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Video: Google’s Data Center Best Practices
The primary goal of the Google European Data Center Summit held Tuesday in Zurich is to advance the adoption of well-known best practices to help make data centers more efficient. The event showcased some case studies from Google, and also featured many industry experts discussing various best practices that can reduce energy usage. The collective recommendations and best practices have been compiled in this video, narrated by Google Technical Program Manager Erik Teetzel and featuring other members of the Google data center team. The video runs 10 minutes, and provides an executive overview of data center best practices.
For more on energy efficiency, see our Green Data Centers Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.
About Rich Miller
Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.
Johnny Mnemonic
Posted May 25th, 2011Article is bs. If you watch closely, you’ll notice that they only discuss what is done in the CCNR and corporate DC space. That accounts for perhaps 5% of Google’s total DC floorspace. Therefore the “best practices” as described here should not be confused with what Google does in their production environment.
There’s a nice point made about the UPS, but wouldn’t putting a battery on each machine lead to a management and maintenance problem when those batteries begin to fail at their MTBF? What do you do with thousands of leaking batteries?
Nuno Garcia
Posted May 26th, 2011Comment to Johnny Mnemonic:
1. it is very immature to say that the article is **. Please grow up.
2. it is true, the article does not discuss the overall issue of corporate DC space. Nevertheless, the article is well presented and the rules that are suggested are sound and important, even if applicable only to 5% of the company’s DC space.
3. The MTBF for batteries is more or less the same as the MTB for the other components, so you end up having a whole machine that has to be replaced. It makes a lot of sense to eliminate unnecessary power conversions, also rendering the solution a lot more scalable – UPS solutions are not easily scalable.
Jeff
Posted May 26th, 2011For Google’s typical use, a server will be outdated and obsolete before the battery hits its MTBF (not counting premature failure) so why worry about that? As long as the server is a sealed box, if it develops a bad battery or something they will just pull it out and throw it away. The batteries will live longer than the CPU will be useful for, and (hopefully) they will just ship obsolete servers by the container-full to China for recycling. Google has a lot of impressive innovation but their methodologies are all centered around cloud computing approaches where servers are cheap, expendable, and fast to expire.
This all means that if you want to run your data center like Google, you need to run your applications like Google; something that’s really not an option for most companies, even large ones.
RESOURCE LINKS:
Building A Cloud-Savvy Model for TCO and ROI
How Storage is Shaping The Cloud Data Center
Bringing Colo to the Customer: Modular Gets Local
Microsoft’s $1 Billion Data Center
May 25th, 2011