What Kind Of Power do you have?

I am writing this in the evening of a day that hit 94, with humidity to match. I live in a 150 year old house that cannot be kept controlled to modern standards. In fact, we have no heating or cooling on the second floor, where the bedrooms are. Ahh, life in the double 90’s

I ran no Air Conditioning today, or even yet this year. Even so, I arrived home to a house that was 20 degrees cooler than the outside, which had already cooled off since the afternoon. I manage temperature the old fashioned way, as befits the house. I run a fan in the attic, where hottest air builds up, to reduce the heat load on the house. I open windows at night after the heat breaks, and close them, and the curtains, before I go to work. After driving home though traffic, the interior of the house felt plenty cool at 71 degrees.

This means I am using energy storage. I do not have to wait for new fangled hydrogen batteries to come along. I am managing energy without fancy photovoltaics. My house has almost no footprint on the grid during peak hours in the afternoon.

What do I get for this? I do not get any price advantages, except those from not using power at all. I am not using the grid overnight to over-chill the house, taking advantage of cheaper pricing that I do not get.

What I get for this is 12:00 flashing on every device in the house. What I get is the right to re-program all modern electronic systems in the house tonight. What I get is the certain knowledge that that my daughter’s laptop, left on but sleeping during the day was probably damaged. What I get is the knowledge that the television probably has a shorter life.

Why do I have to put up with this? I live halfway between a major research university and a huge nuclear power plant. My house is about 150 yards from a 4 lane highway. Many people have worse power than I. The power company tells each of us that we have good power.

I want to have power that is defined by the quality of the power arriving at my house, not by the percentage of minutes that an incandescent bulb would actually turn on. I want power that will not lead to an early failure of the systems in the house. I want something that protects me from the quality of the power that is actually provided me.

I want to be able to automate the procedures I follow to reduce my demand. I want a house that understands hot days and saves me a half hour as I leave in the morning by making the adjustments for me. I want to be able to store more kinds of energy, so I do not have to reprogram everything in the house when the power company fails me. Again. I want to see how much money I saved when I come home at night.

They say the first thing you must do to recover, is acknowledge you have a problem. Well, my name is Toby, and I have bad power. My friends at CP&L tell me I have good power, but I am beginning to suspect that they do not have my best interests at heart.

I admit I have no control over my power. I need help.

How is a Control System like a Database?

"Every Web 2.0 company is ultimately a database company."  Tim O'Reilly

Embedded systems should expose web service interfaces. That web service should be secure or not. That web service should be on a private network or not.

The first generation enterprise interfaces to embedded systems are about cleaning up messes. We got rid of the protocol gunk by moving things to TCP/IP. TCP/IP allows normal routers to pass traffic to and from embedded systems. TCP/IP enables generic service monitors to watch the traffic going to and from an embedded system. We have normalized the lower level functions of the network. That step got us ready for first generation web services.

The first generation web services for embedded systems are about Plain Old XML (POX). First generation web services for Enterprise systems are also about POX. Although we have standardized the serialization strategies, and moved towar4d stateless connections, we are still using the old API (Application Programming Interface) model, requiring the enterprise programmer to have a deep knowledge of the underlying system and its processes.

Even though first generation web services now use an asynchronous protocol (TCP/IP), they are still used to make what are essentially synchronous calls to remote state engines. Do this now. Write information to this register now. Do exactly what I say, when I say it.

First generation web services are characterized by the REST (Representational State Transfer) style of development. REST development uses the 4 verbs of HTTP (POST, GET, PUT and DELETE) to do all programming. Today most enterprise interactions have not grown up into true service oriented architectures (SOA), but are instead procedure-oriented programs connected by URIs. They do no support concurrency, they do not support long-running process. They assume that all calls originated inside the firewall, if not inside the data center, and they therefore use only the simplest concepts of security.

To grow up, web services will have to move beyond simple CRUD (CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE) and into more abstract interactions. But how is a database anything beyond CRUD? Well modern enterprise databases defend their data. They will not let you add records that violate referential integrity. Some records cannot be deleted by certain people. Other records automatically create detailed change logs whenever they are updated. The database is charged with the mission of maintaining referential integrity, and your CRUD is subordinate to that.

I worked a couple years ago with a web programmer who used the latest development tools to work with back-end databases. He would query the tables he wanted from the database first thing in the morning, and manage all changes using his in-memory datasets throughout the day. He felt pretty good that he was using databases at last. But of course, he wasn’t. He had concurrency problem. He had referential integrity problems. He was not using the database, merely writing to it.

If every Web 2.0 Company is ultimately a database company, does it follow that every Web Service 2.0 is ultimately a database interaction? Does it mean that the processes that generate the database, and that the database controls, should be unreachable except through the database? That database should be responsible for all sorts of data, and process integrity issues, just as a mature database is responsible for authorization and auditing functions.

The Green Grid

No, it’s not the Power Grid. It is the data center, and grid computing. It’s multi-processor computers running virtual machines. As one guy said to me, “Before we had a bunch of freshly delivered pizza boxes. Now we have flamethrowers in the rack”

These systems have extraordinary power requirements. These systems have extraordinary air conditioning requirements. These systems have extraordinarily bad failure modes if they overheat or lose power.

These systems are no longer managed as computers. Sure the data center uses DMTF (Desktop Management Task Force) information to track and manage them as assets.

What these systems are managed for is business services. How fast is that transaction running? Should I move the virtual computer to another system? Should I launch another virtual computer to run in parallel. Is it OK to delay processing HR to meet my QOS targets for the delivery of sales transactions?

Sales transactions are quick. What if my transactions are long running? What if the cost of losing this application is mid process is very high, and the process runs for hours? What would I do differently if I want this process to complete as quickly as possible yet the cost of failure during any single transaction is small?

These questions come down to energy. A computer working twice as hard can use much more energy than one that is not. A computer with multiple virtual machines running generates a lot of heat. Energy systems can be pushed to the brink and more by grid data centers.

If a computer has redundant power supplies, I have some choices. I can run it flat out, using all the power available from each power source and lose redundancy. I can run it half loaded and suffer failure of one power supply without noticing. Load becomes a proxy for reliability.

Of course, nothing is more efficient at converting electricity to heat than a computer. This means each of these decisions effect heat load in the building, and there by air conditioning. It take more energy to remove heat from a system than to put it in. Because air conditioning equipment can accept dirtier power than the computer can, there may be another decision about power reliability made there. Conversely, a failure of cooling systems may require shedding business services to reduce heat generation

Time of day billing, brown outs, and even black-outs require that the mix expand to include generators, batteries, and perhaps even fuel cells. If that is not enough, you can include considerations of AC vs. DC power.

These are the problems that The Green Grid is wrestling with. They wish to extend the data center’s management paradigm to include the facilities services that support the data center.

I got to sit in on one of their meetings this afternoon. Eaton was trying to formulate their technology and interface to support this vision. Aaron Merkin from IBM, well versed in DMTF, was explaining the data center side of things. I was there to talk of oBIX. Aaron is one of those guys whose knowledge of standards is deep and wide. It was a fascinating afternoon.

I wish the Green Grid the best of luck and a quick journey. I hope we can find some way for oBIX to use their surfaces to define the standard contracts for Power Systems. I know I could use their work.

Check out www.TheGreenGrid.org.

IT starts to think about Facilities

I had the pleasure of beginning a correspondence with Ken Uhlman through this blog, and of meeting Ken tonight. Ken is with Eaton (Power) in their Data Center group. Eaton is part of a group I had not been tracking before, The Green Grid™.

The Green Grid is a consortium seeking to lower the overall consumption of power in data centers. The organization is chartered to develop meaningful, platform-neutral standards, measurement methods, processes and new technologies to improve energy efficient performance of global data centers.

Readers know that I reach for phrases that get the message quickly, or in a different light when I can. (I alternate with long-winded opaque discussions to keep you on your toes.) Ken had two such phrases he was willing to share.

“Everything in the enterprise today is on the IT network, EXCEPT for Facilities, and when facilities goes down, that’s a problem.”

I have had conversations similar to this many times at UNC. Our remote stations lose connectivity if they rely exclusively on the central data center, especially after a few day outage, as happens during a Carolina Ice Storm, or after a Hurricane, or…I’d say pretty reliable every three years. When it does, the people who are impacted are the folks that Data Center is waiting on to re-create the utilities to get the network up. (That doesn’t matter, during emergencies, non-essential employees are to stay at home)

Ken relates the other question he likes to ask CIOs.

“Tell me about your data center automation strategy, and they espouse all their storage, network, and compute activities with HP, IBM, CISCO…,” and then I ask them, “tell me about your facility automation strategy that supports your IT automation strategy.”

Ken relates that this results in a deer in the headlight stare…I can tell Ken lives in the city. Out where I live, the deer in the headlights usually leap into your car.

Power, Power Quality, Power Back-Up, Power Management, Power QOS, and, dare I say it, 3^rd party Power Auditing loom large in thinking about facilities in the years ahead.

Tomorrow, I will meet more of the members of The Green Grid. I will report back later.