Zen and the Art of Data Center Greening (and Energy Efficiency)

Title
The Green and Virtual Data Center, by Greg Schulz, CRC Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4200-8666-9

What It Is
In a nutshell
This is the first significant book I’ve seen on the new-generation data center, which is based on two major concepts: (1) environmental friendliness and (2) virtualization technologies and practices.

Target audience
The target audience for the book includes a wide scope of industries and company functions:

IT purchasing, facilities, server, storage, networking, database, and applications analysts, administrators, and architects. In addition, manufacturers and solution partners, sales, marketing, support, and engineering organizations, as well as public relations, investment communities, and media professionals associated with IT technologies and services.

Greg Schulz

Perspective
A data center consists of IT and facilities resources. Although there is a good discussion of facilities to support energy efficiency at data centers, the book is written from the IT viewpoint.

Organization
The book is in four parts, each containing several chapters. The table of contents and Chapter 1 are available here. Here is a short summary of the organization:

Statement of IT data center’s green issues and problems, discussions of gaps between green IT and data center challenges, and a good tutorial on power generation and transmission.
Definition of the next-generation virtual data center and discussions of its specification, components, and measurement and metrics.
Listing of technologies to fuel a virtual and green data center, discussions of facilities practices, and technology details about server, storage, and networking gears.
How to tie all the elements together.

Review
A few keywords are used repeatedly throughout the book, such as PCFE (power, cooling, floor space, and environment), EHS (environment, health, and safety), IRM (infrastructure resource management), and virtualization. Actually, this is not an accident. These keywords carry the author’s messages very well.

Most data center practitioners face the PCFE issue. Shortage of power, cooling, and floor space at data centers is well known. Most operators, however, are not aware of the link between PCFE and green IT/data center concepts. In Part 1, Schulz has a good discussion of this issue, bridges green gaps, and shows what green means from the IT perspective. He brings EHS to the reader’s attention, which is equally important but sometimes overlooked.

Another important keyword is IRM, as there are a large number of devices and equipment of heterogeneous nature in every data center. Effective IRM is very important because, along with virtualization, it would allow each and every element to work harmoniously together to enable the entire data center to perform energy efficiently, leading to a reduction in energy cost and GHG emissions, and a cost reduction for the entire data center. Schulz did a good job of articulating the importance of IRM.

The last but not the least keyword is virtualization. Actually, virtualization is the most important keyword of all because it allows multiple heterogeneous physical resources to be virtualized to a single logical entity. This enables resources to be allocated as needed and, thus, energy efficiency to be established. In many publications, the discussions of virtualization have centered on servers only. As the current mergers and acquisitions indicate, the real competition is taking place in the virtual data center space and, thus, in cloud computing. The author, with his strong background in storage technologies, emphasizes the value of data and presents storage virtualization and other technologies. This is timely, as the importance of storage equipment and data is increasingly recognized. The ultimate direction seems to be cloud computing, which requires a virtual data center. This book presents a solid background on the virtual data center concept.

Room for improvement
The book’s target audience is too wide and some discussions are too technical for some of its intended readers. Depending on their technical experience, readers will want to focus on certain parts or chapters and skip others. Some kind of guideline as to which part(s) or chapter(s) is appropriate for which segment of the target audience would be helpful. This book is good material for use as a college-level textbook with a tutor.

On the one hand, the book covers a lot of subjects. This reviewer has extensive experience in many IT technologies and practices, but it took me a while to read the book. On the other hand, for a very technical audience, some of the basic information may be too cumbersome to go through. I suggest creating three different versions of this book to target three levels of readers: (1) nontechnical/executive, (2) somewhat but not very technical, and (3) highly technical.

Future extensions:
Any book is written with the information available at the time. In addition to shorter versions, follow-ons to the book could incorporate:

Frameworks to sort through data center factors and elements
More energy perspectives, such as renewable energies and carbon management
Alignment discussions between IT and facilities at various levels
IT vs. telecom data centers
More discussions of cloud computing

Summary
Overall this is a well-structured and organized book with comprehensive coverage of necessary technologies and practices to understand next-generation data centers. Some technical contents require an IT background, but the book will certainly give you a good understanding of current data-center problems and solutions and what next-generation data centers will require to mitigate their environmental impact.

Because of the wide variety of subjects, several shorter versions of the book will be a good addition. In addition, I would like to see new topics discussed in the next version of the book.

Purchase
The book can be purchased from here.

Tags: Book review Greg Schulz IRM PCFE The Green and Virtual Data Center Virtualization

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Book Review: The Green and Virtual Data Center by Greg Schulz