Los números de 2012: 68+1 posts

 

Este blog tuvo 4.000 visitas en 2012. En 2012 hubo 68 artículos nuevos, a los que si sumamos este serán 69 … comprenderéis que no me pudiera resistir ;-)

Las visitas vinieron de un total de 62 países (en esto va a ser difícil  conseguir 7 países más en tan solo un día).

Esto ha sido solo un extracto, si alguien tuviera interés en el informe completo que haga click aquí.

NOTA: El informe ha sido preparado automáticamente por “Los duendes de las estadísticas de WordPress.com” (pero sirven para este blog, pues ya sabéis qeu son duplicados) sobre el año 2012 de este blog.

Energetic Efficiency in Data Centers and Walhalla

As I mentioned in my previous post, in this Christmas period, when besides I’m just in the middle between of having presented a proposal (the last December th 4^th) to EU FP7-SMARTCITIES-2013 (titled: SMART DC FED “A SmartGrid & DCIM based Approach for a Sustainable DC Federation” addressed to “Objective ICT-2013.6.2 Data Centres in an energy-efficient and environmentally friendly Internet”) and the preparation of a new one whose deadline is January the 15^th, I am not in the mood at all for stealing more time to my family than the just necessary. However, I been mentioned in a new published by “Computer World”. Just mentioned, no more, but for ordinary people as I am that fact is not usual, so I’m proud of it. That new is about an event where I was invited to speech. The meeting (titled “Innovación Abierta en Eficiencia Energética”, i.e. Open Innovation in Energy Efficiency) was organized by enerTIC (an Spanish association for fostering energy efficiency in IT) and the CDTI (the Spanish Public Entity entitled for fostering and funding RD activities). I was asked for speaking about TISSAT’s R&D projects for improving energy efficiency of our “DataCentres Federation”, (Note: a “Federation” is a set of trusted and high speed linked DC, usually owned by the same entity”).

In my speech I outlined our motivation and the different projects we are carrying out (or just finished) ant that they are driven by and converged in the construction of Walhalla, a DC certified as Tier I by The Uptime Institute and that it operates as PUE=1,15 thanks to the combination of multiples techniques, methods, processes and technologies:

• Auto-generation.
• Tri-generation energy production by gas engines in the first phase (and by fuel cell in the second phase).
• Free-cooling.
• Heat confinement.
• Residual and unused energy reuse
• Overhead Distribution of power, data and climate.
• Integration between ITC management systems and energy infrastructure DCIM).
• Designed for Cloud Computing Services

And where new efficiency metrics are been measured

• Of course, PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness)
• WUE (Water Usage Effectiveness)
• CUE (Carbon Usage Effectiveness)
• GEC (Green Energy Coefficient)
• ERF (Energy Reuse Factor)
• Other from the points of view of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emission

Coming back to our R&D related projects that let to the Walhalla improvements, they range:

• From bare innovation processes projects either:
  • Improving energetic efficiency processes: ISO 50.001, EU Code of Conduct for Data Centers , ISO 14.001, and a pilot project with AENOR (Marca CEE CPD), etc.
  • Or improving operational efficiency: ISO 20.000, ISO 27.0001, ITIL best practices, etc.)

To research and development projects:

• Directly addressing energetic efficiency of our DC:”Green DC” and “CDPVerde”,
• Or addressing its operating efficiency: “Predicitve I2TM”, “DCIM”, etc.
• Or the ones that look for both to improve energetic efficiency and to offer new advanced services: “RealCloud”,“CloudSpaces”, “StackSync”.

A complete relation of our R&D project could be found in http://www.tissat.es/en/rdi/projects:

Since copying is easy and comfortable, the remaining of this post (the one related with other speech in the event) is extracted from the new published in “Computer World”, but I’m sorry since because it is in Spanish:

El Encuentro reunió tanto a proveedores de referencia, organismo públicos, universidad y centros de innovación como a usuarios corporativos con el objetivo de ser punto de encuentro y detectar posibles intereses comunes para desarrollar proyectos en colaboración. Como asistentes participaron expertos de compañías innovadoras como Grupo Santander, Correos, Endesa, Telefónica, BBVA, Renfe, Ferrovial y Ono, entre otras muchas.

El evento lo inauguró con su intervención, D. Javier García Serrano, jefe del Departamento de Energía, Química, Medio Ambiente, Producción y Servicios del CDTI (Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial), se refirió al compromiso de su entidad con “los proyectos de I+D, individuales o en consorcio, como instrumento fundamental para fomentar la competitividad de las empresas, así como a las nuevas empresas de base tecnológica a través del programa NEOTEC y de la iniciativa público-privada INVIERTE ECONOMÍA SOSTENIBLE, puesta en marcha recientemente”. Sobre la eficiencia energética en concreto, destacó la relevancia del futuro programa Horizonte 2020 de la UE, que “contempla un presupuesto provisional de alrededor de 14.000 millones de euros para los retos sociales de energía segura, limpia y eficiente, y transporte inteligente, limpio e integrado”. Finalizó su intervención recordando que aún permanecen abiertas varias convocatorias relacionadas con la eficiencia energética, con un presupuesto de 26 millones de euros para la aplicación de las TIC a la movilidad cooperativa y 18 millones para Smart Grids. Asimismo, destacó la alta participación española en la convocatoria SMARTCITIES, cerrada recientemente.

A continuación, D. Borja Izquierdo, representante del CDTI en el Comité de Programa de Energía del Departamento del Programa Marco, se refirió al European Innovation Partnership (EIP) sobre Smart Cities & Communities, que contribuirá al despliegue de soluciones innovadoras conjuntas en las áreas de TIC, transporte y energía para aumentar la eficiencia energética.

La sesión plenaria finalizó con las intervenciones de D. Gabriel Cuervo, Innovation Project Manager en Ferrovial, y de D. Carlos Cebrián, Director de I+D+i en Tissat (un servidor). Ambos detallaron el compromiso de sus compañías con la eficiencia energética y la sostenibilidad en sus distintos ámbitos de actuación, así como su modelo de innovación abierta a la colaboración con organismos públicos, la industria y las universidades.

Tras al sesión plenaria se sucedieron unas Mesas de trabajo, que tenían por objetivo fomentar la colaboración entre los asistentes en los distintos ámbitos de aplicación de las TIC en la eficiencia energética, como edificios inteligentes, centros de datos, infraestructuras TI, colaboración, utilities, eGovernment, cloud computing, vehículo eléctrico, movilidad y ciudades inteligentes. Cada mesa contó con la participación de un representante del CDTI para ayudar a resolver las dudas surgidas durante los debates y dar apoyo al moderador de enerTIC.

Durante la jornada, enerTIC presentó una guía para la mejora de la eficiencia energética, que ofrece las principales tendencias y soluciones en la aplicación de las TIC para la eficiencia energética desde la perspectiva de expertos de la Administración española y europea, consultoras, analistas, representantes de la industria y usuarios corporativos. Incluye además referencias a los 100 principales proveedores de este tipo de soluciones TIC: uno de los cuales, por supuesto, es TISSAT.

A funny video about OpenStack geeks

In these previous Christmas days I’m not in the mood for writing a serious post, but I remember that perhaps TODAY is my (our) LAST opportunity to do it. So, let me say that we’re using OpenStack not only for making business but also for R&D projects as “RealCloud” and “CloudSpaces” that are partially funded by the European Union Commission’s Programme. So I’m a fan of OpenStack and that’s the reason of this funny new video about OpenStack geeks that I’ve just copied from http://www.dopenstack.com/:

 

Who says geeks cannot dance? And sing, for that matter? They can. The enthusiasm post-the OpenStack Summit led to this rocking video “Cloud Anthem.” An excerpt from the lyrics goes like this:

We’re gonna turn it up, we’re gonna rock your cloud
This is the open future that we’re talking ’bout
So baby listen close, you gonna feel this track
Cause you know you gotta get this OpenStack

 

 

 

By the way I wish you MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR in this NOT-ENDED world.

Cloud SLAs: a review of current contracts

Last week I spoke about Cloud SLAs (Service Level Agreements) from a technical point of view, and to back my opinion I cited Gartner’s analyst Lydia Leong’s post that states that Amazon Web Services (which Gartner recently named a market-leader in infrastructure as a service cloud computing, and I think everybody agrees) has the dubious status of “worst SLA of any major cloud provider” and that HP’s newly available public cloud service could be even worse. Let me remind that the main reason (but not the only one) for this statement is the strict requirements of service architecture forced by Amazon and HP. As stated, this isn’t the only reason: besides SLAs are also unnecessarily complex and limited in scope.

Moreover in an amazing post titled “SLA feather allows you to fly in the cloud” another Gartner analyst, Jay Heiserm, uses the Disney’s cartoon Dumbo analogy, and he remind us that AN SLA IS NO MORE THAN AN EXPRESSION OF INTENT; IT IS NOT EVIDENCE OF DELIVERABILITY; in fact, an SLA from a public cloud service promising some sort of recoverability can be a crow feather, clutched in the trunk of the enterprise elephant, providing them the false courage to be willing to fly in the public cloud.
 

Another Jay Heiserm’s post (“Bulletproof Contracts“) summarizes some contractual terms provided by a SaaS prominent vendor and that I copy below (including funny Jay’s comments):

• We believe that we obey the law. If there are any questions pertaining to how your data is handled within our system, it is YOUR problem.
• We won’t give your data to the police. Unless we do give it to the police.
• When this contract is over, you may have the ability to get your data back, but that is YOUR problem, not ours.
• If one of your customers contacts us, we won’t give them anything. Unless we are forced to give them something.
• We will store the data in whatever country we want.
• We might have third parties help us with this, and they of course would be held to the same weak levels of standard as we contractually obligate ourselves to follow.
• You the customer are obligated to obey the law at all times, even if you have no idea what that may entail. (Guess what happens if there is a dispute with us and our lawyers can find some way to demonstrate that you didn’t completely follow the law.)
• We will follow appropriate security measures—as understood by us.
• We will back up your data at least once a week, we will review our procedures periodically, although this seems unnecessary, given that none of these procedures were knowingly designed to fail. If we have the slightest plan for testing our ability to recover, we are not sharing it with you and we hope that you won’t ask that question.
• If any of our support personal ever accesses your data, by definition, it is necessary access.

Finally, copying again but now from NetworkWorld, I analyze the contracts usually signed about SLA cloud, the terms they include, what is its impact, and how often they are present in the current cloud contracts.

All these point are summarized in the next table (please note that I only have copied the NetworkWorld’s data in a table, so for a more accurate a big explanation you should read the NetworldWorld post):

 

Note: Encryption related clauses are not present because in my opinion currently they are either a new service itself, or a differentiating service feature.

Cloud SLAs: a technical point of view

Initially, when I started the first version of these comments, I was decided to speak about Cloud SLAs (Service Level Agreements), because I reminded the contribution of some friends of mine in the last ISACA conference I assisted about its importance (and in spite of that it was lightly treated in the conference discussions because of other subjects capitalize the attention) and ‘cause in my point of view they’re almost nil in the current Cloud contract, as a recent Gartner’s study states. In fact, it is a subject I faced in previous posts: some in English (“Real” Cloud Computing Services vs. “Fake” Cloud Computing Services), and some in Spanish (El Cloud Computing y la ISO-20.000 e ITIL: conteniendo el sobre-aprovisionamiento – Capacity Management).

But, I don’t know how, a few lines after I was speaking about Cloud risks in general, and a few lines further, I was thinking of security concerns, but trying to don’t speak again only about privacy and regulations compliance (as in many discussion everybody only thinks), but also about data lost, data integrity, and so on, remember what CIA means for security: Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability, where everybody adds a second A for authenticity, in both senses, to avoid repudiation and to grant information access only to the correct persons. Then I reminded myself that although without doubts security is the most important Cloud risk, but not the only one and it is even losing relative importance against others; in fact, as the time goes by, new risks are becoming more important for the CSOs (Chief Security Officers) of big companies (75% of them “are confident in security of their data currently stored in the cloud”, according to a recent VmWare report) that are already using Cloud Services: portability, vendor lock-in, standardization, learning curve, and so on (see my Spanish post  ¿”Nubarrones” en la Nube? whose title means something like “Dark clouds over the Cloud?”), and we must not forget SLA incompliance, that was the idea I was trying to write about.
 

And then, when I came back to the initial point, I decided to throw all the written so far in the trash (and the time spent), and to focus only in this subject and trying to not wide (I’ll treat the other subjects in next posts) because otherwise this is going to become confuse and difficult to understand, and to use the information that more clever minds have written. So, here I go:

According to Gartner’s analyst Lydia Leong, Amazon Web Services (which Gartner recently named a market-leader in infrastructure as a service cloud computing, and I think everybody agrees) has the dubious status of “worst SLA of any major cloud provider”.

However, HP’s newly available public cloud service could be even worse. By the way, HP launched the general availability of its HP Compute Cloud on Wednesday, December the 5th  (HP Cloud Compute is a pay-as-you-go Cloud IaaS service that the company first announced earlier this year as a beta program and now is generally available) and it’s based on OpenStack (my favorite open Cloud Platform, I’ll promise to show my reasons about in a future post and compare it against other open platform).
 

Despite of AWS has voluntarily refunded customers impacted by major downtime events even when the SLA did not require it (AWS has experienced three major outages in the past two years), as I underlined it has been voluntary decision, not a consequence of signed SLA. In fact, Ms. Leong recommends investigating cyber risk insurance, which will protect cloud-based assets, because of the SLA requirements basically render the agreements useless. “Customers should expect that the likelihood of a meaningful giveback is basically nil”, she sayd. The main reason for this statement is the strict requirements of service architecture forced by Amazon and HP:

• Both AWS and HP impose strict guidelines in how users must architect their cloud systems for the SLAs to apply in the case of service disruptions, leading to increased costs for users.
• AWS’s, for example, requires customers to have their applications run across at least two availability zones (AZ), which are physically separate data centers that host the company’s cloud services. Both AZs must be unavailable for the SLA to kick in. Of course, that does imply bigger costs.
• HP’s SLA, only applies if customers cannot access any AZs. That means customers have to potentially architect their applications to span three or more AZs, each one imposing additional costs on the business.

However, this isn’t the only reason, others aspects of the SLAs contribute to void its effectiveness as a user’s control and defense: besides SLAs are also unnecessarily complex (“word salads”) and limited in scope. For example, both AWS and HP SLAs cover virtual machine instances, not block storage services, which are popular features used by enterprise customers. AWS’s most recent outage impacted its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service specifically, which is not covered by the SLA: “If the storage isn’t available, it doesn’t matter if the virtual machine is happily up and running — it can’t do anything useful”.

Next post I’ll come back on this subject and I analyze the contracts usually signed about SLA cloud, the terms they include, what is its impact, and how often they are present in the contracts.

SofCloudIt relies on Tissat as his partner of infrastructure services

Let me be proud of copying this new:

 

SofCloudIt has relied on Tissat, company specialized in integral outsourcing of mission-critical services, to consolidate its position in Latin America. SofCloudIt has more than 10 years of experience in online services, providing a platform for distribution and marketing of products and services in Cloud model. “SBC, Soft Business Cloud”, will now be hosted in Tissat’s Walhalla DataCenter due to the agreement reached by both companies. Thus, the two companies become partners to expand their business and meet new opportunities presented by the international market with a global offer in terms of infrastructure and services.

This way, Tissat becomes SofCloudIT’s infrastructure partner and offers maximum security and availability housing in its DataCenter, Walhalla, a Tier IV certified by the Uptime Institute, along with its many services associated with this eco-efficient infrastructure generation. Both companies expand their portfolio of services being able to offer their customers a comprehensive range of service, solutions and infrastructure.
 

“This partnership promotes the international expansion that a company like SofCloudIt pursues because right now our Datacenter is a unique reference at the European level; we have the maximum security certification, Tier IV, guaranteed by the Uptime Institute and it is commercially available. Furthermore, Tissat Datacenter is the only eco-efficient one because it has 30% less emissions than a conventional center and saves 40% of energy” said Manuel Escuin, General Manager of Tissat.
 

Meanwhile, Jesus Angel Bravo, Managing Partner of SofCloudIt, adds “SofCloudIt presents itself as a company “Enabling Cloud Broker Solutions” for that Telcos, ISPs and VARs which can offer Cloud services to SMB. We needed a partner with the maximum level of service and we have found this in Tissat. With them we can engage our expansion in Europe (EMEA) and Latin America with warranties. The customers of our SBC Platform, that we have developed with our technology partner Parallels and his Parallels Automation solution, are companies like Telcos, ISPs and Integrators, all of them requiring a high level of SLA that we can now guarantee thanks to our partnership with Tissat and his Tier IV Datacenter infrastructure. Together we can be the perfect partner for these companies, so they incorporate our cloud business model oriented to “SMBs” market (small and medium enterprises).