IBM Generator Failure Causes Airline Chaos

A generator failure Sunday at an IBM data center in Auckland, New Zealand crippled key services for Air New Zealand, prompting the airline’s CEO to publicly chastise Big Blue for the failure. The data center outage crashed airport check-in systems, as well as on-line bookings and call center systems Sunday morning, affecting more than 10,000 passengers and throwing airports into disarray.

The problem occurred during planned maintenance at IBM’s Newton data center in Auckland. A generator failed during the maintenance window, dropping power to parts of the data center, including the mainframe operations supporting Air New Zealand’s ticketing. IBM says service was restored to most clients within an hour, but local media reports say Air New Zealand’s ticketing kiosks were offline for up to six hours.

Air New Zealand chief executive Rob Fyfe is not happy.

Getting Faster: SGI, IBM, Pliant SSDs, Akamai

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines on benchmarks, speed records, and response times:

• IBM breaks processing speed record. IBM announced Monday that the company set a new technology benchmark for the financial services industry, delivering the fastest recorded throughput performance and lowest network latency on Reuters Market Data System v6.0 (RMDS). Using the IBM BladeCenter HS22 server they processed 1.3 million market data updates per second, while maintaining a latency of less than 1 millisecond. Alex Yost, vice president IBM Systems and Technology Group said “The new generation of System x and BladeCenter solutions redefine how x86 clients can address today’s challenges with servers that have less than half the power consumption, one-third the management cost, and more than twice the performance.”
• SSD startup offers more than twice the input/output. Startup Solid State Drive (SSD) company Pliant Technologies announced Monday an enterprise flash drive (EFD) family, a new class of high-performance, high reliability storage drives.  The EFD’s deliver 2 -4 times faster input/output operations per second and 10 times higher data reliability than existing SSD’s.  The Pliant Lighting EFDs are the first flash-based storage devices to feature a cache-less design to prevent data loss on power interuptions, and a number of advanced data reliability features to deliver complete end-to-end data protection.  The Lightning EFDs have been specificaly designed for demanding, mission-critical 24×7 applications.   The products are being delivered for OEM evaluation and qualification and will be available in September 2009.

Roundup: Michigan Cloud, IBM’s Green Degree

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

• Michigan plans Government cloud. Michigan CIO Ken Theis details the plans that the state has toward building a massive data center designed to provide cloud computing services to state agencies, cities, counties and schools across the state.  Government Technology magazine interviews Theis, who left General Motors 11 years ago to join state government. Theis states that it could potentially be a 80,000 to 100,000 square foot facility and break ground in October 2010.  The goal is to build a cloud to provide application hosting and managed services not only for the state government, but for the public-sector as well.  Data center consolidation efforts to date by Michigan have closed 35 of 38 facilities and repurposed nearly half of its existing IT equipment.  These efforts have saved more than $19 million and reclaimed 30,000 square feet of office space, according to the state.  Michigan will use American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds and other sources in an effort to make the new data center as green as possible.  Theis said ”No private-sector CIO wants to offshore, but right now there’s not really a good alternative. And they have the same problem now as government does: They don’t have any money.”
• Verari FOREST container selected by Qualcomm. Verari Systems announced Tuesday that Qualcomm has selected their second-generation FOREST container solution for their most recent data center expansion.  Qualcomm vice president of Information Technology Brian Baker said “When we evaluated the cost efficiencies of operating a container versus a traditional data center, it became a natural step for us to deploy one.”  Verari’s second-generation container recently won the Uptime Institute’s 2009 Green Enterprise IT award for Energy Efficient Products: Facilities.  The Verari FOREST container houses up to 2,880 servers or 26 Petabytes of storage and the company says it can be deployed at about 50% of the capital and operating expense of traditional brick-and-mortar data centers.

IBM Inks Cloud Deal with JVC Kenwood

the IBM Technology Center in Makuhari, Chiba, Japan

For IBM, the cloudy horizon extends well beyond the United States. The latest example: JVC Kenwood Holdings, Inc. has signed a six-year, $28 million (2.6 billion yen) contract with IBM Japan to adapt cloud computing technologies to manage its IT systems.

JVC Kenwood, which makes audio and video electronics, will use Big Blue’s Shared Hosting Services out of IBM’s data center in Makuhari, Chiba to leverage pools of technology resources during periods of high volume. IBM will also centralize IT resources by relocating JVC Kenwoods’ existing data centers in Saitama and Tokyo to the Makuhari Data Center, which features an advanced seismic isolated system and redundant electrical system. JVC Kenwood will use IBM System z mainframes (“zSHS”) for a shared, virtual infrastructure.

The deal is the latest in a series of international cloud computing announcements for IBM. Big Blue’s global cloud computing initiative features cloud computing centers in Dublin, Ireland; Beijing, China and Johannesburg, South Africa. The company has provided cloud computing services to clients such as Wuxi City of China, Sogeti, the Local Professional Services Division of Capgemini, the Vietnamese government institutions and universities, and iTricity, a utility-based hosting service provider headquartered in the Netherlands.

Rackforce Unveils B.C. GigaCenter

An exterior view of a high-density GigaVault in the new Rackforce data center in Kelowna, British Columbia.

RackForce Networks has opened the first phase of its new GigaCenter in Kelowna, British Columbia, which combines Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 equipment and many of IBM’s “Big Green” data center technologies. The facility is powered by hydro electricity and offers a cold-aisle containment system that Rackforce says can support rack power densities of up to 35 kilowatts per rack.

The first phase of 30,000 square feet offers a range of space options, from single a cabinet up to dedicated ”GigaVaults” offering up to 170 cabinets. An additional 120,000 square feet is scheduled to be complete in 2011. GigaVaults employ a total air separation model (GigaVault Advanced Cold Aisle Containment).

Rackforce says the GigaCenter is running a fully-converged 10 Gigabit network on Cisco Nexus routers that uses Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to network its servers and storage.  

IBM Unveils New Water Cooling Technique

A close-up of the IBM Aquasar server blade shows the piping and processor enclosures supporting the water-cooling system.

IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) have unveiled plans for a new water-cooled supercomputer that will reuse excess heat in the university’s buildings. The new Aquasar system is expected to decrease the carbon footprint of the system by up to 85 percent.

The system is the result of a collaboration between ETH and IBM scientists on chip-level water-cooling and energy reuse. The supercomputer will consist of two IBM BladeCenter servers in one rack and will have a peak performance of about 10 Teraflops. Each of the blades will be equipped with a high-performance liquid cooler on each processor, as well as input and output pipeline networks and connections, which allow each blade to be connected and disconnected easily to the entire system (see photo above).

Chip-level cooling with a water temperature of about 60 degrees C (140 degrees F) will keep the chip at operating temperature well below the maximum 85 degrees C (185 degrees). The high input temperature of the coolant results in an even higher-grade heat as an output, which in this case will be about 65 degrees C.

IBM’s Cloud Gains Definition

What does the “Blue Cloud” look like? There have been times when IBM’s vision for cloud computing seemed diffuse, largely because Big Blue has so many points of entry. IBM sells servers and software, builds data centers, and provides consulting services. The company also had to consider the issue of whether it might wind up competing with its customers. As a result, IBM’s early efforts in the cloud didn’t align neatly with the most visible examples of the genre, such as Amazon Web Services or Salesforce.com.

This week IBM is rolling out new products that begin to bring some definition to its cloud computing roadmap. IBM is offering several services enabling public cloud computing. But Big Blue’s sharpest focus is on the private cloud, which presents an opportunity to sell hardware and software rather than monthly subscriptions.

Here’s what IBM is announcing:

Public Cloud: IBM can run your application testbed in its public cloud today, and will soon offer a subscription service to host virtual desktops in its data centers. The IBM Smart Business Test Cloud Services taps into, while the upcoming IBM Smart Business Desktop Cloud will establish a beachhead for expected future growth in enterprise desktop virtualization as a service delivery strategy. 

IBM, Syracuse Team on ‘Green’ Testbed

An artist rendering of the exterior of a new data center IBM will build and equip at Syracuse University.

A new data center at Syracuse University will serve as a testbed for energy efficient data center design, backed by technology from IBM and financial support from the state of New York. The $12.4 million, 6,000-square-foot data center will combine multiple energy-saving technologies, including on-site power generation, DC power distribution, chillers and cabinets equipped with water-cooled rear-door heat exchangers.

Syracuse University will use the data center for its IT equipment, and also provide detailed analysis of its energy efficiency. IBM will supply $5 million in electrical co-generation equipment and servers, and use the facility to showcase its “green” data center technology. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) is contributing $2 million to the project.

The new facility, which is scheduled to be completed late this year, will be powered by a microturbine engine fueled by natural gas, which will generate all electricity for the center and provide cooling for the computer servers. The heat generated by the microturbine will power an absorption chiller unit, which will convert the heat into chilled water to cool the data center’s servers.

The chilled water will be piped into IBM’s “Cool Blue” rear-door heat exchangers attached to each cabinet. IBM and Syracuse say they will implement a precision cooling system that reduces energy use by targeting only the servers that require cooling resources, rather than delivering cooling to all servers as in most data centers. Computer-controlled sensors will be used to monitor thermal conditions in the data center and direct cooling.

SciNet Supercomputer Runs on IBM iDataPlex

The University of Toronto’s SciNet Supercomputer Datacenter combines massive power (it’s number 53 on the Top 500 list) with exceptional energy efficiency, with a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.16, according to university scientists. SciNet features an unusual design combining IBM’s iDataPlex server and Cool Blue rear-door heat exchanger, which allows the university to run high-density cabinets with minimal room air conditioning. SciNet will soon be expanded with a 30,000-core system using iDataPlex servers with the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) processor, Intel’s new high-power, low-energy chip. This video provides an overview of SciNet and its technology, and runs about 6 minutes.

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