From hardware to human factors, from operating systems to carp (no, really) the FST Roundtable discussed the current needs of data centre management. Assembled were attendees from financial institutions, legal firms, suppliers and associations, and whilst it is fair to say there were some differences of opinion, the debate was stimulating and wide ranging…….

PA

GE

22

F

ST J

ULY

/A

UG

US

T 2

00

8R O U N D T A B L E : D A T A C E N T R E S

Once settled and introduced, ourattendees sipped their coffeesand were called to order by the

chair. The first point on the agenda wasecological – a topical area for discussionto start with, but the conversation soonexpanded away from just the data centreinto legislation, lifecycle costs and justwhat 'green' really means:

Can We Build in a 'Green Way'?

DC: I'm not sure how many of you areaware, but at the moment, there's a code

of conduct being put before the EU for the management of data centres froma green and efficiency perspective which may actually be interpreted asbeing law. Can we build the data centrein a green way?

GD: You know, we try our very best to beas energy efficient as possible, and that'sthe most effective way data centreoperators can manage the environmentalimpact of their businesses. Our new datacentres in London and Amsterdam usesome of the most sophisticated tech-

nologies available in the market to helpus achieve this, and we are working toconstantly maximise the energyefficiency of our existing data centresacross Europe.

CH: I think it's at least possible to be a lotgreener. We have similar legislation in theUS, and that legislation is drivingmanufacturers to build greener productsfor government data centers.

MT: Definitely you can, but I do have aproblem with the word 'green'. I don't

Data Centres Discussed

Malcolm Herbert, servicesmanager architect, Redhat

Dia Davis, partner, BrookeNorth LLP

Mark Hawkins, globalfinance marketmanager, Siemon

Jonathan Pontin,portfolio architect,American Express

Mori Tehrani, Europeandata centre servicesmanager, Morgan Stanley

Carrie Higbie, globaldirector of data centresolutions, Siemon

David Cuthbertson, BCS, chairman

Scott Harrison, globalaccount manager, Redhat

Geoff Donson, groupsecurity manager, Telecity

FS

T J

ULY

/A

UG

US

T 2

00

8 P

AG

E2

3R O U N D T A B L E : D A T A C E N T R E S

know if its really 'efficient', rather thangreen. Really it's about design andstrategy. Whether you have a modulardata centre strategy or you have one bigdata centre strategy.

MHaw: At the end of the day it’s in thebusiness's interests and its in the client'sinterests to make the data centreeffectively cheaper to run and, so, allthose elements of 'green' as we call it willbe more efficient as you rightly say.

DD: But that's only part of the answer.The question asked was "can you makethe data centre green?" and I say "no".The comments that you're making I don'tdisagree with, but all you're saying is, if you play around with the edges, thenwe can make data centres greener. All theideas raised wouldn't actually make a data centre green when looked at objectively.

CH: Well, to me 'green' is reducing your carbon footprint so technically,whether you offset that carbon footprintwith other things or you come along with something to lower yourcarbon footprint, to me that's what 'green' means.

JP: What interests me really, I suppose, isthe possibility of reusing some of thewasted energy.

MHe: But the key thing is the side effects. From a services-based businessthe ecological impact is of travelling to and from data centres. For exampleRedhat consultants get a phone call. Thecustomer wants you to go to their datacentre now, fix a problem and go livenext week. The data centre just happensto be in Turkey. So there is an impact ofjust getting people around the world.

DD: It's the supermarket problem – mostof the inefficiency is when you get inyour car and you go shopping, not theshop itself.

SH: Companies aren't in business to beenvironmental and be green, they're

actually in business to make money fortheir shareholders. That's perhaps wherethe legislative approach comes in –threatening some pain if you do notcomply to some set standard.

GD: Our customers come to us first andforemost for the data centre environmentsthat we offer. That is always their priority.The 'green' discussion is one that takesplace further down the track. It'simportant, but something that ourcustomers expect us to consider.

DC: They've outsourced the problem.

GD: I think that's very much the case, but we recognise our obligation and we're happy to support the process and we are working on a programme of initiatives at the moment. As anindustry we need to be aware of ourresponsibilities and ensure efficiencies are applied at every level of the business, while also being careful aboutclaiming that we can build perfectly greendata centres.

JP: But there must be the possibility of reusing wasted energy - there is boundto be wasted energy coming out.

CH: There is - it's called heat!

JP: But if we can do something with it. It's all coming through as heat at the moment. Seriously, in the AmericanExpress building in Brighton themainframes were water cooled – andthey were used as part of the centralheating in the building.

GD: That is a good point. I was speakingto someone at one of our data centresearlier in the week, and it was fascinatingto hear about the cooling and heating andthe trade-off between the two. We areactively investigating the use of thistechnology in our new data centres.

JP: There's a chip on market now which has a Stirling engine [heat engine]which reuses the heat from the chip torun the fan to cool air which recycles backa little bit of the wasted energy, which isquite nice.

MHaw: We’ve got a customer who has a very good heated carp pond, not verybig carp being grown, but carp.

Hardware and Software Issues

DC: If you look at Intel and others theyare saying their processors are goingfaster and consume less power, butwhat's actually happening is people arestarting to morph them in the same box.Data is shared by many applications andsystems. A good example is a bladeserver. How many virtual servers run onit? A data centre guy doesn't have accessto that. But what do virtual servers do?He doesn't know that either. So if hewants to move it from one place toanother, it's very painful in terms ofunderstanding who and what is affected.The easiest thing is not to do it. So, itbecomes more difficult to manage.

MT: That’s one of the challenges ofvirtualisation. When you talk tobusinesses about virtualisation they ask"how much is a server? Perhaps $3,000"because they're looking at the physicalcost of the server, but it's not really thecost, its going cost you $15,000 to run it.

DD: These days hardware is almostirrelevant, it's a commodity. If you startbringing in the total ownership costs then it begins to get somewhere closer tobeing realistic.

SH: Virtualisation is favourable to certainworkloads and not other workloads, sothose that can be virtualised are beingvirtualised. If you've got a trading systemthat's got massive peaks at market open

There's a chip on market now which has a Stirlingengine [heat engine] which reuses the heat from the chip to run the fan

PA

GE

24

F

ST J

ULY

/A

UG

US

T 2

00

8R O U N D T A B L E : D A T A C E N T R E S

and market close then that system isgoing to be 5-10 per cent utilised for mostof the day, but then it's going to hit –maybe spike – at 60/70 per cent andthere's got to be some head room forlarger days, and then that's not a greatcandidate for virtualising.

DD: In fact on the contrary, you'dprobably have a hot box somewhere elseand actually end up using double thepower because it's just not worth the riskof losing everything by having all yourdata on one box.

CH: Not just there. At a lot of data centresthe servers automatically come with twonet cards. Now that doesn't mean thatapplications running on that server needthat redundancy, but it automaticallycomes with two cards and automaticallygets connected to two switch ports on two separate switches; there is a lot of waste.

MHe: And that's partly beingcontributed by the hardwaremanufacturers. Every time we come to astack that's maybe under-performing thefirst comment is always "the hardwareneeds beefing up".

MT: More memory!

MHe: More memory, more CPU. Funnilyenough that comes from the applicationvendors – not necessarily from thehardware vendors.

CH: That's because they don't want to admit their applications are slow. The biggest problem that we have in data centres today is that we've let ourapplication vendors determine what'sgoing to be in our data centre; that's the tail wagging the dog. You know, somebody says, "you can't put my storage in this cabinet because

it will void the warranty". We got awayfrom mainframes and then all of asudden virtualisation went away. Everysingle application developer out therewanted their application running on their own box – they didn't want to share it with any other box in the worldand, so, now all of a sudden your stuck with not only what your applicationvendor wants, but you're stuck with the preferences of the person that'sdoing the implementation.

MT: One of the issues for a lot ofcompanies, mainly investment banks, is that different business units havedifferent technologies and sometimes,they'd like to have their own section of the data centre. One group doesn'timpact on the other group, for instance.So there are some shared services like thenetwork, but everything else issegregated because of the business, andone of the issues here is that, again, thereis no standard.

Measurement and Total Cost ofOwnership

DC: What's started to happen in thefacilities world is that managers arehaving to have, by legislation, an energyplan for each building and it's probablygoing to be applied to the data centre.

MT: I still don't see how they are going to actually implement this because one of the big issues with any of this ismeasurement. How do you measure yourefficiency versus somebody else? It's justlike an old car – the government wants toput bigger tax on old cars, but peoplecan't afford to change their cars. So whatdo you do?

CH: Well one of the hard parts you havewhen you do measurement is a that lot ofdata centres are sitting right in the

middle of a corporate office building.They get one power bill, so how much ofthat is your data centre; how much of thatis the rest of your office building?

MT: The measurement technology isreally improving and maturing. There aretechnologies that allow you to make sureyou get at least 99 per cent utilisation ofthe cabinet. So we've started using thatensuring that we really use the cabinet toits full potential.

MHaw: What we've seen is that manymore clients are now more interested in having intelligent management of the cabling because you can actuallyget active equipment which is sittingthere doing nothing. It's not cost-effective and just not efficient. An example there would be a switchwhere it's got 48 ports but only five of them are plugged in to something.

DD: I would suggest that it must be easier to measure the total life cycle of hardware than software simply because you, or at leastsomebody, has the metrics. It's very rare to have the metrics in terms ofsoftware failure, even from the supplier.

MHe: We've seen hardwaremanufacturers, usually after year three,who have whacked up the maintenancecosts, which have just come completelyout of the blue.

JP: We don't know the true cost. We do try and charge out thedevelopment costs in the first place,CPU and disk space, but what seems to be lost is the ongoing costs of keepingthe system going, keeping expertisearound and consequently after, 20 or 30years, you do get this huge portfolio ofredundant systems and nearlyredundant systems that could go with aslight push, but I think that's just thehardware side – lot of peopleconcentrating on putting things inbecause it's a lot easier than takingthings out!

We've let our application vendors determine what'sgoing to be in our data centre; that's the tailwagging the dog

R O U N D T A B L E : D A T A C E N T R E SFS

T J

ULY

/A

UG

US

T 2

00

8 P

AG

E2

5

CH: There's a lot of companies thatdon't have a decommissioning plan,which has hurt them a lot. I did an auditnot too long ago and this companythought it had 600 servers in their datacentre, but they had 725 and the onlyway they could figure out who ownedthose servers was to unplug 'em and seewho screamed.

MT: What is easy to measure from myperspective is the data centre cost itselfand, again, there is no rule here – youcan see the cost yourself over a periodof 10, 15, 20 years. But, as I said, that'svery easy to say. But, when it comes tothe IT side it's always very difficultbecause you can't find the costs – thetransparency is not there to say, okay, isit three years or five years. Whathappened to licensing costs forexample? What happened to themigration costs and so on and so forth,and how many servers per unit? Howmany units per person? How do youcharge the purchasing people, forexample? So, that is where the challengelies. After that it becomes just a gamble.

JP: I mean, the technical costs we canwork out. What we don't always havefrom the applications is how many tradesor enquiries we have, and have had in thepast. We can get back the CPU costswhich is in the system automatically, butwe don't know exactly how much thebusiness is actually benefiting – so youneed to look at the total benefit and notjust the total cost.

MT: The challenge I think is what's in andwhat's out. Where do you stop? Whetherit's the rent, the operations, you know theheating and power and cooling; thehardware costs, the software costs, thepeople costs and insurance costs. What isincluded and what is excluded? There isa danger that it becomes just a numberthat you produce. You have to think whatvalue it has.

CH: Well sure, but a lot of the customersthat I work with are bringing all of thebudgets back together and it's now

straight into the CIO. There is not aseparate facilities budget; or separatenetworking; or separate security. Poweris directly under the CIO under hisbudget because that's really the only wayto bring all that stuff together to even geteven remotely close to an idea.

DC: And until you start doing it, thenyou can't set your targets or measures,and without the targets and measurespeople then can't follow through. What iseasy to measure so that the cost ofownership is understood, as opposed towhat's difficult?

SH: All the customers I look after areinvestment banks and there seems to beno end to the need for more and morecomputer power. Everything is movingaway from the trader and moving moreand more towards algorithmic tradingand computer grids are growing, oftenthere are many thousands of computernode servers at these data centres. Some of the American banks areanticipating more legislation coming outof the US which will force green issue tobe adopted.

CH: Yeah - we have a lot of senators thatlove to put their name on stuff.

SH: I've actually been called in to twomeetings now in the last couple ofmonths where they were talking withall the vendors. They were taking theview that they wanted to be able toanticipate and beat legislation and,essentially, avoid tax, and so they weredriving every vendor to look atpackaging; how they provide theircarbon footprint at every level.

Human Factors

DC: So we're trying to actually look atreducing the total cost of ownership

without forgetting the people factorswhich might sabotage it, and that maycost you more in the long run.

MHe: I think it’s easier to manage theupfront costs than the ongoing costs butyou don't necessarily get the moresubtle things in there. We've started to do some work with customers in Europe where we'd look at some of the hidden items. One of the thingswas staff morale, measuring theiraptitude and agility. Some of ourgreatest success is when the staff are upto the task because they've got thebackground – and people from a goodold school of UNIX or mainframebackground are far more agile in newtechnology than maybe the people from a Windows background are. While TCO is part of that in thetraditional, upfront procurement costs,we're trying to build in a number ofother factors to come up with a redlight/green light; go for/don't go for itoperation assessment.

CH: Well you can also be penny-wiseand dollar foolish. I would venture tosay nearly every single person in thisroom has seen some period of timewhen purchasing and procurement gothold of a bid and it turned in tosomething completely different by thetime the equipment was delivered.

MHe: Well its interesting that one of theearlier comments was to do with thebusiness units and the way thatbusiness units drive procurement,rather than the IT department. Theyhave a greater say in what the shape inwhat the final solution is, and we hearthis from the technology officer or thetechnology architects who we talk to.Sometimes they want Red Hat to helpthem push back against the businessunits. For example, a retail group that

The only way they could figure out who owned those servers was to unplug 'em and see who screamed

R O U N D T A B L E : D A T A C E N T R E SP

AG

E2

6

FS

T J

ULY

/A

UG

US

T 2

00

8

we dealt with last week are selling aJAVA-based point of sale system, butthe business unit now want a parallelsystem for a different part of thebusiness that is based on Windows. This now means that they now have two completely separate architectures.That's driven by the business unit – they made the decision and justpresented it as a fait accompli. So how will that affect the staff morale of the operations team, let alone their effectiveness?

MHaw: Absolutely! So, one of thethings we're being asked to do issupport some of the internal decisionmaking about the business units.

SH: I think it’s interesting to see howthings seem to be on a cycle: the lastthree or four years have been fantasticyears in the City and the people makingthe money have had flexibility aboutwhat they want, when a particulargroup comes in and says "we want tomake 'X' units per minute" it getsrailroaded and it gets put in. But whenthings start getting flatter and costs startgetting tighter, and those guys aren'tmaking much money any more, that'swhen they're left with that legacy.

The Future, Future-Proofing andOutsourcing

DC: That leads on to future-proofing.When we put our investment in, it willcontinue to meet business needs. In thecurrent climate of new hardware gettingsmaller and hotter and differentcontrols coming in, how easy is it tofuture-proof the data centre withoutover engineering?

MT: But there is another side of future-proofing. I've seen a lot of companiesthat don't want to do their own data

centres anymore because there's anotherway of you buying a service and nothaving a huge investment. It used to belike renting your TV or buying your TV.You know, to be honest, a lot of peopleare going back to that now.

DC: Telecity, I believe charges on thebasis of power to the cabinet.

GD: We do; we've moved to power-based pricing over the last couple ofyears as this is one of the driving factorsbehind our customer requirements. Wederive the rack space according to thepower requirements of the customerand the power spec of the facility. Forinstance, in our new Powergate datacentre we offer 4kW per rack, and wealso have areas in some of our datacentres which offer 20kW per rack.

CH: Some of the hosting companies thatI work with in the US have the sameissue. They charged for floor space andthey charged for the amount of powerdelivered to a cabinet, but then theystarted realising that people had wayovershot with the cabinet. They weredesigned to be 4kW cabinets, and theaverage cabinet in the UK now is 5 kW,in the US it's 6.7 kW on average.Without some type of meteringtechnology, that can really gut yourbusiness

SH: We recently did some work withAmazon on their EC2 plan, and that'ssomething we're starting to see quite a lotof customers getting interested in – forthe parts of their business where theyneed something just for a campaign for arelatively short period of time. They'vegot some pretty sophisticated processesso that essentially you just expand yourdata centre capacity for a short period.

MHaw: I had a conversation on a

delayed flight from Dublin with acolleague, and we decided if we everwanted to offer a financial servicesproduct we wouldn't even think abouthardware, cabling, computing or IT.We'd just get the CPU space by the hour,or by the month or by the week and negotiate it with a third partyprovider. There's enough in the market-place to do that – whether it be Amazon or whether it be Telecity orsome other providers who could giveme that sort of product. Why would Ibother? I would just remove lots ofheadaches and I could just concentrateon the business.

DC: But what they've done is transferredthe responsibility to the guys that aregoing to be working at the facilities.

MHaw: I've got my title for my newbook, it's How to Manage by NotHaving a Data Centre. I think this is theway forward on how not to have one.

Summary

DC: Any last points?

SH: Just one. You talk about thechallenges in the data centre, peoplewanting things to be incredibly efficientin the way that they delivered thatprocessing power and the businesseswouldn't need to worry about what wasgoing on underneath that abstractedlayer. It seems to me that would be oneway of having much more efficient datacentres because end users wouldn't bedemanding a piece of this and a piece ofthat which drives a lot of theinefficiencies.

DD: I don't agree. The only way you canpolice security is to lock down thehardware, which turns away fromvirtualisation; and I don't see how youovercome the ever-diminishing cost ofhardware and until you change thingsfairly radically, why would somebodywant to go down the virtual route?

DC: Shall we close now on that point.

The only way you can police security is to lock down the hardware, which turns away from virtualisation