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Uptime Institute Says Power to Cost 300-2250% More Than Server Hardware; What Does This Mean?

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:31:00 -0400

I came across Uptime Institute founder Ken Brill's CIO Magazine article via 3tera VP Marketing Bert Armijo's blog.

Ken says while hardware prices are falling, total cost of data center ownership is headed through the roof. 5 years from now, the purchase price for a rack of servers will drop 27.5% from $138K today to just $103K. But while it only takes 15 kilowatts to power that rack right now, the energy requirement will rise to 22 - 170 kilowatts by 2012. It could cost as much as $2.3 million to power/cool $103K worth of gear throughout its 3-year lifespan.

(I'm not sure if this figure includes switches and routers and such. A recent Cisco/APC/Emerson study shows that servers/storage/cooling consume 76% of data center power, with 11% going to networking equipment, 3% lighting, and 10% power conversion losses. If Uptime's calculations didn't take the other 24% into account, Ken's $2.3M becomes over $3M!)

I've been thinking about Ken's stats and trying to understand what they mean. As a point of reference, I was looking at Dell's website, which advertises the 4U PowerEdge 6950 dual core, dual processor Opteron server for about $9K. Is Ken saying that:

(a) This particular machine will cost 27.5% less 5 years from now?

(b) 2012's late model machines will sell for 27.5% less than what's on the market today?

(c) The amount of server hardware that fills up 4U of space will be available for $6500 in 2012?

If we assume he means (c), and we accept Sun's claim that "server performance, power and space efficiencies are improving at up to 40% annually on average, and could double every 2 years", then 4U of space may be able to accommodate not one but 4 servers that each feature 4x more processing power and 4x greater energy efficiency.

In other words, $6,500 could buy you 16x more computing resources than that dual Opteron! If that's the case, you might even be able to afford $1M per rack per year in electricity. But only if you virtualize like crazy. No more leasing data center space per square foot or per rack. No more dedicated servers, either. The average customer won't need 4x more processing power in 5 years, which means you won't be able to justify turning on a whole entire server just for them.

You'd also have to replace hardware early and often. Sun recently announced a refresh service for swapping out your servers at least 3 times over 42 months. At first I thought that sounded wasteful, but if server power efficiency is improving at 40% per year, holding on to old gear might end up costing you more. Again, virtualization would be a must. You wouldn't want customer apps to become attached to machines that will be phased out before long.

Bert from 3tera says changes in data center economics will make it increasingly difficult for enterprise CIOs to justify operating their own facilities. But they won't outsource to traditional colo or dedicated server providers. Instead, he agrees with Cassatt CEO Bill Coleman that in the near-ish future, you'll be "paying for data center horsepower the same way you pay for electricity or gas". I think so too. How about you?

PS - On a somewhat related note, eWeek says Intel will release its "Clovertown" chips today. The quad core processors have a 50 watt thermal envelope, versus 80-120 watts on earlier models. That's a 38-60% drop.

PPS - Also, speaking of the Uptime Institute, check out this SearchDataCenter.com interview on how they've helped The Planet save $10K/month on electricity. The Planet, the article says, is looking to expand beyond Texas into the Midwest.

Quick Domain Searching with Domize

Tue, 20 May 2008 12:11:12 +0000
Ready for the Online tool that promises to provide you with the quickest domain name searching ever?  Domize.com is promoting themselves as the “better” instant domain search tool.  Do they live up to that hype?  Yes, they do!
There is no rocket science needed to use it either, which as you all know if something I ...]

Ya-Host.com Review – The Rising Star

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 19:09:05 +0000
After many requests for a review of this particular host we have decided to check them out
Ya-Host.com has been in operation since 2005
owned and operated by a small crew located in Fort Worth Texas.
What first caught our attention was there claim to be their own Data Center.
Skeptical at first I asked for some kind of ...]

The Future of SaaS, and What Puts ThinkFree Ahead of Google

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 18:30:00 -0400

ThinkFree is way cool! I signed up for an account earlier this week, and its web-based spreadsheet, word processor and slide presentation apps work beautifully. TJ Kang, the company's founder, has been developing office productivity software since the 1980s, and it shows.

Founded in 1999. ThinkFree spent its early years as a desktop software company. Its online edition was released in April 2005. Now the LA Library offers it on 2,200 computers across 71 branches, and NHN, a Korean telco with 20 million subscribers, has integrated the product with its email system. In addition, over 250,000 individual users have signed up for accounts.

Unlike Zoho, which offers an amazing breadth of hosted services, ThinkFree focuses on three applications - but makes them available in more forms than you can imagine. Let's count them:

1. The ThinkFree-hosted edition

2. The server edition (for self-hosting by enterprise customers and on-premise hosting by telco and ISP partners)

3. The iPod edition (so that you can travel with your sales presentation, but not your computer)

4. The USB edition (which allows you to edit documents on someone else's computer without leaving any trace of your work after you disconnect)

5. The upcoming premier edition (which allows synchronized online/offline document editing), and

6. The also upcoming SMB edition (which allows companies to create groups for different sets of employees to share different documents).

All of the above offer round trip compatibility with Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint.

But I think what makes ThinkFree really, truly awesome is the company's idea of what SaaS should be like. VP Marketing Jonathan Crow says that one of his most important priorities is DocExchange, a shared repository of user-submitted documents. Because there's more to online collaboration than sharing documents with people you already know. It's also about leveraging and building upon the enormous amount of collective knowledge out there - knowledge that would have been inaccessible without SaaS. SlideShare and Swivel will have to watch out; as DocExchange evolves, ThinkFree users will be able to view public slides/datasets/documents - and reuse them on the spot.

This is as exciting as Amazon's EC2 machine image sharing announcement earlier this year. As Amazon puts it, sharing accelerates community-wide innovation. Not coincidentally, ThinkFree's document viewer runs on EC2, and DocExchange files are stored on S3. (SlideShare is an S3 customer as well.)

Earlier today Dennis Howlett wrote that being a Connector (in the Tipping Point sense) is part of every service provider's job description. Some connections are specific (you could introduce two customers to each other), others are sort of self-organizing (SlideShare making customer A's knowledge accessible to B, C and D through tags, auto-recommendations, etc), and still others are implicit (Freshbooks making aggregated invoice data available to customers within the same industry).

In the future of SaaS, I think, winning vendors will get ahead by being the best Connectors rather than the snazziest technology providers. (Which is why biggest community wins.) ThinkFree is well on its way. Google will most likely catch up. And Zoho; I'd bet on that. 1&1 CEO Andreas Gauger tells eWeek that he hopes to generate more SaaS than hosting revenues within 3-4 years. Could it happen? While he's got a sizable customer base, he's far from being in the Connector business. If I were him, I'd give TJ a call :)

For the month of march 2008, hostican uptime appear to be above the 99.9% uptime guarantee. Previous months, the hostican uptime was recorded as above 99.9% uptime as well. Currently, hostican web hosting had upgraded their hosting plan to 3000GB storage space, and how will this effect the hostican uptime and server performance? Hostican hosting is really delivering the best quality hosting services. And there is nothing to worry at this moment, i am happy with their hosting services.

The Proper Web Hosting Tech Support Blog

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 04:22:37 -0600
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