So I admit it .. at heart I'm a geek.  I love geeky things.. High performance computing, workstation applications that do dynamic 3D modelling, HDTV.  But I am also a recovering academic.. I have studied and taught marketing and strategy for about10 years.. Love that too.

Now.. I spend a great deal of my time.. travelling around and talking to people about the really cool things they do, and how intel might help them.  So.. yep.. I'm a wandering geek.  Last year: Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, All over the US, London, Paris, Hamburg, Barcelona, Munich, etc.. Mostly northern hemisphere... have to work on that.

I am thrilled to see the amazing things people are doing with our technology.  the guy modelling race cars, the folks making football helmets safer (met Drew Brees at SC10), the folks who are reinventing medicine, finding new sources of energy (and under utilized old ones).. Weather modelling and forecasting in the pacrim ... someday someone will take on snow removal in boston with HPC... but not today.

I was really happy to see Dr. Stephen Wheat get listed as a person to watch in HPC.  I assume HPCwire meant that metaphorically...  While somewhat visually unpretentious, Dr. Wheat is a passionate advocate for his industry, his company and his country.  There are interesting people to FOLLOW in this industry.. I am blessed to work with a cadre of them.

Congrats Dr. Wheat.. see you around the world.

photo credit: Tom Metzer.. "A Nice night in Tokyo" Spargo left.. Geek right

What do the phrases “My datacenter power bill is too high” and “We have an energy crisis in our data center” have in common?  The answer is that each gets the meaning of the words POWER and ENERGY wrong. The words ENERGY and POWER are so commonly misused it can lead to confusion what people are actaully talking about. I thought I’d write down some thoughts about what they mean, or should mean, to the CIO.

Why should the CIO care? Because both POWER and ENERGY drive data center Total cost of Ownership (TCO) along parallel, but different tracks. Understanding the difference helps with prudent usage to distinguish different cost drivers. You'd do one thing to fix a power problem in a data center, and quite another to reduce energy costs.

Why does the CIO care about POWER?  Because POWER drives Capital Cost. Power is (roughly) how many electrons you are pushing through wires, into transistors and ultimately turning into heat that needs to be dissipated. More electrons means more POWER. The greater the POWER, the bigger the substation, the more capacity your UPS system will need, the more wiring infrastructure you need and, likely, the more servers you will be installing. The greater the POWER, the more air handling equipment you will need. Think of the cost of POWER as they cost of capacity; this typically runs $5 to $15/Watt for a modern data center. The catch? Once you buy the capacity, you have it (and pay for it) whether you use it or not. On the other hand, if you run out of capacity you’ll need to buy more, which is expensive and possibly disruptive to business.

What does the CIO care about ENERGY? Because your ENERGY bill is likely the biggest operational cost line item for your data center. People often use the rule of thumb like “a Watt’s a buck.” It’s a nonsense statement, but what they likely mean is that a Watt consumed over a year (which equates to 8.8kWh of ENERGY) times a nominal ENERGY cost of $0.11/kWh is $0.97 - about a buck. Unlike power you only pay for the ENERGY you use. So for instance, by refreshing your data center with more energy efficient modern servers, you should see a big decrease in your ENERGY bill even if your power infrastructure remains unchanged.

This kind of thinking can help us decode words like Power Efficiency (which, when substituted for energy efficiency, I've never liked) and Energy Efficiency (which has a well defined meaning). In the above context, Power Efficiency for a data center might reflect something like how much of the (paid for) power infrastructure is actually being used. A metric for stranded capacity. Energy Efficiency is well defined as the amount of work produced by your data center per the energy being consumed (and paid for).

So there you have it. ENERGY and POWER. Although often used interchangeably in the vernacular, they have, in reality, very different meanings. Some might say the difference is splitting hairs. But the reality is they contribute in very different ways to the cost structure of the data center. And I would argue that being precise about what we mean when it comes to the cost structure of a multi-million dollar data center is far from an academic exercise.

So that’s why the difference between ENERGY and POWER matter to the CIO.

Does that make sense? Did I get it right?

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CERN openlab is a framework for evaluating and integrating cutting-edge IT technologies and services in collaboration with industry, focusing on future versions of the World-Wide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid* (WLCG*). Working closely with leading industrial players, CERN acquires early access to technology before it’s available for the general computing market segment.

CERN openlab recently tested an Intel® Xeon® processor E7 4870-based server for use with its Large Hadron Collider* (LHC*) and infrastructure services and found a significant leap in performance. The Intel Xeon processor E7-4870 delivered throughput gains of up to 39 percent when using HEPSPEC06 benchmark. Energy efficiency also increased by up to 39 percent.

“We count heavily on continued improvements in throughput per watt to satisfy the ever-growing demands of the physicists associated with the Large Hadron Collider and its four experiments,” explained Sverre Jarp, CTO of CERN openlab.

To learn more, download our new CERN openlab business success story. As always, you can find more like this on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page.

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

I’ve  been doing a fair amount of travel for speaking lately for speaking engagements. One of the great things about all that time on the road is getting direct feedback and information about what people are thinking about.

One of the areas I’ve been helped is in crystallizing some ideas about actionable  priorities for fixing data center energy efficiency. Most of the problems aren’t really all that new, but I think we sometimes get hung up on different interpretations of the same message. So I worked with some folks to get a kind of “simple” mantra we can all remember.

What did we come up with? Organize, Modernize, and Optimize.

Let me talk about the motivation and thinking for each one:

Organize: One of the biggest problems (still!) in the data center is getting started. Making just a simple change to organization responsibility of ensure data center owners are responsible for the site energy consumption is probably the most impactful long term change a CEO or CIO can make. Beyond that, measuring costs, power consumption, and data center productivity are about all you need to start making the right decisions.

Modernize: The next step is to make sure the IT equipment in the data center is a efficient as possible. In many cases, this in and of itself can make a tremendous difference in energy consumption. For instance Television Suisse Romande just reduced the number of servers by about 50% through consolidation.

Optimize: The last big step is making the entire data center run as efficiencly as possible. Why do this last? Well, you can’t really optimize it if you can’t measure it, so you need to get organized. And if you have missed the opportunity to reduce the number of servers by 50%, why take 10% off your PUE when, in a few months when you do need to replace those servers, you’ll just have to do the work again. For example in the Datacenter2020 collaboration the results indicated cooling did not need to be as high as initially anticipated.

So there you have it. Three priorities for data center optimization that you can remember:

• Organize
• Modernize
• Optimize

Your call to action as CIO: don’t let your people talk to you about progress on the second or third step until you are comfortable with progress on the preceding one. It will dilute accountability and results.

Over the past decade I have worked with many of the great technologists and companies of the x86 Virtualization era on developing new innovations in Virtualization technology. This work has been very rewarding in introducing new technologies Intel VT, Intel VT for Connectivity and Intel VT for Directed I/O, along with a host of lesser known but equally important virtualization technologies from Intel. I have seen the rapid increase in the BFBC (Bigger, Faster, Better, Cheaper) technologies to improve performance of virtualization technologies while delivering industry breakthroughs in data center and client efficiency.  During this time many of us began to research the “Next Big Thing”, now known as Cloud Computing. At the time of many of these discussions on how to enable “Cloud Computing” some of us argued that Cloud Computing was merely an extension of the Virtualization “foundation”, the next phase in Virtualization BFBC, if you will. However, as we begin to embark on the next decade in computing I believe now, we were amiss. Cloud computing is not merely an evolutionary step in the development of virtualization technologies; it is a paradigm shift in compute architecture development. Let me explain why I believe building a “virtualization foundation” was a single step in a direction, not a foundational element. More precisely, virtualization is a single step on our Computing journey, one of many that has become another secret to unearth.

At the core value of virtualization lays utilization of system resources. Many of the key virtualization technologies provide increased efficiency in the use of more CPU cores, more I/O bandwidth, more memory channels and reducing performance overheads of the hypervisors needed to effectively deploy virtualization technologies.  In essence, BFBC for the many-core era in which we live today. To deliver efficiency in compute, the industry led by Intel, has delivered more compute, memory and I/O capabilities with each generation of our technologies. In some cases, our competition has led the way and Intel has worked quickly to catch up…..though I certainly believe we have been leading for the last several years. However, utilization design methodologies can result in unintended consequences. Storage replication, virtual machine management and rapid application deployment can create their own series of expense for IT organizations that previously had a “firmer” grasp on these issues in the Client Server era (i.e. One Server, One O/S, and One Application). Did the industry intend to create these new concerns when we developed the initial hypervisor and VM management technologies? Not at Intel, nor most of the industry leaders whom I have the privilege to work with every day. Yet unintended consequences, lead to new opportunities, new challenges and in this case I believe a whole new era of Computing.

Despite investment markets “irrational exuberance” with all things Cloud there are some fundamental “truths” which the investment community has gotten correct. Cloud Computing is a VERY BIG DEAL. Cloud computing will change the way in which data centers are deployed for the next decade. In the coming years, Cloud Computing and virtualization will change the way in which clients and applications migrate from hardware platform to hardware platform. I believe Intel Architecture has a distinct advantage in our programming flexibility to scale from handheld to Data Center. However, despite Intel’s Vision, Investment and commitment to Cloud computing our work will go far beyond virtualization and utilization technologies. Our journey (an overused term in Cloud by the way) has just begun. Cloud is going to force us to reexamine ourselves as a company, and reinvent ourselves in what is increasingly, as Intel CEO Paul Otellini has made clear, a Compute Continuum. Is that enough? Is it sufficient to deliver seamless efficiency of Virtual Machines to migrate from handhelds to Data Centers? For all users around the world (over 4 billion by the end of this decade, read previous blog on predictions for the next decade) to access their User environments regardless of the manufacturer, regardless of the device, regardless of the network topology? Is that Cloud Computing? Well…it’s a start.

Like Virtualization, Cloud Computing’s next generation of solutions and technologies will have unintended consequences that will continue to force us to reexamine our design methodologies in silicon, software and systems management. These unintended consequences and the investments in research and development to examine their effects on the Compute Continuum will determine Cloud Computing’s future history. BFBC has been an industry trait; it has been a key driver to our growth, success and profitability….beyond Cloud Computing, beyond virtualization, beyond Moore’s Law, beyond Metcalfe’s Law, lies a new frontier in the Compute Continuum that will once again force us to examine that our tenuous “foundation” was fleeting and to move forward…one step at a time.

Let me know what you think, your thoughts, comments and opinion are always welcome.....