Datacenter Scale

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Alibaba Group plans to invest in Singapore data centre

Alibaba Group plans to invest in Singapore data centre

The deal is part of its US$1 billion investment to drive the growth of Aliyun, its cloud computing arm.

SINGAPORE: Chinese Web giant Alibaba Group on Thursday (Jul 30) announced it will set up data centres in Singapore,  as well as Japan, Europe and the Middle East, as part of its US$1 billion investment to drive the growth of its cloud computing arm Aliyun.

In a press release, Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang said Aliyun will serve as an "essential engine" for the company in the new economy which sees the physical and digital arenas becoming increasingly integrated.

"This additional US$1 billion investment is just the beginning. Our hope is for Aliyun to continually empower customers and partners with new capabilities, and help companies upgrade their basic infrastructure," Mr Zhang said. "We want to enable businesses to connect directly with consumers and drive productivity using data."

To do so, it plans to expand its data centre footprint from the five in China and Hong Kong, as well as one in the Silicon Valley in the US.

When asked, Alibaba spokesperson Beckie Wang said in an email that there are no further details on the Singapore data centre currently, such as whether it would be building one from scratch or leasing space from data centre operators here.

Besides data centres, Alibaba Group also has its international Marketplace Alliance Program, a channel programme that offers Aliyun cloud computing services via partners such as Singapore's Singtel.

- CNA/kk

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Dirty Data or "Dirty" Data?

Dirty Data or "Dirty" Data?

Someone told me a lame joke some days ago... Someone told me his eyes were swollen due to dirty / "dirty" data.

Well,  this word dirty or "dirty" have different meanings. I have properly use "" to highlight the differences.

"Dirty" can be related to sexual related content.

In database, dirty data is basically inaccurate, incomplete or simply erroneous data. This could be ported in wrongly or entered / keyed in wrongly.


Source: Dirty Data


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Moms

-From: http://invisiblebread.com/2015/05/moms/

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Keppel T&T confirms plans for data centre REIT

Keppel T&T confirms plans for data centre REIT

This follows earlier reports that Keppel T&T is set to start pre-marketing for the IPO next week for a REIT of its data centres. The REIT is estimated at between US$200 million and US$400 million.

SINGAPORE: Keppel Telecommunications & Transportation (Keppel T&T) has confirmed that it is planning an initial public offering and that efforts to list a data centre real estate investment trust on the mainboard of the SGX are currently ongoing.

The statement came in a stock exchange filing on Thursday evening (Oct 30). It follows earlier reports that Keppel T&T is set to start pre-marketing for the IPO next week for a REIT of its data centres. The REIT is estimated at between US$200 million and US$400 million (between S$255 million and S$511 million).

In its statement on Thursday, Keppel T&T said that it has submitted applications for the IPO to the SGX and the Monetary Authority of Singapore. However, it also added that the details of the terms of the IPO are still being finalised and that the proposed listing will be subject to, among other things, market conditions and relevant regulatory approvals being obtained.

A successful listing will make this the first data centre trust in Asia.

- CNA/ac

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'Let's try and not have a human do it': How one Facebook techie can run 20,000 servers

'Let's try and not have a human do it': How one Facebook techie can run 20,000 servers

Summary: Facebook on how it has managed to ease the pain of running one of the world's largest fleet of servers.

By Nick Heath | November 25, 2013 -- 12:43 GMT (20:43 SGT)

How many people does it take to run 20,000 servers? In the case of Facebook just the one.

Facebook's low overhead is born of necessity. When you run a computing infrastructure supporting the Likes of more than one billion users worldwide – the less human input needed to keep it ticking over, the better.

The philosophy of the social media giant is if a job doesn't need to be carried out by a person, "let's try and not have a human do it", said Tom Furlong, Facebook's director of site operations.

Facebook cuts manual maintenance of its IT infrastructure wherever possible. Servers and drives can be replaced without tools thanks to their Open Compute Project (OCP) designs, a system called Cyborg fixes tracts of misbehaving servers automatically and tools like Chef help manage thousands of servers at a time.

One of the latest of these manual labour-saving tools is Cluster Planner. Facebook regularly deploys servers in their thousands to meet the constantly changing demands of its business. Cluster Planner helps the company find the best home for these clusters within its global datacentre estate.

"Cluster Planner helps us calculate where we're going to put machines, so we can best utilise the infrastructure that we have," said Furlong.

"It basically replaces an incredibly manual process," he said, adding it had reduced cluster deployment time from days to hours.

Cluster Planner takes a snapshot of what sits where in Facebook's estate. It aggregates data about Facebook's computer systems – such as server components, average CPU utilisation and number of IOPs – and details about the datacentres, including electrical capacity and available floor space.

"It's normally a very cumbersome process for engineers to do the math calculations. With Cluster Planner you can do that very quickly, so what took us days before now takes us hours."

A core challenge for Facebook when cataloguing infrastructure spread across its global datacentres is ensuring consistency in how the data is collected and labelled, so Facebook can properly aggregate data. For example ensuring that data derived from generators at its datacentre in Prineville, Oregon is labelled in the same way as that collected from generators at its Forest City installation, more than 2,500 miles away.

Cluster Planner is in beta, its tools are being worked on and Facebook is in the process of hooking it into all of its datacentres.

Keeping track of Swiss cheese clusters

The make-up of Facebook's datacentres is moulded by the ebb and flow of business demands, with its computing estate changing shape to support alterations to systems and the roll out of new software. Furlong believes Facebook's IT operations could become more efficient by using systems like Cluster Planner to capture information about the composition of server clusters as they change during their lifetime.

"You don't put a server in production and then have [it handling] exactly the same workload during its three year lifespan. It's a moving landscape," said Furlong.

"Over the lifespan of the cluster you start to see things disappearing from it. You get people saying 'Oh there are underutilised resources in that cluster, let's put them in that new cluster that we're bringing up'.

"After a while there's like this 'Swiss cheese' [cluster], which I know by looking at it doesn't have enough machines in it to be used efficiently.

"If we had something that allowed us to better calculate what that 'Swiss cheese' is, we could go back to capacity planning and say 'Hey send us some more stuff' or 'How about we compact this and use some free rows for other things'. Those are the types of things I want us to be able to do over the lifetime of the equipment, so we don't have this static view of the world."

Automating away the pain

Maintaining one of the world's largest fleet of servers could be a massive hassle.

Facebook eases that pain in several ways, such as by using OCP-designed servers, storage and datacentre equipments that have been stripped down to the core components needed to carry out specific computing workloads, an approach that the OCP refers to as 'vanity-free design'.

These designs not only remove unnecessary screws from servers and drives so they can be installed without tools, but also reduce the number of components that can go wrong. The company estimates that using OCP hardware has cut the time its staff spend on maintenance jobs by more than 50 percent.

Also cutting the number of manual repairs are automated software tools like the aforementioned Cyborg, which monitor Facebook's infrastructure and try to correct problems without manual intervention.

"We've said that one datacentre technician can basically handle about 20,000 machines," Furlong said.

"One of the reasons why we can operate as efficiently as we do in terms of server repairs is we have huge numbers of automated systems that collect and analyse data.

"Cyborg goes out and tries to do its own server repairs, like a soft reboot or something that is an easy way to fix a system that's hung up. Cyborg keeps literally thousands of potential tickets from ever hitting a human hand.

"The more stuff we can have a system do, the better. I don't want to employ armies of people to do the things I can automate out. I want the people who are there to do high value work, the more complex repairs, the installs and de-installs, and all the kind of things that you need people to do."

Furlong is also examining ways to cut the manual work needed to add new hardware to Facebook's inventory system, and is considering automated alternatives to its current system of adding items by manually scanning barcodes.

"Say we have a setup where you just snap the new thing in and the system recognises it then updates all of your inventory systems," he said.

While the scale of Facebook's IT operations can be difficult to manage, its size can be an asset when it comes to weeding out problems in the infrastructure. Furlong recalls the company spotting a recurring fault with a small number of motherboards in its OCP servers when they were installed in its Prineville datacentre.

"What we realised was we actually had the same failures in all of our legacy equipment, we just couldn't see it before because the sample sizes were small," he said.

"That's the beauty of having a large sample size to look at, you can knock things out that keep you from having to do a whole bunch of work [in the future]."

If Facebook is to continue to grow its 1.1 billion-strong user base it will need to continue work at sweating its datacentres, but Furlong believes there are plenty more efficiencies to wring out.

"To me that is the Holy Grail of this, to look at that server to datacentre ratio and be able to say 'I can get more servers into my datacentre'," he said.

"I think we do a good job of that today but I absolutely believe there is room for improvement."



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Data growth remains IT's biggest challenge, Gartner says

Admins plan to expand data center capacity by the end of '11

By Lucas Mearian

November 2, 2010 06:01 AM ET

Computerworld - Data growth is the biggest data center hardware infrastructure challenge for large enterprises, according to a new survey by research firm Gartner Inc. 

According to Gartner, 47% of the respondents to a survey conducted over the summer ranked data growth in their top three challenges. With spending returning to more normal levels after a couple of down years because of the economy, 62% said they plan to expand hardware capacity at existing data centers by the end of 2011; 30% plan to build entirely new data centers.

"As the global economy begins to revive in 2010 and organizations start to shift focus to a return to growth, IT organizations will be challenged to support the various growth initiatives," said Naveen Mishra, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Last year, Mishra said, many data center managers were forced to defer infrastructure upgrades and extend technology refresh cycles. As a result, those same managers are now hampered with an aging infrastructure or, in some cases, product obsolescence.

"Vendors wishing to tap into this reopening market should propose infrastructure solutions that are high in efficiency and offer scalability as the demand grows, thus helping the companies to prepare for a return to growth," he said.

The survey took place between June and August and involved IT staffers from 1,004 large enterprises in eight countries. The data from it is available online.

In addition to concerns about data growth, 37% of those surveyed named system performance and scalability as the second biggest challenge for them in the coming year, with 36% citing network congestion and connectivity issues.

"While all the top data center hardware infrastructure challenges impact cost to some degree, data growth is particularly associated with increased costs relative to hardware, software, associated maintenance, administration and services," April Adams, research director at Gartner, said in a statement.

In an e-mail response to Computerworld Adams said data capacity on average in enterprises is growing at 40% to 60% year over year due to a number of factors, including an explosion in unstructured data, such as e-mail and documents that have to be stored due to "regulatory requirements that continue to evolve and change."

Survey respondents chose archiving and data "retirement projects" as their most popular approach to dealing with their data explosion. Sixty-two percent indicated they will invest in data retirement efforts or continue to push ongoing efforts through the end of 2011.

Adams said that while survey respondents pointed to data growth as their top challenge, they did not blame a lack of data center capacity as driving their strategic plans. Instead, they indicated business continuity and data availability as their chief reasons.

The second and third most commonly mentioned drivers for strategic change were data containment initiatives, named by 37% of respondents, and maintaining or improving user service levels and satisfaction, which was named by 36% of those surveyed.

Other projects at the top of IT staffers' lists for 2011 include: data security from internal or external hackers; storage consolidation; storage management tools rollouts; and data reduction techniques.

When it comes to technology investments, server virtualization topped the list with 67% of respondents saying they plan to spend money on that in 2011. About 56% of respondents said they also plan to invest in application consolidation. And 51% plan to spend money on blade servers.

Respondents were split when it came to IT budgets, with 44% indicating it would increase over the next year, 40% saying it would stay the same and 14% indicating it would decrease. Two-percent said they didn't know what would happen to their budgets, Adams said.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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Nearly half IT shops central to corporate sustainability strategy

As more stakeholders within a company become interested in building a sustainable enterprise, eyes turn to the IT organization and, according to Forrester, rightfully so

(10/14/2010)

Yevgeniy Sverdlik

Christopher Mines, senior VP and research director at Forrester, delivers a keynote at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's Data Center Efficiency Summit 2010 in San Jose IT is becoming central to the way companies tackle corporate sustainability. According to a recent Forrester survey of IT leaders on the subject, 44 percent replied that IT was key in both planning and executing corporate sustainability strategy, said Christopher Mines, senior VP and research director at Forrester. “It organizations are perfectly positioned to be the exemplar … but also the enabler for the rest of the company to improve the sustainability of operations,” Mines said during a keynote address at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s Data Center Efficiency Summit in San Jose, California, Thursday. “It has everything to do with IT. IT can be a catalyst (and) a leader across the entire organization.” Ed Kettler, green IT strategist at HP, said in an interview that the observation made perfect sense, since CIO’s have a more comprehensive visibility into companies’ operations than most other executives. “The CIO’s have the collective knowledge of the company,” he said. As companies realize the centrality of IT to operations, members of IT staff are also increasingly starting to spread out across the rest of the organization, Mines said. “IT is becoming the training ground for business-process leaders who move across the company. We see it over and over again at our client companies.” Mines outlined three basic steps in an IT organization’s path to taking the driver’s seat in corporate sustainability. The first is to get IT’s own house in order; the second is to partner with other business-process leaders; and the third is to take the leadership position. A key component in getting IT’s house in order is increasing data center energy efficiency. Organizations approach this differently, but the most popular way is virtualization and consolidation. According to Mines, 68 percent of respondents to the Forrester survey had active virtualization and consolidation programs. Improving energy efficiency of IT is not always a bottom-up process however, with 36 percent of respondents saying they were working on eliminating redundant applications. “If we can reduce the number of applications that our data center is supporting we can reduce the hardware footprint” and the underlying power and cooling infrastructure that supports it, Mines said. Such a decision usually comes from management levels above the data center, however. Kettler said companies that grow through acquisitions – such as HP – are naturally prone to having redundant applications that are being supported by redundant infrastructure. Eliminating such redundancies requires a wider push from the top. “It requires more business change to accomplish,” he said. - wong chee tat :)