1) We ended up monitoring 205 nodes in the official show network. They broke down as follows:

• 73 switches (Enterasys and Netgear),
• 4 routers (Enterasys),
• 28 power distribution units (APC),
• 5 IDSes (Enterasys Dragon),
• 20 environmental monitors (APC),
• 2 load balancers (Coyote Point),
• 2 VMware servers,
• 5 DNS and DHCP Servers (BlueCat Networks),
• 27 IP KVMs (Avocent),
• 27 IP Power Strips (Server Technologies),
• 1 Master Wireless Controller (Aruba Networks),
• 2 IP-PBX Boxes (Digium Asterisk),
• 4 Optical Taps (NetOptics),
• 1 Splunk server and
• 4 external WAN links (Qwest).

EM7 pulled data from all of these devices and delivered a single view of the data to the NOC.

2) Uptime for the network was 100%. That isn’t to say that there weren’t some device failures, but each of them was handled properly by the redundancy in the network and the show exhibitors and attendees saw no impact from these failures. This is a real testament to the design and build of the network. It’s hard enough to build a complicated network in two weeks, but then to keep it up and running 100% of the time in the wild west environment that is Interop, is really phenomenal.

3) The average monitored device in the show network didn’t even hit 10% CPU utilization. This is interesting because many items were virtualized using vmWare this year and yet, there was still a lot of hardware overhead available. (Maybe we should run Folding@Home on the show network?)

4) The show network was busy. By our calculation over 864 gigabytes of data was pulled in and 1.01 terabytes of data were pushed out of the WAN links in the 3 days that the show floor was open. That’s a sustained 56Mbps average, including off hours. At peak the show network hit about 102Mbps of WAN utilization.

5) In the three days the show floor was open the network and its supporting NOC gear used 600 kwh (kilowatt hours) per day. As a comparison, the town of Rockport, Missouri (1,300 residents) uses about 35,600kwh per day. On a side note, they are completely powered by wind power and in fact sell 3,000,000kwh per year back to the local power utility. I’m thinking next year Interop should bring some wind turbines as part of the InteropNet kit?

Next I’ll be doing some analysis on the trouble tickets opened. I think it’ll be interesting to see the kinds of issues that vendors experienced and how quickly the InteropNet staff handled them. Look for that in the next couple of days.

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Actually one of the most entertaining panel discussions at the Hosting Transformation Summit in London this week was titled Eco-Efficient Datacenters: Where’s the Money? Panel members included Jeff Lowenberg (The Planet), Michael Winterson (Equinix), Lex Coors (InterXion BV) and Tony Day (APC). The panel was moderated by Andy Lawrence at the 451 Group.

Judging by the debate, the European hosting companies have a fight on their hands keeping the politicians out of the datacenter. With green issues being even higher on the political agenda than in North America, and the vast energy requirements of modern data centers becoming more widely known, there are some legislators and “Eurocrats” sniffing an opportunity to add to the hoster’s power headaches. Never mind the fact that escalating power hosts are incentive enough for these companies to be as efficient as possible.

The panel discussion ranged widely between big picture green issues, and the technical challenges of retrofitting older data centers to be less power hungry. There are many incremental improvements to be had, but Tony Day pointed out that the biggest and most immediate savings are to be had simply by running our data centers hotter.

The American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers say data centers can operate at 77F. Most modern rack-mounted computers can run happily a long way higher than that, and yet most data centers are cooled to the high sixties (many of our customers now use EM7 to trend the environmental fluctuations across their data centers using environmental probes as well as readings from the servers themselves).

For the hosting companies this is a matter of educating their customers, so that raising the data center temperatures is seen as a welcome green move rather than a lowering of quality of service.

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• 73% said Green IT was important
• 16% said it wasn’t
• 9% admitted they didn’t know what the agency’s policy was

The follow up question (and the responses) was the kicker though:

• Only 13% had tools/solutions for Green IT in place
• An additional 13% had plans this year to implement
• 55% didn’t know or had no plans to implement

Call me a skeptic, but the environment, and what people do to “save it”, must be pretty high on the list of things people pay lip service to. 3 out of 4 people said Green IT is important – but most people seemed to be responding from a personal perspective. I mean, who’s gonna come out and say “I don’t care about the environment”? In our conversations at the show, there was a lot of talk about energy-saving solutions that people personally used, but very few institutional examples.

Not to say that companies aren’t doing it. I was just talking to a Gartner analyst who had a customer with 2500 servers and ended up virtualizing them 6:1 with a resulting annual power savings of $1.1 million. Very cool. And of course, Opus Interactive, whose data center is 100% wind-powered. But so far, these guys are the exception and not the rule.

I was reading recently about IBM’s Big Green initiative, launched last year. There are many different components to this plan, but their recent announcement on new power/energy monitoring capabilities was pretty interesting. IBM partnered with companies like APC, Eaton, Matrikon, OSIsoft and VMware, to come up with a way for Tivoli customers to collect data from partner products in the power and cooling space.

So what’s going to drive adoption of Green IT? The cost savings – especially as energy costs rise? A more institutional approach to doing what’s right for the environment? Will it be a side benefit of the push to virtualize? Another article on how “hot” Green IT is? More vendors baking energy/power management features into their products? (Which I think is a great thing, BTW)

What do you think?

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• 73% said Green IT was important
• 16% said it wasn’t
• 9% admitted they didn’t know what the agency’s policy was

The follow up question (and the responses) was the kicker though:

• Only 13% had tools/solutions for Green IT in place
• An additional 13% had plans this year to implement
• 55% didn’t know or had no plans to implement

Call me a skeptic, but the environment, and what people do to “save it”, must be pretty high on the list of things people pay lip service to. 3 out of 4 people said Green IT is important – but most people seemed to be responding from a personal perspective. I mean, who’s gonna come out and say “I don’t care about the environment”? In our conversations at the show, there was a lot of talk about energy-saving solutions that people personally used, but very few institutional examples.

Not to say that companies aren’t doing it. I was just talking to a Gartner analyst who had a customer with 2500 servers and ended up virtualizing them 6:1 with a resulting annual power savings of $1.1 million. Very cool. And of course, Opus Interactive, whose data center is 100% wind-powered. But so far, these guys are the exception and not the rule.

I was reading recently about IBM’s Big Green initiative, launched last year. There are many different components to this plan, but their recent announcement on new power/energy monitoring capabilities was pretty interesting. IBM partnered with companies like APC, Eaton, Matrikon, OSIsoft and VMware, to come up with a way for Tivoli customers to collect data from partner products in the power and cooling space.

So what’s going to drive adoption of Green IT? The cost savings – especially as energy costs rise? A more institutional approach to doing what’s right for the environment? Will it be a side benefit of the push to virtualize? Another article on how “hot” Green IT is? More vendors baking energy/power management features into their products? (Which I think is a great thing, BTW)

What do you think?

ShareThis

• 73% said Green IT was important
• 16% said it wasn’t
• 9% admitted they didn’t know what the agency’s policy was

The follow up question (and the responses) was the kicker though:

• Only 13% had tools/solutions for Green IT in place
• An additional 13% had plans this year to implement
• 55% didn’t know or had no plans to implement

Call me a skeptic, but the environment, and what people do to “save it”, must be pretty high on the list of things people pay lip service to. 3 out of 4 people said Green IT is important – but most people seemed to be responding from a personal perspective. I mean, who’s gonna come out and say “I don’t care about the environment”? In our conversations at the show, there was a lot of talk about energy-saving solutions that people personally used, but very few institutional examples.

Not to say that companies aren’t doing it. I was just talking to a Gartner analyst who had a customer with 2500 servers and ended up virtualizing them 6:1 with a resulting annual power savings of $1.1 million. Very cool. And of course, Opus Interactive, whose data center is 100% wind-powered. But so far, these guys are the exception and not the rule.

I was reading recently about IBM’s Big Green initiative, launched last year. There are many different components to this plan, but their recent announcement on new power/energy monitoring capabilities was pretty interesting. IBM partnered with companies like APC, Eaton, Matrikon, OSIsoft and VMware, to come up with a way for Tivoli customers to collect data from partner products in the power and cooling space.

So what’s going to drive adoption of Green IT? The cost savings – especially as energy costs rise? A more institutional approach to doing what’s right for the environment? Will it be a side benefit of the push to virtualize? Another article on how “hot” Green IT is? More vendors baking energy/power management features into their products? (Which I think is a great thing, BTW)

What do you think?

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