Coping with Data Centers in Crisis
Surging Internet traffic and rising energy costs are forcing companies to overhaul the way they design and run computer facilities
11/6/2006
Source: BusinessWeek.com
http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/nov2006...
By Peter Burrows
Dec. 18 will be a landmark day at FedEx (FDX). That's when yuletide business is expected to peak, reaching a record 9.8 million deliveries. Company computers not only have to process those transactions but they'll also need to handle an expected 1,000 online inquiries per second from gift buyers and recipients at certain periods during the day. That's on top of keeping up with the company's everyday operating needs. "We call it a dim-the-lights day," says FedEx Chief Information Officer Rob Carter, because the thousands of servers in FedEx.com's data centers need every bit of power just to keep up with the workload. Such is the massive increase in the amount of digital traffic now coursing over the Internet. Everyone from governments to major corporations to your Great Aunt Edna now relies on a vast, growing list of services—be it parents sharing pictures of their kids in Halloween garb or corporate salespeople recording deals on an online software tool operated by Salesforce.com (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/17/06, "The On-Demand Software Scrum"). Indeed, the world just got its 100 millionth Web site, according to NetCraft, and many of the existing ones are seeing traffic far beyond anyone's expectations just years ago. All this surging traffic is forcing many companies to rethink the way they manage Net offerings, and in some cases completely overhaul information technology strategies. The locus of much of the transformation: the data center, packed to the rafters with the servers that run Web sites and corporate networks. Goal: Utility Computing Most companies first created these facilities in decades past to run mainframes, the high-level multipurpose number-crunchers that remain the heart of information technology systems at many companies. But in the years since, companies have added armies of cheaper servers, storage banks, and other devices, creating computing environments that are mind-numbingly powerful, complex, and energy-sapping (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/12/06, "Servers as High as an Elephant's Eye"). That's largely because much of this hardware was purchased by one department, to do one particular job. As a result, much of it ends up operating at just 10% to 20% of its capability. But even while sitting idle, the hardware remains on and consuming electricity—one reason (along with spiking energy prices) that the power bill is now the largest operating expense for many CIOs. "We see a lot of creaking at the seams—companies that are having to kill future projects because they can't manage the ones they already have," says Cameron Purdy, CEO of TangoSol, a software startup that is trying to simplify elements of the mess. To cope, many companies are scrambling for ways to harmonize the cacophony of servers and storage and networking gear so that it works in concert to adapt quickly to whatever needs doing at a given moment—whether it's processing a surge in online orders or running a data-mining program to figure out how to get those customers to buy more tomorrow. This digital nirvana, dubbed utility computing, has been held out as a possibility for years and remains an elusive vision. But thanks to advances in key technologies and customers' increased need for new ways of operating, analysts say it's now within reach. Data Processing on Demand Indeed, radical new views of the future of computing are already coming into focus. Sun Microsystems (SUNW), for example, has lately been showing off prototypes of a Project Blackbox. It's a portable data center within a shipping container for companies that need massive amounts of computing power but don't want the massive headache of creating it from scratch. "This is going to reinvent the way people think about delivering capacity for Internet applications," promises Sun Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos. The idea is that, in the future, an e-tailer could rent such a center to get through the Christmas crush, or the military could helicopter one into some far-off war zone. Indeed, the U.S. Marine Corps has already created a smaller version of such a porta-center. In less than a year, contractor Smartronix pulled together servers from Dell (DELL) and software from VMWare, a unit of storage king EMC (EMC), to create a Tactical Collaboration Work Suite (TCWS)—a compressed data center that is small enough to fit on a dining-room table. Three of these units are being used by the First Expeditionary Force to meet daily computing needs, from basic e-mail to sophisticated mapping applications. Sun's Project Blackbox and the TCWS are emblematic of how IT shops are organizing themselves to get work done. For decades, servers and related gear were typically purchased by a particular unit to run a particular piece of software—say, when the Latin America division wanted to deploy new customer-tracking software. Virtual Power The new model for IT is less project-centric; instead, disparate pieces of hardware will be grouped together to create a more sophisticated computing backbone that is capable of running nearly all applications, and configured so it can be easily expanded or altered to meet future needs. "You can view a data center like your brain; we supposedly only use 5% of what it's capable of," says James Geis, who runs a consulting practice for services provider Forsythe Technology. "The technology has reached a maturity level that we can use more of that gray matter, so it no longer makes sense to just throw money at problems" by buying more and more hardware. Consider the impact of so-called virtualization software made by companies including VMWare and XenSource (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/20/06, "A Virtual Revolution"). This technology lets companies make thousands of individual servers behave more like one big pool of processing—available to be doled out as required at a moment's notice. A host of companies, particularly startups such as 3PAR and Isilon Systems, have come up with ways to do something similar for storage gear. 3PAR's "thin provisioning" software, for example, sets aside far less drive capacity to each application, but then quickly finds room in other drives when necessary. Virtualization is also transforming the connections used to zip data over networks, whether to PC users or servers in another data center. The method enables a YouTube clip or Internet-based phone call to be routed over the most cost-effective, fastest journey to a PC or cell phone. And networking giant Cisco Systems (CSCO) is developing so-called application-oriented networking technologies that make corporate networks smart enough to spot problems before they hit the data center—say, to identify spikes in traffic that will swamp a given server or to quarantine a virus before it can infect a particular application. Next: The Super Center Now the holy grail is to find a way to pool the efforts not just of storage, bandwidth, or servers separately—but the whole kit and caboodle. While that's still a pipe dream, analysts say some of the necessary building blocks are coming into existence. For example, many companies are implementing new so-called interconnect technologies that speed the links between the various types of gear. Mellanox Technologies sells chips for a standard called Infiniband that ties servers with storage banks at far faster rates than current standards. The company recently filed to sell shares to the public. Cisco recently forked over $50 million to buy 80% of Nuova Systems, which, sources say, plans to come up with a simpler, one-size-fits-all way to connect diverse kinds of hardware, rather than force data-center operators to deal with a half-dozen different ways to connect devices. Basic computer architecture is evolving too. Besides just making chips that are faster and more power-efficient, Intel (INTC) and AMD (AMD) are designing chips tuned to run virtualized software, rather than just programs built for a specific operating system such as Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows or Sun's Solaris, says VMWare President Diane Greene. This fast-growing unit of EMC, along with a host of giants including IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and Cisco, are working on software that will orchestrate the efforts of all these technologies from one console. "We don't expect to be the only player in the data center," says Jayshree Ullal, a Cisco senior vice-president. "But we hope to be the anchor in the data center." Lifeline may be more like it. While companies used to struggle to handle the processing load, they can now pack a few dozen "blade" servers featuring powerful multicore chips from Intel and AMD into a rack that might have held a single server of similar strength in the past. The trouble is, line up too many of these racks and it becomes cost-prohibitive, if not impossible, to crank up the air-conditioning high enough to keep them from overheating. Indeed, market researchers at IDC expect companies to spend more money to power and cool servers by 2009 than they will spend on the servers in the first place. "The cost of technology is going down, but the cost of power is going up—so the cost structure of data centers is changing," says Steven Sams, vice-president of IBM's Site & Facilities Services unit. Housing the Hot Gear This shifting cost structure is causing major changes in the way data centers look. While most companies have been trying to get by with the same facilities used to house their old mainframe, they're now having to install expensive new air-conditioning gear and generators. For example, rather than cool the entire facility, some data centers have "hot rows" and "cool rows." Since so much heat is generated in such small places because of those densely packed blade servers, a new trend is to enclose just those racks in their own air-conditioned housings. "Research shows that more than 70% of customers are in crisis mode," unable to properly cool the gear they need to meet their business goals, says IBM's Sams, who says his unit plans to increase its staff by 25% this year to meet demand for a range of new services announced on Oct. 10. Indeed, data-center construction is no longer an IT backwater left to facilities managers—the folks whose job has long included tasks such as making sure there's enough soap in the bathrooms. CIOs are taking over and thinking harder about what their computing systems need to meet the demands of the burgeoning Internet economy—right down to making sure it is terrorist-proof. FedEx, for example, is working on a massive new data center that will employ very few people and will be hardened to withstand earthquakes, tornadoes, or even light artillery or small bombs. "With the pulse of the world so oriented toward information, bits are as relevant to making the world hum as are atoms," says FedEx's Carter. "So smart companies need to take a 'that could happen' kind of mindset." Asked where this new facility will be, he's mum: "That's a need-to-know kind of thing."