Not long ago the infrastructure pieces needed to construct a data center were pretty straightforward--Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) units, power conditioning equipment, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), and electrical and plumbing to tie it all together. It wasn't unimportant. But it was largely a well-understood extension to the HVAC infrastructure of a typical commercial building.
That's changing in a big way for two major reasons.
The first is that servers may have gotten smaller but IT shops are trying to cram ever more of them into a given space. The result is that more power has to be delivered to and more heat taken away from ever smaller volumes of space.
The second is that data center operators are starting to factor power efficiency into their buying decisions. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) has entered the lexicon as a metric for evaluating how much of the power delivered to a data center goes into running the computers themselves as opposed to the infrastructure needed to support them.
In short, figuring out innovative ways to build efficient data centers is suddenly sexy. I've been offered more tours of data centers in the past year by companies such as Intel intent on showing off newly developed approaches to cooling and modularity.
Thus, it's not especially surprising that IBM is now announcing that, together with Syracuse University and the state of New York, they "have entered into a multi-year agreement to build a new computer data center on the university's campus that will incorporate advanced construction and smarter computing technologies to make it one of the most energy efficient data centers in the world. The data center is expected to use 50 percent less energy than a typical data center today, making it one of the 'greenest' computer centers in operation."
The $12.4 million, 6,000-square-foot data center will have on-site electrical co-generation system that uses a natural gas-fueled microturbine engine to generate all the electricity for the center and provide cooling for the computer servers.
Syracuse will manage and analyze the performance of the data center, "as well as research and develop new data center energy efficiency analysis and modeling tools. IBM will provide more than $5 million in equipment, design services and support, which includes supplying the electrical co-generation equipment and servers such as IBM BladeCenter, IBM Power 575, and IBM z10 systems. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) is contributing $2 million to the project."
This will be an operational data center, albeit a relatively modest-sized one compared to mega-service provider facilities. (New Microsoft and Google data centers are reportedly in the 100,000- to 500,000-square-foot range.)
This may not be a particularly surprising announcement given the level of activity in this area. But it's nonetheless notable that an aspect of computing that was, in many respects, a sleepy backwater of incremental advance and its own impenetrable jargon is suddenly the subject of lots of new fundamental research.
About this time last year, I took a look back at some of the macro trends that hit their stride during 2007. I thought it would be interesting to see which of those trends are still noteworthy, which new ones are on the radar, and generally how the landscape has changed.
Server virtualization remains perhaps the hottest trend in IT. It may no longer be pegging the hype meter quite as hard, but that's only because server virtualization has moved into the mainstream. It's ever more clearly one of those fundamental developments that touches and transforms all manner of associated technologies, products, and processes.
To be sure, lots of virtualization customers are still using it for relatively straightforward server consolidation, but more and more are also implementing high availability and other services on top of a virtualization foundation. One notable event during the year was the ouster of Diane Greene from VMware's helm, but so far, neither this nor Microsoft's increasingly aggressive virtualization efforts have had a substantial impact on VMware's position as market leader.
Alternative clients are ways of provisioning applications and delivering software services that differ from the loading up of an operating system and clients on a traditional PC. This includes accessing applications through a browser interface. It also includes a variety of technologies that, collectively, keep desktop applications and/or operating systems in the data center, and push them out to user devices--including, but not limited to, thin clients--in a managed way.
This trend continues to gather pace, albeit in a relatively measured way, with security and compliance often the primary driving force. Most major virtualization players have steadily broadened their portfolios to encompass both client-side and server-side virtualization, taking advantage of one with the other.
Power and cooling, or more broadly, "green," remains at the same relatively nascent level as last year, when I wrote that "power and cooling is increasingly something that IT staffs think about--even if, in most cases, they're not the absolute top-of-mind worry that is sometimes suggested."
Running out of power or space in a facility remains the primary reason that companies take substantive action on major clean-technology projects. Because power bills are usually in someone else's budget, even operational cost savings--never mind generalized environmental concern--don't have a big impact on decisions absent high-level corporate mandates or governmental regulation.
Intel's resurgence continued in 2008, as it ramped its 45-nanometer processors. For its part, Advanced Micro Devices did take steps to repair the damage caused by its delayed "Barcelona" processors. Its 45nm "Shanghai" processor shipped ahead of schedule, lending credence to company claims that its development and manufacturing processes were back on track.
On the financial front, AMD put its Asset Smart plan in motion--essentially spinning off its fabrication plants and people as The Foundry Company, and taking a major investment from Abu Dhabi-based organizations. However, Intel retains a much stronger financial position during an economic period that is likely to be extremely challenging for the semiconductor business.
Open source and open-source licenses certainly didn't go away in 2008. But I don't really view them as a trend at this point any more than programming languages or databases. They're just part of the software landscape--a way to develop and market software.
Open source has, in a sense, won, and one of the consequences is that the license wars are largely over because of an implicit consensus that open source has proven to be a good development model that doesn't need a lot of protection through legalisms.
In particular, very few people are showing much enthusiasm for the Affero GPL, a license whose intent is to extend the GPL's restrictions (enhancements have to be contributed back to the community) to software delivered in the form of a service. Yet that's how an increasing amount of software will be used.
And that's really the trend that emerged in force this year: "cloud computing," a term that I use to refer broadly to using software services or infrastructure over the network.
To be sure, there's more vendor hype (and consumer use in the guise of Web 2.0) than there is enterprise adoption. And I strongly suspect that will remain the case for quite some time. Part of the reason is that deployments will tend to happen with new applications rather than legacy ones.
However, more broadly, enterprises will want to understand and have the tools to manage attributes such as security, compliance, and portability (including the ability to run applications on-premises, off-premises, or a combination of the two).
Is cloud computing a legitimate trend? Yes. And it will be a long-term trend, so just count this as a start.
I spent the past couple of days attending Technology Review's EmTech08 conference at MIT. Lots of interesting speakers and ideas, some in areas of tech that I follow day-to-day (such as cloud computing) and others that I follow more in the vein of an interested observer (alternative fuels, open voting systems). In many respects, it's a refreshing change of pace from the events I commonly attend that tend to be more focused on today's immediate IT concerns.
EmTech08 gave me lots to mull--and I'll roll that mulling into more in-depth pieces down the road. For today, though, I'm just going to expand a bit on a few statements and thoughts I ran across in the course of the two days that particularly caught my attention.
The state of the market for tools in parallel computing is abysmal. (Marc Snir, University of Illinois)
There seems to be a default assumption around the IT industry today that, as processors evolve to more cores and more heterogeneous processing (and as computing architectures get more distributed), the software will evolve apace. Changes will be required, of course, but nothing to really worry about. I'm not so sure. Even if one discounts the most dramatic doomsayers, lots of researchers and IT executives see serious gaps in both tools and training to deal with highly threaded processing. Consider that several of the panelists in the Parallel Programming session spoke warmly of the potential for functional languages. Yet it's very early days for the likes of Haskell and Fortress and, in general, language development and adoption is a very long process.
People choose killer apps. (Craig Mundie, Microsoft)
Craig Mundie spoke at length about many of the characteristics that he saw such an application as having. He used terms like context- and location-aware, immersive, and personal. The general theme was "client + cloud," the idea being that this level of realism and immersion requires huge processing power and function at the client even if the data and orchestration takes place in the network someplace. He didn't really specify a specific next-generation application though. I'm not sure killer "app" is really the right term though. The original PC had a true killer app--the spreadsheet. But subsequent generations have really had interaction models--first the GUI and then the browser. The next generation will probably be something similar, exposing an even more varied set of applications but in richer ways. (CNET News' Dan Farber has an in-depth post on Mundie's keynote.)
Ephemerality of the Web is something that needs to be addressed. (Web 2.0/3.0 panel)
One of the ironies of the digitized world is that it's a potential enabler for an unprecedented level of preservation but, in practice, it often ends up opening the door to huge amounts of content vanishing in an instant. At the consumer level, photos offer an illustrative example. The combination of external hard drives and online services can far better protect digital photos from mishaps than is possible with negatives, slides, and prints. But, in practice, most consumers don't have good backup systems and can easily lose everything with the crash of a hard disk. Long-term preservation is an even bigger problem, both online and off. What happens as companies are purchased or go out of business to the content that they create or host?
Web technologies are the best platform for mobile development. (Kevin Lynch, Adobe Systems)
The iPhone hype (or, indeed, the babel that surrounds Apple in general) can be wearing. However, one thing that the iPhone has really accomplished is to crystallize the notion that the browser is a viable interface for mobile phones--at least high-end mobile phones. Kevin's contention that Adobe's AIR runtime is also necessarily part of the mix is more debatable, but the general concept that mobile applications will tend to center around the same mobile technologies that are used on "PCs" seems sound. (I tend to think that the mobile device will be a smartphone rather than a separate "Mobile Internet Device" (MID) but that's a separate debate that centers more around form factors and networks than programming models.)
Many energy solutions are not relevant at the scale that matters. (Vinod Khosla)
Finally, a sizable chunk of the conference was devoted to "green" and energy. Unsurprising given how it's a hot (if also overhyped) topic in IT and elsewhere. It's also an area that lends itself to transformative innovation--which fits well with the general focus of EmTech. Which is what venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, is really talking to with that statement. It's not that incremental changes aren't desirable. They are. Indeed, a lot of power efficiency work in technologies such as microprocessors is a sort of whack-a-mole game of accumulating small wins. However, from a macro and policy perspective, big wins don't come from the niches. They come from making substantial impacts on substantial use cases.
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