Martin Hingley's Blog

NGD In Wales

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 15:22:48 EST

I went with Per Berh from AMD to look around NGD's facility in Wales. I was amazed at the size of the place. The substation is big enough to power Bristol, the building is the size of T5 at Heathrow and the top floor is big enough to turn two jumbo jets around. Simon Taylor (Chariman) says he has a plan to fill it in 3-5 years. You should look around and think about the advantages of locating in Wales. He's already got three tennants. It's a good site to watch.

Fujitsu Opens London North - Europe's First Tier III Data Centre

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 08:52:21 EST

I was very pleased to get an invitation from Fujitsu to visit its new facility north of London recently. The first in Europe to be built to the Uptime Institute’s Tier III standard, the new data centre is one of many Fujitsu has around the world. It won awards from Datacenterdynamics in 2008 and 2009 - so I’m sure many readers will already know about it. Key features include:

3,688 m2 (40,000ft2) technical space
6 technical data halls
Positioned to serve all industry sectors with standards to support Financial Services and Government customers in and around London
The ability of technical halls to attain the UK governments ‘List X’ rating
The use of Diesel Rotary Uninterruptible Power Supply (DRUPS) machinery
Maximises advantages of a relatively low outside ambient temperature, reducing the need to run chillers for most of the year
A Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.4 and a Data Center infrastructure Efficiency of 71% –DCiE measurements were developed by the Green Grid to measure the power efficiency of data centres

Fujitsu London North Uses Low Ambient Air Temperature To Minimise the Use Of Chillers

When the ambient temperature in the area is below 11oC, which is a large percentage of the year as per a Northern Hemisphere climate. Air flows through the evaporative tower allowing the water to be chilled before going through heat exchangers. The heat exchangers are the clever part, transferring energy and allowing the cooling of the water returning from the technical hall before it enters the chillers. The two water loops never meet or mix. This supplementing and complimenting of the mechanical load helps drive energy efficiency. The chilled water then is pumped onto the CRAC and forced out to the cold aisles within the technical halls. Fujitsu maintains a temperature in these rooms of around 24oC. Standard machines such as Fujitsu’s RX3000 typically have extra internal cooling fans, Fujitsu maintains the environment to a level that will avoid ironically increasing energy consumption through the activation of fans of the installed IT infrastructure.

DRUPS Flywheels Maintain Electricity During Power Cuts

Fluctuations in power are an expected event in data centres. Its DRUPS machines are a generator system mated to two flywheels in turn connected to a marine diesel engine, which will are able to maintain electrical supply during the short period whilst the engine is fired up. These DRUPS supply electricity until the mains connection comes back on line. In reality the power fluctuations cuts are typically short, but guaranteeing a stable supply is obviously essential in a highly-available data centre. In the case of a long power outage the DRUPS machines can run for 72 hours without refuelling. Refuelling is can occur in flight. Fujitsu is currently one of a number of companies using DRUPS machines in data centres. They appear to have clear cost and efficiency advantages over traditional battery-powered UPSs.

Some Conslusions - Data Centre Designs Require Power Efficiency And Strong Resilience

I suspect that improving PUE ratings for older facilities is harder than designing them into new ones. As electricity prices continue to soar, so I expect many data centre owners will look to retrofit new innovative features such as DRUPS machines have the ability to reduce costs significantly. The advantages of Fujitsu's London North facitlity are in its proximity to other data centres - Financial customers in particular will not fall foul of the infamous 60km 'speed of light' transaction problems. The opening of the centre also coincides with the company's introduction of IaaS services, so any of the 6 technical halls which fail to find external customers could be turned over to Fujistu's hosting activities.

Server Chips And Suppliers Address Data Centre Priorities

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 04:35:48 EST

For everyone responsible for managing servers it looks like it's going to be a great year and month. Well as long as you like handling new kit. After a depressing year in which Intel's Nehalem was one of the few bright spots, we're going to get new processors from almost all chip manufacturers.

Intel has already released its Westmere EP processors this month and has more to come in the next couple of days
AMD is launching its Magny Cours chips today
IBM has launched its Power 7 RISC chips a few weeks ago and will update its mainframes with the z11 processors later in the year

Aside from the performance hikes and growing complexity in terms of the number of cores, most server vendors are working on unique features to help with data centre deployment. IBM, for instance, has added its MAX5 memery extension and will be offering water cooling on its z11, Fujitsu has designed a chimney on its CX1000 racks to do away with 'hot aisles', Dell's Data Center Solutions (DCS) team continues to produce highly-customised high density designs, etc. This is the first time in which data centre use has been thoroughly addressed in design terms from the chip up and each vendor's differentiation makes researching and choosing servers more interesting than ever. One key issue to consider in selecting new servers is 'power per Watt per $' and there are a number of new solutions which will help both those who need the greatest processing power and those who have space restrictions. Over all all it's going to be an interesting year for data centre deployments and, if capital expenditure budgets can be unlocked again, a period of growth for server vendors.

Electricity Price Arbitrage In Cloud And Other Data Centre Location Decisions

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:13:35 EST

'Location, location, location' are said to be the most important issues in choosing a retail store. In deciding where to locate a large data centre other considerations are also important, such as:

The availability and cost of highly skilled staff to install and manage equipment
The regional or country legislation which requires certain applications to be based in specific countries
The cost and availability of property suitable for the proposed facility
The availability and cost of networking pipes
The ambient temperature of the site, especially if you’re considering fresh air or other alternative cooling techniques

I’m very grateful to David McCann, Microsoft’s General Manager of its Windows Server Division, who spoke at last week’s AMD Server Summit in Austin. He points to another important criterion – the cost of electricity. In a recent two day meeting in London he met with 6 customers running very large operations with tens of thousands of servers, who debated which countries were best to locate their future data centres. They decided that low cost fibre allows a distributed approach (although David himself mentioned that there is no ‘homogeneous latency’ and that there is some variation in countries such as Manila, India and Israel). Server prices continue to decline, or at least price/performance increases steadily with new designs such as AMD’s. Individual salaries for skilled staff can be high, but in some large ‘lights out’ data centres you don’t need very many (I discovered just 12 in HP’s Wynyard facility for instance). David believes that the USA has the cheapest electricity in the World, but other countries are more challenged. In the UK for instance the slowness in replacing coal-fired power stations is like to drive prices up by 25% a year for the next five years, according to the Economist. He claims quite rightly that the top 500 companies in the world need to think about the cost of power. Obviously the price and availability of electricity has already played a role in building new facilities: Google’s decision to use hydroelectric power in Colorado wasn’t just about CSR and Iceland has been promoting its advantages in geothermal power and cool ambient temperatures. I believe David is right in predicting that electricity price arbitrage will play a growing role in decisions about where to place new data centres, whether for Cloud Computing or other purposes.

HP Uses Fresh Air Cooling At Wynyard - Is This CSR?

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:15:26 EST

I had great fun visiting HP's brand new data centre at Wynyard, which has been deliberately placed near its existing Doxford (near Sunderland, UK) facility. The plant is built inside what would by design have been a very large retail warehouse, with a very high roof and enough room to fit the Colosseum. It's just in the process of installing its first customers' equipment and has built redundancy into every aspect of the operation, from backup diesel generators, to the n+2 ideas behind the UPS system, to the dark-fibre connections and electrical supply. I was pleased to hear that the use of fresh air cooling will limit the running of the chillers (hardware cost £4m) to just 20 hours a year and help make substantial savings to the running costs. I believe that Corporate and Social Responsibility (CSR) is about companies introducing 'unique' (rather than 'best') practices and finding a way of reducing electricity costs in this massive data centre qualifies. Actually fresh air cooling was originally pioneered by Steve O'Donell at BT, so HP isn't really being 'unique', but you know what I mean.... Of course saving money by using less power is a benefit to HP in itself, but the company has also set some aggressive internal targets for the reduction of its carbon footprint. CSR was also part of 'the HP Way' from the outset. I think it's well worth a look and maybe follow at what HP is doing. Have a read of my blog if you want to read more about Wynyard.

Could Symantec De-Dupe Reduce Your Storage and Communications Costs?

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 07:59:10 EST

During this downturn almost all IT Managers are having to deal with reducing budgets. While backup procedures are not the most exciting of components, Symantec's introduction of new versions of Backup Exec 2010 and NetBackup 7 bring with them the first standard integration of de-duplication techniques. If successfully implemented you may be able to reduce your expected spending on storage and communications - just think about the huge amount of resources used to move copies of copies of copies around the organisation. This 'cross the park' move is similar to those successfully employed by Oracle (v traditional TP monitors), VMWare (virtual v physical servers) and Microsoft (x86 v risc servers) in the past. You should have a look at updating your backup and archiving procedures with an eye to reduce total IT costs; many of you will need to focus on these areas as the mass of unstructured data from new sensor and monitor equipment hit your organisation in any case.

Cloud Computing - A Maturing Subject In 2010

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 06:00:14 EST

Cloud Computing has been notoriously difficult to define. Often those people most involved with technology have been least likely to embrace the term. However for consumers the experience of social networking and other free-to-use Internet sites is making it attractive. For financial directors in large companies it even holds the promise of turning Cap Ex into Op Ex where internal ‘non-core’ applications can be reasonably replaced with Cloud services. Whether we see Cloud Computing as a new delivery model, a systems architecture, a new type of Outsourcing or just a marketing mantra, I believe the subject will mature significantly in 2010. In particular:

The adoption of ‘… as a Service’ applications by small and medium business will continue to dominate the Cloud Computing news for the first few months of the year.
Large American ISVs like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft will build out from their current consumer focus to address pay-per-use business applications.
However many traditional CIOs in large organisations have a greater challenge in mixing legacy and Cloud applications together. You should expect to see an increase in data centre transformation and private Cloud Computing development services from vendors such as IBM, HP, Fujitsu and Cisco as a result.

During the year I also expect a whole slew of new Service Providers and wholesalers to emerge providing ‘horizontal outsourcing’ through in depth industry sector and/or business process skills. Beyond ITC I’ve heard it say that ‘outsourcing begins with the canteen and the car parking’ - similarly in 2010 we can expect many companies to outsource non-core business applications such as email and printing to a growing number of ‘… as a Service’ providers. You may be interested in reading more of my analysis of Cloud Computing, which is covered extensively on my own site.

Five Predictions For 2010 Data Center Developments

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 13:14:05 EST

I'm very excited to be linked with Focus Magazine and Datacenterdynamics. I wanted to make my first post here about some predictions for 2010 thinking about computing will develop in the data centre in 2010.

First of all I think there will be continue focus on energy efficiency. Even if the Copenhagen Summit failed to introduce legal restrictions on emissions (expect a mass of new legislations of that comes with the Berlin Summit), saving electricity costs and searching for new ways to dissipate heat will increase as the cost of power increases inevitably. Watch the price of electricity in 2010 closely.
Secondly I expect continuous focus on consolidation and transformation. CIOs have difficulty in delivering SLAs from most existing sites. They will spend the year reducing the number and simplifying the applications they provide to their customers and organisations. Look at transformation projects such as that at the credit management company Intrum Justitia.
Thirdly I expect many organisation to seek out new sites from which to run their operations. High costs in city centre locations will make new hosted sites attractive, especially in well designed with efficiency and connectivity (NGD's new facility in Newport, Wales for example). Look at local and central governments developing citizen portals in this area.
Fourthly I expect to see Cloud Computing mature both from an operations and Outsourcing point of view. While it is becoming a new delivery mechanism for users, it is going to raise some fascinating challenges for the CIOs and data centres that provide associated applications and services. Look at what smaller SPs such as Datacenter Online are doing as well as Google, Amazon and the big ISVs.
Lastly I expect to see significant moves to bracket the co-management of facilities and ITC together. Organisations will look to focus on how computing supports the business, funding new applications from the consolidation of older - less efficient - ones.

Please check out my own site for more of my publications on data centre and ITC issues and best of luck for success in the coming year