The First Graduate Degree for Datacenter Systems Engineering Program is at SMU

I have an engineering degree, and most of my data center friends have engineering degrees too.  But, no one has a degree in datacenter engineering.  SMU announced the first Datacenter Systems Engineering graduate degree.

SMU’s Master of Science in Datacenter Systems engineering is built around five core courses that address the industry broadly, while offering elective specializations in three technical areas:

  • Facilities, infrastructure and subsystems
  • Datasystems engineering and analytics
  • Computer networks, virtualization, security and cloud computing

”SMU’s Master of Science in Datacenter Systems Engineering program addresses a long unfulfilled need in the datacenter industry,” said Chris Crosby, CEO of Compass Datacenters. “Its comprehensive, cross-disciplinary curriculum provides the breadth of knowledge professionals need for success in this complex industry with numerous interdependencies.”

The SMU Datacenter Systems Engineering program is directed toward preparing professionals for a leadership role in this field, whether specifically as a technical contributor or more broadly in management. The program is designed to build a solid foundation for continued professional growth consistent with modern datacenter engineering practices and the changes that lie ahead for this industry.

SMU has a unique opportunity to play a significant role in educating engineering professionals in this field both locally on-campus and nationally via distance education. Approximately 50 datacenters exist within the greater Dallas area.  

There are some so called data center experts out there with no engineering degree so they can’t get their graduate degree in datacenter systems engineering.

In addition to meeting Lyle School admission requirements for a Master of Science degree, applicants are required to satisfy the following requirements:

  • A Bachelor of Science degree in one of the engineering disciplines, computer science, one of the quantitative sciences or mathematics.
  • A minimum of two years of college-level mathematics including one year of college-level calculus.

Part of what is needed in the data center industry is a pool of knowledge and SMU will enable a place to go to look for datacenter knowledge.

Key factors which determine successful competition in today's global environment are: timely and rapid response to customer needs, high product quality, and flexibility of operation. To achieve these objectives, the common element is an effective and knowledgeable organization oriented towed customer needs and requirements.

 We should all buy Chris Crosby a beer to show our appreciation to start something that hopefully will grow over time.

Greening The Data Center in the HPC scenario

I have been writing on Green Data Centers for 6 years.  This month I hit 2 year anniversary working for GigaOm Research, and thanks to the folks at Verne Global who sponsored a white paper on the Green Data Center topic here is a just released paper for GigaOm Research subscribers on The Value of Green HPC.

Jonathan Koomey, Tate Cantrell, RMS and BMW were interviewed for the paper and provided valuable perspectives the current state of greening a data center in a specific use case, HPC (High Performance Computing).

Table of Contents

The value of green HPC

by 
 Oct. 30, 2013
This report underwritten by: Verne Global
1Executive Summary

Forward-thinking CIOs are anticipating increased regulation of carbon emissions and want lower and more-predictable energy costs over the long term. As part of that process, they are looking at ways to go green. They know that data centers are under scrutiny for how sustainable they are, and they know that demand for data center services is growing while the costs of fossil fuels are already high, getting higher, and becoming difficult to predict.

Green data centers present one solution because they use renewable energy sources, have efficient data center facilities, and use efficient IT equipment. The savings these data centers offer can be transformed into more processing power, which gives new opportunities for increased business revenue. Many of these data centers are located where they can take advantage of an area’s natural resources (cool climates, for example) and sources of power such as wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric.

However, not all applications are suitable for offloading to a data center, whether it’s green or not. Deciding which applications can be placed in a green data center while still satisfying business and performance specifications is critical to success. Among the candidates to consider are high-performance computing (HPC) applications. HPC was once limited to scientific research, but many businesses now use it to analyze large amounts of data and to create simulations and models. HPC applications are compute-intensive and, when applied at scale, require large amounts of energy. However, because users of these applications don’t require real-time responses, you have flexibility in where you place these applications. This means that you can take advantage of the lower energy costs a green data center offers, no matter where it’s located. This report analyzes these topics as well as the following areas:

  • Three factors to consider in choosing a green data center for HPC are the source of the data center’s power, the efficiency of its IT equipment, and the data center’s efficiency.
  • Today’s CIOs have the options of building a new data center, refurbishing an existing data center, using co-location, and using the cloud. Each option needs to be balanced against the following criteria: the requirements of increased data center traffic, government regulations, volatile energy costs, and sustainable practices.
  • Latency is the single most important criterion for choosing the appropriate applications for cloud or co-location. Following latency, other considerations are whether the application must peer with another company, the business requirements, the application architecture, current and predicted application workload, and the application’s resource consumption rate.

Should you get Excited about Verizon choosing Seamicro? How many boxes? What % is this of installed servers?

I was chatting with an analyst friend today and he asked me what I thought about Verizon choosing Seamicro.  Here is the press release.

Verizon Selects AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 for Enterprise Class Services: Verizon Cloud Compute and Verizon Cloud Storage

We shared our knowledge of how many sea micro boxes were being used at various customers we knew and our numbers matched.

Here is the question that almost never gets asked.  In the same way that Airbus made a major win over Boeing getting JAL to buy the A350 and the news hits the WSJ.  There is clear announcement of the number of planes bought, and the options acquired for future deliveries.

JAL ordered 31 A350 jetliners carrying a catalog price of ¥950 billion, with an option to buy 25 more of the long-distance planes, the companies said Monday. Deliveries will start in 2019 and roll out over six years.

When the hardware vendors start having press releases that identify the number of units sold over what period then we can judge whether the deal is a big one or not.

What we don't know is what is the rest of the hardware in Verizon's Cloud.  Is SeaMicro 1% of the units?  2%?  5%?  10%?  25? of the total server count.  We don't really know and if you don't know, then why should you think the announcement has an impact on the way you do business.

Practice every day, make mistakes, learn, get better

I write almost every day in this blog. Some think i do this for money.  No, a year's worth of blogging revenue is less than I make in a day with a client.  So, I write for getting my name out there.  No, I don't focus on marketing myself as most people don't even know what I do.  So, why write?  Because it gets me every day spending a bit of time, sometimes more than others, sometimes less, on thinking about what is going on in the industry that is worth writing about.  This every day effort for the past 6 years has made it so it is natural for me to analyze and write what I observe.  Part of observing is understanding how things work.

Reasoning from observations has been important to scientific practice at least since the time of Aristotle who mentions a number of sources of observational evidence including animal dissection (Aristotle(a) 763a/30–b/15, Aristotle(b) 511b/20–25). But philosophers didn't talk about observation as extensively, in as much detail, or in the way we have become accustomed to, until the 20th century when logical empiricists and logical positivists transformed philosophical thinking about it.

The first transformation was accomplished by ignoring the implications of a long standing distinction between observing and experimenting. To experiment is to isolate, prepare, and manipulate things in hopes of producing epistemically useful evidence. It had been customary to think of observing as noticing and attending to interesting details of things perceived under more or less natural conditions, or by extension, things perceived during the course of an experiment.

As a skill I have found being able to document the analysis process for my clients and myself is useful.  Parts leak into this blog when I think it is useful to my friends and there is a public disclosure.  Many times when I write I have specific people I am thinking about like the departed Olivier Sanche.

If you want to get good at something practicing every day, making mistakes, learning, and getting better is powerful.  Here is an article in Fast Company on this idea.

WANT TO CONQUER A NEW SKILL? DO IT EVERY DAY

AT THE INTERSECTION OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PRODUCTIVITY LIES A SIMPLE TRUTH: TO DO SOMETHING WELL, YOU MUST EMBRACE QUANTITY.

 ...

When you're learning a new skill--whether developing dance moves or websites--quantity is way more important than quality.

Why? Over at Medium, entrepreneur-essayist Herbert Lui expounds on expansion:

Quantity should be a higher priority than quality, because it leads to higher quality. The shorter path to maximized quality is in maximized quantity, and executing on the feedback after each finished product.

 

To put it into startup terms, you're making yourself maximally iterative. To put it into hardware, the idea is to get as many cycles as possible. To put it into workout terms, the idea is to get as many reps as possible. Try fast, fail fast, learn fast.

Why does the do-it-a-bunch technique work? Take it away, science:

How to cost effectively increase efficiency in the data center by me

I was going through the gigaom site, and saw a post on cost effectively increase efficiently of the data center, and then saw I wrote it.  I worked on the post so long ago I lost track of it.  (Note: you need to be a subscriber of GigaOm Pro to read the full report.

How to cost-efficiently increase efficiency in the data center

This report underwitten by: Telx

Today’s data center managers must not only satisfy customer demands for around-the-clock availability from anywhere in the world; they must also contend with demands from within their own organizations to help reduce operational costs.

Customers and internal stakeholders alike expect and ask for the same availability as the traditional “plain old telephone service” (POTS). In days gone by, providers such as AT&T engineered their dial-tone service to be available 99.999 percent of the time. This dial-tone reliability has become such a well-known benchmark that it is commonly known as the “five nines” standard, which is the equivalent of having a dial tone available for all but five minutes a year.

However, high expectations translate into increasing pressure on data center managers, who can quickly find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, they must keep their facilities operating at peak performance. On the other hand, they have budgetary concerns from within their own companies because external regulatory bodies are demanding that energy usage be reduced.

This paper is intended for executives who determine their organization’s business strategies and IT policies. If you are looking for ways to decrease data center costs, and are considering a variety of options, you require knowledge of the possibilities that are available as well as the successes that others have had.