How Intel Manages 100,000 Servers

A look at the dense server configurations in one of the 97 data centers operated by Intel Corp, which runs more than 100,00 servers.

Chipmaker Intel has one of the largest data center management challenges on earth, with more than 100,000 servers housed in 97 data centers around the globe. About 70 percent of those servers support Intel staffers designing microprocessors, with the remainder dedicated to Intel’s office, IT and web operations. The company manages more than 18 petabytes of primary and secondary storage.

Those are just some of the data points Intel (INTC) shares in an interactive overview of its data center operations on its web site, which provides a series of videos to highlight different elements of its data center strategy.

Major Consolidation In Progress
Intel’s infrastructure won’t be this expansive for long. The company is several years into a massive data center consolidation that has already retired about 35 older facilities, and eventually hopes to compress its entire infrastructure into eight large, highly-efficient facilities.

Vette Corp. Unveils Coolcentric Unit

A diagram of the LiquiCool system, from Coolcentric, which uses liquid cooling delivered to the rack via a rear-door heat exchanger.

Vette Corp. believes its time for liquid cooling to have a higher profile. Today it is launching Coolcentric, a new division of Vette to market its LiquiCool systems, which cools servers using a water-cooled heat exchanger in the rear door of the cabinet.

Coolcentric will make the case for liquid cooling as a tool to save money and space while making data centers more energy efficient, a pitch designed to resonate with data center managers grappling with corporate focus on cost-cutting and sustainability.

“A majority of the world’s data centers are highly inefficient and utilize legacy air cooling methods that consume vast amounts of energy,” said George Dannecker, President and CEO of Vette Corp. “The benefits of data center liquid cooling are clear, evidenced by dramatic reductions in power consumption, space requirements and operating costs. Coolcentric aligns all our knowledge, experience and resources to best serve the needs of owners and operators of sustainable data centers.”

Cloud Monitoring Services: A Resource Guide

The cloud computing market has spawned an ecosystem of third parties that provide tools that monitor the performance of your hosted apps in the cloud, or keep a watch over public clouds (notably Amazon EC2) for breaks in service-level agreements. Some cloud computing monitoring services provide a single dashboard for SysAdmins to check the status of all their different clouds, whether public or private.

Below is a list of cloud monitoring companies (in alphabetical order) with a brief description of what they offer. We will continue to update this list as new suppliers come on board. Have we missed someone? Send us your feedback.

Amazon CloudWatch
If you’ve read enough pitches from independent providers of software that monitor Amazon clouds, you might  think Amazon doesn’t offer tools to monitor its own clouds. Amazon does offer CloudWatch, a Web service for monitoring Amazon Web Service cloud resources, starting with EC2. According to Amazon’s CloudWatch description page, the tool enables customers to monitor EC2 instances and Elastic Load Balancers in real-time. Its Auto Scaling feature, which is free to CloudWatch customers, allows customers to dynamically add or remove EC2 instances based on CloudWatch metrics. CloudWatch is pay as you go, and priced according to the EC2 instances monitored.

Gomez
Perhaps better known for its Web performance products, Gomez also provides cloud evaluation, testing and monitoring. Gomez claims that most cloud providers currently do not offer monitoring of their services from the perspective of the end-user, nor do they offer SLAs that guarantee the performance of their infrastructure. Gomez helps customers monitor the performance and availability of cloud apps, and monitor for SLA compliance. “We can monitor any cloud platform – and customers using the Gomez portal
can use charting, drill-down and contributor group functions to identify specific components of their applications,” Gomez says. A single dashboard for monitoring multiple cloud platforms is in the works, according to a spokesperson.

Hyperic/Cloud Status
Peformance monitoring and management company Hyperic offers CloudStatus BETA, a free service that provides real-time reports and weekly trends on cloud issues including service availability, response time, latency, and throughput. The service supports Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine. “As each cloud vendor provides multiple services for their users to consume, CloudStatus groups reports on performance and health statistics by each service,” according to Hyperic. In addition to CloudStatus, Hyperic provides Hyperic HQ Open Source, which the company says is the first software to allow companies to monitor cloud services alongside their internal infrastructure. The commercial version of Hyperic HQ, monitors Amazon Web Services.

LogicMonitor
LogicMonitor’s SaaS-based cloud monitoring software uses the same automation features that are central to its physical datacenter monitoring tools. Administrators can drill down into detailed performance data from disk latency to network traffic to application-specific parameters , says the company. Central to LogicMonitor’s cloud monitoring is its Active Discovery engine, which provides ongoing discovery of newly added or deleted instances as they are provisioned, and automatically configures them for monitoring. Thousands of virtual devices can be added to monitoring without a need to maintain in-house monitoring servers, the company adds. LogicMonitor is available on a month-to-month subscription basis, which includes maintenance and support.

Nimsoft
Monitoring specialist Nimsoft says its Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) monitors all enterprise applications, whether they’re in the corporate data center, or on private or public clouds. All this can be monitored from a single Unified Monitoring dashboard. Nimsoft provides monitoring of both public and private clouds. In the public cloud, Nimsoft casts its eye over infrastructure as a service platforms, including Amazon and Rackspace; platform as a service, including Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine; and software as a service, including Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

Monitis
Monitis, a spin-off from Web portal Lycos Europe/Bertelsmann, provides monitoring of Amazon EC2 and S3 cloud storage. Monitis agents can be automatically installed on new servers to monitor performance metrics, plus generate notifications when resources are detected to be low. Users are notified if a server is lost in the Amazon cloud, or if thresholds are being broken, says Monitis, which also provides system monitoring, performance testing, and configuration management from the cloud.

Tap In Systems
San Francisco-based Tap In Systems says it bridges the systems management gap between the traditional monitoring tools that “typically do a poor job with the virtual environments of the cloud,” and the “limited visibility into the status and performance of cloud-based systems and applications.” Its Cloud Management Service is built on an event management architecture in the Amazon cloud, and provides real-time monitoring and alerting of system status, usage and peformance of cloud and on-premises systems and applications; reports and charts of historical events and performance metrics; and models the states of applications and generates alerts based on those models.

TechOut
TechOut is founded by John D’Esposito, a former consultant to IBM who led the development of n-tiered infrastructures for clustering servers for performance and load balancing. TechOut monitors a range of technologies, including Website monitoring and business transaction monitoring. It monitors cloud services from Amazon, FlexiScale, Go-Grid, Joyent, Nirvanix, and 3Tera.

Zenoss
Zenoss’ creators say they founded the company after managing the cloud-based services of a large telco application service provider and being frustrated with using a traditional “big 4 monitoring tool that was failing.” “The management tool was too complex, un-integrated, too expensive, and too ’static’ to monitor the services required by the dynamic nature and scale of the business,” Zenoss explains on its Web site. The company says its “unlegacy” tools were developed to monitor the new generation of dynamic clouds and data centers. Zenoss says it manages physical virtual and cloud devices, monitoring networks devices and relationships. Zenoss also automatically adjusts its monitoring as change occurs.

Fast-Growing Mozilla Adds Phoenix Data Center

This chart from Mozilla shows the growth of its infrastructure since 2006.

Mozilla has added a second major data center in Phoenix to accommodate the growth of its popular open source software projects, especially the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail client. The non-profit corporation will house six racks and about 80 servers at the mammoth Phoenix ONE data center operated by i/o Data Centers.

The expansion space in Phoenix will support Mozilla’s primary data center in San Jose, Calif., with production apps running in both locations. The project also has smaller satellite facilities in Amsterdam and Beijing.

Infrastructure for 350 Million Users
“Since 2006, we’ve tripled the amount of data center floor space (and tripled our IT/Ops team), grew our user base 8.75 times and now push 18x the bandwidth,” Matthew Zeier from the Mozilla operations team wrote in a blog post. “Sure, in comparison to other sites, this growth is small. It’s no Facebook. But it’s still a significant amount of infrastructure that supports 350 million users and the world’s most popular web browser (we’re at about one engineer to 43.7m users (or one to 800 servers).”

The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’

A look at some of the high-density server and networking gear inside the Weta Digital data center used to render the animation for the new James Cameron movie "Avatar." (Photo: Foundry Networks Inc.)

It takes a lot of data center horsepower to create the stunning visual effects behind blockbuster movies such as King Kong, X-Men, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and most recently, James Cameron’s $230 million Avatar.  Tucked away in Wellington, New Zealand are the facilities where visual effects company Weta Digital renders the imaginary landscapes of Middle Earth and Pandora at a campus of studios, production facilities, soundstages and a purpose-built data center.

The 10,000 square foot server farm manages thousands of work orders and a serious amount of data. Information Management magazine reports on the creative artists and rendering done for the movie, as well as the thoroughbred data center supporting it.

The Weta data center got a major hardware refresh and redesign in 2008 and now uses more than 4,000 HP BL2×220c blades (new BL2×220c G6 blades announced last month), 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking gear from Foundry and storage from BluArc and NetApp. The system now occupies spot 193 through 197 in the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers.

Reader’s Choice: The Top 10 Stories of 2009

Who has the most web servers? One of the leaders was 1&1 Internet. This is its data center in Karlsruhe, Germany.

It’s time to take a look back at the best and worst of 2009. We start today with a look at the most popular articles published on Data Center Knowledge in 2009, as determined by our readers. These were the stories that attracted the most page views during the year:

Who Has The Most Web Servers? Topping the list is our look at the companies with the most servers in their data centers, according to public data, as well as some speculation about the “secret servers” at Google, Microsoft and elsewhere.

The Gallery of Exploding Servers: Some servers die quietly in their racks, with little fanfare. But not these servers. Some failed to meet expectations. Others were found to be convenient fodder for marketing stunts. All of them had their violent demise preserved on video and posted on the Internet.

Facebook Now Has 30,000 Servers: The relentless growth of Facebook fueled a number of our stories this year. News that the social network has crossed the 30,000 server barrier seemed to catch the imagination of our readers.

Inside the ‘James Bond Villain’ Data Center: How can you not love an underground data bunker 100 feet below Stockholm, complete with waterfalls, greenhouse-style NOC, glass-enclosed conference room “floating” above the colocation floor, and blue-lit diesel engines? Dean Nelson of Data Center Pulse took the tour, and we lived vicariously through the video.

Google’s Chiller-Less Data Center: Data center operators have been moving away from the use of energy-hungry chillers to cool their data centers. And no one moved further than Google, which built its new data center in Belgium with no chillers on-site.

How Google Routes Around Outages: Making changes to Google’s search infrastructure is akin to “changing the tires on a car while you’re going at 60 down the freeway,” according Urs Holzle, who oversees the company’s massive data center operations.

Inside Microsoft’s Dublin Mega Data Center: A closer look at Microsoft’s Dublin facility, which represents a milestone in data center design. The new data center will power much of Microsoft’s global cloud computing operation, while using far less energy and water than typically consumed in other data centers of this scale. 

HP Scales Out With New Cloud Servers: In a departure from its “blade everything” reputation, HP launched a line of rackmount servers designed to appeal to cloud-builders’ focus on energy efficiency and cost, and be delivered by the rackload.

Google Unveils its Container Data Center: After years of secrecy, Google lifted the lid on its data center operations during an April summit for industry executives. The highlight of the day was a video tour of the long-rumored container data center, which was built in 2005 – confirming that Google was into containers before containers were cool. 

Google Envisions 10 Million Servers: There were many data center innovators in 2009, but Google continues to prompt fascination from Internet watchers. That included our summary of a presentation by a Google engineer indicating that the company is preparing to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future.

You can stay current on the latest data center news by subscribing to our RSS feed and daily e-mail updates, or by following us on Twitter or Facebook.

Power Densities Likely to Drive Expansions

Average power densities continue to rise in data centers, and are affecting the lifespan of existing data center facilities, according to new survey data from Emerson Network Power. A majority of data centers say they will run out of capacity within two years, suggesting a wave of expansions is in the pipeline.

Thirteen percent of the members of Emerson’s Data Center User Group (DCUG) said the average power density in their data centers was 12 kilowatts a cabinet or higher, with five participants reporting average power loads exceeding 20 kw a cabinet. Eleven percent reported average densities between 8 and 12 kw, while the largest group of users – 36 percent – cited loads of 4 to 8 kw per rack.

Short on Power, Not Space
The survey reinforces the prevailing wisdom that data centers are running out of power before they run out of physical space. Thirty four percent of respondents cited power as the primary factor limiting data center capacity, while just 14 percent cited floor space.

Surge in Federal Cloud Revenue for Terremark

The NAP of the Capital Region in Culpeper, Virginia is hosting many of Terremark's cloud computing customers.

The Obama administration’s plan to shift federal IT services to a cloud computing model is beginning to boost revenues for Terremark Worldwide, one of the early leaders in the government cloud services market. The Miami-based company said yesterday that its revenue from cloud computing has surged to an annual rate of $13.2 million, with the majority of that growth coming from the federal government.

Terremark (TMRK) is hosting two of the earliest federal web sites to seek out a cloud hosting model, the USA.gov information portal and Data.gov, an ambitious project to provide the public with better access to government activities through machine-readable data feeds. “Our early success with the federal government has clearly validated our technology leadership which is accelerating our commercial customer’s interest in an adoption of cloud computing,” said Terremark chairman and CEO Manuel Medina.

Medina said the Terremark cloud platform is becoming a gateway to selling additional value-added services to its customers. “Really what gives the premium to our cloud is the services we wrap around it. We don’t expect those (profits) to come down any time soon. To be perfectly honest with you, I’m a lot happier today when we sign a cloud deal than when we sign 1,000 square feet of colo.”