AFCOM Northern California Chapter Meeting: Featuring Chill Off 2 and Data Center Pulse

Santa Clara, CA – October 16, 2008 – AFCOM Northern California Chapter held another successful meeting on September 24, 2008. The event was hosted by Sun Microsystems in Santa Clara, CA. The meeting introduced the Data Center Pulse community – an exclusive group of global datacenter owners, operators and users. It also provided an opportunity for chapter members to contribute and influence what should be tested for the Chill Off 2 Research event scheduled for mid 2009.

Dean Nelson, Vice President of the AFCOM Northern California Chapter and GDS Senior Director for Sun Microsystems, led the meeting presentations and discussions. He started the chapter meeting with a quick summary of the Data Center Energy Summit first Chill Off that was conducted earlier this year. Afterwards he had an open roundtable discussion that featured participants from the first Chill Off event and Data Center Operators.

The expert panelists included:
- Mike Ryan, GDS Senior Staff Engineer from Sun Microsystems
- Olivier Sanche, Senior Director Data Center Operations for eBay
- Phil Hughes, CEO of Clustered Systems
- Bill Tschudi, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LBNL)

It was a lively discussion between the audience and the panelists on changes to consider for the next Chill Off 2 Research. (The audience included Consultants, Data Center Owners/Operators, Engineers, and Vendors.)

The discussions resulted in the outcome below:

1. Possibly have a mixture of hardware/vendors (blades, 1U, 2U, etc) in the test rather than all one form factor (sun x4100) - or do both? 
2. 2N testing down to N to compare efficiency losses.
3. Fault insertion that shows both equipment failures and humans faults such as opening the door of a container for maintenance, leaving a hole in an APC HACS, etc. Also, simulate moves adds and changes and their affect on the test environment.
4. Mix the work load in the test, not serial tests. So HPC, Web and enterprise all in one test as the mixed workload.
5. Add results from a tuned/contained raised floor/crac based DataCenter to the chart. Show the real differences, not just theoretical, against all the solutions.  Current chart shows a traditional open raised floor/crac installation.
6. Standard communication protocol for data collection? How easily and effectively do these solutions tie into a BMS?
7. Compare main PDU, in-rack PDU wireless sensors, environmental monitors and server sensor efficiency. Include mixture of vendors that can meter down to the plug level and see how accurate they are compared to the internal server readings.  Take temp and humidity readings across the equipment and the cooling devices to see how accurate they are.
8. A fully isolated environment so there are no questions about other in-room conditions affecting the tests. Also have the ability to watch the affect of raised water temps and raised inlet temp, on each solution.
9. TCO of each solution? This would be difficult, but would be very interesting data.
10. Remove all the server fans in the container and compare that to the regularly loaded test. In other words only use the containers in-line cooling fans to move air rather than the servers.
11. Do a full 3D CFD model of the solutions and compare that to what is actually seen.  Future Facilities.

After the lunch break and networking, the second half of the meeting featured the Data Center Pulse Roundtable.  The panelist included Data Center Owners from Cisco, Apple, VMware, eBay, Stanford and the CEO of IDS, a startup firm that provides data center co-lo space on container ships. The discussion focused on topics and questions that were asked from the Data Center Pulse Linked In Group and additional questions from the debate. For more information about the specific questions and responses, please go the Data Center Pulse Blog.

There were over 80 professionals involved with IT, Facilities, Data Centers that attended the second chapter meeting. Attendees had the opportunity to participate in an open discussion forum and gain insight from industry experts and peers. The information gathered at the chapter meeting helped to formalize the strategy and goals for the second Chill Off 2 forum to be held in mid-2009.

Contact:
Maricel Cerruti, AFCOM Northern California Chapter
mcerruti@afcomnorcal.org
(510) 979-4251