New Paradigm Shift in Data Center Deployments

Virtualization, Collaboration and Data Centers

Two versions of a new approach to data centers have recently come onto the market, and both bear scrutiny. They could change the way we do business, open new markets, and offer a boost to developing countries in their efforts to compete globally.

Constantly increasing computing needs mean constantly expanded data centers, and increased operating costs. Completely contained and virtualized data centers may be the answer.

Two companies are leading this innovation: Sun Microsystems’ Project Blackbox, and Rackable’s ICE Cube are already marketing portable data centers. Google holds the patent.* In two to four months—versus a traditional five year projected build out—a containerized data center can be deployed to developing countries, or placed on high rise buildings, in parking lots, or anywhere in the world where chilled water and power are readily available. Virtualized and built into steel cargo containers, they can replace, enhance, or extend a traditional data center. Instead of having to wire all the racks yourself, the units are prepared so that simply plugging them in and pressing a button will get a portable data center running quickly.

Both companies’ data centers appear to solve the issues of space, energy constraints, reduction of utility costs, and meet the requirements of Web 2.0. Business Organizations are now in a position to dispense with the high costs associated with building and housing hundreds of floor-to-ceiling racked computers, cables under raised flooring, storage systems, trays and cooling systems.

A data center in a shipping container should be attractive to businesses. Features include

• Rapid deployment: two to four months to go online
  
• Economic Feasibility: Financing available with 12 to 60 month financing options
  
• Mobility: Set up anywhere with sufficient electricity and water for cooling
  
• Flexibility: Expandable
  
• High Density: Requires less space
  
• Environmental Factors: Less energy; no need for air conditioning.

Among the possible uses for portable data centers are: field deployment to remote areas, transitional use during traditional data center expansions, rapid increase of capacity for fast-growing start-ups, and as mobile command centers for disaster, military, or disaster relief projects.

Paradigm Shift or Fad?
While portable data centers are stirring discussion, so far only a few have been deployed. Sun's Project Blackbox boasts an installation at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Palo Alto, California, and another in Russia. According to Sun officials, Russia is planning to acquire eight more.

Rackable, Sun's chief competitor in the field, has shipped three units of its new ICE Cube data center ‘in a can’ to existing customers, and expects to ship three more units to federal customers by mid-2008. ICE Cube is a second iteration of Rackable's Concentro portable data center, offering a denser server environment and the option of a 20-foot container size.

OVERVIEW

Project Blackbox
Sun’s Project Blackbox houses about 15 metric tons of computer hardware in a steel cargo container, capable of being shipped, airlifted, and hoisted by crane. The Blackbox needs no air cooling. It engenders very high-density computing capacity for more than 700 CPUs, 2000 cores, or 8000 compute threads. As self-contained as a laptop, a typical configuration can provide 146 teraflops of CPU power, store 2 petabytes of data and provide seven terabytes of memory for the processors. Blackbox can accommodate any kind of equipment, including that of competitors, but it must conform to the rack specifications—19" wide, 30.75" deep, including handles, bezels, etc., and front-to-back cooling. It's scalable, and uses standard components. Price incentives will be available to encourage ordering equipment from Sun. Sun can provide the entire solution, including power equipment, chillers, site preparation, etc., through their Professional Solutions Services; or customers can chose to do some or most of the preparation and installation work themselves.

Not just a container with racks, Blackbox is highly upgraded with plumbing and electrical to operate and cool up to 200kW worth of equipment. Customers must also procure a water chiller and necessary power equipment. Pricing begins at $300,000 to $400,000.

ICE Cube
Rackable's ICE Cube 'data center in a can' is already making the claim that it can do more processing and store more data than Sun's Blackbox, while reducing cooling requirements. It comes in a full size (40 foot) or half size (20 foot) shipping container. The full size can hold 28 racks (1400U) of servers totaling 2,800 quad-core Intel Xeons, or 4.1 petabytes of storage that can be mixed and matched. This is four times more server racks or almost three times more disk storage than Sun's Blackbox. Rackable also claims an 80 percent cooling reduction, as compared to a 20 percent reduction over a comparable data center from Sun. ICE Cube uses DC power technology and Rackable Systems’ low wattage servers and storage, as well as self-contained cooling technology. Rackable also put an additional "green" spin on its new offering, noting that ICE Cube "diminishes geographic barriers to alternative energy sources," giving companies the option to place a portable data center next to a windmill farm, solar array or close to hydro power sources.

Starting price for ICE Cube is $750,000. A fully populated ICE Cube can be designed, built and delivered in a matter of weeks.

Benefits
Small and developing countries can skip the five-year, expensive build out of traditional data centers. Portable data centers are:

• environmentally friendly: delivers extreme energy, space, performance efficiencies and liquid cooling
  
• energy selective: can be relocated to areas where energy is inexpensive, as new cooling technologies replace the necessity for air conditioning
  
• temporary set up: can be used for quick Web 2.0 company build-outs, for recovery work after natural or man-made disasters, or can be used for advanced military applications
  
• expandable: can increase capacity of existing traditional datacenters, stand-alone, or be coupled with additional portable datacenters
  
• reduced building costs: inexpensive materials, decreased labor time, eliminates needs of planning and design, five percent of the size of traditional corporate data center, and available as needed, within a few months of order
  
• secure: built-in security systems and GPS
  
• ‘ruggedized’ for easy shipping, can be airlifted to oil rigs and positions on tall buildings, stackable in warehouses
  
• system-ready with few additions needed: power, water and network bandwidth.

The future looks rosy. Microsoft's James Hamilton, who was general manager of the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services team before joining the Live Core effort, recently made two presentations discussing modular data centers' ability to provide economies of scale for Software as a Service (SaaS). Hamilton describes a distributed network of portable data centers as "an idea whose time has come…this architecture transforms data centers from static and costly behemoths into inexpensive and portable lightweights…. Multiple smaller data centers, regionally located, could prove to be a competitive advantage."

This bears consideration. Do portable data centers represent a new way business will be done? Will this bring more business to developing countries, or will we see western businesses using the cost savings to keep jobs at home?

* According to an October 10, 2007, Arstechnica.com article by Jeremy Reimer, Google was recently granted the patent, and sought it so that they can continue to “manage its own internal services as well as possibly offering competitive VoIP and video-on-demand solutions without interference from the big ISPs.” Rackable executives also briefly addressed Google's recent patent award for a modular portable data center. Company officials said they had reviewed the patent and it was not a direct issue, saying "we are confident we do not infringe, nor do they infringe on us."

Arshia Tayyab Meets Nobel Prize Winner Mohammad Yunus

CCI's Arshia Tayyab recently had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Muhammad Yunus, managing director of the Grameen Bank. Yunus’ vision is the total eradication of poverty from the world. “Grameen,” according to Yunus, “is a message of hope, a program for putting homelessness and destitution in a museum so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long.”

“Meeting Muhammad Yunus was a thrill,” said Tayyab. “He told his story about Grameen Bank.” A former professor of economics, he is famous for his successful application of the concept of microcredit, the extension of small loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans.

“He started by lending $27 to a group of people. At first, he used a local bank, which was sure that this idea would fail because people would not return the money,” said Tayyab. “Little by little, however, he was able to lend small amounts to an increasing number of the poor. He found that they were responsibly repaying the loans. But as he became more successful in this venture, the bank he was working through made the loans more difficult to obtain, so he applied to open a bank himself. It took two years to get all the paperwork arranged with the government, and the result was Grameen Bank.”

His work is a fundamental rethink on the economic relationship between the rich and the poor, their rights and their obligations. The World Bank recently acknowledged that “this business approach to the alleviation of poverty has allowed millions of individuals to work their way out of poverty with dignity.”

The lighthearted Yunus joked about the fact that Grameen Bank does everything the opposite of what a conventional bank does.

“Conventional banks give money to the rich; Grameen Bank gives money to the poor. Conventional banks want collateral; Grameen Bank does not require collateral. Conventional banks give money to men; Grameen Bank gives money to the women. Grameen bank is owned by the people who have the loans. Ninety-seven percent of the owners are women,” he said.

He also told the story of the beggar program at the bank, which in its first wave, quickly converted 10,000 beggars into sales people.

“In Bangladesh, beggars go door to door asking for money,” said Yunus. “The bank now provides them with something to sell, effectively making them into entrepreneurs. Originally, the program required each bank officer to support one beggar in an effort to get him or her off the street. The program was so effective that bank employees now each support four beggars. The result is that, to date, 27,000 beggars are now on their way to self-employment.”

“It was such a pleasure to meet him,” said Tayyab, “and speak to him in our common language, Hindi. He told me that he was in San Diego last week, and the next time he is in San Diego, he will connect with me. He was wearing traditional clothes, which were nice to see.”

Arshia Tayyab meets Mr. and Mrs. Kofi Annan

Arshia Tayyab met with Mr and Mrs Kofi Annan recently. Since his retirement from his work at the United Nations, they live in Geneva, Switzerland. Tayyab and Kofi Annan share a mutual interest in the improvement of the economies of developing countries. A former secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan was co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize.

“Kofi Annan told me that he became Secretary-General (SG) of the United Nations on Friday, December 13, not an auspicious day,” said Tayyab. “He had to deal with a board of 192 members. He joked that ‘God gets to work alone and has the veto. God does not have to have 192 members agree. God gets things done.’” Annan added that ‘SG sometimes stands for scapegoat.’ Mrs. Annan listened intently to her husband and smiled."

They talked about Tayyab’s father, who has worked with Benazir Bhutto of the Pakistan Peoples Party; and on UN initiatives. He has also worked in press, radio and television in Pakistan. Tayyab asked whether Annan had spoken to Bhutto recently, but he had not. “She is probably very busy now,” said Annan. “The situation in Pakistan is very sensitive.”

Annan’s three main interests are: human rights, labor issues, and environmental issues. He said that the main risks and threats of the twenty-first century are war, violence and civil war, poverty, nuclear and biological weapons, terrorism, and international organized crime.


“There is no security without development and no development without security,” he said. “With prevailing conditions in Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, and Syria, the world cannot afford another military war in Iran. Oil prices might go over 100 dollars and the world economy will be impacted.”

Tayyab was pleased to have met Annan. “I think he is one man who understands international relations like I do. You only truly understand when you have to live and breathe it,” according to Tayyab.

Tayyab is president and CEO of CCI-Worldwide, a privately-held consulting company that assists clients in forming organizational globalization teams capable of reviewing twenty-first century IT requirements for outsourcing and off-shore projects. A frequent industry spokesperson, Tayyab has advised the Pakistan Software Board and the U.S. Government. She has been interviewed by Pakistan TV, Pakistan radio and newspapers and other publications on her international efforts. She has been identified as one of the top Information Technology professionals by “Who’s Who in Information Technology.” She speaks English, German, Hindi, and Urdu, reads and writes Arabic, and has a working knowledge of French and Italian.

Google Docs vs. Microsoft Office: An International Perspective

Google, in a challenge to Microsoft, has recently released its web-based office suite, Google Docs, and is offering it for free. Developing countries stand to benefit from the competition. In the same way that cell phones have solved the problem of building costly wide area network line infrastructure for customers in developing countries, these same customers will employ wireless Internet networks and free Internet applications to their advantage.

Because Google Docs is web-based, users can collaborate on a document from their desks world-wide, save the document on the web, and access it from anywhere the Internet is available. They can save time because the need for emailing back and forth is eliminated. Google Docs accepts most common file formats, including DOC, XLS, ODT, ODS, RTF, CSV, and PPT; which means that it accepts Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, among others. It offers all the basics for creating documents, including bulleted lists, sorting by columns, adding tables, images, comments, formulas, changing fonts and more.

Non-profits and missionary workers are expected to quickly take advantage of this new Internet tool. For example, Summer Institute of Linguistics International (SILI) has Linguists all over Africa translating the Bible into several different languages. Their collaborators in Africa cannot afford Microsoft Office license fees, but the free Google Docs application makes it possible to collaborate and make full use of the Internet. This is also a great tool for journalists and other business travelers who need to collaborate on documents in different regions, languages or time zones. At this writing, Google Docs supports the following languages: Danish, Czech, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Norwegian, Swedish, Thai, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

According to its Terms and Conditions, Google Docs expects to be supported by advertising revenues and may display ads and promotions targeted to the content of information stored on its servers. It is expected that Google Docs’ largest growth, development and revenues will be seen within the next couple of years. Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced its competitor to Google Docs: Microsoft Office Live Workspace. Rather than offer a web-based version of all of its office products, Office Live Workspace will be an extension of Microsoft’s leading desktop applications for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software, and will continue its licensing fees approach to profits.

History has seen the demise of other, free or less expensive word processing applications, such as Word Perfect. Microsoft has a history of aggressively competing in price and licensing terms to discourage software pirating and to expand their market share. An example of such efforts is the Unlimited Potential $3 dollar initiative.

As a result, Microsoft still dominates the market. Microsoft is also promoting a series of new technologies under its virtualization umbrella to address some of the issues created by the current need for a desktop system to run its office suite. Soft Grid is an example of this, wherein applications are de-coupled from operating systems to make them mobile and stateless.

Web-based applications not only appear to represent the future; at some level they also solve the problem of software piracy. To be viable, Google Docs must win international market share. According to eBay CEO Meg Whitman, revenues from international markets are now larger than domestic revenues.

In dealing with emerging international markets, it is important to realize that price and accessibility and brand recognition are not the only driving forces. Companies must also contend with the ‘We have always done it this way and we will make up our own mind’ attitude. The developing country’s consumer response to a more personal touch and a trust in the company can lead to market domination.

Google's advantage is that it is trusted by the consumer, and is able to launchttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifh functional products in a timely manner. In order for Google Docs to win market share and become the universal application, they must expand their marketing quickly and effectively across the globe. At present, the Google search engine leads in the USA and Japan, but market share in Russia still goes to Yandex; in South Korea, Naver leads; and in China, Baidu commands, so Google cannot rely on the leverage of its search engine to promote the suite internationally. However, effective marketing of Google Docs can lead to the search engine's domination of the markets where they lag behind. If that happens, Google Docs will be ready to dominate.

It should be interesting to keep an eye on how this competition between Microsoft and Google develops internationally.

***This article was produced by Computer Consultants International, Inc. If you liked this article, check out our web site to assess how we can serve your needs.