A Book Review: “Green IT”

The book Green IT: Reduce Your Information System’s Environmental Impact While Adding to the Bottom Line by Velte, Velte, and Elsenpeter is extremely interesting. Unlike some other books that might go in this direction, this is not a book of theory, nor of political change, nor of persuasion. This is a book for IT staff about how to create a “green” data center and more.

Because of the nature of IT, going “green” can mostly be summed up in one word: electricity. A vast amount of what makes an IT department “green” consists of using less electricity wherever possible. This includes such areas as the corporate data center, the corporate desktops, and much more.

However, the book also gives significant attention to the other big environmental impact of computing: paper. There are a lot of ways to reduce paper use, and this book seems to cover all of them.

The book is in five parts: part I explains why to implement conservation in IT; part II talks about consumption; part III discusses what we as IT users can do individually to help the environment; part IV covers several corporate case studies; and part V expounds on the process of becoming “green” and how to stay that way.

It would have been nice to see more information about how the authors exemplified their suggestions during the creation of the book. The only hint of any environmentally sound practices is the recycled paper logo on the back cover (100% post-consumer fiber). That leaves more questions: did they use thin clients? Did they work from home? Did they use soy ink? Perhaps lastly, where is the e-book?

There is a web site that is set up for the book, but the current breadth of the site is disappointingly anemic. Some of the best web sites for Green IT would be Dell Earth, Intel, as well as IBM’s Green IT and Energy, the Environment, and IBM web sites.

It was interesting to note that HP’s Eco Solutions web site is “heavy” compared to the others – that is, it requires much more processing power to display, and requires a lot more time to download – which translates into more power consumption to view the web site. In addition, IBM and HP are the #1 and #2 in Computerworld’s list of Top Green-IT Vendors – whereas Dell is #6… HP also topped Newsweek’s 2009 list of Greenest Big Companies in America (along with IBM, Intel, and Dell in the top 5).

New programming blog: Programmagic!

As a programmer, I have found that system administration benefits from a lot more programming than most people realize. Scripting languages are not limited to just the UNIX shell – nor to Perl.

There is a new blog, a sister blog to this one, entitled Programmagic! which will focus on programming. It will focus on lesser used languages like Lua, Scala, LISP, Smalltalk, and many others.

Recent posts are on Scala; there are many more to come. Why not come visit?

Why I Use Korn Shell Everywhere

The first thing I do when I log into a system, including Solaris, HP-UX, FreeBSD, and Linux is exec ksh. Whatever for?

Consider this fact: the root shell on FreeBSD defaults to C shell; HP-UX defaults to the POSIX shell (without history); Linux almost everywhere defaults to bash. All of these shells are different in various ways. It is possible you might log into three separate machines and get three separate shells with three different ways of handling things.

Using Korn Shell means that all of these systems will be standardized on one shell, and every system will act the same when you interact with it. There will be no surprises – and surprises at the root command line often translate into disastrous errors.

On HP-UX, using ksh has the additional benefit of enabling history for root – although the security risks of this make this a dangerous benefit: best to erase history after you log out and to make sure that history is independent for every root shell.

What makes this possible is that the Korn Shell is available virtually everywhere, including FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX – whereas other shells are not (which includes C shell, Bourne shell, and bash).

HP Instant Capacity (iCap)

One of the things that may affect any clusters you have – or other systems – is that management does not want to spend enough to handle any possible load.  With a cluster, this means that you may not be able to handle a fail-over because there is not enough spare processing power to handle the extra load when it happens.

HP’s Instant Capacity (“capacity on demand”) is an answer to this dilemma.  The base idea is that you have extra hardware already in the data center that is not available for use until it is necessary.  The switch that will enable this expanded capacity can be automatic or manual; when some portion of the extra capacity is enabled, you pay for it and it can be used from then on.

Yet, Instant Capacity (iCAP) is more flexible than this.  The capacity may be enabled only temporarily instead of permanently – this is known as TiCAP (temporary iCAP).  Thus, you can save even more by buying extra hardware but enabling only a small portion of it.  During the recent HP Tech Days that I attended in San Jose, California, a situation was described where an HP Superdome could be purchased with a large amount of the hardware already in place – but only a small amount of the hardware enabled.  When the extra power is needed, for example, a cell in the Superdome could be enabled until such time as the power is no longer necessary.

There is also Global Instant Capacity (GiCAP) which even allows the movement of power from one system to another.  For example, if a CPU on one system is underutilized and another system needs the resource more – then the CPU resource can be “logically” moved from one system to the other through GiCAP.  Alternately, if one system dies and another system needs its power, the dead system’s resources can be used by the active system by moving them through GiCAP.

iCAP and TiCAP are available for HP-UX (on PARISC and Itanium) and for OpenVMS (only on Itanium). GiCAP is only available for HP-UX. 

I find iCAP and TiCAP to be very interesting.  From a cost perspective, you pay only a minimal amount to keep the resource; when it is enabled, you then pay for it for the duration – or buy the hardware outright for permanent use as needed.

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Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change

Every year, blogs around the world center on one topic for a day; this year, climate change is the focus. What can IT staff do about climate change?

A lot, it turns out. The data center is a huge user of electricity, and there are a lot of things that can be done to reduce power usage. A lot of electricity comes from polluting sources and contributes in other ways to a global change in the climate.

One thing that can be done is to pull old machines out entirely and replace them with newer more power efficient models. Often, older models are hoarded because of the cost to the organization in getting a new computer. Newer computer models with newer processors can use half the electricity of older models; just make sure that you actually get efficient servers instead of getting one which is not efficient.

Another possibility is to go with blade servers. These are servers that are thin and small, permitting a higher density of servers in a rack than ever before. Blade servers are typically designed to save power; for instance, HP claims a 25% power savings with their c-class server blades (which can run HP-UX, OpenVMS, Linux, or Windows).

Alternately, you could run several machines on one server using a virtual machine. HP-UX 11i offers something called Integrity Virtual Machines (or IVM). IVMs are full virtualized Integrity machines; currently supported are HP-UX 11i, Red Hat or SUSE Linux, and Microsoft Windows Server. OpenVMS 8.4 (expected in the first half of 2010) will support running as a guest operating system in an IVM as well.

Let’s look at the Top 500 list – a ranking of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. However, this list only focuses on speed and power; with this in mind consider the Green 500 list. The Green 500 takes the Top 500 list and ranks it by computer power per watt used: thus, the most power for the least number of watts (that is, the most efficient supercomputer) is the top entry.

HP Tech Day: HP Superdome

I was recently invited to take part in an HP Tech Day in San Jose, California, celebrating the 10th anniversary of the HP Superdome (the most advanced server in the Integrity line).  This was an event designed to introduce several of us in the blog world to the HP Superdome.  The attendees included David Adams from OSNews, Ben Rockwood from Cuddletech, Andy McCaskey from Simple Daily Report (SDR) News, and Saurabh Dubey of ActiveWin.  This was a quite eclectic and broad mix of perspectives: David Adams covers operating systems; Ben Rockwood covers Sun goings on (as he mentions in his article, he wore a Sun shirt: bold as brass!); Saurabh Dubey covers Microsoft goings on; and I, as loyal readers may know, cover system administration (with a focus on HP-UX, OpenVMS, and Linux – all of which will run on Superdome). Andy McCaskey over at SDR News also had a nice writeup on his experiences.

It is possible I was the most familiar with the architecture and with the capabilities, though I’ve not seen or worked with a Superdome in the past: the capabilities of the Superdome are largely based on the fact that it is cell-based.  The rp7420 cluster which I have maintained over the last several years uses the same technology, though cells from the rp7420 are incompatible with the Superdome.  The software is the same: prstatus, etc.  The System Management Homepage (SMH) was also shown, although it was almost shown as a benefit of the Superdome (it’s actually in every HP-UX since 11i v2, and is an option for OpenVMS 8.x).

There was a lot of talk about “scaling up” (that is, use a larger, more powerful system) instead of “scaling out” (using a massive cluster of many machines).  The Superdome is a perfect example of “scaling up” and is possibly one of the best examples.  I was impressed by what I saw as the capabilities of the Superdome.  There was a lot of comparison with the IBM zSeries, which is the epitome of the current crop of mainframes.  The presenters made a very strong case for using Superdome over zSeries.

They did seem to focus on running Linux in an LPAR, however; this creates a limit of 60 Linux installations.  Using z/VM as a hypervisor, one can run many more Linux systems.  I have heard of a test run in Europe (years ago) where a zSeries was loaded with one Linux installation after another – when the testers reached into the tens of thousands (30,000?) the network failed or was overloaded; the zSeries system was still going strong.  Trouble is, I’m not able to back this up with a source at the moment: I’m sure it was available as part of a print (Linux) journal – it may have been called “Project Charlie.”  Can anyone help?

The usability features of the Superdome were in prime display: for example, the power supplies were designed so that they could not be inserted upside-down.  Another example: the cells for the Superdome are in two parts: the “system” (including CPU, memory, and chip glue) and the power supply.  This makes it much easier to remove in the typical datacenter row and makes each part lighter, making it easier for users. There are innumerable items like this that the designers took into account during the design phase.  The engineering on these systems are amazing; usability has been thought of from the start.  In my opinion, both HP and Compaq have been this way for  a long time.

Speaking of the tour, this system that they showed us was a prototype of the original HP Superdome that shipped for the first time in 2000.  This system was still going and was using modern hardware: these systems are not designed for a 3-4 year lifecycle, but a much longer, extended lifecycle.

There were a lot of features of the system that I’ll cover in the next few days; it was enjoyable and educational.  I very much appreciate the work that went into it and hope to see more.

By the way, if you read Ben Rockwood’s article at Cuddletech, look at the first photograph: your author is center left, with the sweater.

Update: thanks to Michael Burschik for the updated information on Test Plan Charlie, which saw 41,000 Linux machines running on the IBM zSeries back in 2000. I’ll have a report on it soon. Strangely enough, I still haven’t found the article I was thinking of – but of course, a project like that isn’t reported in just one periodical…

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