An IT manager at Intel Corp. says that the company wants to run its data centers “like an Intel factory,” a strategy that includes a plan to consolidate 133 existing IT facilities into eight data center hubs.
Intel currently has about 93,000 servers — more than one for every employee. And many of them are based on single-core processors, according to Brently Davis, manager of the company’s data center efficiency initiative.
Davis outlined Intel’s data center consolidation strategy in a short blog posting and an accompanying video in which he responded to questions asked by someone who was outside of the camera’s view. In response to some of the answers, the person asking the questions sprinkled in a couple of superlatives, such as, “Wow, that’s amazing.”
“Like most other companies these days, Intel is facing a growing demand for computing resources,” Davis wrote in his blog posting. “As a result, our computing costs are going up along with that demand. All of these issues prompted us to take a hard look at our data center strategy to see where we could make it more efficient.”
As part of the consolidation effort, Intel wants to increasingly move to servers with multicore processors as well as server virtualization software, Davis said in the video. Instead of running one operating system per server, the company wants to put four operating systems on individual machines, he added.
Davis said the consolidation moves may result in as much as US$1.8 billion in cost savings for Intel over the next seven years. It is expected to take that long to fully implement the efficiency program, he said, although he added that the company hopes to accelerate the process and complete the work by 2010 or 2011.
Data center consolidation has become a mainstream trend within IT departments, including the ones at major technology vendors. For instance, Hewlett-Packard Co. has been reducing 85 data centers located worldwide into six major facilities, all in the U.S., under a consolidation plan announced two years ago.
If Intel did nothing, its server count would continue to rise and might reach 250,000 systems at some point, Davis said.
Intel is probably in the middle of pack among large IT vendors in embarking on such a consolidation program, said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H.
Eunice said companies have found that they can make dramatic savings through data center consolidation, which typically also involves consolidating applications and other software programs to ensure that different systems are running on the same versions of products and have the same patch levels. Consolidation also enables IT departments to move off of legacy hardware and applications to “a more modern foundation,” he said.
While blogging by company officials is giving businesses a new way of reaching customers and the media, it’s also arming some of their employees with a means of communicating anonymously with the outside world.
In Intel’s case, a blogger who calls himself Intel IT Guy has been using his Intel Perspective Blog to detail the impact of ongoing cutbacks within the company’s IT department.
Anonymous blogs are potentially fraught with credibility issues. But when Intel IT Guy described the layoff process in a September posting, an Intel spokesman confirmed that cuts were being made and said that the company intends to reduce its IT staff by as much as 10%.
In his most recent blog entry, posted on Wednesday, Intel IT Guy described IT workers at the company as “angry, frustrated, buried in work and looking for some leadership. And after worrying about keeping their jobs for three months, they now have to figure out how to try and keep the infrastructure from falling apart.”
The blogger also criticized Intel’s management for not having a concrete operating plan to follow the workforce reductions. “We need a vision, a strategy and a plan that shows where we’re going and how we’re going to get there,” he wrote. “Resource reductions are an action, not a vision. They’re a consequence, not a plan.”
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The Eclipse Foundation will make available Monday Eclipse RAP (Rich Ajax Platform) 1.0, an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) server for building and deploying rich Internet applications.
Leveraging the Eclipse component model that based on the OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) standard, RAP 1.0 is suited for enterprises and enables development of component-based applications that can integrate with existing systems. RAP 1.0 is freely downloadable.
With RAP, developers can build AJAX applications “completely in Java,” said Jochen Krause, project leader for RAP at Innoopract.
“The benefit is many developers know [how] to write Java code,” he said. “If you look at enterprise IT, you find very few people that are seasoned in JavaScript.”
“Our key strength is we can use the Eclipse component model,” deploying plug-ins to extend applications, said Krause.
Featured in RAP 1.0 is the ability to build RIA or Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) applications from the same Java code base. Also included are Java development tools and frameworks for building AJAX applications that support user interfaces, complex widgets, and data-binding.
RAP’s ease of use was cited by one early user.
“RAP is very easy if you have skills in Eclipse/RCP technology. Even if you have developed Java desktop applications, RAP has a lot of similar concepts,” said Roberto Sanchez Custodio, CEO of Autonomind, which has used RAP for developing a public Web application.
Using RAP, though, has had its trials. Using Milestone 2, there were typical issues such as API changes, bugs and poor documentation. But most of these problems have been solved now, Custodio said. There also have been some features missing that other Java Web frameworks have, such as a visual graphical editor for Windows, he said.
Custodio also said he thinks RAP is too oriented to Eclipse/RCP developers instead of Java Web developers.
RAP differs from another AJAX project at Eclipse, the AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF), in that ATF features an IDE for tooling while RAP is a server-based runtime for AJAX applications, Krause said.
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Massive data centers are vital to the economy. They are also notorious power hogs. If their numbers keep growing at the expected rate, the United States alone will need nearly a dozen new power plants by 2011 just to keep the data flowing, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
That’s why a small server-farm company called AISO.net (for “affordable Internet services online”) has gone completely off the grid. Located 80 miles southeast of Los Angeles in the desert hamlet of Romoland, AISO.net has flanked its 2,000-square-foot building with two banks of ground-mounted solar panels, which generate 12 kilowatts of electricity. Batteries store the juice for nighttime operation.
To slash energy consumption, AISO.net switched from 120 individual servers to four IBM blades running virtualization software that lets one computer do the work of multiple machines. The cooling system cranks up for only about 10 minutes an hour, and when the outside temperature drops to 60 degrees, air is sucked into the building to cool the servers. Solar tubes built into the roof illuminate the facility’s interior.
The service is attracting plenty of eco-conscious clients. Al Gore’s Live Earth concerts were webcast on AISO.net’s servers in July. And San Diego startup GreenestHost is reselling AISO.net’s services to mom-and-pop website operators who want to go carbon-neutral. “Small data centers could easily start to adapt and make changes like this,” says AISO.net co-founder Phil Nail, who claims the project cost about $100,000.
His monthly electric bills, once as high as $3,000, have dropped to zero. Larger data centers can’t match that. But Sun Microsystems did recently slash power consumption 61 percent by consolidating its Silicon Valley servers into a single state-of-the-art facility. And IBM BladeCenter VP Alex Yost sees growing demand for energy-efficient servers like the ones AISO.net uses. “It’s an enormous economic opportunity,” he says.
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