Practical steps towards a greener, energy-efficient cloud

(Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog)



Update June 14, 9:14am: Videos of all the presentations at the Data Center Summit are now available on our website.



Data centers are very important to us—they’re critical to the cloud services we deliver. Over the last 12 years, we’ve put a lot of effort into minimizing the amount of energy, water and other resources we use—because it makes financial sense, and because it’s good for the environment too. That work means that today, we use half the energy of a typical industry data center.



Last week, we brought together more than 150 industry professionals in Zürich, Switzerland for our second conference on data center efficiency. Since our first conference two years ago in the U.S., the industry’s come a long way, with large operators now very focused on energy efficiency.







With “free cooling” we can dramatically reduce energy consumption by using the local environment to cool servers, instead of energy-intensive chillers. In our data centers we use both air cooling and evaporative cooling—and we revealed the details of the seawater cooling system we’ve custom-engineered for our new data center in Hamina, Finland.







Google is lucky enough to have the resources and experts to continually improve efficiency. But around 70% of the world’s data centers are operated by companies that probably don’t.



That’s why we shared five simple and low-cost steps that any company, large or small, can use. These include using plastic meat locker curtains to separate hot and cold air, or welding your own air-conditioning chimney out of cheap sheet metal. These techniques are proven to increase energy efficiency, reduce electricity consumption and improve environmental footprint.



We also announced that we’re now participating in the European Commission’s Code of Conduct for Data Centres, a framework for designing and operating data centers efficiently. It ties in closely with the way we build and run our facilities, and has a robust checklist of efficiency best practices that are well worth trying out.



The main take-away was that there is no magic in data center efficiency. With the right information and a bit of creativity, anyone can make their computing infrastructure efficient. If you operate a data center or server room, please visit our website and make use of the techniques we’ve outlined. Videos of all the presentations from the Summit will be available on the site next week.



Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure

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Virtualization And Cloud Security Startup Bromium Raises $9.2M From Andreessen Horowitz And Others

In March we wrote about new Andreessen Horowitz partner Peter Levine’s first investment for the fund in Bromium, a stealthy startup that was at the intersection of “security and virtualization.” Today Bromium is formally announcing the funding and merging from stealth with more details about its business.

The virtualization and cloud security company has closed a $9.2 million series A round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Founded by Gaurav Banga, Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt, Bromium is focused on the delivery of infrastructure products that allow enterprises to safely adopt consumerization and cloud computing.

Bromium says that now more than ever enterprise data faces security risks with the growth of new devices and application access as well as the increasing mobility within businesses. But cloud computing also leaves enterprise data and applications vulnerable to attack. Bromium’s technology promises to bring a more trustworthy computing infrastructure to enterprises who want to move to the cloud.

And Bromium’s founders combined have a considerable amount of experience in virualization and the cloud. Banga was previously CTO and SVP, Engineering at Phoenix Technologies. Crosby was formerly Citrix’s CTO of the Data Center and Cloud Division. And Pratt was the vice president of advanced products in the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix.

Bromium says that its product will debut in the second half of 2011.

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Microsoft Cloud Service Was Down For Hours This Morning (MSFT)

Microsoft's current competitor to Google Apps, known as BPOS, suffered a three-hour outage this morning.

This isn't the first time, but the timing is unfortunate: next week, Microsoft is releasing its next generation of the service, called Office 365.

Microsoft didn't say how many customers are affected, but the company used Twitter to keep customers informed about the outage, which has been going on for a couple of hours now.

Microsoft also says via Twitter that Office 365 is rebuilt from the ground up to be more reliable.

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See Also:

• A Googler Explains Why Microsoft's Cloud Services Crashed Today
• A Microsoft Horror Story: Newspaper Chain Is Switching 8,500 Employees To Google Apps
• Google Tries To Show Microsoft How The Cloud Should Work*

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A Googler Explains Why Microsoft's Cloud Services Crashed Today (GOOG, MSFT)

Microsoft's current competitor to Google Apps, known as BPOS, suffered a three-hour outage this morning.

During the outage, Microsoft explained via Twitter that the next version of its cloud services for business, Office 365, has been rebuilt from the ground up to be more reliable.

Why did Microsoft have to do this?

Google Apps leader Rajen Sheth has a theory.

Basically, Microsoft has been TALKING about cloud services for the last several years, but a lot of its biggest customers have probably been using hosted servers instead. When it comes to true cloud computing, Microsoft is still getting its footing.

There's a subtle difference here that's important to understand. Microsoft kicked off BPOS in 2007 as a dedicated service. Basically, each customer got Exchange (and other software) running on its own server hardware. Customers would save money by outsourcing IT costs to Microsoft, but the technology was no different than running Exchange on site.

Sheth explains that Gmail and Google Apps were designed and launched more than five years ago as a multitenant solution. That means that that the service itself and underlying data is automatically distributed among thousands of physical machines.

Google argues this is a much better way of doing things:

• Reliability. If a hosted server goes down, customers might notice a problem -- at the very least, performance will suffer while they're switched over to the backup server. With a multitenant solution, the system automatically adjusts, putting applications only where there's enough capacity and swapping data and services around as needed. Only massive system-wide failures will be noticed.

• Cost. With a hosted server, each server still has to be managed -- hardware has to be fixed, patches have to be applied, and so on. As a result, it's usually more expensive to run, and those costs are passed along to customers.

• Updates. Hosted servers are updated the same way on-premise servers are -- each physical server has to be taken offline and the software has to be updated. This means updates are usually pretty rare -- in the case of Microsoft, they're usually timed to big new releases of the equivalent on-premises product. (In other words, Exchange 2010 comes out, and at some point the BPOS Dedicated customers get the option to upgrade to Exchange 2010. Eventually, they're forced to move.) With a multitenant solution, new features can be added regularly and users will "just get them" -- just as happens with consumer online services. 

Microsoft later launched a multitenant version of BPOS in 2008. It's called BPOS Standard.

But that service has apparently been plagued by outages -- including the one this morning -- and even Microsoft seems to be admitting it wasn't ready for prime time. Why else redesign it from scratch? (The likely reason: Microsoft's own server products were not originally designed to be multitenant, so it has taken some time for the company to rebuild the underlying software.)

This will begin change next week with Office 365.

In fact, Microsoft is so confident that the multitenant version of Office 365 will be able to run at scale, it has raised the floor for dedicated (hosted) service from 5,000 to 30,000 seats. In other words, only the very largest Microsoft customers will even be able to get dedicated hosted servers from Microsoft. Everybody else -- including the mid-sized enterprises that are Microsoft's bread and butter -- will be steered toward the multitenant version of Office 365.

In other words, Microsoft is in perfect agreement with Google -- multitenant is a better solution. It's just taken a lot longer for Microsoft to get there.

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See Also:

• Google Tries To Show Microsoft How The Cloud Should Work*
• Microsoft Cloud Service Was Down For Hours This Morning
• THE GOOGLE INVESTOR: Google Buys Place-Shifting Software Company To Enhance Google TV

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