in theory) to host more IT equipment but cannot expand further for some reason—maybe there are hot spots. This is called stranded capacity. By diagnosing the root cause, they can fix the problem by constructing a virtual facility and analyzing it.

This is great, but there is no mathematical model for existing data centers, which consist of hundreds and thousands of pieces of IT and facilities equipment. How do you collect a list of equipment and logical connections to construct a model for that? Initially, FF collected and entered information by hand, a time-consuming and error-prone process. Later, they created an interface to bring in data automatically from multiple sources, such as IT configuration databases that might be produced by someone like Asset Point with their autoscanning of IT equipment. With this interface, FF could work with a company like Nlyte.

A natural question is whether there exists a standard for a communications protocol and data format to share the data created by each DCIM tool. Unfortunately, at this point there is none, although FF uses XML as a base. Even with XML, you could still have your own data formats, although it might be easier for conversion because XML is ASCII based. In any event, FF developed their own interface and data formats, which they share with their partners, like Intel, Nlyte, Aperture, RF Code, and SynapSense. This allows assets and monitoring information into the virtual facility model.

Well, this is interesting. It would be great if FF, or whoever leads the standardization of data formats, could integrate many more DCIM tools into their virtual facility platform and accelerate the adoption of DCIM. I explored this in my previous blog.

FF is working with Intel as a development partner, and their solution interacts with Intel’s data center manager (DCM). Intel has established an interface with data coming from servers and is working with FF to merge their interface with it. Since the DCIM market is in its infancy, there are no standards. Cooling and electrical solution providers like Schneider and Liebert-Emerson and others have their own interface and data formats. I know Intel is big and that more than 80% of all the servers in data centers run Intel chips. Is Intel powerful enough to force a standard to unite DCIM tools? After all, we need to convince facilities types to agree on a standard, and they are not used to standards.

Sherman thinks that the most important thing for really optimizing the efficiency of data centers is to understand data from servers, which is the real culprit, not cooling or electrical systems. “If Intel controls such data, why not?” he continued. It would be IT, not facilities, that would set the standard, he said.

This argument is convincing, but my skeptical nature forces me to wonder if the facilities type would go for a standard. In the BMS market, vendors were forced to support an interface with the Web because the Web revolution was so powerful that they needed to support the Web/IP protocol. We need a similar magnitude of scale to force the standardization of data formats so that each DCIM tool can share information on a single platform like FF’s. I do not have any idea what that would be. Would it be a power crunch, I wonder?

How about adoption? FF has roughly two types of customers: Web/Internet and mission critical. The former includes Intel, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. The latter includes Bank of America, which will soon announce its adoption of FF’s solution, and JPMorgan Chase. FF is also targeting medium-size data centers, as they expect them to get the same benefits as large data center players. The company originally came from Europe, and their presence there is fine. But they have yet to penetrate the Asian market, although they have customers there for designing server boxes with their tools.

As for channels and reselling their products and services, EYP/HP might be the closest to being certified, as FF is in discussions with them.

As Chuck Rego of Intel mentioned to me, we need to cover both the monitoring and the capacity planning sides of DCIM. If somehow FF can standardize the data for DCIM and unite both sides, DCIM will make it mainstream, and many of the “damages caused by IT” may be avoided.

SVLG’s Fourth Data Center Energy Efficiency Conference

Zen Kishimoto — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:05:52 +0000

The fourth annual SVLG Data Center Energy Efficiency Conference was held Nov. 18 at IBM Almaden Research Labs in San Jose, CA.

SVLG stands for Silicon Valley Leadership Group, whose vision (from its website) is to:

Ensure the economic health and a high quality of life in Silicon Valley for our entire community by advocating for adequate affordable housing, comprehensive regional transportation, reliable energy, a quality K-12 and higher education system and prepared workforce, a sustainable environment, and business and tax policies that keep California and Silicon Valley competitive.

SVLG has been offering data center energy efficiency (DCEE) conferences for the past three years. It is situated in southern San Jose and surrounded by a large, natural open space.


		Computerized Maintenance Management Solution Buyer’s Guide

Like the previous conferences, this one was sold out, and a lot of people showed up.

Crowds at SVLG DCEE conference. There are more rows behind this.

The agenda for the program was as follows:

I will report on the entire conference, and some sessions in detail, in upcoming blogs.

Carl Guardino, CEO of SVLG, gave the opening remarks. Although he covered a few topics, I only remember one thing (sorry, Carl!!).

Carl Guardino

It is a joint program between SVLG and the City of San Jose to donate your time and money to match 1,000 adult volunteers with 1,000 struggling K–8 public school students to help eliminate the achievement gap in SV.

More can be found here. One type of contribution is to spread the word. So this is a part of my contribution.