Imagine the power of a completely dynamic, fluid infrastructure of data centers that can act as a single logical network and take advantage of even momentary changes in power expenses/requirements, users or even avoid predictable natural disasters.

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Watching the Scale, It's Not Just For Humans Trying To Lose Weight!

Dieting, the mere thought of it makes me shudder. I could easily diet if there was just no food around! What are the triggers that make us go on a diet, well there are the obvious things; appearance, health, energy level and maybe a desire to get out and enjoy the planet a little more.  How are these things any different that managing our data centers, infrastructure or basic facilities more effectively? The simple answer is there isn't a difference. The only reason it's not as obvious is that we don't have simple visibility into the real performance or health of our facilities and infrastructure. As humans we have friends and family who can say "Mark it's great to see you, looks like life’s been treating you well", or worse "why are you married to that guy, he's getting old and fat?". Then there’s the mirror, the scale and the doctor, assuming our lack of breath from walking up the stairs or fear of trying on last years suit wasn't enough. And therein lies the problem, the data center, your cloud, and or your facility don't have that simple visibility that we do.

The sophistication in our current tools and the metrics should enable most organizations to put the equivalent of a health metering, management and reporting solution in place. So why haven't we? The reasons are myriad and range from a lack of concern for the issue to not having the right organization in place to identify and implement improvements. A while back I did a blog about why data centers are slow to improve and this story has some direct correlations. In that blog I point out the issue of visibility in the sense that if there isn't someone responsible for owning the data center then the chances of real improvement being made diminish dramatically. This same concept might eventually apply to the “Cloud”. If you build a cloud and don’t know what it’s supposed to look like when it’s done or when it’s running at peak/off peak utilization, how will you know you’re getting your monies worth? I’m guessing you’ll need to have a person responsible for ensuring success.

So, what to do, what to do, I guess we could just wring our hands and hope for a miracle. Unfortunately, I've never been very good at the whole waiting for a miracle thing. I've got this old fashioned belief that I need to take responsibility, what a concept, responsibility, there I said it again.

I just got off the phone with a friend in the EPA who believes like I do, that we need to get in front of the issue that faces us today, we can't wait for regulation or the famous miracle. We need to take responsibility for our environments and develop a level of visibility that can shame us into action. This visibility should take the form of an environment health, improvement, metering and management solution. The risks are in every facet of our infrastructure from the buildings to the data centers and yes, even the cloud. I know, I said it, you could even be wasteful using the cloud, who would've thunk it?

I guess the next question is where, what & how, OK, three questions.

• Where - on the building, including power, water, & waste, especially e-waste. In the data center, measuring PUE, DCIE, or EUE and on the Cloud measuring “useful work per watt” or something like that.
• What - software tools that can provide a sophisticated view of how your environment is running against goals, in comparison to benchmarks and or other assumptions of efficiency.
• How - install the tools and use them to provide analysis, dashboards (the scale) and reporting (Global Reporting Initiative, Carbon Collective, Cap & Trade, or customers & partners).

Over the last few years I've been looking for or helping to develop tools that could help with some of the problems outlined above. One of my first hair brained ideas was to create the equivalent of a "Gas Gauge" for the cloud. The thinking was that you could monitor one screen to tell what the health (from an efficiency and capacity standpoint) of your Cloud or virtual infrastructure is. We have those tools for buildings and even for buildings that house compute infrastructure, tools like CSRware. These tools with minimal regular human intervention can help you ascertain whether a given building is performing as expected or whether you're using more or less energy or water than you should be. You can compare buildings against each other and define targets, metrics and reporting. This is what a health management solution really looks like. It's not a "fix the problem" solution (stop eating for two weeks and then go back to normal), it's a tool that helps to ensure you get on track and then stay there, kind of like a diet with teeth! This capability can be applied to a campus or to the data center facility or both. However, the real problem with effective use of resources (understanding whether we're a little or a lot over weight) is that you need to be able to quantify what it is that you're producing. In the cloud and in generic IT infrastructure there is the distinct risk of over provisioning. As humans we have an amazing ability to use up what ever extra (space, power, roads, food, money, bandwidth) capacity we create. 

So I guess what I'm saying is fairly straight forward. We need to establish measurable objectives for ourselves, our infrastructure and our buildings, baseline where we're starting and measure our progress. I'm sure this isn't a foreign concept, but it's amazing how rarely it gets applied to IT, data centers and buildings. If you're just starting out and you've been inspired by someone (even yourself) to make a change for the better, I suggest starting small. Bite off something small that's got a strong 80/20 ratio. A tool like CSRware's solution is a great example, low cost and quick implementation, which is especially important for facilities that are already in operation. If you're looking for a more complete solution for a new facility then be sure to invest properly in the right monitoring and metering solutions (Energy Wise from Cisco, Foreseer from Eaton, Tivoli from IBM, etc.) that can help feed a CSRware type tool. On the cloud and virtualization front there aren't any good tools that I'm aware of yet. I think VMware is working on something, but I don't have the details and I know several groups are trying to create the all knowing data center infrastructure solution.

Time will tell, I just hope we can convince the majority of business owners before it becomes regulation. If you know a small to medium business owner pass this along, they are often the most at risk because they don’t have the scale that makes facility or Cloud operations an obvious target for the CFO. The fact that they don’t have the “scale” doesn’t mean they can’t benefit themselves and the planet by focusing on using what they have more effectively.

Should the next generation management of network and application network devices look and act more like Facebook and Twitter? Infrastructure 2.0 could take us there.

Y ou may think I’m kidding and certainly I make this proposal with some amount of humorous intent, but there is some value, I think, in applying the concepts of Web 2.0 and social networking to network management systems (NMS).

There’s a reason it’s called social networking, after all. It’s modeled closely on networking and NMS is primarily about managing not just individual network and application network devices, but on managing the relationships between them. “Dependencies” are often included in NMS applications to better visualize and traverse the myriad relationships between network, application network, storage, and applications that make up the data center infrastructure. Understanding which devices are “friends” and which are “followers” is nothing new to NMS and IT professionals who spend their days mired inside these applications.

I occasionally see tweets and press releases regarding new versions of this NMS solution or that, but even the newer ones are all very focused on doing the same old thing with a dash of “cloud” for flavor. If we’re going to completely and potentially irrevocably change the style of computing, shouldn’t we change our methods of management, too?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use mechanisms similar to OAuth to connect various devices together and on a granular basis permit the exchange of configuration – relevant polices, for example? And wouldn’t it be even nicer if that exchange could be mediated automatically? When BIG-IP 003 “tweets” a configuration update – such as the launch of a new virtual instance of an application - it is picked up by its followers (including BIG-IP 002) and triggers the appropriate update on its configuration. Facebook style Walls could substitute for text-based log files and provide many of the same features as Web 2.0 and social networking sites do today: sharing with other systems, tagging, marking for later perusal, etc…

Example: you’re perusing through your Apache “Wall”. You see in the log an HTTP request that is obviously an attempt to exploit a vulnerability. You click the “SHARE” button and are presented with a list of all your “network” friends. You choose your firewall/web application firewall and options are immediately presented as to the kind of sharing you want to do. You choose “create a policy to block this IP” and WHAM! No more exploitable requests from that IP address. It’s the virtual patching that White Hat Security has been doing for years married to Facebook. Awesome powerful stuff there.

I started out by mentioning there is some amount of humorous intent in this idea but the core concept is very serious: the collaboration and relationships that are inherent in Web 2.0 and social networking are definitely applicable to managing emerging data center models. The ability to interconnect the network, application network, storage, and applications is paramount to a successful implementation. Without that interconnection - without a dynamic control plane to support the collaboration – any next generation implementation simply adds complexity to an already complex set of systems. Efficiency and indeed agility is achieved through dynamism, and dynamism is achieved through the ability to send and receive actionable data and execute the appropriate processes without requiring human intervention. But we shouldn’t stop at the operational layer. Let’s keep going, up the “stack” and re-examine how we manage these systems. There’s no reason we can’t leverage the robust APIs available to control and manage infrastructure solutions to build a next-generation management system that is itself dynamic and collaborative.

How this collaboration is leveraged is completely up to the implementer, which is why even though it may seem funny we certainly could see Facebook/Twitter-style functionality in our HP OpenView/CA Unicenter/IBM Tivoli/<insert NMS here> solutions. There’s no reason why, when most infrastructure 2.0 solutions are capable of SOAPy or RESTful (or both) integration that we can’t create something that’s more collaborative, more integrated, and generally makes the ability to configure and manage systems across multiple installations a bit easier.

A while ago a colleague and I created Twitter-bots for BIG-IP? It wasn’t just alerting and notifications; we could command a BIG-IP remotely via Twitter. So my funny idea gets a bit more serious when you consider we’re already leveraging the collaborative capabilities of infrastructure 2.0 to find new ways to manage and interact with network, storage, and application network solutions. There’s a lot we can learn from the success and rapid adoption of social networking and Web 2.0, and primary among those lessons is that collaboration, relationships, and integration doesn’t have to painful. It can be dynamic, simple, and even at times enjoyable.