Everyone is closely follow up the news after the Japan Earth quake last week, not just because the impact to the country, environment and also the people who are suffering from the incident. As from IT perspective, I am strongly urging all of us to reconsider many of the activity which been carry out there 24×7 today, to re-look into the strategy which could improve and save the environment. The Heat, e-waste and green issues been created due to IT is HIGH and we could not deny it. Therefore the latest solution and technology are very emphasis to reduce the necessary foot print & energy consumption which could harm the environment.
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I had been busy with numbers of Data Center Projects recently. All of these projects are referring to Data Center Expansion or new Data Center Build up requirements. There are number of interest discussion we had with multiple clients and exchange technical knowledge and opinion from each others. Does a data center efficiencies or success measure by the size, usable capacity, density or etc? Everyone should had a different opinion about this topic.
Traditional Data center were built by M&E or facilities management, mostly without IT department involvement. This had been transformed in most enterprise organization as IT has the better understanding what will be deployed into the data center after it build. There are always conflict from Facility and IT, as both KPI been measure separately and conflict to each other. Let’s assume a 5000 SFts data center, the facility guy may require to fill up the max capacity with the lowest budget. It may physical fill up with few hundred of racks and look nice at the end, but the usability could be question due to the density and capacity per rack which impact the data center life cycle. A physical 42U rack doesn’t mean it allow us to fully mounted any physical devices into it, as we need to consider about the power and cooling pieces. From IT perspective, they will prefer to use less space into the data center, and reduce the power, cooling & cabling to achieve green IT environment. This had been part of IT main goal with storage consolidation, virtualization & I/O virtualization. If the power and cooling capacity are not proper plan, IT will not able to optimize the data center facilities.
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Is a very tired week for me since I had traveled 3 different locations within 2 weeks time for business purposes. This morning, while I woke up and checked my email, I realized John Troyer from VMware, who is the MAN that organize the vExpert 2009 and 2010 nomination had dropped me an email about the vExpert 2010. I am very happy to receive the email from VMware again. I would like to thanks VMware for the vExpert 2010, and also thank you to the people around me which provided all the opportunity during my career which allowed me to blog most of the finding for knowledge sharing purposes. I will definitely continue blog about virtualization, data center solution, cloud computing solutions, and reply more questions in VMTN or VMUG from time to time.
As many of us may know that there are some article talk about the High Efficiency Data Center. I would like to talk about 1 of the major point here which is Virtualize & Consolidation, since our site is more focus on Virtualization.
High Gas/Petrol price become an global issues, no matter which region or which country are you from, this had become and issue which drive the Operational Cost for a Data Center to keep alive from daily basis. In Malaysia, the goverment had recently increase the commercial eletricity for 26 %. Imagine that if you DC consume RM 30000.00 a mount from power perspective, you had to pay RM 37800.00 a month. that had been significant impact the entire IT budgets plus the operational cost. As IT always be the main driver for most business today, we may need to provide a highly efficient Data center solution which able to recover the ROI within the shortest period as possible. Virtualization & Consolidation had come to the point for this.
As if we compare the power consumption from major chip maker like AMD and Intel, the watts per processor had stack and remain the same for the last 3 generations at least. The only improvement they made was really the perfomance per watt. 6 cores and 8 cores had been down the road, I will be strongly encourage who had not adapt to virtualization need to start virtualize or prepare to virtualize 80% of thier production environment.
My environment currently had running the entire DR solution with VMware technology. In production, I do have more than 50 production VM which provide web hosting, middleware, file & print servers and etc. Imagine you had a tight budget with only 50k USD, how many of physical servers will you able to buy from there? and wat about the amount of power you need to absorb on monthly basis? That is the real cost as many of you may had not see the electric bill. For my case, my cost center had to paid for the power bill ourselve.
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Virtualization become a MUST for every single environment which run a small, medium or huge Data Center today. Even we can see the grow at the level of small medium business as well as some manufacturing plant too. VMware as the technology and market leader, it had provide a lot of new flexibility in term of reducing carbon foot print, green IT initiative, as well as CAPEX saving and etc. It had been huge saving from every single different perspective. Somehow, it had created complexity in term of Data center, Power & Cooling, Storage, and of course the complexity and extra workload on the engineers who support the environment.
Many of the case study happen today, we do see that users or the implementers had not for see some important hidden potential issue during the earlier stages of deployment. The fast grow of the storage, the higher bandwidth required, specify cooling and power needed to be supplied for the Virtual Infrastructure zone in the data center as well as the operation support task needed to be carried on as daily basis.
A success architect for Virtualization had to been specialize is all those area I had stated above to ensure the entire deployment will able to achieve all the goals had been set during the project planning. Some how, we do need to urge the employers to send the system engineers for further training in multiple products, example like VMware training, Linux administration, Microsoft Training as well as Network Training plus Data center training too. That is all the necessary requirement for the engineer to able to support, manage and plan for future extension of the virtualization farm.
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