2009/07/16
TheRegister: Google data center born without chillers
by Cade Metz
The cooling system inside Google's Belgium data center has no chillers. It uses nothing but outside air - so-called "free-cooling" - to keep temperatures down. And if the Belgian air gets too hot, Google shifts the data center's compute loads to other facilities.
As we reported late last month, Google senior manager of engineering and architecture Vijay Gill alluded to this chiller-less setup during a cloud-happy tech conference in San Francisco. And our piece sparked a follow-up story from our friends at Data Center Knowledge.
According to the site, Google openly discussed its chiller-free facility this spring during a data-center summit inside the Mountain View Chocolate Factory. The Belgium climate can provide free cooling for all but about seven days of the year, the company says, and during those hot summer days, Google offloads the facility's tasks to other custom-built data centers, which now number about 36 worldwide.
The free-cooling idea is hardly unique - the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo! are also working to cut energy costs by using alternative cooling sources - but Google isn't even using chillers as a fall-back.
Google tends to operate its data centers at over 80 degrees Fahrenheit - well above the norm - and according to one former employee, Intel provides the Chocolate Factory with chips that are better able to withstand heat than garden variety Chipzilla processors. But it's unclear how Google's free cooling setup operates. The company did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
Speaking at Structure 09, the wonderfully-witty Vijay Gill seemed to indicate that when there's a temperature spike in the chiller-less data center, its top-secret infrastructure can respond without human intervention.
"You have to have integration with everything right from the chillers down all the way to the CPU," he said. "Sometimes, there's a temperature excursion, and you might want to do a quick load-shedding - a quick load-shedding to prevent a temperature excursion because, hey, you have a data center with no chillers. You want to move some load off. You want to cut some CPUs and some of the processes in RAM."
And he hinted that Google can (almost) instantly shift loads from one data center to another as if moving data between servers. Google likes to think of each data center as one big machine. The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines is the title of the now-famous paper.
"How do you manage the system and optimize it on a global level? That is the interesting part," Gill continued. "What we've got here [with Google] is massive - like hundreds of thousands of variable linear programming problems that need to run in quasi-real-time. When the temperature starts to excurse in a data center, you don't have the luxury to sitting around for a half an hour...You have on the order of seconds."
But when asked if this technology is in place today, Gill responded in typical Google fashion. "I could not possibly comment on that," he said. Likewise, when The Reg contacted Google today about its chiller-less setup, the company did not immediately respond.
In a March interview with Data Center Knowledge, however, Google senior vice president of operations Urs Holzle indicated that the company uses manual tools for load shifts between data centers. "Teams regularly practice failing out of or routing around specific data centers as part of scheduled maintenance," he said. "Sometimes, we need to build new tools when new classes of problems happen."
And if Google does have automated tools doing this sort of thing, you have to wonder how well they're working. Earlier this year, two much-discussed Gmail outages involved Google shifting loads between data centers. ®
InfoWorld: Theft of Twitter documents from Google Apps raises cloud security concerns
by Jon Brodkin
A hacker has reportedly obtained and distributed more than 300 confidential documents pertaining to Twitter's business affairs. The documents were reportedly stored on Google Apps.
The hacker apparently accessed documents with potentially sensitive information about Twitter employees, company finances, partner agreements, and other topics, and forwarded the documents to media outlets such as TechCrunch, which reported on the data breach Tuesday.
On how the breach occurred, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington writes that "the original security hole seems to be Google, via Google Apps for your Domain. Some passwords were guessed and things started to fall apart from there. Most (or all) of these documents were downloaded from Google's servers."
The exposure has raised ethical questions about whether any or all of the exposed documents should be published. TechCrunch said it would refrain from posting documents relating to individuals who interviewed at Twitter and others that show "floorplans and security passcodes to get into the Twitter offices." But TechCrunch said it will publish some documents "showing financial projections, product plans, and notes from executive strategy meetings."
The exposure is also certain to raise questions about cloud-based services, both in terms of whether the services themselves contain inherent security flaws and whether customers are too trusting and aren't using strong enough passwords.
CNet: 'Free' is(n't) a four-letter word...
by Matt Asay
Just as Amazon and Google are obliterating profit margins for old-school publishers, so, too, is open source putting the squeeze on them, whether in cloud computing or in search or...you name it. As the world digitizes, there's a mad rush to commoditize everyone else's business. This is good for consumers (low prices!) but not so good for vendors (low margins!).
The problem (and promise) of digitization is, of course, "free." Everyone loves to pay "free," but few really enjoy selling it. Or competing with it.
As Bill Gurley suggests: "The key question for anyone in business is, 'Can someone do what you do for free?' If the answer is 'yes' you have a problem." In a digital world, that "problem" is wreaking havoc on an increasing array of industries.
The problem, however, isn't "free.'" It's that old businesses persist in trying to charge for goods that others give away.
Twitter, for example, may not be making much money from its service, but a host of companies are starting to derive considerable cash from the sale of ancillary software or services, as TechCrunch points out.
Or take the media industry. As Andrew Savikas persuasively argues, media continues to think it's a content business, while the world believes it's a services business.
JP Rangaswami illustrates why:
What if the troglodytes finally began to realise that customers were scarce and digital music was abundant? What if they finally began to realise that downloads were an excellent way to advertise scarce things like concerts and physical memorabilia, as Prince figured out?
And what if the customers have given up and moved on, from the download to the stream?
It was never about owning content. It was always about listening to music.
It was never about product. It was always about service.
The customer is the scarcity.
That scarcity only appears to grow as digital goods proliferate. So much content seeking audience with comparatively few consumers. Something has to give.
That something is, first of all, old business models premised on selling an abundantly available good as if it were scarce. The real model is to foster abundance while selling the scarcity that naturally accompanies it. Google gives away search so that it can help you narrow that search with ads; Red Hat encourages open-source development so that it can boil down that teeming mass of uncertainty to a certified, stable build of Linux; and so on.
Some in the software world don't get this. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer can repeat ad infinitum that "We just keep coming and coming and coming" with the same strategy, the same software, the same everything.
But eventually it won't, because even Microsoft's bank balance and "Tenacious. Tenacious. Tenacious" approach can't withstand a perennial battle with 'free' (or enterprise customers' apparent indifference to more of the same). Not unless it can re-learn how to make 'free' work for it, as it has with SharePoint.
The same is true for the media industries as well as new-school software companies like Google. Today's profit center is almost certainly going to be given away by one's competitor.
That's why creative destruction must be creative to pay off. It's what drives innovation. No one is entitled to its business model forever, for which consumers should be very, very grateful.
