{"id":6703,"date":"2013-03-28T15:01:38","date_gmt":"2013-03-28T15:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloudnewsdaily.com\/?p=14422"},"modified":"2013-03-28T15:01:38","modified_gmt":"2013-03-28T15:01:38","slug":"measurement-control-and-efficiency-in-the-data-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/measurement-control-and-efficiency-in-the-data-center\/","title":{"rendered":"Measurement, Control and Efficiency in the Data Center"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Guest Post by Roger Keenan, Managing Director of\u00a0City Lifeline<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>To control something, you must first be able to measure it.\u00a0 This is one of the most basic principles of engineering.\u00a0 Once there is measurement, there can be feedback.\u00a0 Feedback creates a virtuous loop in which the output changes to better track the changing input demand.\u00a0 Improving data centre efficiency is no different.\u00a0 If efficiency means better adherence to the demand from the organisation for lower energy consumption, better utilisation of assets, faster response to change requests, then the very first step is to measure those things, and use the measurements to provide feedback and thereby control.<\/p>\n

So what do we want to control?\u00a0 We can divide it into three: the data centre facility, the use of compute capacity and the communications between the data centre and the outside world.\u00a0 The balance of importance of those will differ between all organisations.<\/p>\n

There are all sorts of types of data centres, ranging from professional colocation data centres to the server-cupboard-under-the-stairs found in some smaller enterprises.\u00a0 Professional data centre operators focus hard on the energy efficiency of the total facility.\u00a0 The most common measure of energy efficiency is PUE, defined originally by the Green Grid organisation.\u00a0 This is simple:\u00a0\u00a0 the energy going into the facility divided by the energy used to power electronic equipment.\u00a0 Although it is often abused, a nice example is the data centre that powered its facility lighting over POE, (power over ethernet) thus making the lighting part of the \u2018electronic equipment, it is widely understood and used world-wide.\u00a0 It provides visibility and focus for the process of continuous improvement.\u00a0 It is easy to measure at facility level, as it only needs monitors on the mains feeds into the building and monitors on the UPS outputs.<\/wbr><\/p>\n

Power efficiency can be managed at multiple levels:\u00a0 at the facility level, at the cabinet level and at the level of \u2018useful work\u2019.\u00a0 This last is difficult to define, let alone measure and there are various working groups around the world trying to decide what \u2018useful work\u2019 means.\u00a0 It may be compute cycles per KW, revenue generated within the organisation per KW or application run time per KW and it may be different for different organisations.\u00a0 Whatever it is, it has to be properly defined and measured before it can be controlled.<\/p>\n

DCIM (data centre infrastructure management) systems provide a way to measure the population and activity of servers and particularly of virtualised machines.\u00a0 In large organisations, with potentially many thousands of servers, DCIM provides a means of physical inventory tracking and control.\u00a0 More important than the question \u201chow many servers do I have?\u201d is \u201chow much useful work do they do?\u201d\u00a0 Typically a large data centre will have around 10% ghost servers \u2013 servers which are powered and running but which do not do anything useful.\u00a0 DCIM can justify its costs and the effort needed to set it up on those alone.<\/p>\n

Virtualisation brings its own challenges.\u00a0 Virtualisation has taken us away from the days when a typical server operated at 10-15% efficiency, but we are still a long way from most data centres operating efficiently with virtualisation.\u00a0 Often users will over-specify server capacity for an application, using more CPU\u2019s, memory and storage than really needed, just to be on the safe side and because they can.\u00a0\u00a0 Users see the data centre as a sunk cost \u2013 it\u2019s already there and paid for, so we might as well use it.\u00a0 This creates \u2018VM Sprawl\u2019.\u00a0 The way out of this is to measure, quote and charge.\u00a0 If a user is charged for the machine time used, that user will think more carefully about wasting it and about piling contingency allowance upon contingency allowance \u2018just in case\u2019, leading to inefficient stranded capacity.\u00a0 And if the user is given a real-time quote for the costs before committing to them, they will think harder about how much capacity is really needed.<\/p>\n

Data centres do not exist in isolation.\u00a0 Every data centre is connected to other data centres and often to multiple external premises, such as retail shops or oil rigs.\u00a0 Often those have little redundancy and may well not operate efficiently.\u00a0 Again, to optimise efficiency and reliability of those networks, the first requirement is to be able to measure what they are doing.\u00a0 That means having a separate mechanism at each remote point, connected via a different communications network back to a central point.\u00a0 The mobile phone network often performs that role.<\/p>\n

Measurement is the core of all control and efficiency improvement in the modern data centre.\u00a0 If the organisation demands improved efficiency (and if it can define what that means) then the first step to achieving it is measurement of the present state of whatever it is we are trying to improve.\u00a0 From measurement comes feedback.\u00a0 From feedback comes improvement and from improvement comes control.\u00a0 From control comes efficiency, which is what we are all trying to achieve.<\/p>\n

\"Roger<\/a><\/p>\n

Roger Keenan joined City Lifeline, a leading carrier neutral colocation data centre in Central London, as managing director in 2005.\u00a0 His main responsibilities are to oversee the management of all business and marketing strategies and profitability. Prior to City Lifeline, Roger was general manager at Trafficmaster plc, where he fully established Trafficmaster\u2019s German operations and successfully managed the $30 million acquisition of Teletrac Inc in California, becoming its first post-acquisition Chief Executive.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by Roger Keenan, Managing Director of\u00a0City Lifeline To control something, you must first be able to measure it.\u00a0 This is one of the most basic principles of engineering.\u00a0 Once there is measurement, there can be feedback.\u00a0 Feedback creates a virtuous loop in which the output changes to better track the changing input demand.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[780,327,936,78,1297,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cloud-it-management","category-data-center","category-data-center-infrastructure-management","category-guest-post","category-opinion","category-virtualization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}