APC a good start, others adding geeky "solutions"

Ok, sorry for the delay in posting, but things been kinda hectic around these parts...

Following the "bouncing Dave":

First, I had a great visit to Interop in NYC w/o September 18th, where I co-presented on a Panel with the VP of Marketing from Opsware, Erik Vishria. We talked about Managing the Virtualized Data Center: Monitoring and Managing for Performance and Availability.  In the Q&A that followed, we had several attendees come up and talk further about the challenges of the "we've got too much capacity, and its heat is killing us" vein... Yet another set of validation datapoints.

On a whim, I decided to swing by the floor, where I immediately gravitated to the APC exhibit. After some probing questions, I was steered to a helpful Sales Manager, Keith Markowitz, who worked with me to demo some of their latest approaches in this space.

They showed me a demonstration of their NetBotz solution/console (at least that is what they said it was!), which basically can give you access (via SNMP queries) to the voltage and current draws at an "outlet by outlet" level. Envision the inside of their rack technology having a bunch of fancy (basically!) power strips. You know, the kind you have when you need to plug 6 things into one outlet?  Anyway, they can query (and graph!) power consumption at the outlet level... the blades, or rack-mount servers, or whatever, are then plugged, on a one to one basis, into those outlets...

So, you can measure power fairly close to the physical server/cpu level over time... Problem is you don't know its a server, unless you have an up to date CMDB which maps things like: "Rack 12, Strip 17, Outlet 2 == ExchangeServer01@Bldg3@USA" or the equivalent... This is a technological start/pre-requisite, but its basically extremely hardware centric! 

(Naturally I just now went back to their website and tried to find more information on NetBotz, and all I can find on the web is how it offers video surveillance of your racks! Kinda what you would expect from a hardware vendor actually... just try and find a software solution on their website!)

Earlier that day in NYC, I had met with the new VP of Capacity Management for a very large worldwide Financial institution. They have 18,000 physical servers (Intel/AMD-based) and they have not yet begun any virtualization projects because they don't have a good handle on Capacity or where to start!  So now I am just envisioning the sheer management hassles of associating 18,000 servers with the specific electrical outlets they are plugged into! Someone is going to do that manuall? And then type it in? Yeah, that will happen in our lifetimes! NOT!

New favorite Rant #1: Why is it that everyone in IT technology has to make everything so darn geeky and technically detailed? We don't want to identify the specific fungus spot on *that* leaft on *that* tree; we just want to know - is the forest healthy? Or Not? And Why? Argh - the approach is always: lets build yet another widget!

On the other hand, check out this Information Week article on our Heat/Power topic. There is actually a company called SprayCool, with a solution to heat they call "SprayCool M-Series direct chip-cooling technology". It's water injection cooling to spray a cooling mist directly onto the chips! Check out that gnarly rats nest of water tubes! Looks almost like the inside of my water cooled PC! I can only imagine how cheap/easy a solution that is going to be for customers with 1000's of servers! Sigh.

See Rant #1! (Disclaimer: yes they do make a rack solution, but now you have a proprietary rack that is HW vendor specific, and you still gotta move that heat somewhere - they conveniently say to "connect it to your buildings cold water loop! Wonder how long it will remain "cold water"?)...

Now, HP are further getting into the fray, naturally, as a HW vendor with yet another clever HW solution. Techno-geeks rejoice! They are introducing Thermal Logic Technology, a new type of rack with special, intelligent, patented fan technology! Apparently they spin faster, have better blades for lower cavitation and less noise, and some intelligent controllers! Way cool!

Think about this folks... It may be a cheaper/better way of cooling your blades, but how do you spell "Vendor lock-in"? See Rant #1!

Why, oh why can't people understand that most of all of these servers are quite simply being wasted? Its not about cooling them better, its about having only as many as you really need!

Then last week, it was off to that HOT vacation destination, Acapulco, Mexico for our annual BMC analyst event. I now understand why it is actually the off-season there right now... it was really HOT!  Even my compadres from Houston were really hurting... something about 16 North lattitude, coupled with temps in the 90s and humidity in the 90s really gets to you! I guess we all needed the Human version of the "SprayCool" (is that the H-series?).

Speaking of things "capacity related", any of you ever have the pleasure of trying to change airlines in Mexico City using an e-Ticket? Lets just say this: the only people that can help you are two incredibly friendly (and massively overworked) ladies at a manual face-to-face help desk. They use walkie talkies to find out gate assignments. Because they don't have enough gates for "peak demand", Mexico City uses a system whereby gates are "dynamically assigned" at the "very last minute"... so you don't know where you have to run to, until it is literally almost too late... Any of you ever RUN at 7000' altitude in a city with the worst air pollution on earth and where they all smoke? Yeah, not fun...

I ended up with - no joke - a handwritten boarding pass created at the gate as they were boarding! Amazing! But, all was not awful - at least I got upgraded to First class!

Just yesterday, a quick "day trip" to NYC for some meetings with CTO and staff of a very large life insurance company, and separately with the Sr. Management in charge of capacity and data center consolidation and virtualization at a very large brokerage. Once again, wonderful, first hand validations of the drivers behind virtualization: complexities and costs associated with too many physical servers!  At the brokerage, they admitted that across their thousands of servers, their average utilization was 7%... which means that they are using 14x the power they actually need! And, btw, they are OUT of data center space, so they have a "one server in must be preceeded by one server out" policy.

Folks: if you get one thing outta this blog, make it: ignoring the discipline and process of capacity management is gonna cost you. May not be today, but it will happen! It may cost you in service outages. It may cost you in running out of floorspace. Or Heat. Or Electrical bills. Or in loss of agility by having to purchase expensive, highly proprietary hardware "solutions" to a problem you wouldn't have if you could plan more accurately...

The merging of the knowledge discipline of capacity management, with dynamic provisioning of virtualized and shared technology is going to happen folks... It quite simply has to... the alternative is ever more bizarre hardware-oriented band-aids to the problem, with all the vendor lock in associated with those approaches.

In the meantime, let the heat build (at your peril!)

regards

Dave