Category: Technology

Published: SNMP as Datacenter Facility Management Protocol

Just one of many ways of viewing SNMP data

This one slipped by me when it hit the inter tubes nearly a month ago. I wrote it back in February or so, shipped it off to my editor, and promptly forgot about it. My editor’s wife gave birth to their first kid, and my editor’s life changed far beyond his expectations (though in my defence I did warn him!) Anyway, after a delay it finally published early last month. TechTarget shuffles their site around so much that my RSS feed reader obviously has lost track, otherwise I should have been automatically notified. Oh well better late than never, here’s my take on what I considered to be the most important point of Datacenter Pulse’s “Top Ten” list for the industry (though they put it at #7, oh well):

Users demand SNMP standard-based monitoring for data center power and cooling equipment .

Yes, it is way off the beaten path my blog readers are accustomed to, but I do use some analogies you can understand!

And no John, I didn’t specify SNMP v3, if only to keep it simple. These are HVAC & Electrical guys, so I have to ease them into a new way of thinking first before I can get specific. 😉

“They are not too big to die, they are too big to survive”

Insightful comments, as always, from the man known as “Bob Cringely“.

I’ve been reading Stephens‘ work for well over 15 years, and have always enjoyed his style, his insight, and his humor. I appreciate his willingness to admit when he’s wrong (which, oftentimes he is) and his accessibility to his audience. We’ve exchanged emails a few times, usually with me calling him a “dipstick” (a legacy term from an old column of his) and correcting an error he’s made on some detail of our industry. He’s always acknowledged the corrections politely and the mistakes rarely, if ever, get repeated.

I like his optimism and his outlook, and really appreciate his comments here about allowing nature to take its course with regard to dying industries, be they financial, or automotive, you’ll note he doesn’t specify.

Intersections of Interest

Occasionally several of my personal and professional interests converge at one point. I enjoy making images. I enjoy telling stories. I enjoy technology. I make my living in the datacenter industry. I enjoy sharing all of these with others.

This week at work is the culmination of over a year’s efforts by my employer, and one of our clients. A medium-scale project is coming to fruition, involving the client, several contractors (Engineers, Mechanical, and Electrical contractors) our Sales & Operations teams, and mostly our Facilities Manager, who as always is able to make things happen timely and with a smile. My job? Capture it all, and present it as yet another example of what we can accomplish for potential clients: We’re flexible. We’re available. We’re here to serve the client’s needs, even if they are “off the price sheet” so to speak.

You can follow along on our Support Blog. First post is here. The second one is here. I’ll be posting again tomorrow with an update, and a wrap up later.

Worst. Presentation. Ever.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Inter-Cloud

As you may know I’m a skeptic about “Cloud Computing”. I’m not skeptical about the technology, I’m mostly skeptical about how the concept is being seized by the marketers and bent to define anything and everything. It is as if the term is suddenly a magical spell that can make all your economic woes be cured. Cloud Computing, as it is practiced by Google for example, makes a ton of sense. But it seems as if the entire industry has decided that cloudiness is the next big thing and they have to jump on the bandwagon, even if they have no idea what the bandwagon is, or where it is going.

I saw this presentation posted on Rich Miller’s excellent blog, DatacenterKnowledge, entitled “What the heck is the InterCloud anyway?” (perhaps Rich shares my skepticism?) and I as I generally respect what Cisco does, I watched it.

My first thought: Douglas Adams is in his grave, launched into perpetual rotation.

I have said many times that I’d rather spend an hour in a dentist’s chair being drilled upon than sit through 30 minutes of a PowerPoint presentation. Steaming piles of presentational crap such as this is the reason why. I would hope that an organization with the resources of Cisco could produce something that is not only aesthetically reasonable, but also clearly communicates complex concepts. This presentation appears that its creator swallowed a giant bowl of industry buzzwords & clipart, downed an ipecac chaser, and then barfed them up onto the screen. Just about every rule of thumb concerning effective presentation is broken here, on damn near every slide.

If he’s trying to convince me to lose my skepticism about cloud computing, it isn’t working.

So what about the actual content, not just the poor use of media? I would hope it makes more sense when accompanied by a speaker, who can lay out their ideas verbally to try and make sense of the jumbled mess on-screen. In reality I see a lot of hand-waving, assumptions, and glossing over of details. I guess if you call something a cloud because it runs virtualized in a datacenter, then you can make the logical leap to multi-tenant clouds, and then “InterClouds”. But seriously, why would say a Fortune 500 company, who is subject to all sorts of external scrutiny concerning the integrity of their data, want to have that data just out there drifting about on who knows whose hardware? A virtualized OS with virtualized storage, in a virtualized cloud spread over multiple sites in an Enterprise or InterCloud… sounds great if you are the guy selling the hardware to make it happen [cough]Cisco[/cough] but how about the guy who is writing the Purchase Orders to buy it? To them it should sound terrifying, especially to their auditors, and probably does. There are a whole lot of buzzwords being thrown around here, but very little hard and useful data.

This is yet another product marketer hitching themselves onto a buzzword bandwagon, and creating new buzzwords in the process, while punting the hard work of actually defining, building, and operating buzzword-compliance to others.

Google uncloaks once-secret server | Business Tech – CNET News

Google uncloaks once-secret server | Business Tech – CNET News.

I love this machine. It speaks to me on so many different levels. While the server vendors have been building slimmer-but-longer 1U servers, Google has literally broken the mold, and built a server with the entire datacenter in mind, not just the rack. Instead of fighting a fruitless war for density by going longer, Google looked at the problem as a whole and came up with an ingenious solution. I applaud them. I especially applaud them from my position of having to deal with the rest of the industry’s complete backassery in their approach to the same problem, which as I have said publicly many times, has failed.

Note the low-cost components. Note the lack of a case, which only adds weight and complicates cooling. Note the lack of hardware. This server has components held together by Velcro strips. It has a built-in 12V battery backup. It has a very compact motherboard. It’s width means that it can fit 2 side-by-side in a standard 19″ rack, and its height means they can fit, I’m guessing between 28 and 32 of them per standard 42U rack. But given that they can squeeze the rows of racks MUCH closer together than in a same sized facility equipped with 36″-42″ deep cabinets this means the number of servers per facility increases by around one third to half again as dense. In fact, the larger the datacenter, the greater the delta in density scales towards this form-factor. From the one Google datacenter I’ve seen, they are large facilities.

Well done Google. My hat’s off to you.