2008 Predictions

As promised, here are my 2008 Predictions. I don't think my predictions from last year (fiber to the home) came true at all -- as I visit my in-laws who can't even get a cable-modem or DSL in their new neighborhood (yet).

Ok...here goes:

1. As I have eluded to in the past, I am a big fan of utility computing. It does receive a fair amount of hype, but I can see the true potential in it and why people will start to see the light in coming years. Events that 365 Main and Rackspace encountered in 2007 helped paint the picture for web sites that only had a single hosting presence to wake up and take a more serious look at utility computing. Amazon EC2, S3, 3Tera and Joyent are pretty cool and worth a look for most anyone. I think the tools to measure, monitor and deploy utility computing will definitely grow in the enterprise realm, now that the internet sites/companies have pioneered so much. The growth of utility computing and enterprise interest should also help along the WAN accelerations and optimization industries as well. BTW--there was an interesting response to Intel's question about what emerging trends are in compute models - check it out here.

2. 2008 will see the hype phrase "Software as a Service" finally fizzle. There's no rocket science here people - get over the warm-fuzzy terminology.

3. Green/New Energy sources will continue to be big news in 2008 (big stretch here, huh?). Only two things I'll offer here.... the first, is to take a look at the Kleiner Perkins (Venture Capital firm) list of greentech companies they are funding --- here. I listend to Tom Perkins on the Venture Voice podcast recently -- what an interesting and amazing person! The second item is wind; Kansas took recent headlines , but it will continue to grow as a new energy source in 2008. There was an interesting story in Sunday's Des Moines Register about the wind industry in Iowa....some interesting stats and stories to see how the industry is growing here.

4. With the data center industry booming, I think 2008 will see more data center related services come out. I.E.- this article

5. Companies to watch / will be acquired? Akamai (an established company, but they will be doing exciting things), Riverbed , Savvis , Platespin , 3tera , and Joyent

6. Political ads will continue to be skipped on my Tivo . Living in Iowa means the privilege of having the first caucus, but the trade is enduring 24x7 ads on TV from the candidates. Maybe after the caucuses are over the ads will take a break until next fall.

7. Death to the RIAA in 2008 -- Alleluia!!

8. Here is my shot in the dark prediction -- at least 1 large acquisition will take place in 2008 in the Colocation or CDN industry. There has been a lot of activity here and some quality players; I think the market has hit a spot that something big will happen next year.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Dear Lord, I've been asked to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us, a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird, a social being capable of actual affection. Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it.

-- Berke Breathed
(as seen in Forbes Magazine)

I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and prosperous 2008!!

I will be attempting some technology and data center predicitions, just as soon as I am done reading what everyone else has predicted, so I can pick the good ones and make them my prediction as well. :)

Sun BlackBox in Australia

It seems like the Sun BlackBox has arrived in Australia.

Check out Tom Worthington's post/review of it here

Chicago Data Center Market

As a follow-up to a comment I made in my last post -- Chicago is a RED hot market for data centers. ZDNet has an article "Bragging Rights: Chicago as green data center powerhouse".

It mostly talks about the new Microsoft data center, but lists the reasons why they chose Chicago. It seems like the hot area has shifted -- it was Texas, is now Chicago, and who knows where is next! Hopefully Chicago will not become as over-crowded as Texas is now.

MLB and Orbitz Case Studies

Network World is probably in the top 3 for my favorite magazines and web sites to visit. They really do a good job of capturing the news, but also delivering some good interviews that demonstrate real world use of the technologies they cover. Two particular stories caught my attention recently that I enjoyed:

The first was a story of Major League Baseball Advanced Media -- I visit mlb.com and stlcardinals.com frequently. The article interviews Ryan Nelson, director of operations for MLB Advanced Media. MLB uses Joyent services to 'dial-up' and 'dial-down' their use of servers and compute power based on the seasonal load and needs. I had heard of Joyent before, but never really looked into them. It's a pretty cool service, and seeing how MLB.com uses their service helps solidify the concept. Yes, it's another company jumping on the "cloud computing" bandwagon, but they offer some pretty innovative solutions, coupled with some cool Sun hardware and technologies. I had a brief introduction to Sun virtualization technology at the Blackbox event earlier this year, but if you haven't checked Solaris Zones it is worth a look. MLB has data centers in New York and Chicago, and thanks to the infrastructure they have setup they can move utilization between centers (for upgrades and such) on the fly. It sounds like Ryan Nelson has a pretty cool job playing around with this infrastructure and new technology. Check out this interview/article here

The second article (thanks for the link Ben) from Network World is about travel web site Orbitz. Like everyone else in the industry, Orbitz is trying to go green -- or as CIO Bahman Koohestani put it, "taking his IT operations carbon neutral". One thing that I liked about Orbitz (in this article) is that they know how much energy they use, monitor their use on a daily basis, and they know how much cooling they use for various parts of their operations. Going green is great, but keeping very close tabs on energy use and mining the data is even better (in my opinion). Orbitz has two large data centers in the Chicago area and Koohestani touts it as an excellent place to locate data centers. Chicago is RED hot now days for data centers. Like other stories we have seen about company strategies -- Orbitz is slashing the number of servers used, and consolidating data center operations world wide. The article has all of the details about how they are greening its IT operations.

Renewable Energy Capital of America

Continuing the push for Iowa as an ideal place to locate business, Governor Chet Culver announced that Iowa was the "renewable energy capital of America". Playing off the attention Iowa gets for political caucusing Culver encouraged campaign staff and media to rethink what they knew about Iowa.

Culver went on to list some of the statistics to back up the renewable energy claim:

• Iowa ranks #1 in ethanol production, #2 in biodiesel production and #3 in wind energy production
• In 2006, Iowa alone accounted for over 30 percent of U.S. ethanol production and 25 percent of U.S. biodiesel production.
• Iowa is over 1,000 wind turbines which create almost 1,000 megawatts of energy, generating enough power to service 250,000 homes.
• The $500 million Iowa Values Fund and the new $100 million renewable energy research and development initiative called the Iowa Power Fund offer businesses the tools and financial resources they need to be successful. Administered through our state Department of Economic Development, these funds provide tax credits, incentives, loans and regulatory assistance to foster business development and job creation.

Check out the complete press release here

Mission Critical Magazine

As an information junkie I tend to visit a lot of web sites and read a lot of blogs. I also frequent a lot of tech industry magazines. A new magazine has come out that I will be adding to my list - Mission Critical Magazine. I have only had a short time to check out the site, but what I have seen so far is really good.

On their home page is a link to Chris Crosby's presentation on 5 Data Center myths. I attended this session at Gartner's Data Center Conference and really enjoyed it. At the conference there was a nice follow-up presentation of a case study that Digital Realty Trust implemented. Chris described their POD Architecture and Gating Process and how it was applied to the customer requirements.

Check out Mission Critical Magazine!

International Site Selection

When I did my site selection white paper back in October, I limited it to the United States. Adam Trujilo over at searchdatacenter.com has a nice write-up on some of the international studies done on site selection as well as references to recent data center activities abroad.

Check it out here

Security in Ten Years

Just a quick link to an interesting post where security guru Bruce Schneier has a conversation with Marcus Ranum.

The conversation with appear in Information Security Magazine this month. While there is nothing earth-shattering in the conversation, it is a good read.

Check it out here
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Also check out the SANS Top 20 2007 Security Risks

Gartner Data Center Conference -- Polls

Here are some more Garnter Data Center Conference Polls that I found interesting:

Question: When are you starting a CMDB?
Responses:

• Now: 41%
  
• 6 months: 7%
  
• 6-12 months: 18%
  
• end of 2009: 21%
  
• not planning: 13%

Question: Who is your CMDB Vendor?
Response:

• BMC: 22%
• CA: 9%
• IBM: 7%
• HP: 21%
• Managed Objects: 1%
• Home grown: 14%
• Service desk: 15%
• Other (NI2, Caimit, Service-now.com): 1%

Question: What are your top Network Operations Pressures?

• VoIP: 8%
• MPLS: 8%
• Wireless: 12%
• Compliance: 3%
• Security: 3%
• Network Faults: 15%
• Proactive Prevention and Performance: 27%
• Meeting SLA's: 12%

Question: What is your #1 priority for 2008?

• Network Device configuration: 8%
• Network Operations Management: 32%
• Performance Reporting: 20%
• Traffice Analysis: 11%
• Capacity Planning/emulation: 16%
• Other: 3%
• No Plans: 10%

TheRegister Article on Google's Iowa Data Center

I just had to do a quick post so you could enjoy the title of The Register's article about Google in Iowa. "Virgin Mary Appears in Google's Iowa Data Center"

The Register always has a......um.... unique (yeah, that's it) take on stories and humorous twist

Check it out here

Gartner - BCP Session

Yesterday I attended an informative session on Business Continuity Planning. I loved their definition of Business Continuity Management -- because it encompasses SO much that people tend to forget about. Their organization groups under BCP were:

1. Business Recovery
2. Contingency Planning
3. Business Operations
   
4. Information Security Management
5. Pandemic Planning
6. Crisis Management (very important one with lots of sub components)
7. Damage Assesment
8. IT Disaster Recovery

Here are a couple of polls that were taken of the attendees in the session.

Question: Do you have a business continuity Management Office?
1. Yes: 55% 2. No: 44$ 3. Don't Know: 1%

If you have a BCM office, where does it fit within the organization?

1. CFO (11%)
2. CIO (26%)
3. CISO (10%)
4. COO (17%)
5. CRO (Chief Risk Officer): 17%
6. Don't Know (6%)
7. Other (13%)

BTW: Having it in the COO office is the ideal according to Gartner.

Finally....you have heard me tout ITIL before and it looks like I need to catch up on ITIL v3. Version 3 includes continuity management guidelines.

Paradigm Shift

Without sounding too much like an analyst and over-generalizing the tech industry as a whole, I really believe we are in the middle of a paradigm shift for technology. I’m old enough to remember mainframes, but never operated or administered them (unless doing COBOL programming in college counts). So there was the mainframe era, the client/server era and whatever-we’re-in-now era. I’ve loved the concept of utility computing ever since the hype (and over-hyping) began. I think it has a ton of potential and some really important concepts and intelligent people behind it. As many others have pointed out, the internet companies have contributed a significant amount to changing architectures used in IT. Perhaps they can be credited for driving much of the needed change that allowed for such enormous scalability (there, the words paradigm shift AND scalability should sit well for the search engine spiders :) A comment from a Gartner session yesterday summed it up nicely…. “cloud computing has ‘some’ degree of truth to it, but also a lot of fog”.

I’ll keep this post as short as possible so I don’t blab on too long and lose readers (assuming you have made it this long). I wanted to link to some utility computing and virtualization articles I liked and then make a few links out to some thoughts on data center containers/black box (DataCenter in a box part IIIa).

Bert Armijo and Peter Nickolov from 3Tera wrote an article recently on Fishtrain about services that virtualization needs adapt to the utility computing model. It is a very good article about future concepts and why virtualization is “not a complete utility computing solution”

The additional service that I would add is security. I’ve been a big fan of Christopher Hoff’s blog that frequently discusses virtualization security and potential vulnerability attack angles. And speaking of innovative technologies and industry shifts, check an excellent post on Security and Disruptive Innovation part III. Security needs to be improved in virtualization, but even more so as it spans across a utility computing implementation.

Network World also ran an interesting article on virtualization security and the realization that many are coming to for their implementations and how some have not even started their implementation because of security issues.

Because I am in the data center business I always digress to the physical part of the infrastructure when the ‘virtual’ data center is mentioned. To me there is no such thing as a virtual data center because it is the one true ‘real’, tangible asset in the infrastructure equation. So when I read about Amazon EC2 and 3Tera, I love the utility computing concepts and having infrastructure virtualized across physical data centers. Of course, with my recent white paper on site selection I also automatically assume geographically disperse data center locations to account for BCP plans and risk avoidance.

A final paradigm shift item I’ll mention is workload lifecycle and management. I don’t know if I completely understand it yet, but I have spent a fair amount of time on the Platespin web site and feel they have a very complete set of products. As it relates to a new and better way to deploy, manage and control your infrastructure I would recommend anyone gives their products a consideration. There is also a decent joint presentation from Dell, Microsoft and Platespin on their respective technologies here

Ok, so there is the paradigm shift in infrastructure architecture and deployment options. Let’s go up a level and look at the data center as a whole. If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time you know I am intrigued, interested, and perplexed by the container model that Rackable, Sun, APC and others have come out with and Google patented, but was dropped as a research project.

There are some interesting comments on the Slashdot post about Intel Data Centers. Some of the interesting points I noticed from these comments are:

1. Chuck Thacker from Microsoft has a very interesting PowerPoint presentation on data centers as a container model. It is a 26 slide presentation full of their research and insight to the topic.

2. There are references to the recent news about Sun’s BlackBox being used underground in Japan and using Geo-exchange for cooling and heat exchange.

3. A user comment: “The reason a "data center in a box" sounds so attractive is that the amortization schedules are different for IT equipment and buildings. If building infrastructure can last its advertised 25-30 year life then a tilt-up or factory assembled type of building structure is more cost-effective than containerized data centers architecturally.”

The thing I have always been thinking about, and that was brought up many times in the Slashdot comments, was just what in the world was the practical application of the data center container? With Google, Sun, Microsoft and others seriously looking at it and doing such deep research on the possibilities, you simply have to think that there is something that they have found that makes business sense and that they have justified.

More later --- back to the Gartner conference for now…..

Google - Renewable Energy Push

While I don't think this is necessarily anything new.... Google announced a new program yesterday called Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal. The goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. The hope is to do it in years instead of decades.

Check out the Reuters article here

Gartner Conference - Polls

Just a quick post to give some background on the Gartner Data Center Conference that I am currently attending. During the opening comments and first keynote they took a few polls of the audience.

I think these are important --- to profile the average attendee and show real data about the industry. Here is what was covered so far:

Poll Question: What is the make up of your Data Center?
Responses:
40% Mainframe, Linux, Unix, Windows
25% Unix, Linux, Windows
10% Mainfram, Unix, Windows
10% Unix, Windows
(I couldn't write fast enough to get the rest :) )

Poll Question: Do you have server consolidation projects?
Responses:
1. No Plans -- 3%
2. Looking into it -- 17%
3. Project Under way -- 50%
4. Already completed a project, may do another -- 30%

Poll Question: How long have you worked in IT?
Responses:
< 2 yrs: 1%
2-5yrs: 2%
5-10yrs: 8%
11-20yrs: 35%
21-30yrs: 40%
31-40yrs: 13%
40+yrs: 1%

Poll Question: Do you have a long term strategy for Infrastructure and Operations?
Responses:
Yes: 42%
No: 37%
Unsure: 21%

HSBC Questioning $1 billion Niagra County Data Center

The Niagra Gazette reports that global banking giant HSBC is reconsidering the $1 billion data center it had planned for Cambria, NY. The data center would add 56 jobs, averaging $76k and would add $14.5 million in property tax collections.

HSBC is not terminating the project, but just looking at alternate sites in the county (otherwise they will give up the $89.5 million in tax breaks. The bank indicated that current business climate was the reason for them to step back and stay in planning phase for a while.

In January of this year Data Center Knowledge reported the plans for the 275,000 sq. ft. facility.

Check out the Niagra Gazette article here

BroadGroup - 1mil sq ft of Fresh Capacity

BroadGroup Consultancy (London) announced build plans that include more than 1 million square feet of data center capacity. Most of the planned capacity, it was stated, will serve one or more large companies. Other projects for the space included managed services by ISP's, colocation and disaster recovery planning.

A little over a month ago BroadGroup predicted the constant demand for European data centers.

BroadGroup is an independent consultancy based in London and focuses on analyzing and interpreting business strategy. BroadGroup also runs the data centre portal datacentres.com

Check out the WHIR article here

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!

Just wanted to wish everyone well this Thanksgiving. I'm heading to the Gartner Data Center Conference on Monday and will of course report all that I can in what time allows

Also--check out Network World's Top IT Turkeys of 2007. :)

Parallel Computing and Cognitive Fitness

I just finished reading the article "Cognitive Fitness" in the November 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review. The article covers new research in neuroscience about staying sharp and exercising your brain. One of the items you often find in these articles and research is to learn something completely new and/or something you don't normally deal with.

After reading this article I went back to surfing the web.....and came across some information on parallel computing. Perfect! This is something that I've always considered out of my realm of comprehension, yet I have always been very interested in it. As an added bonus there are some insights to draw in the data center industry and links to information about Google!

First -- Microsoft. Microsoft has made a couple of moves this year to indicate a trend in parallel computing and perhaps a tie-in to container-style data centers....stay with me, I'll get to that. In July of this year EETimes.com interviewed Burton Smith about programming languages and parallel computing. Smith oversees research in programming languages for parallel hardware architectures.

Multicore processors are driving a historic shift to a new parallel architecture for mainstream computers. But a parallel programming model to serve those machines will not emerge for five to 10 years, according to experts from Microsoft Corp.

Then, last Friday, Microsoft Research hired veteran supercomputer researcher Dan Reed. Reed's mission is to take a "green field approach" to the spiraling power and reliability requirements of large data centers.

"There is a sea change in computing coming at the intersection of multicore and large data centers, and working on this is one of the most exciting things I can imagine doing," said Reed. There's no single path to the parallel programming models needed to support tomorrow's multi core processors, said Reed. "It will take a variety of efforts in areas such as functional languages, transactional memory, extensions of existing languages and new higher level tool kits," he said.

And as we all know now, Microsoft is building 'mega data centers' to support the massive computing infrastructure required for internet-scale initiatives and Microsoft Research.

EETimes.com also had an interesting article about a month ago on the Cloud Computing initiative for Google and IBM. Google's Christophe Bisciglia explained:

"It's no longer enough to program one machine well; to tackle tomorrow's challenges, students need to be able to program thousands of machines to manage massive amounts of data in the blink of an eye."

The Google/IBM initiative is to advance large-scale distributed computing by providing hardware, software and services to Universities. Google is providing several hundred of their custom-built computers, while IBM will provide its BladeCenter and Sytem X Servers. The initiative (and article) are pretty interesting; check it out here

The other Google link I found returned me to the 'brain workout' I was receiving by reading about parallel computing. Check out the slides and presentations on Distributed Systems and Cluster Computing at Google -- here

Ok, so now the container angle. Caveat---remember I'm a newbie for the parallel computing topic, so tell me if I'm way off here. Google's infrastructure is more or less, clusters of networked CPU's orchestrated for various tasks and applications. Microsoft hints at similar items when talking about writing programming languages for parallel computing. Why not call a fully-loaded container of computers a cluster, write 'internet-scale' applications that will be able to reference multiple clusters (i.e.: thousands of CPUs across different containers) and still utilize the multi-core processors within each computer. Ok -- I know, this is essentially what Google does now across their data centers -- but why not change up the data center model. Place compute units (in this case, a full container) at geographically disperse locations and then reference them with an parallel-optimized OS or language. The benefit to shipping containers in this case is not having the high up-front costs involved with building the mega data centers that they are today, and they can move the containers to where the cheap power and land are without too much trouble. With such dense computing and more raw power than form factor, the container is a good fit, and the portability and quick build time are added benefits. I still advocate that security is an absolute must add-on for shipping container parks, but retro-fit a warehouse and BYOUG (bring your own UPS and Generator).

Ok -- that's enough brain exercising for one night (maybe a couple).

Intel IT (and shipping containers, Part III)

About a year ago I listened to HP discuss their consolidation plans of reducing their data centers to a few key hubs. Recently, Intel has published some of the details surrounding their consolidation plans. Brently Davis has a nice YouTube video explaining the details.

Intel also launched their new power-efficient Penryn processors today.

A little while back I received my Winter 2008 issue of Premier IT -- Intel's magazine for sharing best practices. It is a pretty nice magazine -- usually vendor magazines are 80%+ a pure marketing vehicle, but Intel's is actually quite infomative. The "Transforming Intel IT" article in this issue was particularly interesting. I continue to be hung up on the exact use of the shipping container model for data centers. I still picture trailer parks full of black boxes and fiber hooked up as if they are getting HBO. :)

I have a number of items (and links) queued up for a longer post on shipping containers, the Google patent of the modular data center, and potential (practical) uses of the container model, but for now, I wanted to point out the interesting quotes from this Intel magazine article.

The article explains that Intel is evaluating all types of innovation......

We’ve determined that our compute servers operate quite well at a higher ambient temperature than do other systems such as storage; by comparison, the storage environment requires much cooler temperatures (10 percent to 20 percent lower) and more floor space per unit. By segmenting storage systems into smaller rooms that are tuned to the specific needs of storage,
we could run the compute servers at higher temperatures, around 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

The second item is about containers:

The cost of building a new data center is extremely high—between USD 40 million and USD 60 million. As an alternative, we are considering placing high-density servers on racks in a container similar to those you see on container ships and trucks. We estimate that the same server capacity in this container solution will reduce facility costs by 30 percent to 50 percent versus a brick-and-mortar installation. Because it’s a small, contained environment, cooling costs are far less than for traditional data centers. Even if we build a warehouse-like structure to house the containers (thus addressing security and environmental concerns), the cost is dramatically less per square foot. In fact, the difference is so great that with this solution, brick-and-mortar data centers may become a thing of the past.

The site requires (free) registration, but once logged in, the article can be found here

Finally -- a presentation on their site for the energy efficiency opportunity had a cool slide on delivering data center optimization:

2002
3.7 TFlops
25 racks
512 servers
1000 sq. ft
128 kW

2007
3.7 TFlops
1 rack
53 blades
40 sq.ft
21 kW