Christian Belady Then and Now?
June 1, 2008I came across an interesting article at the Register which highlighted Christian Belady when he was still at HP. The title of the article is “Efficient data centers make companies less green” and represents Belady’s views from roughly one year ago. Now that he is with Microsoft, he seems to have changed his tune to some degree. One quote sticks out for me
“People think by heading towards efficiency you are actually going to reduce cost,” Belady told LinuxWorld in SanFrancisco today.
While this is consistent with his recent article on Jevon’s Paradox, I am curious if his move has changed his thoughts. I have seen him speak once or twice in the last year and he is one smart cookie. One year ago he published a roadmap
First, companies need to start looking at the entirety of a data center as a computer. Businesses must completely analyze the implications of adding hardware into the data center before making acquisitions. Buying “green” hardware is fine, but infrastructure can no longer be overlooked. Basically, this equates to paying people to analyze their airflow.
Hardware vendors must agree on energy efficiency metrics. If companies can’t measure it, they won’t improve. hoBelady’s pe for this kind of consolidation lies largely with The Green Grid, a consortium of technology companies bent on energy efficiency. Benchmarks for server efficiency such as SPEC and Power Usage Effectiveness for data centers must be broadly adopted.
In the future, guidelines need to be created to make the data center a plug and play environment. Having a common architecture with efficient cooling and heat dispersal will ultimately drive down costs and eliminate fragmentation. In Belady’s future data center, if the IT staff adds a liquid-cooled rack, the water pipe can plug into the same spot regardless of manufacturer.
“When I bought my HD TV, I didn’t have to rip out my infrastructure to add it in. That’s where the data center needs to be.”
I am curious where he sits one year out. Here is a link to the original Register article.
Thanks for taking an interest in my work and yes I still feel the same way. Let me address point by point.
1) Now that I am with Microsoft, I definitely see that there are huge opportunities on the data center side to substantially reduce power consumption and cost. More importantly, there is a bigger opportunity if we make the interface between IT and th data center fuzzy. In other words, instead of optimizing each seperately, if you optimize both holistically, the opportunities are endless.
2) I still feel that end users that measure efficiency and act on it will win. Honestly, I am still baffled by how few companies are taking advantage. At Microsoft we measure efficiency daily and also select servers based on application per watt perfromance. The Green Grid has made great headway in this respect as well with the promotion of PUE/DCiE. In fact, the European Commission has adopted DCiE…so we are starting drive to a global metric.
3) I still believe in the notion of the commoditization of the data center and the idea of plug and play. The only differnce now is that I was thinking too small. Instead of plugging the rack into the standard interface, it is actually the whole container that plugs into the standard interface! The really cool thing is the vendors can now use whatever technology they want inside the container…liquid v air, DC vs AC or any thing else and we don’t really care. It is all abstracted away and all we do care about is which solution gives us the best overall application performance for the lowest possible cost and energy. Truly “plug and play” and we do not have to be part of the technolgy religion wars.
So you see, I think my position has still not changed but rather I think I was just not thinking big enough! The move to Microsoft has really opened my eyes in ways I never could have imagined. I feel blessed to have been on the server design side and now the data center design side…there are not many people who have had that opportunity…I am really quite lucky!