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Data Center War Stories talks to CIX’s Jerry Sweeney

And we’re back this week with the third instalment in our Data Center War Stories series (sponsored by Sentilla).

In this episode of the series I am talking to Jerry Sweeney. Jerry is Managing Director of Cork Internet eXchange (CIX). CIX is a small, currently co-lo, data centre located in Cork, Ireland (and full disclosure – I was a co-founder of CIX).

I love Jerry’s story about the chiller compressors coming on for the first time after 12 weeks – free cooling rocks! (watch the video, or see the transcript below!).

Here’s the transcript of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone and welcome to GreenMonk’s DataCenter War Stories sponsored by Sentilla. The guest in the show is CIX’s Jerry Sweeney. Jerry is Director of Cork Internet eXchange. Jerry welcome to the show.

Jerry Sweeney: Thank you for having me Tom.

Tom Raftery: Jerry can you tell me a little bit about Cork Internet eXchange, how old it is, what kind of size you are talking about?

Jerry Sweeney: Cork Internet eXchange was conceived in 2006, in September of 2006, construction occurred in 2007, and it opened for business in March 2008. So it’s 3-years-old now.

We have two rooms on the technical floor area, one of them is kitted out, it’s 3,000 square feet and the other one is available for expansion and that’s also 3,000 square feet, as well as there is approximately 7,000 or 8,000 square feet for the services, offices, call center and so on.

So, whatever that works out at 12 and seven, so it’s about 19,000 square feet in total. Eventually it will be a 240 rack facility. At the moment we have about 75 occupied racks. To date it’s exclusively a collocation facility, but we are now getting into the infrastructure as a service and platform as a service business.

Tom Raftery: In the building of a facility of that size what kind of — what are the most pressing kind of issues you come across typically day to day?

Jerry Sweeney: I suppose your question had the concept of size and — so we are a very small data center, and I suppose trying to scale the expenses against our revenue stream is probably an issue with a company this size. So running 24/7 shifts, so I would say scale is probably our biggest single problem, and having people with the right resources, and having the facility occupied. If you have a 1000 racks okay, then you can spread those costs over a greater number of customers and a greater number of racks.

Tom Raftery: Any interesting things that you — any interesting problems you happened to cross and solutions you came up with to solve them?

Jerry Sweeney: We live in a city Tom with 160,000, 170,000 people. We — all of the data centers in Ireland are basically clustered around Dublin, all of the connectivity that comes into Ireland is located or lands in Dublin.

So, remoteness and scale okay were huge problems for us when we started off. And one of the big issues for us okay was to get adequate connectivity into the building so that we would be taken seriously. And we came up with a strategy very early on and the strategy was to — initially before we focused on being a data center that we focused on being a regional internet connectivity center.

And the name of the business is very interesting; the name of the business is Cork Internet eXchange. We registered the URL which was the Cork Data Center, but we never used it, and the reason for that is because Cork Internet eXchange was more vital to us at start up then the Cork Data Center.

So, in order to justify gigabit connectivity in the back-haul costs around that, we had to get serious volumes of IP transit through the building first. And we have a 30 meter, it was 24 meters initially, but we just added six meters to it this year, our address is Hollyhill and that’s a clue, we are on top of a hill. That enabled us to sign up every single wireless internet service provider in the region.

So, all of the non-incumbent supply broadband homes and businesses in Cork take their connectivity out of here and we see that as being about 20,000 homes and businesses. So that was a huge win for us in the 2000 — in early 2009. By the time we got to say March 2009, which would be a year after we opened, we had our IP transit up in the gigabits and that made cost effective procurement of transit sensible.

And it was at that time that we noticed a growth in the — people took us more seriously as a data center, because of the connectivity. We had the resilience from design in, what we didn’t have is, we didn’t have connectivity at a price okay, and at a quality level that made us attractive.

So, I think that probably was the… and if we hadn’t been successful of getting that connectivity issue; then, I don’t think we would have been able to scale as a data center.

Tom Raftery: Can you talk a little bit about some of the interesting concepts that went into the design of the data center?

Jerry Sweeney: The concept of building the data center was started in September 2006, and we made a decision in 2006 to go for cold aisle containment and today that seems like a really kind of standard idea — the argument is now do you go for hot aisle or cold aisle containment. But in 2006, it was actually even alternate hot and cold aisles were considered novel at that time.

So it seemed like a remarkable unusual thing. So we built it from the ground up with the cold aisle containment as a strategy. Also because we are located in Cork, which is a mild – neither hot or cold climate, we have 11 degrees as an ambient temperate, average for the year and the difference between summer and winter is not enormous, so we are able to take advantage of an awful lot of free cooling.

Even in the summer at night time we can usually do free cooling here and for much of the winter okay, our chillers never start. We know that our chillers did not start from the — from November of 2010 until a warm sunny afternoon in February. So free cooling okay, took us for whatever number of weeks, that is six and six — about 12 weeks, without ever starting a compressor.

We were shocked when the compressor cut in, what’s that noise, okay.

Tom Raftery: Jerry it’s been fantastic. Thanks a million for coming on the show.

Jerry Sweeney: Yeah, it’s my pleasure; Tom, thank you.

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By Tom Raftery – November 28, 2011

The whole interest in sustainability is wearing off isn’t it? SAP’s Scott Bolick answers

At the SAP TechEd event in Madrid recently, JD-OD.com had an interview scheduled with SAP’s Scott Bolick. Scott is responsible for SAP’s Sustainability Solutions. Dennis Howlett, of JD-OD, knowing my interest in sustainability, asked if I’d like to conduct the conversation with Scott.

I was happy to oblige and so here’s a transcript of our chat:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone. This is Tom Raftery of GreenMonk TV, doing interview for JD-OD. And with me I have Scott Bolick from SAP. Scott, would you like to introduce yourself?

Scott Bolick: Thanks Tom. My name is Scott Bolick as you said, and I’m responsible for SAP Sustainability Solutions and those solutions are across at four different areas and hopefully we can chat a little bit about those now.

Tom Raftery: Sure. So Scott, sustainability it’s a – the whole interest in sustainability is wearing off isn’t it, nobody is really into sustainability these days. Am I right?

Scott Bolick: Well I think you are wrong, I think there is a caveat. I think one of the things that we’ve seen in the market which I think is actually a good sign is that sustainability was a topic de joure in 2008, 2009. It’s still there, you still see more and more CSOs coming online but what you are seeing is instead of a centralization of power within those chief sustainability officers, what you are actually seeing is the sustainability officers setting the strategy for the company.

And then whenever you look at the actual execution, when we look at where people are actually purchasing IT that really is coming down into the LOB, so it’s R&D for sustainable products. It is the supply chain when you look at sustainable supply chain. It’s manufacturing whenever you look at sustainable operations. So I think to say that it’s not there, it is wrong, I think it’s there, it’s stronger than ever. I think what people are discovering is it’s sedimenting back into the underlying businesses and that’s where it should be fundamentally.

Tom Raftery: Okay, but I mean with the current state of the economy, are people really willing to get their –stick their hand in their pocket and spend money on sustainability solutions?

Scott Bolick: Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you take a look at why people buy for sustainability, I think there is three reasons people buy. First and foremost is compliance, and there are increasing regulations around the globe whether it be for product or whether it be not just for — whether it be safety and showing that you are increasing the safety within your operations. And so one of course whenever you take a look at that and you look at the complexity of business, it’s spread out on global operations, they need solutions that are IT solutions to be able to adhere to those regulations in a timely and in a low cost manner.

Second you continue to see people interested in those solutions that help them save money, energy management obviously being top of mind.

And third, there are those companies that are spending on aspirational, really trying to understand what is the product footprint of the products that they sell into the market and how they can lower that footprint whether it’d be carbon or whether it’d be other substances.

Tom Raftery: And where are you seeing most of the traction these days? What is the most – what is the area of the largest – well either spend or interest for SAP at the moment?

Scott Bolick: I think if you take a look at some areas that are really hitting for SAP, one of the areas is operational risk management. And if you would go back and you just look at the last couple of years, what you see are these big events that these events happen and then there is a tremendous impact on the brand reputation, there is a tremendous impact on the financial valuation of those companies. And so what you are seeing is companies on a trend, the first trend on operational risk was really about compliance, am I compliant to regulations, now you are seeing people increasingly looking at proactive prevention, how do I actually go out and report incidents before they happen, how do they then analyze those incidents, put them in a risk framework and then how do I actually execute management of change. So we are definitely seeing a tremendous amount of interest from across multiple industries.

And finally what we are beginning to see is some really interesting stuff where people are looking at the tremendous amount of data they have and trying to figure out how they can correlate that data and actually get into predictive analytics around risk. So that’s one of the areas we’re definitely seeing.

Tom Raftery: Okay and when you talk about data I mean a lot of – the various solutions have massive amounts of data associated with them, how is SAP going to handle that, the big data issue?

Scott Bolick: I think one of the things that we are fortunate is that unlike some players in the market, we within SAP have strong technology both for analytics and then when you look at big data obviously we have HANA. So some of the things that we are doing is working with customers and determining how we can leverage HANA to push them over limits that they might otherwise have. Limits in terms of their own operations and limits in terms of processes.

One of the ones I love is we have an embedded product compliance customer who is now looking at putting embedded product compliance on top of HANA. So this company has 100,000 different recipes, they produce 3000 to 4000 documents a day and obviously that’s on the backend, but on the front end they have got to really make sure during the design process that they understand whether or not the substances, whether or not the ingredients are going to be compliant to regulations. One of the things they are doing is by putting it on HANA is they can get the check back in a second rather than getting a check back in terms of minutes or hours. And obviously if you are in R&D, the last thing you want to do is your designing — is to sit in front of the computer and wait to determine whether or not it’s compliant with regulations and obviously those regulations are regulations that are country specific.

Tom Raftery: Sure. So sustainability is here to stay.

Scott Bolick: Absolutely.

Tom Raftery: Great. Scott, thanks a million.

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By Tom Raftery – November 22, 2011

Data Center War Stories talks to SAP’s Jürgen Burkhardt

And we’re back this week with the second instalment in our Data Center War Stories series (sponsored by Sentilla).

This second episode in the series is with Jürgen Burkhardt, Senior Director of Data Center Operations, at SAP‘s HQ in Walldorf, Germany. I love his reference to “the purple server” (watch the video, or see the transcript below!).

Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone welcome to GreenMonk TV. Today we are doing a special series called the DataCenter War Stories. This series is sponsored Sentilla and with me today I have Jürgen Burkhardt. Jürgen if I remember correctly your title is Director of DataCenter Operations for SAP is that correct?

Jürgen Burkhardt: Close. Since I am 45, I am Senior Director of DataCenter Operations yes.

Tom Raftery: So Jürgen can you give us some kind of size of the scale and function of your DataCenter?

Jürgen Burkhardt: All together we have nearly 10,000 square meters raised floor. We are running 18,000 physical servers and now more than 25,000 virtual servers out of this location. The main purpose is first of all to run the production systems of SAP. The usual stuff FI, BW, CRM et cetera, they are all support systems, so if you have ABAP on to the SAP in marketplace, you, our service marketplace, this system is running here in Waldorf Rot, whatever you see from sap.com is running here to a main extent. We are running the majority of all development systems here and all training — the majority of demo and consulting system worldwide at SAP.

We have more than 20 megawatt of computing power here. I mentioned the 10,000 square meters raised floor. We have 15 — more than 15 petabyte of usable central storage, back up volume of 350 terabyte a day and more than 13,000 terabyte in our back up library.

Tom Raftery: Can you tell me what are the top issues you come across day to day in running your DataCenter, what are the big ticket items?

Jürgen Burkhardt: So one of the biggest problems we clearly have is the topic of asset management and the whole logistic process. If you have so many new servers coming in, you clearly need very, very sophisticated process, which allows you to find what we call the Purple Server, where is it, where is the special server? What kind of — what it is used for? Who owns it? How long is it already used? Do we still need it and all that kind of questions is very important for us.

And this is also very important from an infrastructure perspective, so we have so many stuff out there, if we start moving servers between locations or if we try to consolidate racks, server rooms and whatsoever, it’s absolutely required for us to know exactly where something is, who owns it, what it is used for etcetera, etcetera. And this is really one of our major challenges we have currently.

Tom Raftery: Are there any particular stories that come to mind, things issues that you’ve hit on and you’ve had to scratch your head and you’ve resolved them, that you want to talk about?

Jürgen Burkhardt: I think most people have a problem with their cooling capacity. Even if we are — we are running a very big data center. We have a long capacity down the other side. There was room for improvement. So what we did is we implemented a cool aisle containment system by ourselves.

So there are solutions available, you can purchase from various companies. So what we did is, so first of all we measured our power and cooling capacity and consumption in very detail, and on basis of that we figured out a concept to do that by ourselves.

So the first important thing is today I think it’s standard. We have to change our requisitions, especially in the DataCenter which is ten years old, and which now also got the premium certificate. That data center, the rack positions were back front, back front, back front and we had thousands of servers in that data center.

So what we are now doing, already did to some extent in that data center is, we had to change the rack positions front, front to implement the cold aisle containment system. And we did — so IT did that together with facility management. So we had a big project running to move surplus shutdown, racks, turn whole — the racks in whole rows, front to front and then built together with some external companies, it was very, very normal easy method. Buying stock in the next super market more or less, build the containment systems and that increased where we have implemented it the cooling capacity by 20%.

Tom Raftery: Is there anything else you want to mention?

Jürgen Burkhardt: Within the last three to four years we crashed against every limit you can imagine from the various type of devices which are on the — available on the market, because of our growth in size. The main driver for our virtualization strategy is the low utilization of our development and training servers. So what we are currently implementing is more or less a corporate cloud.

When a few years ago, we had some cost saving measures, our board said, you know what, we have a nice idea, we shutdown everything, which has a utilization below 5% and we said well, that might not be a good idea, because in that case we have to shutdown everything, more or less. And the reason if you imagine a server and an SAP running, system running on it and a database for development purpose, maybe a few developers are logging in, this is from a CPU utilization, you hardly see it, you understand.
So the normal consumption of the database and the system itself are creating most of the load and the little bit development of the developers is really not worth mentioning. And even if they are sometimes running some test cases, it’s not really a lot. The same is true for training, during the training sessions there is a high load on the systems.

But on the other side these systems are utilized maybe 15% or 20% maximum, because the training starts on Monday, stops at — from 9:00 to 5:00. Some trainings even go only two or three days. So there is a very low utilization. And that was the main reason for us to say, we need virtualization, we need desperately and we achieved a lot of savings with that now and currently we are already live with our corporate cloud.

And we are now migrating more and more of our virtual systems and also the physical systems which are now migrated to virtualization into the corporate cloud. With a fully automated self service system and a lot of functionality which allows us to park systems, unpark systems, create masters and also the customers by himself. This is very interesting and this really gives us savings in the area of 50% to 60%.

Tom Raftery: Okay Jürgen that’s been fantastic, thanks a million for coming on the show.

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By Tom Raftery – November 21, 2011

Logica and EdP’s smart grid trial in Évora

Energy management devices

Logica brought me to the pretty Portuguese town of Évora recently to check out the InovGrid project which they have been participating in, along with EdP and other partner companies.

InovGrid is an ambitious project to roll out smart grid technologies to six million customers across Portugal. Évora’s InovCity is the first stage of the project. There are 35,000 people living in Évora, almost all of whom have been issued with smart meters by now.

The smart meters are connected in realtime to in-home displays (like the one pictured above) which takes energy consumption readings every two seconds and plots it on the screen. It can display the usage data as kWh, CO2 or more tangibly, the € cost. If the home or business has an internet connection, this information can be viewed remotely on a computer or mobile device (as seen on the laptop on the right in the image above). Interestingly, there is two-way communication going on here, so if smart plugs are installed in the house, they can be controlled (on/off) from the in-home display, or remotely.

The information displayed on the in-home displays, and remotely, is not the same information which is sent to the utility for billing purposes. This may lead to some discrepancies in the € amount on the displays versus the amount on the bill at the end of the month. The smart meters send billing information to the utilities over Power Line Communications (with a GPRS backup). Even with the PLC connection, there is far too much data in 2 second reads, so a lower rate of reads is sent to the utility for billing purposes.

Interestingly, the in-home device shown above was installed in a coffee shop in Évora and it was possible to watch the fluctuations in the consumption graph in realtime as coffee was being made for customers. Also, the coffee shop realised €500 savings per annum in their energy bill when they examined the information from the device and realised they were not on the optimal tariff. It also demonstrated to them the savings to be had from turning off the coffee machine overnight, so the extra information from the device helped influence their behaviour.

EV Parking spot

EV Parking spot

Other than the smart meters, we were shown the information display in the town hall, which shows the realtime energy consumption of the building. This information is also supposed to be available on the town hall’s website for citizens to see remotely, though I failed to find it there (doubtless due to my lack of Portuguese!).

Other nice features on display were dedicated parking places for electric vehicles (EV’s), complete with charging stations as well as LED streetlights with motion sensors which dim the lights in the absence of people on the streets. The EV parking place was predictably empty due more to the general unavailability of EV’s than anything else. The LED streetlights though was interesting. Very few towns or cities have, as yet, embraced LED streetlights and yet 50% of a town’s energy spend can be on streetlights. LED lights can save 80-90% of the energy cost over traditional streetlights, they can report back their status (obviating the need to have staff checking for lighting failures) and they have a much longer lifetime, so they save on maintenance costs as well as energy.

It would be interesting to hear back from the InovCity people how much Évora is saving on lighting costs from the move to LED (even if only the energy savings) but even more interesting would be to try to see if the rollout of the smart meters and in-home displays has led to any sustained, per home, energy consumption reduction.

One last comment on this project – I can’t help but feel that the provision of in-home displays is an idea whose time has past. These days most people have access to a tablet, a smartphone or a computer where they can access this information. I suspect as the InovGrid project rolls out beyond the 35,000 inhabitants of Évora to rest of Portugal, the IHD’s will become at best, an added extra option, or quietly killed off.

Photo credits Tom Raftery

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By Tom Raftery – November 17, 2011

ArcelorMittal FCE roll out Organisational Risk Management software to unify maintenance processes

Organisational risk management (ORM) is the new hotness in the sustainability field. It is receiving increasing attention, as SAP’s Jeremiah Stone mentioned when I talked to him at SAP’s Sapphire/TechEd event last week. One assumes that it is receiving this increasing attention at least partly because that’s where the customer dollar is focussed right now.

What exactly is ORM? Organizational risk management is “risk management at the strategic level” according to the Software Engineering Institute – think of it as kind an amalgam of the traditional Environment, Health and Safety (EH&S) and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) sectors.

How do these fit into the sustainability agenda? Well, risk mitigation is all about reducing the risks of an adverse event occurring – one that either hurts people or the company reputation (or often both!). It does this by mandating procedures and processes with verifiable sign-offs. It also does this by scheduling maintenance and raising alerts when equipment goes out of tolerance. This properly scheduled maintenance of machinery will ensure it not only runs safer, but often will also mean it stays more fuel efficient. This can mean significant energy savings in organisations which use a lot of power.

While at SAP’s TechEd/Sapphire last week I spoke with Edwin Heene, who works with ArcelorMittal and is responsible for the rollout of their ORM software solution. I had a quick chat with him to camera about the project and why ArcelorMittal embarked on it.

Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi, everyone welcome to GreenMonk TV. We are at the SAP Sapphire event in Madrid, and with me I have Edwin Heene from ArcelorMittal. Edwin you have been involved in the organizational risk management project rollout or are involved in at the moment for ArcelorMittal. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Edwin Heene: So in ArcelorMittal Flat Carbon Europe we are doing a global organizational standardization project in maintenance, that including also the safety processes and this is something that we do in several countries namely eight countries in Flat Carbon Europe.

Tom Raftery: So maybe we should give it a bit of context first. Who are ArcelorMittal? You are a large steel company, but could you just give us a little bit of background about the company first?

Edwin Heene: ArcelorMittal is the largest steel producing company in the world doing — covering about 6% of the annual year production. Has a number of employees about 260,000 in 2010. And presence in Flat Carbon Europe because that’s the sector where — segment where I work in. It is covering eight different countries, and we have about 35 locations in Flat Carbon Europe.

Tom Raftery: Okay, so as I mentioned in the start you are in the middle of this organizational risk management software rollout, can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Edwin Heene: So this system we — in 2008 we selected the fact the solution has update to the support us with this harmonization and there we found out that there was a good supporting tool for operational risk management and safety processes namely the solution was PWCM –Work Clearance Management solution.

Tom Raftery: Okay, and you brought SAP in to help you in a kind of collaborative role in developing the application for yourselves.

Edwin Heene: Yeah, because in Flat Carbon Europe we had already a number of plans that are on good level of safety and managing the safety risks and so on in the operational part with some legacy systems, with a decision to go to one common system, the SAP system, we have to convince the other people with, which have already a good supporting IT tool to move over to SAP.

And therefore we found out that there were some lags still in the supporting SAP PWCM solution. So we had a number of meetings with Jeremiah Stone from SAP who is leading co-innovation programs in SAP and there we decided to, in order to close these gaps to provide these functionalities in standard SAP environment to step in a co-innovation program with SAP.

Tom Raftery: Okay and why roll it out — what was the reason behind the rollout of the application?

Edwin Heene: The reason behind the harmonization and standardization program in Flat Carbon Europe is first of all to improve the maintenance processes in effect implementing all the best practices that we have in several plants and you have a best practice in every single plant to absorb that in one common model, one common business model and implement that in all different plants. Throughout this implementation of best practices you have business results, operational results in every single plant. Benefiting of being in a large group and learning from each other, learning from the best practice from another group.

Tom Raftery: Excellent, Edwin that’s been great, thanks a million.

Edwin Heene: Thank you.

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By Tom Raftery – November 17, 2011

Data Center War Stories – Maxim Samo from UBS

Back at the start of the summer I mentioned that Sentilla had asked us to run a series of chats with data center practitioners to talk about their day-to-day challenges.

This was very much a hands-off project from Sentilla – I sourced all the interviewees, conducted all the interviews and am publishing the results without any Sentilla input or oversight. This had advantages and disadvantages – obviously, from an independence perspective, this was perfect but from a delivery point of view it was challenging. It turns out that data center practitioners are remarkably camera shy, so it far longer than anticipated to produce this series, however, finally I’m ready with the first of the series, with more to come every week in the coming weeks.

This first episode in the series is with Maxim Samo, who is responsible for managing the European data center operations of global financial services firm UBS.

Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone and welcome to GreenMonk’s Data Centers War Stories series, sponsored by Sentilla. This week’s guest is Maxim Samo who works for the Swiss financial services company UBS. Maxim, do you want to start off by telling us what you do for UBS and what the kind of size of your datacenter fleet is?

Maxim Samo: Yeah, I run the Swiss and European operation for UBS, at the moment we have five datacenters in Switzerland and three outside of Switzerland spread around Europe, the total size or capacity probably being around six megawatts.

Tom Raftery: Okay and what kind of age is the fleet, is it like you know the last five years or 10, or is that — it’s obviously a variety that you didn’t build all eight in the one go.

Maxim Samo: Right, it’s anywhere between — they were built anywhere between 1980 and 2004, there is a couple of colo’s that are probably newer than that, but yeah.

Tom Raftery: So if they were built starting in 1980, I mean I assume that this is one of the reasons why you think more in terms of power as supposed to space because your — they weren’t optimized around power at that time I’m sure.

Maxim Samo: Oh not at all, exactly. They were built with a density of around 300 watts per square meter or even less right, I mean they were mainframe datacenters and we kind of – well, we did some refurbishments in there and as a matter of fact one of those datacenters is undergoing a major renovation right now to increase the amount of power that we can put in there.

Tom Raftery: Power is obviously one of the more pressing issues you guys are running up against, but what are the other kind of issues you have in the datacenters in the day-to-day operations?

Maxim Samo: So the way our datacenters are built in Europe at least within UBS is that, we don’t have like big data halls, but we have a number of smaller rooms within the datacenter building and in order to be cost effective you know we don’t have every single network available in all the rooms, we don’t have every single storage device and storage network in terms of production storage or tester development storage available in all the rooms.

So some of our constraints or else or around that we have to — not only do we have to manage the capacity, but we have to figure out which rooms the servers come in and then try to get adequate forecasts of how much the business and the developers want to put into what datacenter rooms and try to juggle the capacity around that.

Tom Raftery: We are calling the show the Datacenter War Story. So, have you any interesting problems that you came across in the last number of years and resolved any interesting issues that you hit up against?

Maxim Samo: So, in terms of war stories I guess we are — one thing is we are going to have the interesting issue about switching the electrical network of the datacenter that is undergoing renovation and we are currently looking at the options of how we can do that.

One option would be that we would switch — well, that we would put both ups into utility bypass, runoff the utility, and then switch over the network, where of course you have the risk of a power blip coming through which takes down your datacenter. So, in order to mitigate that we are also talking about a full scale shutdown of the datacenter, which right now is being received very well by the people involved, so that’s going to be an interesting one.

So we had, actually very recently we had a very funny case where we — what we do is, we conduct black star tests, black star test is when you almost, you like pull the plug and see what happens, right. So you literally cut off the utility network, your ups will carry the power, the diesel generators will start and you make sure everything works smoothly.

The last time we did this test that was a week ago on the weekend when the diesel generator started it created so much smoke that a pedestrian out on the street actually called the fire department and we had the fire department come in and lot of people were panicking and asking what is going on, we have a fire in the datacenters, like no, we just tested our diesel generators, that was a very funny instance.

I can really remember a war story in terms of the datacenter going down luckily that has not happened for a very long time, we absolutely, we probably — well, we did have a partial failure at one point where pretty big power switch within the switch gear has failed and brought down one side of the power.

However, since most of our servers and IT equipment is dual power attachsed it did not have any impact on their production.

Tom Raftery: Great, that’s been fantastic. Max, thanks for coming on the show.

Maxim Samo: All right, thanks Tom.

Disclaimer – Maxim asked me to mention that any views he expressed in this video are his own, and not those of his employer, UBS AG.

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By Tom Raftery – November 14, 2011

Sustainability software update from SAP’s Jeremiah Stone

SAP invited me to attend their combined Sapphire/TechEd event in Madrid last week. While there I took the opportunity to have a chat with Jeremiah Stone to get an update on the state of play in sustainability solutions.

Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone welcome to GreenMonk TV. We are in Madrid for SAP’s SAPPHIRE event and with me I have Jeremiah Stone. Jeremiah, you are on the SAP sustainability team. What is your role there?

Jeremiah Stone: So, I’m a senior director for solutions management and what that means in SAP is that I’m responsible for the business cases for producing our products, so developing new products. And then I work with our key customers as well in making sure that our products continue to meet their needs and that we do quite a bit co-innovation with customers and that’s my team that tends to drive that as well with our strategic customers and so really managing the business case and then we build and execution, and rollout of products.

Tom Raftery: So there is a business case for sustainability?

Jeremiah Stone: Well, at SAP there sure is. It’s a interesting aspect I think of our sustainability case that people typically are surprised by is that every single one of our investments is actually a bottom up business case just like any other piece of software at SAP where you have to build the customer business case first. So really what is the customers tangible pain, how much are they spending to deal with that pain today, what are their alternatives, how much can we generate in terms of value for the customer with some development, and then is there a reasonable value capture for us, in other words can we charge the customer a reasonable amount of money to justify us investing in the software. And so we do that for every investment that we make and so that also helps the conversation of course from a business point of view because then we’ve done all that work upfront, we can go to the customer, we can explain the customer business case that we’ve developed and we can validate that and from them to make sure that there is a return on that investment and then they can treat it like any other IT investment. And the other thing, you know with sustainability at SAP is its embedded into our business and so when I’m competing for development resources I’m competing right next to the guys who are developing for HANA, the people that are developing for HR, people for financials, CRM et cetera. So we would, be really treated just as any line of business at SAP, we don’t get preferential treatment et cetera and then really is based upon business case for each investment that we make.

Tom Raftery: Cool. And what is the hot button topic for people right now in sustainability?

Jeremiah Stone: It’s a good question, I think right now we see you know phasing of a development of the market, it continues to be really around management of risk and compliance primarily in the safety of operations. So and that goes really there’s asset intensive and asset non-intensive industries, so I’ve customers in transportations and logistics, major airlines, looking at how they can be safe and that is a bottom line number for them. Obviously if they are damaging aircraft or whatever they are not going to be performing well and so that there is really a safety org from a compliance point of view, that is access to markets. So as public and governmental toleration of eco-toxicity of hazardous materials et cetera is declining, there is this more and more transparency around products and their constituent chemicals et cetera and substances.

The regulatory bounds and burden is going up and on companies to declare the substances in their products so that they can sell them in those markets. That’s primary driver skill, we definitely see energy management is the fastest growing area and that’s really energy and environmental resource management, so not just energy but you can think really sort of all of the inputs into the business whether that’s energy for other resources in other words very much you could think of it as a traditional SAP strength, you think around energy. Although, it is a different challenge as you know because there is the utility as well, involved in that and that’s somewhat complex, there is definitely demand for that, is one of the fastest grown, it’s not biggest business yet, but it is the fastest growing. And then we continue to see a smaller market, but still increasing around analytics, reporting strategy management, setting targets, managing to those and then reporting out to I don’t know the global reporting initiative et cetera on sustainability performance, but for the majority where we are making our money today with our product lines is really around that risk management and compliance activities.

Tom Raftery: Okay and the whole sustainability area is a relatively new business area, is it one that you see is going to be going big time, is it, I mean we’ve seen a jump in last couple of years just because companies started getting into it, but you know is it on a hockey stick or is it kind of plateaued or where about is it?

Jeremiah Stone: Well yeah, I mean it’s very rapidly growing market. We see the overall market size growing compound annual growth rate of around 18% to 20%, so it’s a pretty significant growth in the current spending environment. Lot of that’s because of loss control. So if you think of the current global environment, access to credit isn’t available, stability of financial market we’ve learned, interested in making capital investments if they can’t ensure that that capital investment will be safe.

Tom Raftery: Yeah.

Jeremiah Stone: So in ironic way you know really is that sort of resource constraint or fear of loss that’s driving sustainability as well from any investment. So it isn’t necessarily a, you know there is a joke even people when they spend money on software for you know greed, fear or aspiration, most people assume it’s aspirational in nature when people make sustainability investments, because you want a halo or improve your brand image which — there is some of that, but most of our customers it’s really around the loss management. And to a certain extent the — you know the ambition to grow your brand, grow your business. We do have customers like Solvay for example, I think you may have gotten to talk to them over here.

Tom Raftery: I’m going to see them this afternoon, yeah

Jeremiah Stone: Okay, so I mean they — you know, really say that they are more competitive as a result of the investments that they make in sustainability. So it is a growing, it is an evolution of some older lines of business in this case environment health and safety management that has been there for a very long time. And you know we invested and purchased data that’s strategic to us a couple of years ago but we are on a pretty furious trip to double the pre-acquisition revenue relatively soon. So it is a fast growing market, we are having a lot of success with it and you know we believe that it will continue to be a strategic fast growing market, so.

Tom Raftery: Fantastic. Thanks a million Jeremiah. That was great.

Jeremiah Stone: Thanks for having me Tom.

Disclaimer – SAP paid for most of my travel, food and accommodation expenses to attend this event.

by-sa

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By Tom Raftery – November 14, 2011

Smart meter electricity usage data and energy services

Senior citizen

Utility companies face significant challenges in the coming years, not least of which is the the need to increase revenues while helping customers reduce their consumption.

One trump card they will have is the data from their smart meter rollouts. This will enable them to offer energy services around the data which would not previously have been possible.

Simple examples of this are the ability to alert people if their consumption is about to tip them into a higher tariff band or, for people with holiday homes, a notification if the lights turn on when their property is supposed to be unoccupied.

These would be quite basic offerings – but with a little bit of thought one can imagine other higher value options.

Consider that according to the US Census Bureau:

The world’s 65-and-older population is projected to triple by midcentury, from 516 million in 2009 to 1.53 billion in 2050.

Further, there are currently 30 million solo-single households in the United States (more than the number of households containing married couples with children) and about one-third of these solo singles are men and women 65 years of age and older. The percentage is even higher in Europe.

Now, if I have an elderly relative living alone, wouldn’t it be a very useful service if I could receive a timely message from their utility company if there are deviations from the normal patterns of energy usage (if the lights aren’t turned off at 11pm or the coffee machine/kettle isn’t powered up at 8am)?

This kind of service should be quite straightforward for electricity utilities to provide once they start receiving the detailed energy usage data which smart meters will deliver. This will enable utilities to transition to becoming suppliers of energy services and open up entirely new revenue streams for them.

Photo credit gagilas

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By Tom Raftery – November 11, 2011

HP joins ranks of microserver providers with Redstone

Redstone server platform

The machine in the photo above is HP’s newly announced Redstone server development platform.

Capable of fitting 288 servers into a 4U rack enclosure, it packs a lot of punch into a small space. The servers are System on a Chip based on Calxeda ARM processors but according to HP, future versions will include “Intel® Atom™-based processors as well as others”

These are not the kind of servers you deploy to host your blog and a couple of photos. No, these are the kinds of servers deployed by the literal shedload by hosting companies, or cloud companies to get the maximum performance for the minimum energy hit. This has very little to do with these companies developing a sudden green conscience, rather it is the rising energy costs of running server infrastructure that is the primary motivator here.

This announcement is part of a larger move by HP (called Project Moonshot), designed to advance HP’s position in the burgeoning low-energy server marketplace.

Nor is this anything very new or unique to HP. Dell have been producing microservers for over three years now. In June and July of this year (2011) they launched the 3rd generations of their AMD and Intel based PowerEdge microservers respectively.

And it’s not just Dell, Seamicro has been producing Atom-based microservers for several years now. Their latest server, the SM10000-64 contains 384 processors per system in a 10U chassis with a very low energy footprint.

And back in April of this year Facebook announced its Open Compute initiative to open-source the development of vanity free, low cost compute nodes (servers). These are based on Intel and AMD motherboards but don’t be surprised if there is a shift to Atom in Open Compute soon enough.

This move towards the use of more energy efficient server chips, along with the sharing of server resources (storage, networking, management, power and cooling) across potentially thousands of servers is a significant shift away from the traditional server architecture.

It will fundamentally change the cost of deploying and operating large cloud infrastructures. It will also drastically increase the compute resources available online but the one thing it won’t do, as we know from Jevons’ Paradox, is it won’t reduce the amount of energy used in IT. Paradoxically, it may even increase it!

Photo credit HP

by-sa

Posted in energy efficiency.

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By Tom Raftery – November 2, 2011