What happens in Vegas does NOT stay in Vegas!

Gartner Data Center in Las Vegas was a really "validating" experience for me in terms of some of the topics for this blog...

Lets talk "Hot Vegas" first

First, I really have to offer some additional comments (apologies?) on SprayCool (whom I discussed before). I actually got to see them in action, live on the floor. It is quite cool (HA!) technology. It doesn't use water, but rather some kinda of special liquid chemical that has an evaporation point around the optimal temperature for chips. So, it sprays the liquid onto the hardware (they have heatsink sized versions, as well as variants for other chipsets such as RAM, and they can also encapsulate the entire board!), and then evaporation cools it off.  The condensate (having removed the heat), then is collected and routed to a plenum at the back of the rack... all then flows down to a heat exchanger (one per rack) at the bottom, where it can be pumped out of the rack an into the chilled water loop of the data center. Worries of toxicity (in case of leaks) were addressed by the bold claim by the marketing rep "I'd drink it if I had some here in a glass!" (shudder!)...

The good part is this in total takes only 130 watts (for an entire rack). So, its highly efficient at moving heat - a big challenge. The downside, as I discussed before is that there is simply no way a data center can do this for all their servers and racks. Not only would the capital costs be outrageous, but the sheer complexity would be immense.

All this being said, it looks to be an ideal solution for solving "spot" heat issues (localized hot racks, hot zones) to buy some time in the data center "fighting the heat" battle... But yhou are only moving the heat caused by server inefficiency, you aren't solving the root cause of the problem...

Matt Stansbury of SearchDataCenter. com has an interesting summary/take from the show which really ties the challenges back to the types of solutions we had in the days dominated by proprietary mainframes. His number one conclusion? "Everybody is looking for metrics" - imagine that!  Again, if you can't measure it, you simply cannot manage it.

But its really hard to get all the metrics needed, let alone into one solution!

Speaking of hard...

Had some interesting discussions with Aperture, whose Vista solution is a really nifty data center planning and optimization tool focused on the physical components of the data center.  In many ways it reminds me very much of the hardware/physical analog to our BMC Performance Assurance solutions (it has a hardware library, modeling capabilities, purpose-built graphics, etc.) all designed to allow data centers to understand their infrastructure capacity - not in terms of performance (response time, throughput, resource utilization of servers, etc. like our solution), but rather in terms of power, floorspace, rackspace, etc. type of capacity variables... Melding the knowledge provided by both types of solutions is clearly going to increasingly have to be recommended best practice, I think...

The elephant in the room...

That nobody is talking about is the reality that all this complexity, all this wasting of power, and all this service risk, is caused by having too many servers! If things were'nt so darned underutilized, everything gets orders of magnitude simpler. Why don't more folks realize this?

But, cooperation is sooooo difficult...

There was a great Gartner-hosted session (Ronnii Colville and Kris Brittain - "IT Operations - the Three Tenors: Change, Configuration and RElease Management") where they really drilled down on the unique challenges of managing Change, Confugration, and Release Management; especially on the issues/realities that these critical data center process disciplines typically span organizational silos, thus slowing their adoption! My informal survey of folks there (as well as some of Gartners famous "real time/spot surveys") seemed to indicate that many folks are embarking on consolidation and virtualization (to reduce physical server counts) prior to implementation of complete Change, Configuration and Release Management... This seems to be due to this "different buying centers" phenomena...

So, on the one hand, you can't get to Virtualization or a Real Time Infrastructure without Capacity Planning (presented and reinforced by both Tom Bittman in his keynote on Virtualization, as well as by Donna Scott in her keynote on the Real Time infrastructure), and on the other hand, the complexities of configuration and change in consolidated and virtualized environments calls out for implementing Change, Configuration and Release Management (CCRM) in order to meet compliance and reduce and manage risk of change...

Result? Most data centers seem to be implementing Conslidation and Virtualization projects before implementing CCRM, or perhaps in parallel in different silos... And most appear to be doing it with minimal to no performance oriented capacity planning.

Here's another prediction: over the next year, we are going to see lots of:

• Horror stories of service unavailiability due to poor/non-existent capacity planning, and/or
• Horror stories of continued energy wastage, expense, and even regulation, and/or
• A new buzz-phrase: Virtual Server Sprawl

You can at least start solving both of these problems without implementing complete CCRM by at least doing (even rudimentary) Capacity Management on a project by project basis before any/all migrations or configuration changes, and at least use whatever formal change process you currently have...  then try and break down those organizational silos, and implement a CCRM solution.

But certainly, by the time you are in production - on any scale - with virtualization - you had better have a good control of CCRM,,,

Or, maybe I'll be writing about YOUR data center, perhaps?

Stay Cool! Be Efficient!

Dave

PS: I just got an email from a co-worker about a shopping experience that occurred on Friday, November 24th (busiest shopping day here in the US)... from his attempt to shop at Macy's online store. Heres the text verbatim:

'We'll be right with you.

It's a little crowded in here right now, and to make sure everyone enjoys shopping with us, we're asking new visitors to wait here a few moments (less than a minute!) while other shoppers finish up. We'll refresh your browser and welcome you in momentarily. Thanks for your patience!'