Posted by Donald Klein on Fri, Jun 11, 2010 @ 05:24 PM
One project that we have been working on at Modius is teaming with our friends at GroundWork Open Source (GWOS) on unifying their comprehensive IT monitoring with Modius facilities infrastructure monitoring.
Here is our recent webcast on the integration between our two products. GWOS hosted this webinar from their offices, and many of the people in the audience were IT Operations professionals.
To watch the webinar, please go here:
Unified Infrastructure Monitoring with Modius & GroundWork
Posted by Mark Harris on Fri, May 28, 2010 @ 04:54 PM
While I've seen my share of some pristine new data centers over the past few years, as well as a huge number of large scale retro-fit projects where old centers are being turned into new usable data center space, I have also seen an alarming number of older 'house of cards' data centers that are up in modern production and appear to be 'hands-off'.
These data centers are typically chock full of older devices and interconnects that were passed down from generation to generation of IT managers, only to realize that what they inherited was unmanageable. While it is true that these data centers will ultimately find their way into extinction in a world focused on operational efficiency and pro-active management and best practices, we can all feel the pain involved when we encounter something like this.
Above is one of the most interesting centers I've seen, and would appear to have conflicting priorities as to what is required to move forward. While I don't have a comprehensive sequence of steps required to migrate to a highly supportable, efficient and monitored data center, let me suggest one step that will help tremendously... Find the YELLOW patch cord and disconnect it.
Seriously, when I saw this photo I had to laugh and take a second look. Was it some new thermal blanketing technology? Or a way to eliminate blanking panels? The reason I make light here is that there are countless data centers that are in similiar out-of-spec designs and would benefit from adopting new data center technologies, new power distribution, cooling and monitoring solutions, but are challenged by WHERE TO BEGIN and the magnitude of the task at hand.
In the monitoring world for instance where Modius delivers value, we regularly find data centers with NO VISIBILITY to their energy usage and easily can identify hundreds or thousands of points of monitorable data that would help get energy usage under control. We are ready willing and able to take on chaos and make sense of it.
Posted by Mark Harris on Fri, May 21, 2010 @ 06:32 PM
Just got back from the Uptime Institute's latest data Center conference held in New York City. In a nutshell, it was everything that is interesting in the data center, only in the year 2010 this really means the physical layer!
"Physical Layer" you say? Yes, the physical side of the data center is driving all of the column inches in the press these days. That is where the chaos and panic around power and cooling AND costs and carbon all come together. In 2010, THIS is where the challenges are. This is where the opportunities exist to demonstrate thought leadership once again, and based on what I saw, people are rising to the challenge!
Frankly, the data center has far too long been a 'mysterious black box' where Intel meets Microsoft meets Linux meets storage and networks. This logical stuff USED TO BE the hard part. Physical resources were ASSUMED to be under control. Those days are gone. Today, it is a GIVEN by the CIO that the technologists in the crowd will figure out how to string together all the logical data processing stuff since modern servers and routers and everything in between have the ability to provide a fairly similiar set of functions and compatibility today. It is the PHYSICAL LAYER which is driving everyone CRAZY!!!!
So in New York, we had over a thousand people, all gathered with more than a hundred vendors talking about cooling strategies, powering data centers with high voltage DC, monitoring practices and advances in Computational Fluid Dynamics. There were the cable managers, PDUs, batteries and floor tile systems. Layer-0 Physical Layer stuff is SO TANGIBLE and comes in a wide range of colors, TAN, GREY and BLACK!
All in all, a great use of time, a place to make or renew relationships across the industry, and a suitable challenge to each attendee's traditional ways of thinking about the challenges in building and operating the required data centers of today....
Posted by Mark Harris on Thu, May 20, 2010 @ 11:26 PM
Modius CEO Craig Compiano explains the Modius approach to data center monitoring in this video posted on YouTube.
Originally featured in DataCenterKnowlege.com, this short video provides a short introduction to Modius OpenData.
To see the original article, please go to:
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/03/22/data-center-monitoring-with-modius/
From Data Center Knoweledge:
"At Data Center World we had the chance to speak with Craig Compiano, CEO of Modius, a San Francisco company that makes monitoring software for IT infrastructure. Modius’ motto is “measuring more things in more places more easily,” with the ability to integrate power usage and environmental readings from data centers, server rooms, branch offices, and IDF closets. In this video, Compiano provides an overview of Modius and the landscape for monitoring software. This video runs about 2 minutes, 30 seconds."
Posted by Mark Harris on Thu, Apr 29, 2010 @ 07:09 AM
Understanding the power consumption of any given discrete device in the data center may be accomplished in a number of ways including measurement and modeling technologies. While many approaches have been tried over the years, today there are four main ways to determine the power being consumed.
- Faceplate Values. Each manufacturer places a service value ‘plate’ which identifies things like model and serial numbers, manufacturer’s contact information, safety certifications and power requirements. The power requirements are usually listed as the voltage range acceptable for the included power supplies, as well as the maximum current to be drawn by any configuration and working condition of the device. For a complex device, this faceplate power consumption value is listed as the maximum possible and may be 4 or 5 times the actual power being drawn in normal operating conditions. Since this is printed information required on every device, it essentially has no additive administrative no-cost.
- iPDU Monitoring per outlet. Newer environments have begun to deploy measured or metered power distribution devices within each rack. These iPDU have enough intelligence to allow network inquiries to be made of the iPDU itself, with the most granular of these devices offering discrete values for the power being consumed PER-OUTLET. These PER-OUTLET iPDUs make ideal sources of raw power consumption values, although they tend to be costly to do so.
- Monitoring via operating system service. Most modern hardware telco, server and switch designs and their associated operating systems include what is known as ‘System Services’ or ‘Daemons’ which are intended to allow access to granular operating information. In most modern cases, device drivers are included in the standard software builds which enable power consumption metrics to be read from the actual power supply unit, assuming that the power supply was instrumented in hardware when the device was manufactured. In cases where this hardware instrumentation exists, there are no additive costs to gaining access to the power consumption for these devices across an IT infrastructure.
- Modeling the device. It could be argued that a tremendous portion of the installed IT equipment that was purchased more than 3 years ago has little or no instrumentation capability in hardware. In these cases it is impossible to programmatically read power consumption metrics. Instead one approach has been to model the power consumed based upon a model of the hardware configuration of the device. Mostly for servers, it could be argued that a good approximation for a device can be calculated by knowing an inventory of components inside each device, and then the power consumption of each of those components. Coupled with some workload information and a fair assessment of consumption can be derived.
It should be noted that each and every Enterprise will likely find themselves dealing with MULTIPLE approaches (from the above list) in determining power consumption. Some devices and configurations will lend themselves to highly granular network inquiry, while other older devices may need to be modeled to determine power. It is these sources of power consumption that will need to be gathered, normalized and then ultimately fed into some form of higher value asset or resource management suite.