Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

This one is a neat article, although you would like to work on the figures yourself. What can we learn from this model? First, we see that power costs not only don’t dominate, but are behind the cost of servers and the aggregated infrastructure costs. Server hardware costs are actually the largest. However, if we look more deeply, we see that the infrastructure is almost completely functionally dependent on power. From Belady and Manos’ article Intense Computing or In Tents Computing , we know that 82% of the overall infrastructure cost is power distribution and cooling. The power distribution costs are functionally related to power, in that you can’t consume power if you can’t get it to the servers. Similarly, the cooling costs are clearly 100% related to the power dissipated in the data center, so cooling costs are also functionally related to power as well. We define the fully burdened cost of power to be sum of the cost of the power consumed and the cost of both the co...

Cool video but... - Everything that is being done at the kernel level will eventually (if not already) pass on to the hardware. Virtualization has gone to the chipsets and the chipsets will also do the following: - DPM - Fabric Motion (lot faster) - Fabric Security - Fabric Privacy So you see, all the intelligence is going into the fabric and eventually the OS and the hypervisor will not only be thinned to bare minimum but may virtually vanish as they, or should I say their critical function (OS: host applications, Hypervisor: host OS and Apps stack) gets absorbed into the hardware. But for now, this video may give you the idea of where we're eventully heading for.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, November 3, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- At RealTech Middle East 2008, Pacific Controls announced that they have established a state of the art Energy Services Global Command Control Centre at their headquarters building in Techno Park, Dubai, UAE. This Energy Services Global Command Control Centre will offer their Customers, Business Partner's Government and International Agencies real time measurement and verification of carbon footprint for homes, buildings and infrastructure globally. The Energy Services Global Command Control Centre creates a new dimension in the business of carbon footprint measurement and verification. Pacific Controls has deployed their custom built high performance software platform on advanced distributed computing from "IBM" and networking technology from "CISCO" to offer ene...

This is the price you have to pay, or as some call it investing in the future. Facebook apparently is eating a million dollar a month on electricity bills and half million on bandwidth consumption . That is massive. I guess its time to host their stuff someplace else, maybe at Amazon AWS? Lets hope the Dubai lords are also smitten by the social bug. Obviously the environmental discussion will follow soon when I write about the dangers of not just the effects on the economic meltdown but also the meltdown of the data centers as we keep uploading pictures of beers and bras ( See Nick's post here ) on Facebook. I sometimes really wonder how useful Facebook really is, talk about oversubscription. Let's not call electricity a bitch,we just have to get real. These are pragmatic times and money isn't coming easy this time. This week, the TechCruncher has reported, Facebook chief financial officer Gideon Yu is in Dubai, "possibly" discussing fund raising options with Du...

This report illustrates how cloud data centers and renewable energy make for a potent combination that may forever change the data center computing competitive landscape. These computing giants are in a race to construct cloud facilities: mega-sized data centers that are "off the grid", powered by massive amounts of renewable energy. "Given that the giants in the computing industry have the ability to run their own data centers at such ultra-low costs structures that only a scant few will be able to duplicate, the pursuit of a sufficiently 'green' data center is an unending and impossible mission," writes Denegri. Denegri deduces that cloud computing vendor strategies will make it increasingly difficult, over the long term, for companies to justify the management of their own infrastructure. "In my view," writes De...

However, a person close to British Energy said EDF had been told earlier of the objections and should not have been telling the press it was a done deal when there were still problems. “Calling a press conference was stupid. They knew the [price] issue was there,” the person said. One EDF board member said on Friday his group thought the UK government’s support for the deal would help persuade the rebellious fund managers. “The French are used to a much more interventionist state. When the state says yes or no, the others follow,” the board member said. The collapse of the deal caught the UK government unawares. John Hutton, the business secretary, had been poised to hail the EDF acquisition today as a significant step in delivering Gordon Brown’s pledge of a new generation of nuclear reactors. Instead, the government must now deal with what Mr Hutton on Friday admitted is a “disappointing” setback to its nuclear strategy. At the press conference that EDF had expected to use for the de...

The message from HP is that it wants to deliver more efficiently used assets. "Everything has to be saved now," says Phil Dodsworth, director of HP Datacentre Solutions. That means energy efficiency, power and cooling and lowering operating costs, he adds. "Our strategy is all about managing risk for our clients, and we manage risks through these processes. It's not a silver bullet." HP sees virtualisation as an important strand in what it wants to deliver - but that is a long way from the full story. "Every other supplier seems to imagine that virtualisation is a cure all for everything," says Dodsworth, "but some applications don't lend themselves to virtualisation at all." HP's strategy is very much cost-driven rather than technology-led. "That's what our customers have been telling us," says Dodsworth. "It's the cost of the datacentre that is crippling companies, not the strategic advantages that technolo...

Data Center Knowledge first reported Microsoft’s interest in container-based data centers last May, and late in 2007 Microsoft confirmed that it would use container-based data center solutions in the new $500 million, 500,000 square foot facility in Northlake, Illinois. Microsoft’s Debra Chrapaty said the containers could support power densities beyond 1,000 watts per square foot. The layout of the first floor of the Chicago center will feature rows and rows of containers parked at a 45 degree angle. Manos said the facility will accommodate between 150 and 220 shipping containers, which will be shipped and dropped off by trucks. That approach led Microsoft to consult with parking lot operators to address the design logistics of enabling large trucks to navigate within the facility. Shipping containers have been used for years by the U.S. military. In 2006 Sun Microsystems (JAVA) introduce Project Blackbox (now the Sun MD S20), the first effort at a “data center in a box” incorporating ...

The sketch: Well this looks very ambitious. I am very curious where it might go from here. The Arabs are spending in everything these days and are gradually moving away from their main source of income: OIL! Europe would provide initial funds for developing the solar technology that will be needed to run plants as well as money for constructing prototype stations. After that, banks and financial institutions, as well as national governments, would take over the construction programme, which could cost more than £200bn over the next 30 years. 'We don't make enough use of deserts,' said physicist Gerhard Knies, co-founder of the scheme. 'The sun beats down on them mercilessly during the day and heats the ground to tremendous temperatures. Then at night that heat is radiated back into the atmosphere. In other words, it is completely wasted. We need to stop that waste and exploit the vast amounts of energy that the sun beams down to us.' Scientists estimate that sunligh...