Hedging the Cloud Bets
January 30, 2012 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
With all of the confusion around the cloud, it’s no wonder vendors take advantage of every opportunity to remind us, non-stop, about their cloud offerings.
Why, did you know Dell was a big supporter of OpenStack? Yep, and they have open source backing to show. Dell shows how they can put a team into looking like a scrappy startup.
Have no fear though, they also have a vCloud offering. Who wouldn’t want to miss out on the enterprise space?
But wait, they also preship servers with Eucalyptus on them.
And HP, with their private beta Openstack based cloud. But don’t worry, they also offer at least 8 other cloud branded solutions.
I think it’s clear that..it’s not clear. The cloud concept has muddied the water so much, and created a cone of confusion for so many people. All of these vendors want to be everything to everybody, so they’re betting across the board in hopes one pays off.
I don’t necessarily chastise this approach, but I think it doesn’t help customers when a vendor offers so many solutions and says that all of them are the right approach. Sometimes you have to pick a side; sadly, the cloud space seems riddled with those who don’t.
I’m interested to see how this plays out over the next year; the cloud camp seems to be dividing between two sides: the enterprise high end space, and the commodity low end space.
Personally I think the commodity space is the better play. Let’s see if I’m right.
Midwest Tornados
May 26, 2011 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
Yesterday afternoon and evening was a rocky day for those of us in the midwest as a powerful line of storms rolled through, in multiple waves.
The picture to the right highlights just a small bit of the destruction from the first wave. This property is due south of Data Cave, and about 200 yards from the building. You can see the lean of the trees to the left, the one tree in the middle missing a substantial limb. That limb was torn off, and hit the power line you can see leaning, and eventually went across the street.
What isn’t shown is the house just out of picture on the left, which sustained bad roof damage and major structural damage to a barn next to it. The picture below is of that house, as taken by our local newspaper.
Home on South Gladstone - as taken by The Republic
- The storm approaching from the south of Data Cave
These types of events are always scary. Luckily, we’ve designed our systems to withstand them as best as possible. In this case, the major concern we were facing was wind. The lightning was an issue as well, but the wind damage was much more of a factor.
When this type of event occurs, there’s simply nothing you can do to stop it. Taking cover is your only option.
Our facility is designed to withstand an EF5 tornado. That’s over 200mph. If a tornado comes through and hits your data center, and the equipment is blown completely away, what’s your contingency plan? You don’t want to take those chances, do you?
Rogue SSL certificates
May 2, 2011 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
It seems like the only stories that make the headlines are the ones with the most chilling titles. Unless you were looking, you may never have even know about Rogue SSL certificates making their way into the wild.
The story goes like this: Certificate vendor Comodo issued SSL certificates for popular domains to end users/companies that didn’t actually control those domains. The whole concept of SSL certificates is based on trust, where everything leads back to a trusted authority to validate that the recipient of the certificates is actually who they say they are. If that’s broken, lots of bad things can happen.
What this means is that someone who wasn’t Google was able to obtain a certificate for mail.google.com. If they put up this certificate and somehow hijacked your browser to go to their site, thinking it was the real mail.google.com, you would never have known because the browser would not have put up a warning. That is, you would have been talking to the other end thinking it was Google, even though it wasn’t, and would have not had any good way of knowing.
This is scary. Since certificates were designed to validate that the end party is who they claim to be, the whole mechanism relies on the certificate vendor (or certificate “authority” as it’s called) to ensure that certificates only go to those who are valid.
From the article:
What can you do with such a certificate?
Well, if you are a government and able to control Internet routing within your country, you can reroute all, say, Skype users to fake https://login.skype.com and collect their usernames and passwords, regardless of the SSL encryption seemingly in place. Or you can read their e-mail when they go to Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail. Even most geeks wouldn’t notice this was going on.
It’s clear that methods of attack like this are the way things are heading in the cyber world. Vigilence is a must.
Data Cave’s design is just what Cisco ordered
April 18, 2011 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
Two newsworthy items came out of Cisco last week. The first was that Cisco was shutting down the $550 million dollar Flip camera business as part of an internal reorganization.
The second, and more pertinent, was that they released some specifications around their new Cloud Data Center in Allen, Texas. The data center has a number of features, including:
- rotary flywheels in lieu of batteries for the uninterruptable power supply (UPS)
- an air-side economizer Cisco estimates can use ambient outside air instead of mechanical cooling 65 percent of the time, resulting in $600,000 annual savings in cooling costs.
- 100 kilowatts of rooftop solar power for the building’s offices.
- a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric of 1.35.
- the ability to withstand tornado winds up to 175 mph.
Very interesting indeed. Data Cave utilizes flywheels, uses water side economization (which we argue is better than air-side), has a great PUE (better than 1.35 we say), and can withstand winds up to 207 mph. You could say that they copied our model pretty closely, in fact.
This announcement validates that our vision, from 2 years ago when we first start construction, is in line with what Cisco says is needed today for cloud centric data centers.
You can even see by the picture too that they are not using raised floors, but overhead ducting. Again, something we pursued from the start.
We think that this shows that Data Cave’s choice of design is well suited for the coming years cloud centric computing loads.
The certainty premium
April 11, 2011 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
The data center business, like so many other businesses, is about managing risk.
Our primary objective is to provide a stable environment to our customers, to help them minimize the risk associated with their IT environment. They trust us with that infrastructure and pay a premium over doing it themselves to minimize that risk.
Seth Godin has a short but poignant take on the idea.
In everything there is risk. There’s risk associated with running your own IT infrastructure, and risk associated with outsourcing it. However, that risk can be minimized when putting it in the hands of a capable group of people.
Risk can’t be completely avoided, but it can be minimized. It’s hard to do that yourself without significant investment – that’s why we pool funds with others and buy insurance.
Risk minimization: why you should choose to partner with Data Cave.
Data center electricity economics
April 4, 2011 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
Greg Ness has a great posting about the “new” economics of the data center, especially around electricity. In it, he sums up the thoughts of a few other leads in the data center world that server densities of replaced capital equipment are getting high enough that most legacy data centers simply cannot support those needs.
As we move to more powerful blade servers and virtualization and cloud, what happens to all of those data centers built more than say 5 years ago?
Excellent point, Greg.
Current server infrastructure is already quite dense, and we have nowhere to go but up. In our data center, we have customers running 20kW of usable power to cabinets. Is that the upper threshold, or will that number continue to creep up?
Data centers face two issues: the first is just having enough power capacity to be able to meet the needs of their customers. Many are maxed out already, and those that are close to capacity make bad choices for customers who may need that capacity in another year or two, when it’s gone.
The second is the cooling factor, and this one is the much more difficult one for the data center, because cooling infrastructure takes up a lot of physical space, has to be thought out ahead of time, and is an expensive capital build.
We do think that the electrical aspect will be the most important one for data centers of the next few years, and that legacy data centers simply will not be able to keep up with the increased electrical loads and cooling demands.
If you agree, you should definitely check out our whitepaper on metered power and how it’s beneficial to you as a customer when buying large amounts of power from a data center.
Data breaches are million dollar mistakes
March 28, 2011 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
Cybersecurity is not a new thing for any of us; we hear about stolen laptops with social security numbers on them pretty regularly. But quantifying just how much value lost data contains has always been a tricky subject.
A post at DigitalTrends takes a look, toting a staggering 7.2 million dollar loss on average.
What’s most interesting, we think, is this:
The study noted that the highest contributor to compromised internal data was negligence.
Of course, it’s very easy to be negligent. It’s difficult, time consuming, and obscure to stay up to date with all of the latest security patches, vendor updates, and requirements necessary to maintain a completely secure system.
There’s lots of money to be made off of stolen data. Criminals are only going to get more sophisticated in their attack vectors. Having a comprehensive computer and IT security plan as part of a business is a must anymore.
A day in the life of a DC manager, part 3
March 21, 2011 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
In the first part of this series we took a look at the HVAC and chilling systems, and in the second part we looked at the incoming electrical systems. In this third and final part, we’ll look at all of the other things that go on that we observe daily.
Network Access
Of course network access is a critical part of our infrastructure. Each customer within Data Cave has differing needs for connectivity – some need internet, some need redundant internet. Some customers have private point-to-point connections across either lit or dark fiber. We provide access to what the customer needs, and monitor everything along the way 24/7.
Perimeter Security
One important part of Data Cave is the fence and gate system that keep us isolated from foot and car traffic. Every day we spot check the fence and gate and ensure no breaches have occurred. In addition, we use a number of video cameras around the outside of the building to spot motion and indicate where areas might be of concern.
Our fence also has a major grounding system in it to help mitigate lightning strikes, and as part of the daily check we’ll inspect this grounding system to make sure its still in place and no lines have been cut.
Door Access System
Data Cave has over 80 doors in the building. Access into different parts of the facility is controlled by a door access system, granting both entry and exit to authorized personnel. Also integral in this is a biometric hand scanning system, to doubly ensure the correct person is entering the critical areas. One benefit of this system is that we can know who is in the building, and in which places, at all times. This system is monitored by our NOC 24/7.
Weather
We are always keeping our eye on the weather. If a storm system is moving in, we’ll stay vigilant at the notion of a potential power outage until everything passes. Besides monitoring radar and satellite images, we also have an emergency weather radio in our NOC to receive updates.
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What this 3 part series highlights is simply this: we are working hard every day to ensure the best protection for your IT equipment. Contact us today to see just how our impressive infrastructure can work for you.
A day in the life of a DC manager, part 2
March 7, 2011 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
Following off part 1, today we’ll look at the electrical systems.
Incoming Power
The incoming power feeds that service data cave run through large 4000A breakers before distributing out to subfeed breakers to the equipment in the facility. At this stage the power is monitored for quality, harmonics, and proper voltage. We have status lights on the gear itself, as well as panel readouts. Each breaker in the switchgear has been individually tuned to support its own load, and the health of each breaker is watched.
Of course, this is all monitored remotely to our NOC as well.
Flywheel UPS
Two feeds of power go to the flywheel UPS systems. These systems condition the power, ensuring that what the end customer IT load sees is always available, clean, redundant power. These units have status system displays on them that we spot check daily, and the rotational speed (7700rpm) and DC bus voltages of the flywheels are monitored remotely in our NOC.
Power Distribution Units
Each data suite in the facility has separate power distribution units that take the power from the flywheel UPS systems, step down the voltage, and then provide the individual breaker feeds to the customer cabinets. We spot check these systems daily, and the health of each PDU is monitored from our NOC.
Generators
Each of our generators is spot checked daily, and more thoroughly checked weekly to ensure they are ready to start at a moments notice. Remotely, our NOC monitors for any fault conditions that the Engine Control Module on the generator may have encountered, and we also monitor important standby conditions such as coolant temperature.
Stay tuned for part 3.
A day in the life of a DC manager, HVAC
February 21, 2011 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
ThePlanet has a blog post from a couple of years ago from their DC Manager highlighting some of the daily things they go through in keeping their data centers up and running. I’ll highlight some similar bits of information about Data Cave in the next couple of posts.
Air Conditioning
Each data suite in our center has multiple air conditioning units (CRACs). We monitor these units remotely from our Network Operations Center (NOC) and keep an eye on the temperature and humidity levels in the rooms. We keep historical data for trending analysis. We also will spot check the units daily, verify they are working properly, and ensure the screen readouts agree with our remote monitoring.
Water Chillers
The main part of our chilled water system are our multiple centrifugal chillers that create the chilled water. These units run mostly autonomously, but we still spot check them daily for things like oil level, and level of the refrigerant in the system. We also remotely monitor them in our NOC to ensure that no faults have occurred, and that the water temperatures and flows stay within bounds.
Process Water
The chillers make cold water, but they do so by rejecting heat into a separate water system, known as our process water. This separate water loop is also computer controlled via a system of pumps and cooling tower fans where it is taken outside and water is evaporated to reduce the temperature again. Makeup water is also brought in through wells located around the building, and is purified by reverse osmosis and softening systems. Again, the whole system is computer controlled and remotely monitored, and we spot check it daily.
Because the process water is warm, it is a breeding ground for bacteria. Thus, we have to periodically add chemicals to it to keep bacteria from forming and to prevent it from rusting or deteriorating steel and copper tubing throughout the cooling system. This treatment process is done in house, and is monitored weekly.
Stay tuned for part #2, where I’ll talk about our electrical systems.