Green (low carbon) Data Center Blog

What is missing from prediction of Top 5 Green Data Center Trends in 2011? Words of wisdom from a conversation with Olivier Sanche

TriplePundit has a post on the Top 5 trends in Green Data Center in 2011.

Top Five Trends for Green Data Centers in 2011

By Kathryn Siranosian | January 18th, 2011 3 Comments

Last year, Triple Pundit took an in-depth look at how companies are greening their data centers.

Now, it’s time for us to revisit that issue and ask, “What’s new?”

What’s the list of top 5?

1. Continued emphasis on efficiency –with a twist.

2. Improving business flow through virtualization and cloud computing.

3. Modularity.

4. Innovative design and design integration.

5. Continued evolution of certification and regulation.

But does this list really help you green the data center?  Something is missing.  Something more important.  Then, it came to me as I am researching stories for a eulogy I’ll give for Olivier Sanche’s memorial service.  A method that Olivier practiced – a passion to drive for a complete system that works and is better than the rest.  Which now that I am writing this makes sense why Olivier fit in Apple’s culture and admired Steve Jobs when he read about the company 20 years ago.  Olivier had the same passion for data centers that Steve Jobs has for consumer products.

Read this story shared by Nic Bustamente on a conversation with Olivier Sanche.  You’ll get the idea.

I was lucky enough to meet with Olivier a few weeks before his passing. We conversed about many issues. I was always amazed how he ably wore so many hats. Many folks in the industry wear one or a few hats, but Olivier wore them all so well. We fondly discussed typical data center guy stuff – outages, uptime, maintenance, design, construction – it went on for hours. Throughout the discussion he never seemed to tire. Olivier was ten years my senior, and I was starting to wear out. It was both embarrassing and humbling. I was battling bronchitis, (which later developed in to pneumonia) but we kept talking!  He continued asking me pointed and highly in depth questions. I was honestly starting to get pretty physically tired, but he was so mentally engaging I didn’t want it to end, and he kept me on my toes. It always amazed me how enthused and lively he could be with his energy – his questions and the discussion kept me going. We started discussing our various company’s positions and learned that later on that month we were due to meet up again at an industry event. We talked about how many in the industry present the same thing every year, how things don’t change too often, or as much as we would like. There are very few folks in this world who drive real change, and even fewer who embrace it. Of those among us who are agents of both, Olivier was one who you could always count on to do so intelligently and thoroughly, but most importantly, without ego. His was always a passionately genuine and humanistic approach. I am glad we had the opportunity to talk one last time, and I will always cherish the final experience.

I have a hard time thinking about it, cause every time I do I start to honestly cry. I didn’t think in a million years we would have to say goodbye like this.

Human Spirit and Creativity applied to leveraging hidden assets

if you discuss energy efficiency and greening a data center you’ll get a long list of PUE, hot-cold aisle, power systems, air side economizers.  Rarely do you get creative work.  What do I mean by creative?  Consider this post on Design Steps to Heaven.

Design steps to heaven

I recently visted Luzern, in Switzerland, for a workshop at the oldest art and design school in Switzerland, Hochschule Luzern.

My host, Andy Polaine had asked me to set students in the first semester of the MA Design a challenge.

The task I gave them was as follows: find a neglected asset somewhere in Luzern, and design a service to increase its value to the city.

The author had a specific area he thought the students would leverage.

As the workshop began, I assumed that some groups of students would focus on the city's new cultural centre [photo above]. Designed by Jean Novel, the building had taken twenty years to conceive and plan. With an overhanging roof 35m 100 feet) above the ground, the building had cost the city 130 million euros to build.

This was an iconic building with a capital "I". I thought it must surely have potential as the focus of some new kind of civic activity.

But, he was surprised by what one first prize.  A church turned into a climbing wall.

The first joint winner was called 'Straight way to heaven'.

The team had identified a church as their neglected asset,and proposed to increase its value as a meeting place by opening it up to bouldering in the city.

The group did not expect the church authorities to be thrilled by their idea, but our jury found their service communication to be so engaging that they were made joint winners.

How many hidden assets (ideas) are there in the data center industry?

2nd prize was won by students who created a closed-loop service concept for a cemetery.

The second winning project in Luzern, Graveyard Alive, was especially enchanting. The group had discovered that the city's Friedhof Cemetary contained a lot of as-yet-unused space.

They came up with a sublime closed-loop service concept: offer people the opportunity to donate their bodies, once buried, as nutrients to save endangered plants and cultivate biodiversity.

Data Center Problem Solving or Process, where do you spend your time?

In 1991 after 7 years at Apple I took a sabbatical and vacation for 15 weeks re-living a  childhood summer vacation experience taking off from Memorial Day to Labor day.  It took me 6 weeks to decompress, and I was thankful I took so much time off.  One of my realizations I had is I really enjoyed solving complex product development problems.  Passionate and refreshed I returned to Apple in Sept 1991 told my manager my realization and she said, "well it's nice you like to solve problems, but we are about process here."  By April 1992, I took the leap leaving Apple to go to Microsoft to work on Windows until 2006.

I was having a great philosophical conversation last night with Kevin Francis at Silent Partner.

Kevin Francis

Growing up in Austin, Texas Kevin developed an affinity for live music, tacos and a story well-told. That background somehow resulted in an ability to put complex telecom problems into plain language that non-technical executives can understand and profit from. Previously, Kevin learned the ins and outs of his field at leading companies such as MCI, GST and CRG West. It was at XO, however, where he first met Mike and developed a friendship which would lead to the origins of Silent Partner. When he’s not in his super secret laboratory cooking up strategy for his clients, he’s most likely enjoying a cold beer and watching live music or the Texas Longhorns. Hook ’em.

We first met a couple of months ago at a data center social, and had fun talking about Texas Longhorn football as I plan on taking my 9 year-old daughter next month to her first Texas Longhorn game and to see her Uncle who was an all-American swimmer for Texas.  And, while I am in Austin I'll see the guys at Smooth-Stone and Dell. 

Last night Kevin and I got into an interesting discussion of how so many decisions are made by people who don't really understand the problem they are trying to solve.  And, this morning that's when it hit me.  Most people are going through a process, not a problem solving exercise.  And, this same issue of so many being about process, is causing the data center industry to be slow in changing.

What problem do you want to solve?  Many data center people want to build a data center to reduce their costs vs. collocation facilities.  So, this is a process of cost reduction. 

Silent Partner's engages with many clients who have network performance issues, scalability of their information services, and cost reduction.  The entrepreneurial start-ups are running into these type issues as they grow.

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

We strive to stay at the center of our industry. At this point, we’ve experienced it all. We know what products, services, and vendors work best. We see how deals are struck and what dynamics are at play. We know exactly how much you can get for your money. We hear about new facilities before our competitors and we know which new technologies are being offered. We are essentially stockpiling information to give our clients every advantage.

If you try to take a process approach you'll many times go down a path of "covering your ass" do all the things in a way so you and your peers can't get fired which many times happen in IT as there is low tolerance for risk.  Risk-less development can be costly and ineffective, but it saves people's jobs.  Look who builds some of the most inefficient data centers and they are usually the most bureaucratic process oriented organizations.

To get out of this dilemma you can hire a good set of outside experts like Silent Partner to address the problems and not be focused on process.

We never start with a price list. We get in a room with our clients and listen. Out of that comes all kinds of ideas, big and small. Sometimes we need to get them up and running, yesterday. Sometimes we need to sit back and take a more strategic view of the problem. Every solution is different.

The telecom landscape is constantly being populated and re-populated with new technologies, protocols, services, and vendors. We stay connected and close to the action—it’s the only way to ensure our customer’s success

BAR CHART ILLUSTRATING
SUCCESS RATES:

Their client list is solid.

Where do you spend the majority of your day in process or problem solving?

I try spend the majority of my time talking to guys like Kevin Francis.

Google's Urs Hölzle explains why beefier cores are better than whimpy cores

The Register covers a new paper by Google's Urs Hölzle.

Google ops czar condemns multi-core extremists

Sea of 'wimpy' cores will sink you

By Cade Metz in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 17th September 2010 07:04 GMT

Free whitepaper – The Reg Guide to Solutions for the Virtual Era

Google is the modern data poster-child for parallel computing. It's famous for splintering enormous calculations into tiny pieces that can then be processed across an epic network of machines. But when it comes to spreading workloads across multi-core processors, the company has called for a certain amount of restraint.

With a paper (PDF) soon to be published in IEEE Micro, the IEEE magazine of chip and silicon design, Google Senior Vice President of Operations Urs Hölzle – one of the brains overseeing the web giant's famous back-end – warns against the use of multi-core processors that take parallelization too far. Chips that spread workloads across more energy-efficient but slower cores, he says, may not be preferable to chips with faster but power-hungry cores.

The paper is here and only 2 pages long.  And, when thinking what motivated Urs to write this paper i think it was his frustration that too many people are focusing on the number of cores to solve a problem and not taking into consideration what happens to the overall system when you try to solve problems with a bunch of whimpy cores vs. brawny cores.

We classify multicore systems as brawny-core systems, whose single-core performance is fairly high, or wimpy-core systems, whose single-core performance is low. The latter are more power efficient. Typically, CPU power decreases by approximately O(k2) when CPU frequency decreases by k, and decreasing DRAM access speeds with core speeds can save additional power.

Urs as usual uses excellent presentation skills to make his point in three areas.

First, the more threads handling a parallelized request, the larger the overall response time. Often all parallel tasks must finish before a request is completed, and thus the overall response time becomes the maximum response time of any subtask, and more subtasks will push further into the long tail of subtask response times. With 10 subtasks, a one-in-a-thousand chance of suboptimal process scheduling will affect 1 percent of requests (recall that the request time is the maximum of all subrequests), but with 1,000 subtasks it will affect virtually all requests.

In addition, a larger number of smaller systems can increase the overall cluster cost if fixed non-CPU costs can’t be scaled down accordingly. The cost of basic infrastructure (enclosures, cables, disks, power supplies, network ports, cables, and so on) must be shared across multiple wimpy-core servers, or these costs might offset any savings. More problematically, DRAM costs might increase if processes have a significant DRAM footprint that’s unrelated to throughput. For example, the kernel and system processes consume more aggregate memory, and applications can use memory-resident data structures (say, a dictionary mapping words to their synonyms) that might need to be loaded into memory on multiple wimpy-core machines instead of a single brawny-core machine.

Third, smaller servers can also lead to lower utilization. Consider the task of allocating a set of applications across a pool of servers as a bin-packing problem—each of the servers is a bin, and we try to fit as many applications as possible into each bin. Clearly that task is harder when the bins are small, because many applications might not completely fill a server and yet use too much of its CPU or RAM to allow a second application to coexist on the same server. Thus, larger bins (combined with resource containers or virtual machines to achieve performance isolation between individual applications) might offer a lower total cost to run a given workload.

How many data center operation VPs can write this paper?  One.  :-)

Keep the number of cores in mind for a green data center, smaller energy efficient processors may not be the most efficient overall.

Intel acquires McAfee, defining the relationship between Security and energy-efficient performance

Intel announced the purchase of McAfee.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug. 19, 2010 – Intel Corporation has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire McAfee, Inc., through the purchase of all of the company’s common stock at $48 per share in cash, for approximately $7.68 billion. Both boards of directors have unanimously approved the deal, which is expected to close after McAfee shareholder approval, regulatory clearances and other customary conditions specified in the agreement.

Most will focus on this as the reason for Intel's acquisition.

The acquisition reflects that security is now a fundamental component of online computing. Today’s security approach does not fully address the billions of new Internet-ready devices connecting, including mobile and wireless devices, TVs, cars, medical devices and ATM machines as well as the accompanying surge in cyber threats. Providing protection to a diverse online world requires a fundamentally new approach involving software, hardware and services.

What caught my eye though is this statement.

Inside Intel, the company has elevated the priority of security to be on par with its strategic focus areas in energy-efficient performance and Internet connectivity.

With a quote from Intel CEO Paul Otellini

“With the rapid expansion of growth across a vast array of Internet-connected devices, more and more of the elements of our lives have moved online,” said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. “In the past, energy-efficient performance and connectivity have defined computing requirements. Looking forward, security will join those as a third pillar of what people demand from all computing experiences.

What Intel has identified is the relationship between Security and Energy-Efficient Performance.  How you approach Security can have a big impact on power consumption for a green data center.  PUE is discussed to explain power and cooling overhead for IT. 

What is the power consumed by security infrastructure?  10%, 20%, 50%

How many systems cannot be consolidated because of security issues?

Security issues contribute to the fiefdoms in data centers.

What is the energy consumption of your security decisions in the data center?

I posted about Security's relationship to being Green back in Apr 2008.

Security is The Opposing Force of Green, demonstration - techniques to remove hard drive data

I was a having a brainstorming session with another smart guy, I don't want to name him, because the idea is too controversial.  We were discussing Green Ideas and we stumbled on the issue of Security being un-Green.

Why? Security at its simplest level creates friction in processes to make things more difficult, this takes more energy, effort, and other resources.  The enemies of your Green IT efforts will be your Security group as they will not want to compromise their security policies.

Now I am not arguing for no security.  It is requirement of any system, but how much security creates an environmental cost which is not sustainable?

A day of intense meetings, asking what is the future of data centers & evolutionary economics, a view out of the window

Today was a long day, I was up at 6:15a to catch a bus from Lake Oswego, OR to downtown Portland, then to Portland Airport to meet a cloud computer operations director to introduce him to some ideas that enable adapting to changes if you adopt evolutionary economics ideas.

Evolutionary economics deals with the study of processes that transform economy for firms, institutions, industries, employment, production, trade and growth within, through the actions of diverse agents from experience and interactions, using evolutionary methodology.

The data center is ready for a transformation.  Cloud computing is helping to push things in a direction, but there is much more beyond cloud computing.

The thought experiment we went through is what happens if the data center industry adopts an information sharing methodology as opposed to an information hoarding, accelerating change in the industry, asking tough questions of what problems should a data center be solving.  Being open to discover new ways to look at the problems and ask new questions, driving more innovation.

Here is a bit more explanation of evolutionary economics.

Ideas are articulated in language and thus transported into the social domain. Generic ideas, in particular, can bring about cognitive and behavioral processes, and in this respect they are practical and associated with the notion of ‘productive knowledge’. It is generic ideas that evolve and form causal powers underlying the change. Evolutionary economics is essentially about changes in generic knowledge, and involves transition between actualized generic ideas. Actual phenomena, being manifestations of ideas, are seen as ‘carriers of knowledge’.

Three analytical concepts corresponding to ontological axiomatics are thus:

• (1) carriers of knowledge,
• (2) generic ideas as components of a process, and
• (3) evolutionary-formative causality.

After a long day of intense thinking, I am riding the train back to Seattle.  So glad I didn't drive, so I can get some rest and look at the window, taking some time to reflect.

I'll wait for the cloud computing operations director to write his own blog entry, but that may take a while.  As his head is probably just as tired as mine.

Can China build Green Data Centers?

I am having conversations with an entrepreneur in China who is working on the Green Data Center idea in China.  All the big data center operators have been to China to look for data center sites.  I would expect most cannot find the right site for their data center operations for a variety of reasons.  Building data centers will be difficult with a short term approach if you only want to build one building.  What makes more sense is to take small incremental steps with continuous build out in China and other areas in Asia Pacific.

I've been to Beijing,Shanghai, and Hong Kong over a dozen times when I was working at Microsoft and Apple.  As well as Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore.  I saw many different sides of the country working with hardware suppliers, internal development groups, and software entrepreneurs.

Google's recent pullout of China can be interpreted in many ways and there are some interesting assumptions I can make based on some key people who are coincidentally now working in Google Asia who I used to work with.  These ideas are much too complicated and subtle to try and write in a blog entry.

So, back to the problem of can China build Green Data Centers?  Ideally China would have a few big US companies building data centers in China that Chinese engineers can learn from.  But as far as I know no one has done this, even though a lot of have evaluated sites.  Which makes things difficult, but creates an opportunity.  China doesn't have data center people who have been doing the same thing for the last 20 years who want to build data centers the same way they did in the past.

China can build smaller data centers, using geo-redundancy as part of the design.  Power may not exist, but China is building power generation faster than anyone else.  So, it isn't what power is available.  Tell me what power will be available.  See this Economist article.

Electricity and development in China

Lights and action

China is parlaying its hunger for power into yet more economic clout

Apr 29th 2010 | HONG KONG | From The Economist print edition

AFTER a brief blip caused by the global economic slowdown, the electricity business in China is back to normal: in other words, it is buzzing. On April 26th Huaneng Power, the country’s biggest utility, began work on a nuclear reactor on the island of Hainan. The week before, the firm had announced that its power output had risen by 40% during the first quarter. The day before that, Datang International Power, the second-largest utility, had said its output was up by 33%. Surges of this magnitude, unimaginable in most countries, are commonplace in China.

China’s endless power-plant construction boom has accounted for 80% of the world’s new generating capacity in recent years and will continue to do so for many years to come, says Edwin Chen of Credit Suisse, an investment bank. Capacity added this year alone will exceed the installed total of Brazil, Italy and Britain, and come close to that of Germany and France. By 2012 China should produce more power annually than America, the current leader.

The US gov't hasn't treated the Data Center industry as a strategic industry to provide special treatment.  China will.

Much of the data centers are built and designed to maximize profits for the vendors.  Data Centers are the most profitable construction.  The silos in Real Estate, Facilities, Data Center Ops, IT Ops, Finance, and SW are ripe for over specification for features that have little business value in the holistic view, but look right from a limited perspective.  The top data center people know this which is why they have broken down the silos and integrated the functionality within one manager.  Look to Google's Urs Hoelzle as the epitome of owning the data center stack, including SW infrastructure.

It is a bit of irony if China's data center strategy targeted Urs and his thinking as the customer, asking what he wants in data center infrastructure.  Google wants cheap, reliable, cleaner power.  Multiple Fiber paths.  And, government support for the data center build out.  In the US we hear about the tax incentives, and this is proof the local community wants the data center construction.

An example of the opportunity is to be work with the SinoHydro on a China Data Center strategy.  Here a perspective you'll enjoy reading on China's HydroElectric build out.

China: Not the Rogue Dam Builder We Feared It would Be?

Hydropwer accounts for the overwhelming share of China’s alternative energy mix, but is perhaps also the one of the more controversial alternative energy options due to the ecological and social impacts of dam construction.   This guest post by Peter Bosshard, policy director of International Rivers Network, examines China’s growing pains in its increasing role as an exporter of hydropower technology and expertise.

A few years ago, Chinese dam builders and financiers appeared on the global hydropower market with a bang. China Exim Bank and companies such as Sinohydro started to take on large, destructive projects in countries like Burma and Sudan, which had before been shunned by the international community. Their emergence threatened to roll back progress regarding human rights and the environment which civil society had achieved over many years. However, new evidence suggests that Chinese dam builders and financiers are trying to become good corporate citizens rather than rogue players on the global market. Here is a progress report.

Could you partner with China to build data centers around the world where dams are being built?  The power generation is one part, and Fiber is next.  Government support fits in easily as governments were involved in the Hydro construction.

One of Google's crown jewels are its data center designs.  Is part of the reason why Google pulled out of China are the issues they ran into if they built a data center in China?

Long Now, Long View, Long Lived Data Center, a 10,000 year clock - a 10,000 year data center?

I am currently thinking of rules for the ontology in data center designs.  Translated, I am trying to figure out the principles, components, and relationships for the Open Source Data Center Initiative. 

This is a complex topic to try and explain, but I found an interesting project the Long Now started by a bunch of really smart people, Jeff Bezos, Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Peter Schwartz, and Steward Brand.  Here is a video discussing the idea of a 10,000 year clock.

 

But, what I found interesting was their long term approach and transparency that we will be using in the Open Source Data Center Initiative.  And, now thinking a Long View is part of what we have as principles.

Here are the principles of the Long Now Clock that make a lot of sense to use data center design.

---

These are the principles that Danny Hillis used in the initial stages of designing a 10,000 Year Clock. We have found these are generally good principles for designing anything to last a long time.

Longevity

With occasional maintenance, the clock should reasonably be expected to display the correct time for the next 10,000 years.

Maintainability

The clock should be maintainable with bronze-age technology.

Transparency

It should be possible to determine operational principles of the clock by close inspection.

Evolvability

It should be possible to improve the clock with time.

Scalability

It should be possible to build working models of the clock from table-top to monumental size using the same design.

Some rules that follow from the design principles:

Longevity:

Go slow

Avoid sliding friction (gears)

Avoid ticking

Stay clean

Stay dry

Expect bad weather

Expect earthquakes

Expect non-malicious human interaction

Dont tempt thieves

Maintainability and transparency:

Use familiar materials

Allow inspection

Rehearse motions

Make it easy to build spare parts

Expect restarts

Include the manual

Scalability and Evolvabilty:

Make all parts similar size

Separate functions

Provide simple interfaces

Why think about a 10,000 year clock, because thinking about slowness teaches us things we don't have time when think only of speed.

Hurry Up and Wait

The Slow Issue > Jennifer Leonard on January 5, 2010 at 6:30 am PST

We asked some of the world’s most prominent futurists to explain why slowness might be as important to the future as speed.

Julian Bleecker
Julian Bleecker, a designer, technologist, and co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory, devises “design-to-think experiments” that focus on interactions away from conventional computer settings. “When sitting at a screen and keyboard, everything is tuned to be as fast as possible,” he says. “It’s about diminishing time to nothing.”
So he asks, “Can we make design where time is inescapable and not be brought to zero? Would it be interesting if time were stretched, or had weight?” To test this idea, Bleeker built a Slow Messaging Device, which automatically delayed electronic (as in, e-mail) messages. Especially meaningful messages took an especially long time to arrive.

Read more: http://www.good.is/post/hurry-up-and-wait#ixzz0jmOEcLg4

The biggest unknown problems in data centers are those things that we didn't think were going to happen in the future.  And, this leaves the door open to over-engineering, increasing cost, brittleness of systems, and delays.  Taking a Long View what will the future possibly look like can help you see things you normally wouldn't.

IBM’s Smarter Planet is a mass marketing of System Engineering

I just spent 2 full days at IBM’s Pulse 2010 conference, and got a chance to meet some interesting people.  The one piece of irony I realized is when I graduated from college I had a choice of working for IBM or HP as an Industrial Engineer.  I chose HP 30 years ago.  I wonder what my life would be like if I had chosen IBM? 

Although I probably wouldn’t have lasted too long at IBM and actually helped an IBM engineer leave to join Apple.  Why is it relevant to talk about an engineers?  Because part of what I figured out is IBM’s Smarter Planet is a rebranding and positioning of system engineering.

So what is a Systems Engineer?  I found this post by Univ of Arizona.

Systems Engineering is an interdisciplinary process that ensures that the customer's needs are satisfied throughout a system's entire life cycle. This process is comprised of the following seven tasks.

1. State the problem. Stating the problem is the most important systems engineering task. It entails identifying customers, understanding customer needs, establishing the need for change, discovering requirements and defining system functions.
2. Investigate alternatives. Alternatives are investigated and evaluated based on performance, cost and risk.
3. Model the system. Running models clarifies requirements, reveals bottlenecks and fragmented activities, reduces cost and exposes duplication of efforts.
4. Integrate. Integration means designing interfaces and bringing system elements together so they work as a whole. This requires extensive communication and coordination.
5. Launch the system. Launching the system means running the system and producing outputs -- making the system do what it was intended to do.
6. Assess performance. Performance is assessed using evaluation criteria, technical performance measures and measures -- measurement is the key. If you cannot measure it, you cannot control it. If you cannot control it, you cannot improve it.
7. Re-evaluation. Re-evaluation should be a continual and iterative process with many parallel loops.

The seven steps are too complex for most, and IBM has done an excellent job to simplify the seven steps for the IT executives – Instrument, Interconnect, and Make them intelligent.  Now I would potentially argue IBM’s approach is too simple, but marketing messages need to be simple and contain at most three points.

This idea clicked when I was interviewing District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority CIO, Mujib Lodhi and listened to him describe his approach to manage the Water and Sewer infrastructure as a system using IBM’s asset management tools.  In the short term I had with Mujib he described what a system engineer would do to manage an aging water infrastructure.

IBM has an excellent section on smarter water management.  Which is good if you are a Tivoli user.  If not, there are many other vendors that have been in the water management business for decades.

In other conversations with IBM technical staff, I  kept on hearing the reoccurring methods of system engineers.

Here are slides from presentations.

Alcatel Lucent threw this slide up.

The system needs to be designed to be lean, mean, and green.

Air Force and IBM partner to prove Cloud Computing works for Defense and Intelligence services

One of the top concerns about Cloud Computing is security of the data in the cloud.  IBM has a press announcement on the partnership here.

U.S. Air Force Selects IBM to Design and Demonstrate Mission-Oriented Cloud Architecture for Cyber Security

Cloud model will introduce advanced cyber security and analytics technologies capable of protecting sensitive national data

ARMONK, N.Y. - 04 Feb 2010: The U.S. Air Force has awarded IBM (NYSE:IBM) a contract to design and demonstrate a secure cloud computing infrastructure capable of supporting defense and intelligence networks. The ten-month project will introduce advanced cyber security and analytics technologies developed by IBM Research into the cloud architecture.

There are press articles too.

CNet News

Air Force taps IBM for secure cloud

by Lance Whitney

IBM has a tall order from the U.S. Air Force--create a cloud network that can protect national defense and military data.

Big Blue announced Thursday a contract from the Air Force to design and demonstrate a cloud computing environment for the USAF's network of nine command centers, 100 military bases, and 700,000 personnel around the world.

The challenge for IBM will be to develop a cloud that can not only support such a massive network, but also meet the strict security standards of the Air Force and the U.S. government. The project will call on the company to use advanced cybersecurity technologies that have been developed at IBM Research.

and Government Computer News.

What I find interesting is how few authors reference the IBM press release.  The goal of the project is a technical demonstration.

"Our goal is to demonstrate how cloud computing can be a tool to enable our Air Force to manage, monitor and secure the information flowing through our network," said Lieutenant General William Lord, Chief Information Officer and Chief, Warfighting Integration, for the U.S. Air Force. "We examined the expertise of IBM's commercial performance in cloud computing and asked them to develop an architecture that could lead to improved performance within the Air Force environment to improve all operational, analytical and security capabilities."

Which is cut and pasted into the CNet news article as well.

On the other hand, there are some good insights by Larry Dignan on his ZDnet blog.

What’s in it for IBM? Cloud computing has a lot of interest, but security remains a worry for many IT buyers. If Big Blue can demonstrate cloud-based cyber security technologies that’s good enough for the military it would allay a lot of those worries.

The advanced cyber security and analytics technologies that will be used in the Air Force project were developed by IBM Research (statement).

According to IBM the project will show a cloud computing architecture that can support large networks and meet the government’s security guidelines. The Air Force network almost 100 bases and 700,000 active military personnel.

and Larry continues on the key concepts of what will be shown.  Models!!! yea!

The model will include autonomic computing;

Dashboards will monitor the health of the network second-by-second;

If Air Force personnel doesn’t shift to a “prevention environment” in a cyber attack the cloud will have automated services to lock the network down.