THE DATA CENTER of the FUTURE How New Building Designs and Energy-Efficient Techniques Could Transform Tomorrow’S Computing Facilities
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
THE LEAN, MEAN IT OPS TEAM HURRY UP AND WAIT ON 40 GBE JONATHAN EUNICE: EMBRACING IN-HOUSE IT MMODERN INFRASTRUCTUREi MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE: CREATING TOMORROW’S DATA CENTERS DATA TOMORROW’S CREATING MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE: THE DATA CENTER OF THE FUTURE How new building designs and energy-efficient techniques could transform tomorrow’s computing facilities. PAGE 14 JAN. 2013 MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2013 1 Editor’s Letter Welcome to the Future Home Editor’s Letter By Alex Barrett environmental conditions and favorable Editor in Chief energy prices. Don’t count out the private Currents data center just yet! Speaking of the future, can you believe Bob Plankers: that 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and even In Hot Water IT’S OFFICIALLY 2013, which, forgive me, still 100 GbE networking gear is shipping and sounds so futuristic. Maybe I’m dating available, and deployments are well under Steve Gunderson: myself here, but I can’t help but think: way? But, unlike previous generations, Do Your Home- work on Your Shouldn’t we already be zipping around upgrading to the next version of Ethernet Cloud Provider with personal nuclear-powered jetpacks, won’t be so simple, writes contributor David Jetsons-like, flanked by robots and getting Strom. The shift away from Cat 6 cabling to Brian Madden: our sustenance from a pill? And shouldn’t a new high-density fibre connector called Windows 8? No Thanks! our data centers be floating around in space QSFP will force infrastructure architects to or implanted in our brains? really plan ahead and order properly sized The Data Center But when it comes to data centers, sci- cables in advance, rather than cut them of the Future ence fiction author William Gibson had it on-premises. But for shops running IP stor- right: “The future is already here—it’s just age or pushing the virtualization envelope, Hurry Up and not very evenly distributed.” Today, there those up-front time and capital investments Wait on 40 GbE are plenty of data centers out there that give should pay big dividends. us a glimpse of things to come. Then, in the back-to-the-future The Lean, Mean IT In this month’s cover story, TechTarget department, there’s a column on liquid Operations Team senior technical editor Steve Bigelow finds cooling. Introduced in the 1970s, the tech- Jonathan Eunice: that tomorrow’s data centers look a lot like nology is making a comeback, kind of like In Defense of today’s versions, only better. More efficient bell-bottoms and disco. Contributor Bob In-House IT servers, support for a greater range of am- Plankers thinks liquid cooling is an idea bient temperatures, increased use of free whose time has finally come, because, as cooling techniques, and a small degree of he puts it, “Air is a poor heat conductor.” local cogeneration to improve the facility’s Already, forward-looking data center op- ability to withstand short power outages will erators like eBay are using liquid cooling all converge to make data centers that won’t to achieve energy efficiency numbers that end up on the front page of the Sunday New others can only dream of, and the Leibniz York Times for their inefficiency—but that Supercomputing Centre in Germany is aren’t unrecognizable either. using an IBM System x iDataPlex cluster And unlike pundits who envision a world with direct water cooling to generate peak with only a handful of mega data centers, performance of three petaflops, while con- Bigelow predicts that going forward, we will suming 40% less energy than a comparable actually build more and smaller data cen- air-cooled system. ters in order to take advantage of positive Now that’s a future I can relate to. n MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2013 2 Home Currents{ all the news you can use about modern infrastructure } Editor’s Letter Currents Bob Plankers: In Hot Water ONE ON ONE Steve Gunderson: vendors like VMware with their Do Your Home- work on Your hardware? Cloud Provider VMware’s Stephen It actually is a bit of a nuanced message. Herrod Looks Out The software-defined data center is about Brian Madden: delivering all the services via software. The Windows 8? No Thanks! OVER THE PAST decade, server virtualization main goal for this whole thing is to automate made software a powerful force in the data those things that weren’t previously autom- The Data Center center, giving IT departments more flex- atable. of the Future ibility and bringing about more efficient A lot of our hardware partners are mak- operations. It turns out that virtualization ing their hardware offerings multi-tenant Hurry Up and was the easy part. Applying its principles to and more easily automatable so that we can Wait on 40 GbE other areas of the data center is still a work also plumb them into the system. It is not in progress. strictly that everything in the world runs in The Lean, Mean IT The natural extensions of the server software. Operations Team virtualization trend—cloud computing, As the line between software and Jonathan Eunice: software-defined networking, changes in In Defense of business models—have not had such a clear hardware blurs, how will this change In-House IT path to success. Cloud security concerns still the roles within an IT department? persist. Software-defined networking has We really see this notion of cloud operations. yet to realize its potential. And VMware’s We’ve been calling it CloudOps as sort of move to vRAM licensing and pricing, a more the corollary to DevOps. You need to under- cloudlike model, proved so unpopular that stand how the hardware is plumbed through. the company abandoned it after only a year. We’ve already seen this with virtualization Stephen Herrod, VMware’s chief technology in general: You can’t have an individual officer, discussed these changing data center storage silo and a network silo and a dynamics and more in this One on One server silo. interview. Who do you see handling end-user With all of the talk about software-defined computing initiatives? data centers, storage and networking, There used to be the Windows team or the why should IT professionals trust software desktop team, but it tends to be a different MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2013 3 Currents team that takes on mobile. The notion of enterprise side of things versus the new-age general IT services is also a different team. developer side of things. It tends to be pretty high in the organization, especially if you’re trying to show an overar- How many vCloud-branded Home ching suite. partners are there worldwide? I think there are roles that don’t yet exist There’s the vCloud data center service part- Editor’s Letter that will be in charge of all end-user access, ners, and that is the highest tier, that has a especially as more things are outside the lot of different commitments that they make Currents firewall and are not on inventory owned by when they join. That means they’re selling the company. the entire suite, and they go through some Bob Plankers: certifications of the facilities and how they In Hot Water Is the company satisfied with the train and teach. And I think we’re up to 10 on uptake of its vCloud-branded services? that front. Steve Gunderson: It’s growing at one of the fastest clips of any But then we go down to something we Do Your Home- work on Your part of our business. [VMware Service Pro- call vSphere- and vCloud-powered partners, Cloud Provider vider Partners] are a bit more focused on the which means they’re using it as a primary Brian Madden: Windows 8? No Thanks! The Data Center of the Future OVERHEARD | Gartner and AWS Conferences “ Eighty-five percent of CEOs Hurry Up and will be impacted Wait on 40 GbE “ Let’s be honest: Working in IT operations is the equivalent by the economic of working in the boiler room in certain organizations.” downturn this year, The Lean, Mean IT yet growth is the —CAMERON HAIGHT, Gartner research vice president, Operations Team at the Gartner Data Center Conference No. 1 priority.” —GENE HALL, CEO, Gartner, at the Gartner Jonathan Eunice: Symposium/ITxpo In Defense of In-House IT “ By 2015, big-data “ Ninety percent of enter- demand will reach prises will bypass broadscale 4.4 million jobs deployment of Windows 8.” “ I’ve hugged a lot of servers globally, but only —PETER SONDERGAARD, senior in my life, and believe me, one-third of those vice president of research, Gartner, they do not hug you back. jobs will be filled.” at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo They hate you.” —DARYL PLUMMER, —Amazon CTO WERNER VOGELS managing vice president, in his keynote speech chief of research and at AWS re: Invent chief Gartner fellow, at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo “ There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s a train coming at me.” —DAVID CAPPUCCIO, managing vice president of Gartner, in his keynote at the Gartner Data Center Conference MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2013 4 Currents component of their offering, and that gets amount of money that customers pay really well over 3,000 partners. At last check, we wasn’t different in either model. I think it were at 29 different countries as well. was just too complex for what people were I liken it to kind of a cloud franchise ready for. Home model, in the sense that there are going to be local tastes and local requirements on With all the tools out there for managing, Editor’s Letter data that we think a local partner can see monitoring and backing up virtual envi- better than if we were to try to have some ronments, what can IT departments do Currents global- scale cloud.