Stephenmccarron.com

26.03.2009

A new State computer server strategy could reduce CO2 emissions by 18,000 tonnes.

As the emergency budget looms, and, with the Irish Government looking to cut spending, there is an opportunity for the State to save between €20m and €30m, as well as reduce carbon emissions by 18,000 tonnes, if it commits to an overhaul of its IT systems.

Right now, the average server in any business or State department operates at around 10pc capacity, and many organisations keep several servers, each for specific functions such as email, web hosting, accounts, sales and human resources.

A new revolution is sweeping the computing world under the term ‘virtualisation’, which allows firms to own fewer servers, spread the load and create ‘virtual’ machines to handle a sudden spike in demand. So, instead of seven machines running at 10pc capacity each, organisations can have two servers running at 50–60pc capacity.

The impact of this means that organisations require fewer servers, reducing maintenance and electricity costs significantly as well as the environmental impact.

Globally, computer emissions are estimated to account for 2pc of CO2 emissions, equivalent to the impact of the airline industry.

A further revolution in ‘cloud computing’, whereby IT infrastructure can be accessed remotely over the internet to internet data centres rather than in-house, could pave the way for further cost savings.

A parliamentary question tabled by Fine Gael’s spokesperson for Small Business and Labour Affairs, Damien English TD, last month to every minister revealed that there are an estimated 4,608 servers across Irish State departments, including 52 in the Department of the Taoiseach, 154 in the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, 1,288 within the HSE, 376 in the Department of Agriculture and 510 in the Department of Justice.

A subsequent question about whether any of these departments intend to deploy virtualisation to reduce the number of servers, found only one department — the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources under Minister Eamon Ryan TD — had plans to move to virtualisation.

Data centre expert Stephen McCarron of Dublin-based Hosting365 has looked at the number of servers currently being run by the Irish Government, and he estimates the Government could save the Exchequer at least €23m per annum.

“The running costs of these servers would be €23m a year just in maintenance; this ignores the cost of buying the machines and housing them securely.

“If you are running 4,600 servers, the electricity bill alone to keep them switched on and cooled would be €7m per annum. So, the Government is paying €500,000 a month to run these servers.”

The environmental impact of this, McCarron reckons, could be enormous.

“This would be the equivalent of a small town’s worth of CO2 emissions. There would be 18,000 tonnes of carbon dumped every year by the Government’s own IT infrastructure. If the Government moved to cloud computing, the output of carbon could be reduced to 200 tonnes per annum, he says.

English says the environmental and budgetary aspects of the current swathes of Government servers need to be addressed.

“These things are like smelters, they use that much energy. The people I’ve been talking to estimate a minimum of €20m in savings, this could rise to €60m. That would be by rearranging servers and getting better use out of them.

“This wouldn’t cost any jobs, it would not entail any reduction in front-line services and, in fact, would free people up to provide citizens and businesses with better services.”

English says that Colm McCarthy, who heads up An Bord Snip Nua, in his previous role at the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General brought attention to the vast number of servers used within Government departments.

“This should be looked at in a strategic way. Minister Eamon Ryan TD was the only minister who indicated his department may move to a virtualised environment. A Government plan is needed because this is one area that would deliver an immediate return for the economy,” English says.

Fredrik Sjostedt, director of EMEA product marketing at VMware, says a move to virtualisation would require literally little more than a software upgrade and would safeguard existing IT investments.

“It is important to maintain and keep the investment you’ve already made. The difference is you use what you have more effectively. If these machines were operating at 10pc of capacity, then you don’t need to buy new servers for some time if the devices are modern,” Sjostedt explains.

Microsoft Ireland’s server group manger, Bill O’Brien, says the savings of €20m in running costs and 18,000 tonnes of emissions would be conservative.

“Without looking at the exact calculations, broadly speaking there are huge savings to be made.

“We’re only at the start of the virtualisation journey. Servers are a good place to start and, in fairness, many departments have started. There’s a lot more to do, but it’s great area to save time, energy and space,” O’Brien concludes.

By John Kennedy

Pictured: Stephen McCarron, Hosting365, and Damien English TD, Fine Gael spokesperson for Small Business and Labour Affairs

Link to the full article:  0207_001.jpg

The clever chaps over at Contrast – Eoghan and Paul – have excelled themselves yet again with the super smart and useful Qwitter web application – http://www.useqwitter.com/

If you’re a fan or user of the popular micro-blogging service – Twitter – you’ll know that sometimes your followers will depart, without so much as a ‘goodbye’ or ‘by your leave’!

Now, the solution is here! With Qwitter, you can pop your twitter name into the form, and an email for notifications and now, when a follower leaves, you’ll get a little alert to their departure -and- even better, you’ll get reminded of the last thing you said before they left! The perfect answer to that age-old question – ‘was it something I said?’

And better still, Qwitter is supported by and hosting on the Hosting365 Cloud Platform, giving it ample oomph and exceptional scalability to help cope with the deluge of traffic that has come, particularly after mentions on TechCrunch, TechMeme, Venturebeat, Delicious and sites, forums and blogs all over the web, as well as on Twitter itself!

From the Deloitte Commentary on the Budget yesterday:

Carbon Levy
The Minister confirmed that the Commission for Taxation has been asked to examine how the introduction of a carbon levy might best be structured and implemented to ensure that Ireland’s economic prospects are protected and the vulnerable in society do not lose out.  A firm measure is expected in next year’s budget.

The fact that the Minister is examining the matter in detail and awaiting a more rounded picture of the impact of the introduction of such a levy is commendable and it would be hoped that he would take on board the views of the Commission and other industry bodies before making a final decision next year.

Energy Efficient Equipment
Finance Act 2008 introduced 100% accelerated capital allowances for companies who purchased specific energy efficient equipment.  These included Building Energy Management Systems, Lighting and Lighting controls, and Motors and Variable Speed Drives. Budget 2009 extended the accelerated capital allowance regime to include four new categories.  These new categories are:

• Data server related systems and large energy saving office equipment associated with Information and Communications Technology
• Efficient heating/electricity provision equipment and control systems
• Efficient electrical and control equipment associated with process and heating ventilation and air-conditioning systems
• Alternative fuel vehicles

Any relief for business which commits to the Green Agenda is to be welcomed, particularly in current times when fuel and utility costs are at historically high levels and driving hidden inflation and additional cash outlay for business.

Source: http://www.deloittebudget.ie/

Of particular interest to me is that ‘Data Server related systems’ are now covered under this new measure, allowing for 100% capital allowance right off. For us, it means we could potentially right off our blade/san/virtualisation investments over 1 year, as opposed to the typical 3. It will be interesting to see how this, and the ’spectre’ of the expected Carbon levy next year influence IT spend in the coming months.

Our Cloud Platform already has impeccable green credentials, consuming a tiny fraction of the power of traditional servers and needing even less cooling.

I predict a gradual but accelerating move to virtualisation and cloud technologies, both onsite and outsourced, with more and more companys outsourcing entire IT functions as the costs of refit, refresh and staffing are compounded by carbon levys and penalties on inefficiencies.

… but never had the skill or budget to realise it?

The guys at Contrast have just launched App School 2008 -  they will pick an idea submitted by an Irish startup, charity, non-profit or individual and teach it how to be a fully-grown app. And, will cover 95% of the cost!

I’m also offering to help by providing the winning application with a true enterprise, scalable platform to grow on, with the Hosting365.com Cloud solution – and stump up €3,000 worth of hosting to power the App for the first year of it’s life!

See more at http://www.contrast.ie/blog/app-school-2008/

on one of the fundamental benefits of using a cloud provider – namely, you do not have physical servers, routers, switches, firewalls and other kit to worry about!

http://www.johnmwillis.com/cloud/cloud-computing-101/ 

Now if only we could get fully automatic, belt fed weapons in this country for demos!

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/10/coming-soon-ama.html

Fair play to Amazon for this coup, up until now one of the big factors with EC2 was the absence of Microsoft Platforms (already available on our cloud platform for more than a year).

As consumers and businesses become more environmentally aware, the technology sector’s energy use is being closely examined for traces of an excessively heavy carbon footprint.

Much of this stems from organisations operating an IT model where they traditionally bought more hardware and systems than they needed in order to cope with potential surges in computing demand.

Advances in technology offer significantly reduced energy requirements compared to older systems, says Stephen McCarron, managing director of Hosting365. “Intel now have low-voltage Xeon processors that operate at 60w, where the old ones used to be at 300w.

“Blade infrastructure runs up to 40pc cooler and more efficiently than traditional servers. And tie that again to VMware virtualisation and storage area networks and we’re seeing power savings in the order of 95pc.”

Part of the problem is that, having invested in technology prior to the latest developments, many IT user organisations are stuck with systems that aren’t so energy-efficient. An alternative option is to move their IT over to a managed service contract, delivered by a data centre operator that can take on the cost.

“Because of the economies of scale, a guy who has three servers isn’t going to spend €1m on blade servers and virtualisation and the skills to go with that, just to save his power bill or see it go down by half,” McCarron points out.

Rising energy prices are starting to force the issue, although McCarron believes many customers are not aware of how poor IT use is translating to higher bills.

“I don’t think it’s a real enough issue for most people. Our model is, we can say: you’ve got a comms room in the corner, it’s costing you €300 a month in power for air conditioning and your machines. We’ll take all that off you and that will take €300 off your bill. I’m not sure if they equate that to also reducing their carbon footprint, but we certainly sell it that way to them,” he says.

Hosting365 recently announced a €2m investment in blade servers and virtualisation technology at its Dublin data centre. This cloud computing infrastructure is a combination of hardware, memory, storage capacity and software that acts as a single, giant machine.

“Virtualisation is the key to the cloud. What virtualisation allows you to do is to treat all of that storage and processing power as one pool,” McCarron explains.

The system has already won some high-profile customers including Tesco, Cityjet, the Hilton Hotel Group, Carphone Warehouse and KLM. “These are all companies that have unpredictable requirements. The old model would have meant a rackful of kit, storage, security and redundancy on the what-if,” McCarron points out. “We’ve been selling to lots of customers but the power consumption graph of the facility has been steadily decreasing month on month, so we expect that by the time we finish our consolidation project our power consumption, and by proxy our cooling consumption, and our overall power utilisation will be back to levels they were at 24 months ago, which is very nice from a green perspective.”

Hosting365 is currently consolidating some of its older hardware for use in the cloud computing architecture and is working on a project aimed at significantly reducing energy consumption still further within the data centre. This will include installing solar tubes on the top floor and putting in place a photo-voltaic system backed by a wind turbine to power most of the office lighting. All of the office-space air conditioning units will be replaced with a system that takes the energy from the data centre server rooms and converts it to hot air in winter or cold air in summer.

“There’s a lot of noise about green this and green that but we’re talking about using the actual heat we generate in the data centre with natural gas turbines to produce the electricity to both power and cool the facility again so you get a complete energy cycle. The amount of power we need from the grid will just be to supplement things we lack power to run,” McCarron explains.

Hosting365 is putting the finishing touches to the plan with some external consultants and expects details on the estimated savings in tonnage of CO2 shortly.

“Our angle is, if we take all of those measures, we’re certainly the most energy-efficient data centre in the country,” McCarron claims. “If you tie that to the blades and the virtualisation, then all of a sudden we’re using 3pc of the power of an identical data centre in the city. It’s a vast difference in terms of credentials.” He points out that Hosting365’s green strategy helped it to sign a contract to host infrastructure for the Environmental Protection Agency.

McCarron believes meeting environmental requirements could be brought into legislation before long, making it obligatory for organisations to comply. “Our plans on carbon reduction are attractive to the big corporates because they know that’s coming down the line and they can make decisions based on 36-month contracts, knowing they’ll be better than compliant when it does come down,” he concludes.

By Gordon Smith

I read a piece this morning from Network World (http://url.ie/cuf) which detailed the challenges and concerns facing adoption of co-called ‘cloud’ or ‘grid’ platforms.

The piece included a quote from Kirill Sheynkman, head of start-up Elastra – “Equipment inside the corporate data center isn’t going away anytime soon,” Companies remain reluctant, for a variety of reasons, to trust the cloud for their mission-critical applications.

I was surprised to read such a perspective, as running on our Cloud right now are ‘enterprise’ or ‘blue chip’ companies like Carphonewarehouse, Tesco, Citijet and many many more, but as I continued through the article I realised the 8 points being raised as ‘blockers’ to adoption have already been addressed by hosting365.

Specifically:

1. Data privacy. Many countries have specific laws that say data on citizens of that country must be kept inside that country. That’s a problem in the cloud computing model, where the data could reside anywhere and the customer might not have any idea where, in a geographical sense, the data is.

The Hosting365 cloud service is maintained in Dublin, Ireland. Currently in one physical facility, it is currently ‘growing’ to encompass two facilities for redundancy, but both are in Ireland, in the European Union, and regulated by Data Protection and Privacy legislation in this jurisdiction.
2. Security. Companies are understandably concerned about the security implications of corporate data being housed in the cloud.

With our platform, the concern is no greater than with traditional colocation or dedicated servers. Our cloud is protected by best-in-class Cisco Firewalls and VPN devices, with comprehensive filtering, monitoring and netflow analysis, 24/7.

3. Licensing. The typical corporate software licensing model doesn’t always translate well into the world of cloud computing, where one application might be running on untold numbers of servers.

Simply track how many servers you are running in real time – we need to do this ourselves so we can report license usage to both VMware and Microsot (as just two examples)

4. Applications. In order for cloud computing to work, applications need to be written so that they can be broken up and the work divided among multiple servers. Not all applications are written that way, and companies are loathe to rewrite their existing applications.

Our cloud platform allows horizontal and vertical scaling that does not force application developers to ‘build for the cloud’.
5. Interoperability. For example, Amazon has its EC2 Web service, Google has its cloud computing service for messaging and collaboration, but the two don’t interoperate.

VMware (our cloud platform of choice) is pretty ubiquitous. You can move VM’s to your own kit, you can convert back to physical servers, you can move to another data centre, you can move between virtualisation platforms. You can even use something cool like VMware Fusion on your Mac laptop to build a Debian server just the way you like, then put that online in our cloud, without having to change anything! By adopting enterprise standard virtualisation, and probably the most mature virtualisation platform available, we’re ensuring zero ‘lock in’ for our cloud users.

6. Compliance. What happens when the auditors want to certify that the company is complying with various regulations, and the application in question is running in the cloud? It’s a problem that has yet to be addressed.

For all of the reasons above, we’ve built an environment that can achieve PCI compliance (among others).
7. SLAs. It’s one thing to entrust a third party to run your applications, but what happens when performance lags. The vendors offering these services need to offer service-level agreements.

We offer better SLA’s on our cloud than we do with any other offering. Want 24/7/365 support, 100% network and power uptime SLA’s and a guarantee of no more than 15 minutes downtime even in the event of physical hardware failures – step right in! Our approach from day-1 with our cloud platform was to build an enterprise solution that could replace the ‘old’ way of building bespoke kit, but still deliver the same or better SLA’s.

8. Network monitoring. Another question that remains unanswered is how does a company instrument its network and its applications in a cloud scenario. What types of network/application monitoring tools are required.

We provide comprehensive network and application level monitoring on our grid, with full web access for customers to the same.

There are lots of misconceptions about what a cloud actualy is (or can be) in the marketplace, but, from the customer interest and take-up we are already seeing, I feel we’ve provided a solid, enterprise grade platform, that can deliver better performance and reliability than dedicated hardware, with the same or better SLA’s, but also offer the flexibility and control of rapid scalability, complete mobility of resources and workloads, all backed up with our dedicated support.

Recent news here in Ireland announced that IBM was launching their first European Cloud Platform in their first ‘Cloud Computing Centre‘ in Dublin. Subsequent coverage revealed a 100 CPU compute grid which IBM are using to test and develop their cloud offering.

In the last few days, Google have ‘entered the cloud scape’ with their new Application Engine, joining the likes of Salesforce.com who offer application hosting clouds, and competing (a little indirectly) with Amazon and their EC2/S3 Cloud services.

What does it all mean?

In simple terms, ‘clouds‘ are the new ‘grids‘ But fundamentally it’s all built on virtualisation.

- Cloud Grid Platfoms in a few simple steps:

1. Build a big pile of servers, with lots of CPU’s and RAM
2. Hang a big heap of storage off the back and hook everything up
3. Put a network connection in front of the whole thing (maybe some load balancing or firewalls)
4. Run a virtualisation platform (like VMware) on top
5. (Optional) Replicate all of the above in multiple physical locations

You now have a ‘virtual’ datacentre full of servers and storage that, with the virtualisation, can be chopped into pieces appropriate for the users requirement.

So, you need 4x 2.33Ghz Xeon processors, 8GB of ram and 100GB of fast storage – no problem – click- there you go.

You need 16x 2.33Ghz Xeon processors, 32GM of RAM and only 10GB of storage for a super database – click – no problem.

Virtualisation means you can treat the cloud/grid/blob of resources like an empty framework, and run your services on top, with full flexibility in terms of all the key metrics (cpu power, ram and storage). You can move all the metrics around in near real time, without having to stop the ’server’ running (try adding a CPU to a traditional running server with the power still on and the server running? Ouch!)

Here at Hosting365, I’m happy to report our Cloud is even bigger than IBM’s!

Here’s the spec:

• 128 HP BL460C Blade Servers
• 256 Physical Intel Xeon Processors
• 1024 CPU Cores (2.33Ghz, 1666Mhz FSB, 4MB cache per core) (Or roughly 2,385.92Ghz!!)
• 4TB RAM Capacity
• EVA 8100 Redundant SAN Cluster
• 20TB Fitted Capacity (in 146GB 15k FC drives)

You can see a photo here (apologies for the otherwise lovely shot being ruined by Ed Byrne, our General Manager)

Our cloud lives within a network architecture which includes HP Virtual Connect Modules (switches) for SAN and Ethernet, meaning all WWID’s, MAC addresses, etc, are all virtualised and portable within the cloud (providing immunity from hardware failure of individual nodes). These switches are uplinked to two Cisco 6509 switches, providing full redundancy, and are in turn uplinked to our Network Core. There are also Cisco boxes performing Firewalling and VPN Termination and F5 boxes for Layer-7 Load Balancing.

The real magic though, is in the VMware layer. Running VMware as our virtualisation platform of choice was the logical option for such a high performance, highly resilient grid / cloud platform.

Vmware’s maturity and robustness, allows us to provide real-time node High Availability (no impact to users if there are hardware failures or issues), dynamically move resources around the grid, again in real time and without downtime, to ensure there are always maximum resources available for all users. In addition, the snap shotting and management features of VMware Infrastructure tools mean we can deliver a truley enterprise experience.

In short, we spent a lot of money on a platform, so our customers don’t have to compromise.

For the same price as a basic dedicated server, you get access to everything above in terms of reliability, scalability, flexibility and security. To achieve an ‘apples with apples’ comparison, you would need to buy two, highly spec’d dedicated servers, a layer 7 load balancer (HA Pair) to ensure a server failure wont take you down (or a load balancer failure) a HA Pair of Firewalls to ensure security, and a small SAN. Traditionally, we’ve built many such platforms at costs into the tens of thousands of euros per month – now you can achieve the same business objectives from €99.95 per month!

Welcome to the world of tomorrow! (for hosting anyway )

In the last few months, we’ve all seen various providers and services have problems.

http://url.ie/8xh documents a long list of infrastructure issues with some ‘big name’ hosts, some of whom market their ‘zero downtime’ networks – you can see our own status site for an issue we experienced this week – http://www.hosting365status.com – and more recently Amazon S3/EC2 suffered an outage – http://url.ie/97n

Personally, I hate seeing providers in trouble. I’ve been through the same, I know how it feels and it’s not pleasant. You stress, worry, fret and get not a little angry after having planned, invested, planned more, invested (a lot) more and then planned some more and yet still things go wrong.

Professionally though, I am delighted when issues like these happen. Not because I am some kind of masochist, nor do I get pleasure from another providers problems, but because it helps educate the customer.

Customers want 100% uptime of hardware, networks, datacentre, chillers, staff, they want 5 minute responses to their questions 24/7 and they want it all for less than most of them pay for advertising the service they are running online.

This isn’t a rant, I’m not saying ‘customers’ are dumb’, I guess I’m just reiterating the one truism in this business;

- stuff breaks

No matter what you spend, how much you plan or how good your staff (inhouse or outsourced) are, there is no getting away from that fact.

You can invest in multi-site, cloud based, real-time-replicated systems, and reduce your risk of exposure to tiny percentages, but, as Amazon just found out, a simple software glitch can happily replicate itself and upset those plans.

Service providers can certainly do their part. Hosting365.com is about to launch our new ‘Cloud’ Platform, which offers a huge grid of computing and storage, built on world-class HP Blades and SAN, running a super resilient Cisco network and leveraging the best in class virtualisation technologies HP and VMware have to offer. With offsite replicated DNS and load balancing, and multiple ‘clouds’ in multiple datacentres on separate networks, we are getting close to that 100% target – and are doing it at a price point that doesn’t break the bank. Customers need to also review their own continuity plans – do you have backups for the backups of the backups?