New blog Address

I have moved this blog to a different location.  Please use the following to reach this blog from now on:

http://itconsultant.boblandstrom.com

 

Thanks.

 

Bob

Internet Capacity- Circa 2010

By Carrisa Baptiste- Mobile Devices Consultant, Advocate Networks, LLC

It has been years since I’ve used a paper telephone book, I use yellowpages.com. Several of my friends have received their diplomas from online educational institutions. Let’s not forget my eleven year old nephew who has a cellular phone and uses the internet to connect with other players using his Sony Play station.

Wow, how amazing the internet is and the fascinating opportunities it provides to our world!

Over the next few years, blackberries and other personal data devices will be the primary source for wireless connectivity verses the traditional cellular devices. In doing so, the demand for instant and constant connectivity to the internet will increase. It is essential that we start enlarging our infrastructure to allow for additional usage on the network.

My teenage cousin is a freshman in college and utilizes the social web sites such as myspace.com and facebook.com to stay in touch with her friends around the world. These sites allow us to put information about ourselves on there, which often times include videos, songs and pictures.

So what’s the point of all this? As most of us know, all this new business activity and Gen-Y social dependency on the web places increasingly arduous demands on our network. As this trend continues, the demands on the internet increases and we need to ensure that it is scaleable.

In a recent Web 2.0 forum, Jim Cicconi, VP of Legislative Affairs for AT&T predicted that the Internet could reach its physical capacity to carry all this traffic by as early as 2010. Furthermore, he predicts a 50-fold increase in broadband traffic by 2015.

In my work with our Customers, it’s clear that the trend in enterprise wireless devices is toward more and more bandwidth consumption. This is driven not only by proliferation of affordable wireless broadband services, but also by the increasingly common web-accessibility of enterprise applications. Let’s also not forget the 500 pound gorilla in this mix- video (and her 1,000 pound daddy- HD video).

I wasn’t one of the first to engage in on-line banking, on-line shopping, surfing and online-communicating. However, I cannot imagine life without them. Organizations invest large sums of money in order to provide products and services to their customers in a timely and efficient manner. The internet is a key piece of this element, not only allowing ease of use but often times a competitive advantage. Internet delivery of services to Customers is the great enabler of B2C sales in this decade.

All this is perhaps a long-winded way of agreeing with Mr. Cicconi that the risk of Internet capacity is a problem that is critical from a variety of perspectives. Mitigation of that risk largely comes from investment by the carriers profiting from the use of the web. While there’s a demonstrated temptation to legislate the path to this risk mitigation, let’s hope that this takes a course that enables unrestricted and open use by businesses and consumers while pragmatically profitable to the service providers.

Thanks go to Carrisa Baptiste of Advocate Networks, LLC for contributing this post.

Year of the Container Data Center: Spring has sprung for the new limb on the Data Center family tree

Momentum is a powerful force, and momentum coupled with synergies cannot be denied.

Today IBM is announcing their entry into the Container Data Center space. Starting with their newly released iDataPlex high density server product, and riding the wake of Microsoft’s widely publicized embracing of Data Center Containers, the recipe was there for a product combining the two concepts.

iDataPlex is a water cooled system of very high density computing which is said to squeeze twice as many servers as conventional systems into the same amount of floor space while reducing power demand by as much as 40 percent. This is a solution in demand by a wide range of business applications, and tracks the trend of massive utility computing platforms in the implementation phases across the globe.

Now we also have the decision by IBM to configure 40 foot containers with iDataPlex infrastructure. The trend is now undeniable, with product releases over the past months

from Verari, Rackable, Sun, et. al.,… and the high profile deployments using these solutions.

I think that the Container Data Center concept holds a lot of potential for a number of reasons. This potential is reflected in the needs I’ve seen in the Clients we serve in our consulting firm.

Modularity is one dimension of this potential. Our Clients are often planning the construction of a data center facility to accommodate long term business growth. Data centers are expensive enough, let alone building excess capacity that is not participating in revenue generation. The application of Containers facilitates an option to grow incrementally, and could reduce a large amount of planning risk.

Real Estate is another dimension. The concept of Containers gives an out-of-the-box option to plan for land without the traditional data center building. This could have a significant favorable impact on the construction budget in some cases.

Another dimension is Disaster Recovery. The Container option may be an attractive fit for many enterprise DR scenarios. For many enterprises, DR is not an inherent service that exists from the moment the Business application lights up for users. Sadly, it is often a separately funded risk mitigation project well after the fact. A Container based solution may offer options that are favorable in terms of implementation time as well as for operational costs.

A few years ago, I was tasked with addressing Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery options for Home Depot stores that were at risk for weather-related outages (ie, hurricanes in Florida and the US Gulf Coast). At that time, I collaborated with Intel, HP, Wolf Coach, and Cisco to create a straw-man design for a relocatable data center. That data center was, for that application, quite small in terms of quantity of equipment and compute capacity. I’m certainly not claiming to have birthed the Container Data Center concept, mind you, but rather adding the perspective of mobility and temporal deployments of “contained” data processing footprints.

The Container implementations in the news are largely for high profile data center projects, that would get press coverage whether using Containers or not. If you have an experience with Container Data Centers I’d greatly welcome the feedback.

New Data Center Cost Estimate Updates from the Uptime Institute

You may be familiar with the “Dollars per KW plus Dollars per Square Foot of Computer Floor” white paper from the Uptime Institute for data center construction cost estimation. Following the update to their widely referenced Tier classifications paper, this benchmark for thumbnail cost estimation has been updated as well. If you’d like to look at it directly, it can be found here.

Beginning several years ago, the Institute put together some very good work to give us guidance on the cost of data centers according to Tier classification. The cost model is based upon the premise (quite accurately so) that the cost of the MEP infrastructure is far and away the dominant driver in the cost of erecting an IT facility. The model simply separates the cost of the building and support space from the cost of the MEP infrastructure.

The benefit offered by the Institute’s work in this regard is the benchmark cost data for applying this model to your own project. The reference benchmarks are based upon a set of real-world contemporary data center construction projects, where the relevant component data is extracted, averaged, and provided for our use.

It’s the term, contemporary, in the earlier statement that makes this update of the white paper important. First, the data is updated using four additional new data center projects,… so the sample set is that much larger. This might seem insignificant, but besides having four more data points we also have four new recent data points.

Over the course of the past 12-18 months, there has been a sharp escalation in the cost of materials and components critical to the construction of data centers. The cost of steel and copper has increased world-wide, by over 50% during this time. There has also been a boom in construction of very large data centers globally, which is driving the cost of critical components like generators and chillers. Recent developments such as these are folded into the guidance given by the Institute’s model.

Not stopping with the data updates, the Institute has taken the opportunity to also include cost estimation data for “empty space” in their model. This is a pragmatic addition, given that a facility owner will want to include space in the new building that might not be specifically programmed, but is likely to be used for growth or operation of the raised floor.

Finally, the Institute offers another piece of pragmatic guidance, suggesting the level of “seed funding” necessary to accomplish the planning needed to arrive at an accurate budget estimate. This seed money is used for project planning, design/build contractors, and consulting necessary to bring the definition of the project into focus sufficient to confidently go to the Board for approval.