The Green and Virtual Data Center Review

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The Green and Virtual Data Center ReviewGreg Schulz has delivered with both a timely and informative book. With the economic meltdown occurring in 2008 every company has become focused on cost containment both for Cap Ex and Op Ex and the data center is in forefront. This is taking place at the same time as heighten awareness of our planets ecology and the impact of IT and data centers. As Schulz states in his summary chapter: "The objective is to lower cost, boost productivity, and improve service delivery to meet performance and availability objectives in a flexible or agile manner that also helps the environment."
In the first chapter Schulz coins the acronym PCFE for power, cooling, floor space and environmental to aggregate the IT infrastructure issues that are core to green initiatives. As I read through the book I substituted PC Fe for Politically Correct Iron because in my mind it reflects what Schulz calls the "green gap".This "green gap" is the separation of ecological and economic factors that are tied to the data center. On one hand we have the concerns about global warming, green-house gases, and carbon emissions while on the other we have data growth, power and cooling cost, stock holders looking for profits and the perceived cost to be green. The case is presented that this gap is more one of language and attitude as opposed to reality. If IT directors and facility managers implement best practices to design and run their data centers they will find in most cases they align with green objectives because it makes business sense.
The book is divided into four sections. In the first section there is a summary of the issues facing CIOs and IT directors around energy consumption, safety requirements for the disposal or equipment, and what green IT means. The second section looks at current trends in data center infrastructure and how they can be effectively monitored and managed. The third examines the technologies which are enabling virtualization and driving current trends like cloud computing. This is Mr. Schulz's area of core competency and has the most in depth coverage. In the final portion of the book there are practical applications of the concepts discussed in the other sections. I found the format to be a good organization that kept key areas together and the overall coverage of the topics to be of sufficient depth. I would recommend this book to anyone wants to understand the impact of "green IT" as well how the convergence of a number of technologies has created potential for virtual IT infrastructure.
About the reviewer
Paul Collins is CTO for Total Tec Systems a leading enterprise solution provider for data center infrastructure, and server and storage virtualization. He has a 20 year history of helping customers design, implement and manage IT infrastructure. Total Tec Systems is headquartered in Edison, NJ.
The Green and Virtual Data Center OverviewThe Green and Virtual Data Center sets aside the political aspects of what is or is not considered green to instead focus on the opportunities for organizations that want to sustain environmentally-friendly economical growth. If you are willing to believe that IT infrastructure resources deployed in a highly virtualized manner can be combined with other technologies to achieve simplified and cost-effective delivery of services in a green, profitable manner, this book is for you. Savvy industry veteran Greg Schulz provides real-world insight, addressing best practices, server, software, storage, networking, and facilities issues concerning any current or next-generation virtual data center that relies on underlying physical infrastructures. Coverage includes: Energyand data footprint reductionCloud-based storage and computingIntelligent and adaptive power managementServer, storage, and networking virtualizationTiered servers andstorage, network, and data centersEnergy avoidance and energy efficiencyMany current and emerging technologies can enable a green and efficient virtual data center to support and sustain business growth with a reasonable return on investment. This book presents virtually all critical IT technologies and techniques to discuss the interdependencies that need to be supported to enable a dynamic, energy-efficient, economical, and environmentally-friendly green IT data center. This is a path that every organization must ultimately follow. Take a tour of the Green and Virtual Data Center website.
CRC Press is pleased to announce that The Green and Virtual Data Center has been added to Intel Corporation's Recommended Reading List. Intel's Recommended Reading program provides technical professionals a simple and handy reference list of what to read to stay abreast of new technologies. Dozens of industry technologists, corporate fellows, and engineers have helped by suggesting books and reviewing the list. This is the most comprehensive reading list available for professional computer developers.

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Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs Review

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Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs ReviewIt doesn't take very long to figure out that the authors really like blade servers.
They like their space savings, cable plant simplicity, and uniformity. There are very detailed (although never critical) descriptions of each manufacturer's product lines and some very exhaustive matrices comparing not only blade servers but virtualization products as well.
My problems are in the details. First of all, it is clear that in many cases the benefits being credited to blade servers accrue ONLY because those blade servers are running virtualization products. Moreover, in many cases it is unclear why the benefits would not have accrued to commodity scale out servers running virtualization products.
Two, there are some claims that just stretch credulity too far. For instance, it is claimed that a provisioning a new blade server can be done in a few hours while doing the same with a rack mount server can take weeks.
Bearing in mind that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all constructed their massive data centers with rack mount servers, you have to wonder how they could have made the same mistake (from the author's point of view) several hundred thousand times for each vendor.
The fact of the matter is that blades are a perfect choice for certain data center environments, but not others. Today they constitute ~ 15 % of all server shipments and most vendors hope to get that up to ~20% by 2010.
What's the hold up? Well, blade servers cost more per unit of computing power. Their form factors are proprietary, so their is considerable vendor lock-in (and thus higher prices). And the switches built for each blade center are vastly more expensive and slower to adopt new features than standalone modular or fixed form factor switches.
Conversely, virtualization is a wonderful add-on for certain types of compute applications, but not all. (For the technically inclined, if compute latency is at a premium, or the computations requires large amounts of state to be held in memory, then virtualization is going to be at best a mixed blessing and quite possibly make things worse.) Such limitations are alluded to peripherally, but never spoken to head on.
That's a darn shame. Had the authors included a chapter on when blades make sense and when virtualization makes sense, this would have easily been a 5 star book for me. The writing style is lucid and flows well. The authors are clearly experienced in their field. However, the assertion that blades and virtualization are a broad based panacea for most types of organizations and data centers just does not conform to the facts.Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs Overview
Blade server systems and virtualization are key building blocks for Next Generation Enterprise Data centers
Blades offer modular, pre-wired, ultra high-density servers (up to 10x traditional servers) with shared components (power, cooling, switches) – reducing complexity and cost, and improving flexibility, availability, manageability, and maintainability
Virtualization enables consolidation of physical servers by allowing many virtual servers to run concurrently on one physical server – improving system utilization, reducing the total number of physical servers, reducing costs, and increasing flexibility
This is the first book covering these complementary technologies and how, together, they provide a strong foundation for the future
It examines the history, architectures, features, examples, and user case studies of blade systems and virtualization, and offers guidance and considerations for how to evaluate and implement solutions


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