The inefficient data centers are fading vs. Rapid Growth of the Efficient - Google, AWS, Facebook, Microsoft

The NRDC fired off a blog post this morning that got a bunch of other media to discuss the waste in the data center industry.

Our study shows that many small, mid-sized, corporate and multi-tenant data centers still waste much of the energy they use. One of the key issues is that many of the roughly 12 million U.S. servers operate most of the time doing little or no work but still drawing power – up to 30 percent of servers are “comatose” and no longer needed but still drawing significant amounts of power, many others are grossly underutilized. However, opportunities abound to reduce energy waste in the data center industry as a whole. The technology exists, but systemic measures are needed to remove the barriers limiting its broad adoption across the industry. 

Over the last 5 years the data center growth of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and many others has been growing a pace that blows away the rest.  The old dominants of financials has grown slowly or even declined with the exception of the analytics group that has built huge data farms.

Even though the NRDC raises concerns about the waste, the reality is the Cloud is helping to put so many of these old servers out of business.  But, the top issue is IT asset management is too many times poorly executed, making it difficult to identify the servers that can be turned off.

Gigaom Research analyst Dave Ohara said the report brings up valid points, but more factors need to be considered. CPU utilization is just one metric, Ohara said via email. “RAM and hard-disks also use up energy … and can be just as underutilized …  The problem is that IT asset management is mostly done as a bookkeeping exercise, not as part of a technical IT operations team who purchases, owns and operates the servers.”

Too many times the people who operate the servers can’t find the history of who owns the assets and what is on them.

Data Center Strategic Communications can be your strength or your weakness, Case Example The Data Center LLC

There has been a range of news coverage for the past few months on The Data Center LLC project in Delaware, and it looks the project has been cancelled with the university.

UD expels Data Centers project as 'bad fit' The News Journal - ‎Jul 10, 2014‎ The University of Delaware has terminated its lease agreement with The Data Centers LLC, halting controversial plans to develop a data-center complex in Newark at the former Chrysler site, now UD's Science Technology and Advanced Research Campus.   Data center decision a loss for Markell The News Journal - ‎Jul 12, 2014‎ In recent months, he was among the most prominent supporters of a plan to build a data center and power plant complex on a corner of the former Chrysler plant in Newark. When the project came under attack by locals, Markell made the debate personal, ...

One of the points media captured was the acknowledgement of how poorly The Data Center LLC communicated.

 "We've done a poor job of verbalizing this project," said Kern, president and CEO of The Data Centers, LLC, the company that made the proposal to the university. "It's very hard to explain to people how we will operate this facility because we haven't actually done it and we don't know our [electrical] load requirements, so we can't communicate it exactly."

...

When the university's working group issued its report last week, it validated Kern's first assertion. Yes, indeed, TDC had done a poor job of explaining its plan to create a $1.8 billion facility crammed with high-powered computer servers run by a 279-megawatt power system that would create its own electricity without relying on the conventional power grid.

And, while the UD team didn't quite say that TDC had come up with a nutty idea that's never going to work, the university made it quite clear that piling vague explanations on top of scant documentation to support a questionable business model is hardly the formula for selling a complex concept to a panel of top-notch, detail-oriented leaders of a major research university.

A strategic communication plan is a rarity in many endeavors.  A strategic communication plan is not just did you hire a PR agency.  Are the efforts you spend in communication and the media’s view of your efforts the battle you are ready to win?  Consider this post on Strategic Communication.

The late Colonel Harry Summers liked to tell a tale familiar to many who

served in Vietnam. In April 1975, after the war was over, the colonel

was in a delegation dispatched to Hanoi. In the airport, he got into a conversation

with a North Vietnamese colonel named Tu who spoke some English

and, as soldiers do, they began to talk shop. After a while, Colonel Summers

said: “You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield.” Colonel Tu

thought about that for a minute, then replied: “That may be so. But it is also

irrelevant.”1

If that conversation were to be held in today’s vocabulary, it would

go something like this. Colonel Summers: “You know, you never defeated us

in a kinetic engagement on the battlefield.” Colonel Tu: “That may be so. It is

also irrelevant because we won the battle of strategic communication—and

therefore the war.”

On a contemporary note, a US officer returning from Iraq said privately:

“We plan kinetic campaigns and maybe consider adding a public affairs

annex. Our adversaries plan information campaigns that exploit kinetic

events, especially spectacular attacks and martyrdom operations. We aren’t

even on the playing field, but al Qaeda seeks to dominate it because they

know their war will be won by ideas.”

Is Taylor Swift right about music or Jennifer Lopez? The future is Taylor Swift's way

Gigaom covered Taylor Swift’s WSJ article on the future of music is a love story.

Taylor Swift is right about music, and the industry should act on her ideas

by Jeff John Roberts

15 HOURS AGO

10 Comments

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photo: Taylor Swift/YouTube

SUMMARY:

Country star Taylor Swift made some bold and hopeful claims this week about where the music business is going. We should listen to her.

Country-pop star Taylor Swift penned an optimistic essay in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal about the lasting bonds between performers and their fans, and why she thinks the music industry is “just coming alive.” You can think what you want about Swift’s songs, but her take on the business is a welcome change from the doom-and-gloom we normally read.

The Doom and Gloom is covered by HuffingtonPost’s article on Jennifer Lopez’s statement the music industry is no longer a big magical world of possibilities.

Jennifer Lopez Says Music Industry Is No Longer A 'Big Magical World' Of Possibilities

  | By MESFIN FEKADU

Posted: 06/23/2014 10:14 am EDT Updated: 06/23/2014 4:59 pm EDT

Print Article

NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 20: Jennifer Lopez performs on ABC's 'Good Morning America' at Rumsey Playfield on June 20, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images) | Jamie McCarthy via Getty Images

NEW YORK (AP) — Jennifer Lopez remembers the days when her record label budgeted $1 million for one of her music videos. Today, she's attempting to create the same magic with one-tenth of the money.

The entrepreneur says being a singer has been "challenging" since she debuted on the pop scene in the late 1990s, dominating the charts with back-to-back hits while becoming a driving force on other entertainment platforms.

"It used to be like this big magical world, almost like Oz, when you'd make a record," the 44-year-old says. "(It) was like anything was possible."

Lopez, who released her eighth album, "A.K.A.," on Tuesday, says the music industry no longer feels like Oz.

"Now, it's like, 'We'll see if we can do that and we can give you this much,'" she says of record label meetings. "And you're like, 'Wow, OK. So how am I gonna do that?' It's a whole different mind-set."

Taylor Swift posted here own story on WSJ on the future of music is a love story.  Seems like Taylor swift is falling in love, and Jennifer Lopez is the end of love.

Where will the music industry be in 20 years, 30 years, 50 years?

Before I tell you my thoughts on the matter, you should know that you're reading the opinion of an enthusiastic optimist: one of the few living souls in the music industry who still believes that the music industry is not dying…it's just coming alive.

Here are some of the best points made by Taylor Swift.

There are a few things I have witnessed becoming obsolete in the past few years, the first being autographs. I haven't been asked for an autograph since the invention of theiPhone with a front-facing camera. The only memento "kids these days" want is a selfie. It's part of the new currency, which seems to be "how many followers you have on Instagram."

Fan Power

A friend of mine, who is an actress, told me that when the casting for her recent movie came down to two actresses, the casting director chose the actress with more Twitter followers. I see this becoming a trend in the music industry. For me, this dates back to 2005 when I walked into my first record-label meetings, explaining to them that I had been communicating directly with my fans on this new site called Myspace. In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans—not the other way around.

Watching Google's Data Center Machine Learning News spread

I was curious on how Google’s Data Center Machine Learning news would spread. 

At 1a on May 28, 2014 google posted on its main company blog with this kind of traffic over the past two days.

The following are three posts that went live at 1a PT May 28, 2014 as well with the google post and they were able to interview Joe Kava, VP of Data Centers

http://gigaom.com/2014/05/28/google-is-harnessing-machine-learning-to-cut-data-center-energy/

Google’s head of data center operations, Joe Kava, says that the company is now rolling out the machine learning model for use on all of its data centers. Gao has spent about a year building it, testing it out and letting it learn and become more accurate. Kava says the model is using unsupervised learning, so Gao didn’t have to specificy the interactions between the data is — the model will learn those interactions over time.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/05/28/google-using-machine-learning-boost-data-center-efficiency/

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/google-data-center-ai/

The Wired article spun the machine learning as an Artificial Brain which gave them more traffic than others.

But as I wrote Google’s machine learning is not really AI the way people would think.

BTW, in looking at the other articles, I realized my mistake.  In my post at 1a on May 28, I was a total nerd and got focused on the technology and didn’t mention Joe Kava’s name in my post even though I had interviewed him.  Damn.

Throughout the day the rest of the tech media were able to add their own posts.  I don’t know about you, but I am pretty impressed that Google was able to execute a media strategy that got the range of tech media to post on its Going Beyond PUE with Machine Learning.  PUE is not something widely discussed beyond the data center crowd.

Note the ComputerWeekly post was at the event where Joe Kava Keynoted and got 10 minutes of Joe’s time.  

My 10 minutes with Google's datacentre VP

ComputerWeekly.com (blog) - ‎May 28, 2014‎

Google's Joe Kava speaking at the Google EU Data Center Summit (Photo credit: Tom Raftery) ... Google's network division, which is the size of a medium enterprise, had a technology refresh and by spending between $25,000 and $50,000 per site, we could improve their high availability features and improve their PUEs from 2.2 to 1.5. The savings ... As more volumes of data are created and as mass adoption of the cloud takes place, naturally it will require IT to think about datacentres and its efficiency differently.

 

Google Blog: Better Data Centers Through Machine Learning

PCBDesign007 - ‎May 28, 2014‎

It's no secret that we're obsessed with saving energy. For over a decade we've been designing and building data centers that use half the energy of a typicaldata center, and we're always looking for ways to reduce our energy use even further. In our pursuit ...

 

Google is improving its data centers with the power of machine learning

GeekWire - ‎May 28, 2014‎

google-datacenter-tech-05 In its continuing quest to improve the efficiency of its data centers, Google has found a new solution: machine learning. Jim Gao, an engineer on the company's data center team, has been hard at work on building a model of how ...

Google crafts neural network to watch over its data centers

Register - ‎May 28, 2014‎

The project began as one of Google's vaunted "20 per cent projects" by engineer Jim Gao, who decided to apply machine learning to the problem of predicting how the power usage effectiveness of Google's data centers would change in response to tweaking ...

 

Google's Machine Learning: It's About More Than Spotting Cats

Wall Street Journal (blog) - ‎May 28, 2014‎

Google said in a blog post Wednesday that it is using so-called neural networks to reduce energy usage in its data centers. These computer brains are able to recognize patterns in the huge amounts of data they are fed and “learn” how things like air ...

 

Google data centers get smarter all on their own -- no humans required

VentureBeat - ‎May 28, 2014‎

While most of us were thinking that research would turn out speech recognition consumer products, it actually turns out that Google has applied its neural networks to the challenge of making its vast data centers run as efficiently as possible, preventing the ...

 

Google AI improves datacentre energy efficiency

ComputerWeekly.com - ‎May 28, 2014‎

“Realising that we could be doing more with the data coming out of datacentres, Jim studied machine learning and started building models to predict – and improve – datacentre performance.” The team's machine learning model behaves like other machine ...

 

Google taps machine learning technology to zap data center electricity costs

Network World (blog) - ‎May 28, 2014‎

Google is using machine learning technology to forecast - with an astounding 99.6% accuracy -- the energy usage in its data centers and automatically shift power to certain sites when needed. Using a machine learning system developed by its self ...

 

Google's machine-learning data centers make themselves more efficient

Ars Technica - ‎May 28, 2014‎

Google's data centers are famous for their efficient use of power, and now they're (literally) getting even smarter about how they consume electricity. Google today explained how it uses neural networks, a form of machine learning, to drive energy usage in its ...

 

Google is harnessing machine learning to cut data center energy

Bayoubuzz - ‎May 28, 2014‎

Leave it to Google to have an engineer so brainy he hacks out machine learning models in his 20 percent time. Google says that recently it's been using machine learning — developed by data center engineer Jim Gao (his Googler nickname is “Boy Wonder”) ...

 

Google turns to machine learning to build a better datacentre

ZDNet - ‎May 28, 2014‎

"The application of machine learning algorithms to existing monitoring data provides an opportunity to significantly improve DC operating efficiency," Google'sJim Gao, a mechanical engineer and data analyst, wrote in a paper online. "A typical large-scale ... These models can accurately predict datacentre PUE and be used to automatically flag problems if a centre deviates too far from the model's forecast, identify energy saving opportunities and test new configurations to improve the centre's efficiency. "This type of ...

 

 

 

Blogging/Writing to Share News with Friends

People write (blog) for different reasons.  Many only see a limited range of the reasons, and assume you are blogging with the goal of making money or drive a specific agenda like create visibility for yourself.  I remember talking to a person who was digging on the reason why I blog.  “You must be doing this with an agenda.”  I started blogging when an old Microsoft friend said “I just Google’d Green Data Center, no one is writing on this.  You should.”  My response was I didn’t know.  He pushed again and I started with one of these posts.

Beginning of GreenM3

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2007 AT 11:47AM

Dec 1, 2007

The WSJ with MIT Sloan published an article today which appropriately describes one of the reasons I started working on Green Data Centers. After 14 years at Microsoft, 7 years at Apple, and 5 years at HP, I felt that it was time to do something different, and I quit with no idea what I was going to do.

One area I started working on and had an interest in was how many systems, especially home automation systems were put together for short term objectives of making the sale, and how frustrating it was for home owners when things broke to know the root cause of what broke and whether the repair actually really fixed the problem or systems were just rebooted to mask the problem. Which took me down the path of monitoring and metering. Narrowing down the area of what to focus on I discovered water well systems had the largest value impact to real estate values.  Land without water isn't worth a whole lot, and there were plenty of high end real estate being built on large acreage on the top of the hills with great views.15% of US homes are on well water systems, and the percentage is higher for vacation/2nd homes/future retirement.

Then my paths crossed with Pat Kennedy, CEO and founder of OSIsoft. In our discussion of real estate monitoring systems, Pat mentioned the problem of energy consumption in data centers, and how he wanted to measure the power consumption of applications. Having worked on system software and power management for both Microsoft and Apple, I was thinking how to do this, and how difficult it was given almost all the focus on power management was on laptops.  I remember in 1999, talking to Server OEMs about using Windows 2000 power management features and they just looked at me strange and asked why would you want to save energy on a server.

  In 2008 is when I connected with Mike Manos who I consider my first data center friend who happened to be a speaker at an OSIsoft executive summit.

This started me down the path of writing blog posts to be read by my friends.  Things that are out there that are interesting to my friends.  And, for my friends I try hard to find the original source of public disclosure.

Last night I was reading Gigaom.com, not because I work part-time for Gigaom Research (less than an hour a week), maybe I should call it micro-time instead of part-time, but because I have many friends there which include the writers.  Knowing the people helps me interpret what is written.  It is huge advantage I have versus most,  spending time to know the perspective of the writer let’s you see things from their perspective as they write.

Last night I found a post by a new Gigaom writer who I don’t know yet Jonathan Vanian on Facebook commissioning an economic impact study for Prineville.  This took me to Facebook’s post, and to the specific report.  I posted at 9:33p on May 21, 2014.  I did a News Google search to see if anyone else had picked up the news.

Facebook posted at 10a on May 21, 2014.  This morning is when the tech journals posted on the news.

Facebook notes economic value of constructing data center in Prineville

The Republic - ‎7 minutes ago‎

PRINEVILLE, Oregon — Facebook says 1,500 construction jobs were created during the four-year build-out of its data center in Prineville. The social media company operates two, 330,000-square-footdata centers and has a 62,000-square-foot "cold storage" ...

Study: Facebook's Data Center Created Thousands of Jobs in Oregon Data Center Knowledge - ‎2 hours ago‎ Facebook's data center construction over five years has created about 650 jobs in Central Oregon and nearly 3,600 jobs in the State of Oregon overall. Construction of one of the social network's most important nerve centers has also lead to $573 million in ... Facebook: The human impact of data centers DatacenterDynamics (blog) - ‎28 minutes ago‎ US states are fighting over them, but what really is the economic impact that comes with having a data center in your territory? Yesterday Facebook released a report constructed with ECONorthwest which takes a closer look at how Oregon has benefitted from ...

I will go out of my way to find the original source, reference it, and show a thread of following where things originate.  In the past I have done analysis to figure out who are the influentials in the news.  Given some media don’t reference where they get the news from like press releases or other media outlets, it can be hard to see, but after a while you can see the patterns.

 

I post at 9:33p May 21, 2014 when the tech media guys are asleep.  They get up May 22, 2014 read my posts and know they can find the sources for news.  

 

Some of my biggest readers are other media and PR firms.  They benefit because I am writing for my friends, not for an explicit business purpose.