Posted by Mark Harris on Wed, Jun 02, 2010 @ 02:02 PM
There was a time where x86 hardware systems and the applications and operating systems chosen to be installed upon them were considered good, but not 'bet your business' great. Reliability was less than ideal. Early deployments saw smaller numbers of servers, and each and every server counted. The applications themselves were not decomposed well enough to share the transaction processing, so failures of any server impacted actual production. Candidly I am not sure if it was the hardware or software that was mostly at fault, or a combination of both, but the concept of server system failures was a very real topic. High Availability or "HA" configurations were considered standard operating procedure for most applications.
The server vendors responded to this negative challenge by upping their game, designing much more robust server platforms and using higher quality components, connectors, designs, etc. The operating system vendors rose to the challenge by segmenting their offerings to offer industrial strength 'server' distributions and 'certified platform' hardware compatibility programs. This made a huge difference and TODAY, modern servers rarely fail. They run, they run hard and are perceived to be rock solid if provisioned properly.
Why the history? Because in these early times for servers, their less than favorable reliability characteristics required some form of auxillary bare metal 'out of band' access for these servers to correct operational failures at the hardware level. Technologies such as Intel's IPMI and HP's ILO became commonplace discussion when looking to build data center solutions with remote remediation capabilities. This was provided by an additional small CPU chip called a BMC that required no loading, no firmware, nothing but power to communicate sensor and status data with the outside world. The ability to Reboot a server in the middle of the night over the internet from the sys admin's house was all the rage. Technologies like Serial Console and KVM were the starting point, followed by these Out-of-Band (ILO & IPMI).
Move the clock forward to today, and you'll see that KVM, IPMI & ILO are interesting technologies and critical for specific devices which are still considered critical to core businesses as they are mostly applicable when a server is NOT running any operating system or the server has halted and is no longer 'on the net'. In most all other times, when the operating system itself IS running and the servers are on the network and accessible, server makers have supplied standard drivers to access all of the sensors and other hardware features of the motherboard and allow in-band remote access with technologies such as SSH and RDP.
Today, it makes very little difference whether a monitoring system uses operating system calls or out-of-band access tools. The same sensor and status information is available through both sets of technologies and it depends more on how the servers are physically deployed and connected. Remember, a huge percentage of Out-of-Band ports remain unconnected on the back of product servers. Many customers consider the second OOB connection to be costly and redundant in all but the worst/extreme failure conditions. (BUT critically important for certain type of equipment, such as any in-house DNS servers, or perhaps a SAN storage director)
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 Thu, Apr 29, 2010 @ 07:00 AM
It is funny how many times I have recently visited larger data centers considering 'Green IT' or other Efficiency initiatives and find high priority funded projects for wireless temperature sensors. True wireless environment technology is some of the coolest 'tangible' stuff I have seen in a long time. It is a high-tech version of the kind of technologies that we all grew up with, things we all just inherently 'get'. Temperature and Humidity Sensors. What could be simplier?
Here it is in 2010, and is important to realize that finally there are a number of great choices for wireless sensor solutions out there either using Active RFID or 802.15.4 (zigbee) technologies. A customer today really can deploy a fairly granular 'mesh' of sensors in data centers and related facilities areas without much difficulty. The sensors are simple, small, have long battery lives (> 3 years each) and low-cost. All of the solutions have easy to install packaging with double-sided tape or velcro. How easy is that?
Well, I would argue that the REAL VALUE for wireless temperature and humidity environmental sensors are NOT the sensors themselves, nor the data derived from each individual sensor but the aggregation of all of the data from all of the devices, rolled together with the metric data from the co-located IT gear and the facilities deployed HVAC gear, all normalized and easily accessible using ordinary tools. EXCEL anyone? (Or for the web-bies in the crowd, "Xcelsius Anyone?"). Imagine being able to plot the PUE of your data center as a function of outside temperature, or the total power consumption as a function of actual CPU processing (IT load). Remember, sensors can be found everywhere in your data center as discrete wired and wireless boxes, as well as embedded in every IT device purchased in the past 3 years, such as your servers, routers, firewalls and storage directors as well as in every PDU or iPDU (power strip). Sensors are everywhere just waiting to be queried for their metrics!
Customers should think BIGGER. Push the envelope and think PAST the wireless sensors (which ARE very cool), think PAST the pretty pictures that any one of the wireless vendors can draw, and focus on how to transform ALL of the data that you can get your hands on into actionable, cost saving information that can be directly applied in the BIGGER picture of running the IT structure at the lowest cost possible, supporting SLAs, etc.