James Hamilton: Data center infrastructure innovation

Summary from James’ keynote talk at Velocity 2010 James Hamilton

  • Pace of Innovation – Datacenter pace of innovation is increasing.  The high focus on infrastructure innovation is driving down the cost, increasing reliability and reducing resource consumption which ultimate drives down cost.
  • Where does the money go ?
    • 54% on servers, 8% on networking, 21% on power distribution, 13% on power, 5% on other infrastructure requirements
    • 34% costs related to power
    • Cost of power is trending up
  • Clouds efficiency – server utilization in our industry is around 10 to 15% range
    • Avoid holes in the infrastructure use
    • Break jobs into smaller chunks, queue them where ever possible
  • Power distribution – 11 to 12% lost in distribution
    • Rules to minimize power distribution losses
      • Oversell power – setup more servers than power available. 100% of servers never required in a regular datacenter.
      • Avoid voltage conversions
      • Increase efficiency of conversions
      • High voltage as close to load as possible
      • Size voltage regulators to load and use efficient parts
      • High voltage direct current a small potential gain
  • Mechanical Systems – One of the biggest saving is in cooling
    • What parts are involved ? - Cooling tower, heat exchanges, pumps, evaporators, compressors, condensers, pumps… and so on.
    • Efficiency of these systems and power required to get this done depends on the difference in the desired temperature and the current room temperature
    • Separate hot and cold isles… insulate them (don’t break the fire codes)
    • Increase the operating temperature of servers
      • Most are between 61 and 84
      • Telco standard is 104F (Game consoles are even higher)
  • Temperature
    • Limiting factors to high temp operation
      • Higher fan power trade-off
      • More semiconductor leakage current
      • Possible negative failure rate impact
    • Avoid direct expansion cooling entirely
      • Air side economization 
      • Higher data center temperature
      • Evaporative cooling
    • Requires filtration
      • Particulate and chemical pollution
  • Networking gear
    • Current networks are over-subscribed
      • Forces workload placement restrictions
      • Goal: all points in datacenter equidistant.
    • Mainframe model goes commodity
      • Competition at each layer rather than vertical integration
    • Openflow: open S/W platform
      • Distributed control plane to central control

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