Kyle Ohme — In the life of a dot com

Ok, We got it - we have a cooling and power problem with blades trying to utilize older datacenters - can we please move on?

Although I was very happy to be a part of the first annual BladeSystems Insight conference in Ga, I was pummeled with the talk of power and cooling issues all week. I get it, I understand that cooling and power is a big issue with blades and high density computing. What I dont understand is what will talking about it for three days accomplish? I dont build the actual cooling systems and I dont design the actual hardware for my data rooms. Its my job to understand my options and understand what I can do to combat issues now and in the future. Its also my job to do my research, choose a vendor and work with a solution provider to solve my problem. If we heard it once we heardit ten times a day - for the power coming into the rack you create heat and the more compute power the more power it requires thus more cooling is needed. Got it -

My job is to utilize cutting edge technology with industry best practices to solve business issues anddrive value for the company. I do my research to understand what my options are, solve the problem the best we can and move on.

I was really disappointed last week with the fact very few conversations throughout the conference didnt move past cooling and power as was the same in 2006 with Server Blade Summit. In my opinion cooling and power is an enabler allowing us to take advantage of a better computing platforms. Quite frankly I am not the one designing the inner workings of my cooling system hardware. It is my responsibility to understand my growth and computing requirements and to communicate that to my contractor installing along with my vender selling thesolution to assure a proper fit.

Please dont get me wrong, I understand this is a big topic and its an important one. I also understand that itsthe consumer market driving the research and design of the practical application. Many facilities are not designed for high density applications- mine is and I want to move on!

I personally feel better insight into the future would be more valuable.

Conversations like;

What do we do next when we have 10,000 virtual images sitting around because we just made it too easy to deploy?
What are identified best practices with the deployment of servers and security?
How do we make this platform interact with our business models?
How do we create a policy based computing platform that grows and expands based on business needs?
What issues / advantages do blades and virtualization bring to backups and DR?

I want to hear what others are doing with the newly found compute power, process and limitations.

If anyone would like to strike up a conversation on the practical application of blades and virtualization to help make real headway as an industry track me down. If you want to discuss power I will talk to you later Im moving on.

[tags] blades, vmware, apc, liebert, emerson, bladecenter, ibm, dell, hp, sun, data center [/tags]

I think that I may have created a monster when I got my buddy Mark playing with Enom and working on setting up his first site. I pointed him the direction of wordpress and dotnetnukeand a few weeks later he moved past that to Drupal and others. He stumbled on this product which seems to be a great find!

If you have not seen this application yet, go and take a look at it. Its a great concept allowing you to install Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Mediawiki and phpBB2 with little user interaction. Additionally it installs and configures Apache, OpenSSL, Perl, mod_perl, mod_security, PHP, MySQL, phpMyAdmin.
Site: http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper

I have stacked this on top of a VM image and it works great for testing out new wordpress plug-ins and working on the template that I may once get around to finishing.

[tags] Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Mediawiki, phpBB2 [/tags]

I didnt have the opportunity to post as much as I would have liked but Martin at bladewatch.com seemed to take care of this for all of us.

The last day was jam packed full of content from power, switch and server vendors. The break-out sessions that where arranged seemed to give a good amount of one-on-one time with end users and the vendors.

I had the pleasure during two of the sessions to represent the case study portion for IBM BladeCenter platform and the Ardence software streaming solution. Overall it went well butvery hard to pack all the positive points to this solution in 20 min. I am sure after my audience had to hear almost the same thing in two separate days they had plenty of insight. =)

The early morning sessions brought out some great topics and we continued to hammer on the power issues at hand including cooling.
After lunch was one of my favorite things to listen to in the entire event. Andreas Antonopoulos, in my opinion was right on with his overview of how the market is progressing and the use of blades and virtualization is a new way of thinking. This ranged from QA environments, hardware abstraction layers, security issues and he touched on about everything that we have done so far within our environment. He also commented that some companies inadvertently overlook some of the new models and only view virtualization as a directserver hardware savings (CAPEX Savings). We did the same thing but started realizing many benefitsthat we overlooked after moving to a new approach and freeing up admin time. This new way of thinking — shifting resources as needed without over provisioning was new to the market and still continues to show massive OPEX savings as we spend less time maintaining touch points that relate to a direct expense.

The night followed with a great dinner, live entertainment and a great comedian. This had to be one of the more entertaining wrap-ups and award show that I have seen in a conference. PPM Media did a great job with this show and it was a blast attending.

Wait! We are not done yet …

After the dinner was a great show of fireworks that I would say rival some of the 4^th of July shows I have seen in the past. This was amazing standing on the water in front of the hotel watching this show as huge cargo ships drive pass. It was a great touch to the live music also playing all and all a great end to BladeSystems Insight.