February 2008 Archives

Some of you with engineering background may be familiar with the Doppler Effect.  A while ago, I read an article from Information Week about an insightful analog of the D.E. with regards to computing demand today versus Moore's Law, as described by Sun's CTO.

Basically, Red-shift Companies/processes/applications are growing so quickly that Moore's Law can't keep pace.  No matter how much faster, bigger, or better the technology is, they will still need more more more.

Blue-shifters are the opposite; their IT needs are more than adequately accommodated with today's technology.  This is a space I see VMware and service consolidation fitting very nicely; our own foray into VMware started with the idea of consolidating lots of underutilized servers, to higher util% on perhaps bigger hardware.

WRDS and Research Computing, on the other hand, is clearly a space that can always benefit from faster/bigger/better technology.  Amazon, Google, Twitter, YouTube, they all have monumental Blue-shifted requirements.

Remember when Huntsman Hall first opened, along with our new DataCenter?  Remember how quickly it filled up with rack upon rack of server upon server?  Clearly, we Red-shifted in terms of space, cooling, power, etc.

With the VMware and other server consolidation projects, with the advent of Blade technologies and consolidated SAN storage, I think we've crossed over to the Blue.

I'd posit that two crucial pieces of our infrastructure has remained squarely in the Red: storage and square-footage.  I don't know how many times in the last 6 months I've said that our limiting factor is Storage.  And, you know what?  We're expanding into a newer, bigger DataCenter in the next six months!

So, here's the question.  Is Wharton (Computing) Red-shifting or Blue-shifting?  Give that article a read and share your own insights into your own processes in the comments!

It was really strange to come across this blog post (Storage Magazine).  Serendipitous, really; I just discovered it this morning!

For the first time in many decades someone has built a machine that exceeds all our powers of prediction, and although they estimate the possibility of accidentally destroying the planet as extremely low... [from STOP CERN mySpace page]

ZOMG! The Swiss are going to destroy the planet...by creating a black hole!

When a Technet Magazine article starts out by quoting Karl Marx, it makes me sit up straighter and take a little notice.  When the title of the article includes a word I've never heard of before, and I need a quick iNet-search to define, I'm hooked.

It's a good read, but it's strange how sometimes my daily tech-life experience resonates with some tech rags.  Mr. Mahajan mentions a lot of ideas around the "consumerization of IT", but the one thing that just stood out was the "halo" effect.

I never really understood the phrase beyond the obvious: an event, a product, or a service becomes so culturally important, that whole other industries are affected.  He uses the example of the iPod and posits that, because it's the de-facto portable media player in the market, Apple Inc. has enjoyed a tremendous upswing in its proprietary desktop and laptop computer sales.

That's rings true to me about Apple, but how's this for a personal halo effect?

My partner sends me an e-mail, which is basically an announcement from his non-profit's IT staff explaining that they will be doing system maintenance on their Terminal Servers starting at 10:30am.  He forwards it to me laden with some well-chosen, but fictional expletives (thank you Battlestar Galactica).

I wrote back quickly and told him to be careful, that they might be monitoring his e-mail.  You don't want to piss off the IT department after all.  He writes back immediately and says:

I set higher standards for IT/user convenience since you guys almost always do such maintenance at very low traffic times.

See the halo effect?  He has to, literally, live with Wharton's IT maintenance windows, and he knows that we are a "world-class" IT shop, so he is expecting the same from his!

What crossovers of your work-life are finding their way into your daily personal life?  Maybe the more important question is, what was traditionally in your personal/daily life is now part of your workday?  Drop a comment; I'm all ears!

[Joe's Note: The halo-effect nod in the original article was just that, a nod in the idea's general direction.  It talks about a larger range of supporting ideas for the IT consumerization concept, how the changes that are happening in technology today (and arguably for the foreseeable future), will affect not only the business world, but also our daily, personal lives.  A good quick read.]

Many of us in Wharton Computing were hauling cartloads of old (and potentially busted) equipment, everything from CRT monitors and keyboards, to UPSs and old 1U pizza-box servers, as part of an equipment "recycling" effort.

It got me thinking about our technology purchases and how things have changed, and wanted to just put some ideas "out there".

Buy small.  Buy only what you need.  Buy a ultra-small form-factor desktop computer, instead of a full-blown mini-tower that you'll never upgrade.  Buy a laptop instead of that SFF desktop!  Buy a Blade server instead of a 2U or 1U server.  Virtualize your new server, instead of buying a new one!

Bug your vendors (Dell?  IBM?  Lenovo?  Microsoft?), and insist they think about the materials footprint of everything they sell.  Ask them about what they are doing about the end-of-life of their products, basically, how are they cleaning up after themselves.

For me, I'll continue to use a laptop as my primary computer.  I'll use the two Dell monitors sitting on my desk until they are completely unusable.  I'll recycle as much as possible, and drive others to do the same.

We filled a 15-foot truck with all kinds of equipment that we are hoping will be reused or recycled.  Let's make it a point that the next time we have an equipment recycling day, they can send a 15-foot truck, and it'll leave half-empty.

What can we do between now and then to make sure that happens?  Hit the comments with your ideas!

*** Special thanks to Sharon S. for working to put this all together, and to all of you out there who hauled, dragged, and yes, literally dropped (off) all this equipment.

Ages ago, I threw down a challenge of sorts, asking people to measure their desktop setup's energy footprint using a handy dandy Kill-A-Watt (external link) monitor.

Bev C. set the bar extremely high...(or low in this case), reporting a 65W total utilization for her setup:

I've just gone through the rigmarole of upgrading (nearly) our entire VMware ESX installation to the latest version, ESX 3.5.  After doing some testing, I thought it would make the most sense to get it up and running ahead of the Microsoft Patch Tuesday cycle since a) there's a VMware Tools upgrade that should take place for all Virtual Machines which requires a restart and b) most of our VMs are running Windows.

The other thing that I was looking forward to is Storage VMotion.  In the throes of our IBM SAN disaster at the beginning of the month, we employed a secondary site's SAN storage to host our most critical Virtual Machines.  The VMs' CPU, Networking, and Memory were still hosted in the main DataCenter, but their storage was migrated to the secondary DataCenter.  At the time, running ESX 3.0.2, we had to turn off the VM, first, in order to transfer the virtual disk files to another data store.

In ESX 3.5, with Storage VMotion, basically you can transfer the virtual disk files from one SAN to another with zero downtime.  This is the last remaining piece of the VMotion feature set, covering the full range of virtual hardware.

In the world of server virtualization, this is the New Hotness.

I like to visit Dell's website and "thumb" through their online catalog of desktops, laptops, and servers, because, well, it's FUN!  ****

But also because it helps me stay on-top of what the "state-of-the-art" is for those products, and maintain that operational vocabulary of various vendors' product roadmaps.

Yesterday, I was configuring a new Dell M600 series Blade, their 10G blades that I mentioned  in a previous post, and I came across a dizzying list of processor choices:

• Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5405, 2x6MB Cache, 2.0GHz, 1333MHz FSB
• Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5410, 2x6MB Cache, 2.33GHz, 1333MHz FSB
• Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5420, 2x6MB Cache, 2.5GHz, 1333MHz FSB
• Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5430, 2x6MB Cache, 2.66GHz, 1333MHz FSB
• Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5440, 2x6MB Cache, 2.83GHz, 1333MHz FSB
• Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5450, 2x6MB Cache, 3.0GHz, 1333MHz FSB
• Quad Core Intel® Xeon® X5460, 2x6MB Cache, 3.16GHz, 1333MHz FSB
• Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5310, 2x4MB Cache, 1.6GHz, 1066MHz FSB
• Quad Core Intel® Xeon® L5335, 2x4MB Cache, 2.0GHz, 1333MHz FSB
• Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5345, 2x4MB Cache, 2.33GHz, 1333MHz FSB
• Dual Core Intel® Xeon® 5130; 4MB Cache, 2.0GHz, 1333MHZ FSB
• Dual Core Intel® Xeon® 5148LV, 4MB Cache, 2.33GHz, 1333MHz FSB

Arguably, the CPU has the largest power footprint of any other component in a server.  When your power envelope is as emaciated as it has to be in an ultra-dense blade-chassis, then every last watt has to be accounted for.  And, generally speaking, heat-output is directly proportional to power-draw, you have to take into consideration the cooling of those hot components (and not new hotness, either).

Can you make the informed decision on which processor above has the smallest power-draw?  Does X mean "extreme", a qualifier that Intel is fond of for their desktop processor line?  Does L mean "low-voltage"?  But then what about "LV"?

How about from this list of AMD processors available in the M605 blade?

• Dual Core AMD Opteron™ 2214HE, 2.2GHz, 2X1MB Cache,1Ghz HyperTransport
• Dual Core AMD Opteron™ 2216, 2.4GHz, 2X1MB Cache, 1Ghz HyperTransport
• Dual Core AMD Opteron™ 2218, 2.6GHz, 2X1MB Cache, 1Ghz HyperTransport
• Dual Core AMD Opteron™ 2218HE, 2.6GHz, 2X1MB Cache,1Ghz HyperTransport
• Dual Core AMD Opteron™ 2222; 3.0GHz,2X1MB Cache,1Ghz HyperTransport

A shorter list (AMD's latest server-class processors haven't hit the mainstream yet), but certainly no less difficult to decipher.  Is "HE", high-efficiency?

I had to dig into Intel's and AMD's web\sites to find out for myself.  I was right that "X" does mean eXtremely high power-draw; 120W for the X5460.  And HE probably means "high-efficiency", since the 2218HE only consumes 65W. 

The winner in my book?  Intel's L5335, an awesome 2.33GHz with quad-cores, and only 50W!

Dell? If you're listening out there, put a Watt-rating next to each processor choice, gosh darnit!  I shouldn't have to go to the processor manufacturer's website to figure out the power draw per socket.

Intel? AMD?  Sell your Greenliness!  Just call it the Greeneon and get that over with.

**** I'm not ashamed to admit it.  Dell's 10G Blade chassis makes my heart flutter whenever I see it.  It is beautiful and angular!  It is the new hotness!

I showed this off to Kurt K. and he didn't know about it, so said to myself, "Self? Why not blog about it in case anyone else might think it's like super cool"?

So, pretty much anywhere there's a place you can put in a date (Task or Calendar start dates and end dates, deferred delivery dates, etc.), you can put in "plain English" and Outlook will look up that date automatically.

So, phrases like "Next Monday" or "Three weeks from now" or "Second Sunday in October" will automatically fill in the date.

I think that feature has been there since Outlook 2000.  I have yet to find a phrase that it couldn't understand!

Not exactly "new hotness", but still pretty cool.

So, we  had a new guy start out today (Chris C.) and he wheeled in a big, bright, red chair into his cubicle this morning and the first word that came to mind was "gregarious".  You really have to see it to understand just how red it is!

Come to find out that it wasn't from the normal "pool" of office furniture at Wharton, nor something funky that his previous department provided for him.  Nope, it turns out he bought it for himself...with his own money (well, I'm assuming it's his own money.  He could have won the lottery in which case it was supposed to be my money.  ;)

Then tonight, I read an article in Knowledge @ Wharton about employee satisfaction and how it seems to correlate to better financials.  Both the article and the Chris' extroverted chair got me thinking about what makes me a "satisfied employee" and maybe even more broadly what makes Wharton a "satisfying workplace".

On the employee side, for me, the idea that the organization goes out of its way to invest itself, in my professional and personal development is key.  Just look at all the programs that are available to help (Penn's HR News)!  You may have heard that there are plans to dramatically and drastically change the "core" office space for Wharton Computing.  This is another example of the organization investing itself to hopefully make our environment more collaborative, more energizing, more helpful in getting that highest level of employee satisfaction.

So what makes a "satisfying workplace" then, you ask?  I think it's the flip side. Where the "satisfied employee" can be nurtured by the organization investing in the employee, I think a truly satisfying workplace is dependent on the employees, themselves, investing in the organization, and maybe more importantly, investing in themselves.

I like the idea that Chris C. bought his own chair, and made our space just that much more colorful.  And you know what?  I'm a little bummed that I've "settled" for the office furniture pool for this long!

If you invested some of your own <insert_valuable_asset_here> into Wharton, what would it be?

I'd buy an Xbox or PlayStation, a copy of Dance Dance Revolution (don't worry; it's safe), and just have pure, physical fun!

Now if only I could swing that by Boyfriend, aka The Family CFO.

So, I ran into Sanjay M. in the subway stop after work yesterday.  We chit-chatted about stuff, he confessed his undying love for his Blackberry (which he recently had to divorce for an AT&T Tilt, a Windows Mobile 6 phone that I also have), talked a little bit about the SysAdmin Hangout that I proposed on Brainstorm (you all did remember to sign yourselves up to the Aspect group, right?).

Anyway, the conversation starting wandering into talks about what we were excited about and what was coming down the line in terms of what he's doing at Knowledge @ Wharton and what's going on with me in Core Systems and he brought up a great, though-provoking question!

In essence, why do we do what we do?  It's a very interesting question, and not as easy to answer as I thought.

So, I'm in Core-Systems, and our group is responsible for the core infrastructure IT services for the school, specifically, Exchange, the Active Directory, VMWare, our Blade and SAN Storage infrastructure, Firewalls, VPNs, pretty much you name it, we are responsible for it.

But given that service scope, why do I bother?  What makes me want to get up in the morning and come to work?

First, we are surrounded by really smart, really driven people.

Second, diversity is welcome and encouraged, be it the classic idea of diversity (race, gender, ethnicity), or just diversity of ideas and experiences.  I mean, check out the interests in Aspect!  I feel like I can be myself and still fit right in.

Finally, and to be more techno-specific, I like the way we work to integrate so many disparate and separately managed systems (be they databases, Linux and Windows, SANs and networking, or anything), and aren't married to doing things "just one way", but determined to do things "the right way".

Those are the biggies!  I can go on and on about other things (like access to resources, flexible work schedules, the classic list of benefits of working at a University).

So, why do *you* do what you do?  Hit me up in the comments or draft your own post!