Customer Reviews

The Green and Virtual Data Center

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Greg Schulz has delivered with both a timely and informative book. With the economic meltdown occurring in 2008 every company has become focused on cost containment both for Cap Ex and Op Ex and the data center is in forefront. This is taking place at the same time as heighten awareness of our planets ecology and the impact of IT and data centers. As Schulz states in his summary chapter: "The objective is to lower cost, boost productivity, and improve service delivery to meet performance and availability objectives in a flexible or agile manner that also helps the environment."

In the first chapter Schulz coins the acronym PCFE for power, cooling, floor space and environmental to aggregate the IT infrastructure issues that are core to green initiatives. As I read through the book I substituted PC Fe for Politically Correct Iron because in my mind it reflects what Schulz calls the "green gap". This "green gap" is the separation of ecological and economic factors that are tied to the data center. On one hand we have the concerns about global warming, green-house gases, and carbon emissions while on the other we have data growth, power and cooling cost, stock holders looking for profits and the perceived cost to be green. The case is presented that this gap is more one of language and attitude as opposed to reality. If IT directors and facility managers implement best practices to design and run their data centers they will find in most cases they align with green objectives because it makes business sense.

The book is divided into four sections. In the first section there is a summary of the issues facing CIOs and IT directors around energy consumption, safety requirements for the disposal or equipment, and what green IT means. The second section looks at current trends in data center infrastructure and how they can be effectively monitored and managed. The third examines the technologies which are enabling virtualization and driving current trends like cloud computing. This is Mr. Schulz's area of core competency and has the most in depth coverage. In the final portion of the book there are practical applications of the concepts discussed in the other sections. I found the format to be a good organization that kept key areas together and the overall coverage of the topics to be of sufficient depth. I would recommend this book to anyone wants to understand the impact of "green IT" as well how the convergence of a number of technologies has created potential for virtual IT infrastructure.

About the reviewer

Paul Collins is CTO for Total Tec Systems a leading enterprise solution provider for data center infrastructure, and server and storage virtualization. He has a 20 year history of helping customers design, implement and manage IT infrastructure. Total Tec Systems is headquartered in Edison, NJ.

This book is packed full of information. From ecological and energy efficiencies, to virtualization strategies and what the future may hold for many of the key enabling technologies. Greg's writting style benifits both tehnoligists and management levels.

Overall this is a well-structured and organized book with comprehensive coverage of necessary technologies and practices, including virtualization 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.

The complete review is given in http://bit.ly/12K5Cw.

The book The Green and Virtual Data Center by Greg Schulz includes a vast array of topics pertaining to data center elements and virtualization from fundamentals to practice. The author covered energy efficiency metric basics and continued with the application of PCFE to the current practices in IT operations. The material is relevant and practical yet not overly technical; however, it is also not intended for readers with no prior working knowledge of data center infrastructures or IT in general. The main theme of the book is to analyze current data center operations to find opportunities where energy consumption can be reduced by cutting waste or misallocation of energy, minimizing heat production, introduce a well-designed virtualization strategy to maximize computing output from existing resources, and to adopt technologies and techniques that facilitate efficiency and availability.

The value of The Green and Virtual Data Center lies primarily in its conceptual application, rather than technical application, to the issue of how to get more out of existing computing and storage capacity while at the same time reducing the energy utilization. He states that the intent is not to "green wash" the data center but rather to serve as a very real means of adding to the bottom line and have IT be an active player in the organization's added resource allocation rather than merely a consumer of resources.

Early in the book, Schulz dispels any notion of "green" as a political or PR maneuver but rather sees the implementation of an energy reduction strategy as a business decision while helping make operations more effective and productive. To serve that purpose, the book includes statistics and charts but not as a basis of the concept but rather as an aid to reinforce the main thesis if the book. Schulz also makes it very clear that going green should be all about business and the progress of the industry with the added benefit of being positive to the environment in the way of reduced carbon emissions and recycling. To this Schulz provides and well evolved lecture on the basics of power generation and the different types of fuels involved. He also mentions the electrical grid and the different distribution plants.

In the second section, the book covers virtualization almost exclusively. The topics are relevant but certainly not all of them will be around for long as he gets quite granular when discussing snapshots and data replication. While the current virtualization practices are a good foundation, Schulz perhaps should have covered them from a different angle such as the main underlying concepts only and leave out the details as those will most likely change and some already have such as the rapid advancement of cloud computing, distributed clouds and cloud infrastructure management. Of course, the cloud still has to exist in data centers but some may look be architected very differently than described by Schulz. The Green and Virtual Data Center only includes a few pages on cloud computing without any real new content.

Schulz also discusses virtual data center energy management but using the typical mechanized methods. He describes the types of power sources, energy consumers and devices but does not get into real detail relating to intelligent management mechanisms such as those promoted by The Green Grid or the intelligent management systems developed by IT software vendors. He also does not cover any real concepts relating to intelligent energy routing, provisioning or monitoring. Because of this omission, The Green and Virtual Data Center remained rather neutral and descriptive in nature but missed one of the potentially forthcoming revolutions in IT and perhaps business in general. Nevertheless, Schulz correctly describes cooling as the highest consumer of energy in the data center. He also provides good insight into rack cooling, backup systems, PDUs, and how to determine energy needs and usage.

The Green and Virtual Data Center covers several topics that are better suited for a different book such as physical security, networking, and hardware. Schulz does not particularly specialize or offer any innovative solutions or ideas on how to maximize resource utilization. The material he presents is not original but rather a compilation of what is out in the industry. What Schulz does quite well is put the material together and synthesize ideas from various disciplines into the area of data center operations.

Some topics that Schulz omits almost entirely are the data center management and structure as well as operations as they relate to personnel and processes. These areas would have offered potential practical applications to increasing efficiencies in the data center by way of improved practices, management, processes or structure. He offers some dialogue on outsourced data centers and some mentions of management but not much else.

Schulz's book is an adequate reference resource for individuals who work in data centers. It may also be a valuable source as an inside view to those who do not work in data centers. However, The Green and Virtual Data Center also includes material that is not entirely relevant to the topic of green and virtual data centers but valuable to know. The most value in the book lies in the definition of concepts and trends in virtualization, even if at times it gets overly granular but not to the extent of a VMWare manual. Data center practitioners will get value out of the book but IT and business readers in general may find some topics out of their scope yet a valuable resource that delivers an insider's view of the energy efficient and virtualized data center.

Just so you know (i.e., full disclosure), I am a good business friend of Greg. As an independent information infrastructure industry analyst with a concentration on storage and storage management and a special interest in data protection, I felt that I needed to keep up to speed on what is happening in the modern data center. (That plus my curiosity as to what was happening today from when I ran a Fortune 500 corporate data center a number of years ago.)

And I am glad that I did. For me the book provided valuable insights and knowledge that will be helpful to me in my practice. For you if a data center is critical to your work, you should be able to put the insights and knowledge from Greg's book to practical use.

That is important to you because your data center is going to become green and virtual. Now some of you may not believe that as you still may feel no compelling need to change. However, unless your organization is an anomaly, the predicted growth in compute, networking, and storage requirements for the foreseeable future is likely to increase dramatically. That growth implies that the work that your enterprise performs electronically will likewise increase. Not being able to manage that growth well could very well stifle your enterprise's ability to perform well (if at all).

Now can you grow your data center footprint, always get the electrical power that your data center will demand, and get the budget dollars to hire the people necessary to manage the growth? Even with improved economic conditions that is not likely to happen. So you are going to have to do something be it sooner or later.

The green and virtual data center is the cornerstone to any transformation to the next generation data center. Even though the book covers a lot of technical details, the logic and details are readily understandable for anyone with a basic IT background. That does not mean that the wealth of technical detail may not seem overwhelming at times, but simply take a deep breadth and read slowly. Remember that you can read the book in digestible pieces rather than all at once. I suggest that you flag (using a special sticky note called a "flag") pages that contain information that is particularly relevant to you. Then you might want to take notes and put each note in a category. (If you can do that electronically, so much the better). You may want to rework the categories as you proceed and gain more knowledge.

The sum of the notes should be helpful to you in planning your move to a green and virtual data center. Planning for and justifying the transformation to a green and virtual data center is a necessary beginning for what you need to accomplish. Any transformation that you go through has to be done well so any effort that you expend should be well worth it. Greg's book can serve you well in this effort.

Operating expenses for a data center often exceed initial caital expenses. In today's economy reducing operating expenses is a major priority for IT professionals. Greg Shulz's book, The Green and Virtual Data Center is an excellent reference book for creating and running cost effective and environmentally sensitive data centers.

The author shows us the basic operations, hardware and expenses for a modern data center. He covers the infrastructure as well as direct expenses. Infrastructure expenses such as HVAC, UPS and power conditioning can account for more than half the total operating costs of a data center. By controlling hardware efficiency, extending the allowable temperature range and move efficient cooling suing external air and water as well as better server and storage placement, these infrastructure operating expenses can be significantly reduced.

Virtualization is a popular way to consolidate data center resources. This technology abstractes storage and servers to act as a common pool that can be centrally managed and dynamically allocated. Using the extensive suggestions in theis book, data center administrators can increase their use of these pooled resources to 80% or higher.

A shown in this book, deduplication and compression of data on storage systems reduces overall stoarge system growth. Combining these methods for reducing overall storage demand with appropriate implementation of storage hierarchies and usage of new storage technologies such as MAID and solid state storage can reduce hardware as well as operating expenses.

The book includes a useful glossary as well as helpful references and tips in the appendices. This book is a good investment and will remain a much used reference for data center administers and IT managers.

This book has a lot of great information about data networks. The books covers important information that you will need to know, term wise, about IT safety, Virtual servers, IT management Resources, Server Hardware and a lot of other important IT terms.

CONS: The Author does a terrible job organizing the information through out the book and keeping each paragraphs flowing with information. For example I am currently in the processes of reading this whole book, and one of many issues i have with this book is the Author does not go in enough detailed about important acronyms that are important to know. Another problem is the Author show very confusing pictures or Figures to explain what he talking about in some paragraphs. The figures some times do not have flow chart arrows that explain where data is flowing and what devices is receiving or sending data. It really gets confusing when he talks about consolidating Data in pictures.

Overall this book is great and has important information for all IT beginners or those who have been working there whole lives in IT Center. But I wish the Author did a better job in presenting this important information.