SAP Uses Second Life As Well

The other night, while I was trying to find Cory's blog, I ran across an interesting blog from a guy at SAP. Turns out we were both at the same talk in Palo Alto. (See my previous post for more info). SAP is using Second Life for online training and demos. For details, read Mario's blog. Pretty neat.

Virtual Worlds Hosted in Data Centers

A few weeks ago, I went to a talk by Linden Labs CTO, Cory Ondrejka. His background leading up to Second Life is quite interesting. He started off developing simulators for the military, then moved to writing arcade games, and then finally ended up creating Second Life. Pretty interesting fellow, and a good speaker as well. For those of you not at the talk, here's an interesting article in Information Week about Second Life (SL).

SL runs on dual-cpu x86 servers with Linux and MySQL. A 16 acre "plot" in SL runs on a single core on one of these servers. A human (or company) in the real world can purchase a 16-acre plot for an initial cost of US$1900 and a monthly payment of US$300. SL is essentially a hosting company for virtual real estate and virtual goods that are traded in the real world. As an example, the SL city of Amsterdam sold for US$50,000 on eBay. (Check it out)

Here's some metrics on SL:

• Bandwidth: 10 GB/second outbound
• Storage: 40 TB of user data
• Scalability: 100,000,000 SQL queries/day (using MySQL)

Cory also claims that SL is one of the largest (or the largest) deployment of MySQL. And SL is adding 1-2 racks of servers each week to keep up with demand. Now those are some pretty impressive stats.

Welcome, Connie Weiss!

One of my friends, Connie Weiss, joined the blogosphere. Check out her blog for a welcome change of pace. Although I don't have the variety of pets that Connie does, I do have four parakeets at home!

Data Centers are Hot Again, Thanks to Web 2.0

Yesterday's San Jose Mercury News describes how data centers are "hot again" due to traffic from the growing popularity of social networking Web sites, such as YouTube and Facebook. Demand for data centers is increasing, as companies such as Apple, Yahoo and Kaiser are purchasing or leasing new data centers to keep up with demand for their applications.

Some interesting excerpts from the article:

• While prime office space in downtown San Jose costs about $2 a square foot per month, space in a data center rents from $15 to $30 a square foot per month.
• In the past two years, one million square feet of space in Silicon Valley data centers was purchased or leased, more than all the space taken off the market from 2001 through 2004.
  

The article mentions Apple's 2006 purchase of a data center in Newark, California. I wonder if that's the location that serves my daughter's iTunes purchases-- just a short hop across the Dumbarton bridge.

The Most Energy-Efficient Server Is One That's Powered Off

"Green data centers" and energy-efficient servers are the latest buzz in IT and government, as it turns out. Information Week's March 12 features green data center technologies as the cover storr. The online version doesn't have the same catchy Gordon Gecko-esque "Green is Good" title, but it's still a good read.

Today's data centers are built like offshore platforms from the oil and gas industry. Every 100 years, there's a monster wave, usually 50 feet high, from a massive hurricane or storm. So, offshore platforms are built to withstand this 100-year wave. The platform is taller than the wave's crest, and the platform is built to withstand the force of the wave.

Data centers are typically provisioned to meet peak demand, much the same way as oil platforms are engineered for that 100-year wave. Servers are provisioned to handle peak applications loads or traffic from major events, such as the quarterly sales promotion or special news event. On a typical day, however, utilization is much lower, but you still have all of those servers humming away, using electricity and generating heat.

What if you could power off all of those unused servers? Not only would you save electricity, you would also reduce your cooling costs. Could you determine which servers are idle and then those shut down? And could you do this automatically? How fast could you respond to changes in your environment? If load increases, could you power on the additional servers you need?

These are tough demands for your data center, but these changes can reduce your energy costs. The local utility, PG&E, is providing rebates to companies who can reduce their overall energy consumption or reduce their energy consumption on-demand in order to prevent rolling black-outs. We're participating in a new initiative by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group for energy-efficient data centers. As part of this initiative, we're showing how Cassatt Collage can be used to implement these use cases to reduce your overall power costs.

Back on the home front, we have several hundred servers in our system test lab. Since they're managed by Collage, only a third of the servers are usually powered on at a given time. When we do large scale-out tests, Collage fires up most of the servers in the lab. However, we usually schedule those scale-out tests for the weekends. Our lab A/C consists of three different units, each of which turn on when there is demand. One unit is constantly running; the second one kicks in during parts of the day; the third one only kicks in during heat waves or scale-out tests. Pretty cool, huh? (Pun sort-of intended)

Getting "Out There"

A friend of a friend (funny how that works) gave me some pointers to get my blog plugged into the broader "blogosphere." I just created a profile on technorati.com and am "posting claim" to my blog there.
Technorati Profile

Would You Please Get Those VM’s Under Control!

With all the recent controversy in financial markets and politics, it’s time for us geeks to stir up a little controversy of our own. A recent article in the Register talks about the challenges in managing Virtual Machines and licensing issues associated with the ability to deploy new (virtual) servers at will. A recent blog at Server Virtualization captured some of the opinions regarding the topic of how closely you should control the VM’s in your environment and whether or not developers can/should “hide a VM under their desk.”

Instead of finding new ways to circumvent your IT department, what if your IT department could provide you access to the VM’s you need, when you need them? When you’re done with your VM’s, you could give them back so that others can use them. Since there’s no physical asset, borrowing a VM should be easy. What if your IT department could go one step further and provide your VM’s freshly installed with the O/S and applications you need. This is a win-win situation. The IT department can still keep tabs on server resources and software licenses. And developers get access to the environments they need in their dev/test cycles. Cassatt Collage can help you set up this dynamic VM environment. (Read more)

At Cassatt, our IT director, Kirk, is the one who’s on the hook for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. I really don’t want to see Kirk go to jail for failure to comply with software licenses-- one of the possible consequences of not getting a handle on how many VM's you have in your enterprise. After all, Kirk is a nice guy, and he does bring farm-fresh eggs for Karen, our CFO. So even though I’m a developer at heart, I do my part to make sure that Kirk stays out of the slammer, Karen gets her eggs, and I get my paychecks. So don't you think it might be worthwhile to get those VM's under control?