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Taking a short blogging break. Today was a day for a hike, a bloody mary, and some sun. Oh, I admit I did do some work, but when work is fun it doesn’t feel like work.
Kids are Skiing.
You can see the snow on the mountain in this shot.
It is too warm to ski all day, so the kids can go for a swim.
I was talking to a storage expert the other day and he mentioned a customer that I have worked with has chosen to go all SSD in its data center. I would assume the logic is SSDs are the most efficient solution and given their purchasing power they can get prices that few others can get, therefore the cost differential vs. HDD can become a non-issue. I heard this and think I know some of the people behind this and I questioned their assumptions to use SSDs as storage solution that eliminates HDD.
Digital Ocean has a lot of hype with their all SSDs environment and the idea that SSDs are the future can be a “false positive."
Doing a bit of research I found StorageMojo recently posted on SSDs - hot, hungry and slow.
High performance SSDs: hot, hungry & sometimes slow
by ROBIN HARRIS on FRIDAY, 25 JULY, 2014
Anyone looking at how flash SSDs have revolutionized power constrained mobile computing could be forgiven for thinking that all SSDs are power-efficient. But they’re not.
In a recent Usenix HotStorage ’14 paper Power, Energy and Thermal Considerations in SSD-Based I/O Acceleration researchers Jie Zhang, Mustafa Shihab and Myoungsoo Jung of UT Dallas examine what they call “many-resource” SSDs, those with multiple channels, cores and flash chips.
...
The price of performance
Each flash die has limited bandwidth. Writes are slow. Wear must be leveled. ECC is required. DRAM buffers smooth out data flows. Controllers run code to manage all the tricks required to make an EEPROM look like a disk, only faster.So the number of chips and channels in high performance SSDs has risen to achieve high bandwidth and low latency. Which takes power and creates heat.
Bottom line here are some insights.
Key findings
The many-resource SSD exhibits several characteristics not usually associated with SSDs.
- High temperatures. 150-210% higher than conventional SSDs, up to 182F.
- High power. 2-7x the power, 282% higher for reads, up to 18w total.
- Performance throttling. At 180F the many-resource SSD throttles performance by 16%, equivalent to hitting the write cliff.
- Large write penalty. Writes at 64KB and above in aged devices caused the highest temperatures, presumably due to extra overhead for garbage collection and wear leveling.
And here is the kicker, a SSD can consume 2X the power of a HDD.
The StorageMojo take
This appears to be the first in-depth analysis of the power, temperature and performance of a modern high-end SSD. The news should be cautionary for system architects.For example, one new datacenter PCIe SSD is spec’d at 25w – higher than the paper found on slightly older drives. That’s twice what a 15k Seagate requires.
The paper StorageMojo refers to is here.
This paper closes saying many-resource SSDs are 4-5X more power intense than conventional SSD and HDD.
Conclusions
In this paper, our empirical analysis reveal that dynamic power consumption of many-resource SSDs are respectively 5x and 4x worse than conventional SSD and HDD. Many-resource SSDs generate 58% higher operating tem- perature, which can introduce SSD overheating prob- lem and power throttling issues. Based on our analysis, HW/SW optimization studies are required to improve en- ergy efficiency of modern SSDs in many user scenarios.
WSJ article reports on the mystery of Electricity Demand not growing the way the industry expects.
Electric Utilities Get No Jolt From Gadgets, Improving Economy
Electricity Sales Anemic for Seventh Year in a Row
Five years and an economic recovery later, electricity sales at the Columbus, Ohio-based power company still haven't rebounded to the peak reached in 2008. As a result, executives have had to abandon their century-old assumption that the use of electricity tracks overall economic conditions.
"It's a new world for us," says Chief Executive Nick Akins.
Utility executives across the country are reaching the same conclusion. Even though Americans are plugging in more gadgets than ever and the unemployment rate had dropped at one point to a level last reported in 2008, electricity sales are looking anemic for the seventh year in a row.
The article covers the energy efficiency shift.
Energy efficiency blunts the impact of population and economic growth, because upgrades in lighting, appliances and heavy equipment reduce energy needs. In 2005, the average refrigerator consumed 840 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. A typical 2010 replacement needed only 453 kilowatt-hours of electricity.
There are various industries covered in their usage in the WSJ article, but the one thing that is not discussed is the shift to Mobile. Especially kids. Few kids want to jump on a computer. First choice is their phone, 2nd is a tablet, then a laptop. I don’t know about you, but the PC is gathering dust compared to the rest.
The CilmateDesk posts a Youtube video.
Mother Jones writes up what is shown in the above video.
Inside the Huge Solar Farm That Powers Apple's iCloud
Lisa Jackson on Apple's wide-ranging plan to green its act.
—By Suzanne Goldenberg and James West
| Mon Jul. 28, 2014 6:00 AM EDT
It looks like the green efforts are part of Apple’s marketing strategy.
After converting all of its data centers to clean energy, the Guardian understands Apple is poised to use solar power to manufacture sapphire screens for the iPhone 6, at a factory in Arizona.
And in a departure for its reputation for secretiveness, Apple is going out of its way to get credit for its green efforts.
"We know that our customers expect us to do the right thing about these issues," Lisa Jackson, the vice-president of environmental initiatives told the Guardian.
Businessweek has an article on how Airbus is debugging the development of its latest aircraft the A350.
Reading the article it gave some good tips/lessons that can apply to data centers.
The term debugging is used which also equates to reducing risk.
The company has put unprecedented resources into debugging the A350—“de-risking,” as it’s called.
The big risk is not the safety risk, but the cost of the plane.
The engineering risk with the A350 isn’t that it will have chronic, life-threatening safety problems; it’s cost.
When you get into the details the discussion can sound like a data center issue.
The challenge, Cousin says, is that “in a complex system there are many, many more failure modes.” A warning light in the cockpit could alert a pilot to trouble in the engine, for instance, but the warning system could also suffer a malfunction itself and give a false alarm that could prompt an expensive diversion or delay. Any downtime for unscheduled maintenance cuts into whatever savings a plane might offer in terms of fuel efficiency or extra seating capacity. For the A350 to be economically viable, says Brégier, “the airlines need an operational reliability above 99 percent.” That means that no more than one flight out of every 100 is delayed by more than 15 minutes because of technical reasons.
Airbus realized the past methods of slowly working the issues out was costly.
Instead of a cautious, incremental upgrade, Airbus went for an entire family of superefficient aircraft ranging from 276 to 369 seats, with a projected development cost of more than $10 billion. The goal was what Airbus internally calls “early maturity”—getting the program as quickly as possible to the kind of bugs-worked-out status that passenger jets typically achieve after years of service.
Many companies make it seem like the data center comes from their company, but in reality almost everyone is an integrator like Boeing and Airbus.
Much of the early work was done not by Airbus but by its suppliers. While the company might look to the outside world like an aircraft manufacturer, it’s more of an integrator: It creates the overall plan of the plane, then outsources the design and manufacture of the parts, which are then fitted together. “We have 7,000 engineers working on the A350,” says Brégier, “and at least half of them are not Airbus employees.”
And a smart move is to change the way you work with suppliers to be partners.
Throughout the development process, teams of engineers were brought in from suppliers to collaborate with Airbus counterparts in Toulouse in joint working groups called “plateaux.” “You need to have as much transparency with your suppliers as possible,” says Brégier. “With such a program you have plenty of problems every day, so it’s bloody difficult.”
And just like operations is critical to data center, airplane operations is the reality that needs to be addressed.
The idea is not just to put the systems through every combination of settings, but to see how the whole aircraft responds when individual parts are broken, overexerted, or misused. That, after all, is how the real world works. “Every plane in the air has something wrong with it,” Cousin says.
Name the number of companies who think about their data centers in the above way. The list is pretty short.
