Guest blog written by JB Lemmen, ISS Technology Strategy Manager
Under Siege
Recently while opening my garage door, I came to the conclusion that my garage is officially under siege by “clutter critters”. The mess has taken on a life of its own and as a result my there’s no longer room for my car. All available space has been consumed by motorcycles, bicycles, lawn equipment and patio furniture, holiday decorations, must-have tools, and other items that have become part of the history of my life. The small selection of frequently used items are each secreted away in different places, comfortably hidden in piles of items that have not been used in years. Of course, this now makes looking for an item of “momentary importance” a somewhat punishing scavenger hunt.
While reflecting on the mess in my garage, my thoughts have segued to HP’s Moonshot Project and the goals for this initiative—to provide businesses with the means to radically reduce space, energy consumption and cost of data center infrastructures. Like many businesses, I personally need to minimize items that have been “getting in the way” so I can achieve better efficiencies; in my case, a garage that actually shelters cars instead of “stuff”. This is significant change that can enable a positive impact for many of us.
A State of Change
Thinking about significant change brings to mind several of my favorite authors and their viewpoints on the process and impact of change, namely:
Business are confronted with the same conundrum—how to facilitate change in a proactive manner. Enterprise businesses trying to reach large numbers of consumer clients will be faced with a formidable challenge in the coming years. How to effectively evaluate and sort the massive piles of data cluttering the enterprise and massage it into meaningful data in a timely fashion becomes a primary goal. Meeting and overcoming this challenge will be critical to both business success and influencing cultures, communities, and cooperation around the world.
Trends on a Collision Course – Digital Connectedness: Part 1
The challenge is the result of two significant trends on a collision course. The first trend is the need for scale out enterprise infrastructure owners to grant significantly more connections profitably.
As Internet users have discovered, the Internet provides desirable access to information, connections, and resources. Increasingly, users are also becoming contributors, translating community impact into global impact.
The market for offering digital connectivity has become one of the great marketplaces of the world. But the foundational elements of this offering, the scale out data center, has been built on models, designs, architectures, and assumptions designed for rather different purposes. For the most part, gone are the days of a single server handling a single workload. Even so, few advances have been made to “clean out the garage”, so to speak.
Intensely robust processors still rule the day for most scale out environments. Servers remain locked inside system architectures designed for everyday, heterogeneous applications. Some aspects of server management have been scaled to groups of servers, but there remains a significant amount of individualized attention required to keep every server in the data center healthy and effective. I suspect there is needless excess of bits and pieces which contribute more to energy consumption, thermal production, and the need for management attention than they do to efficient compute outputs.
So scale out computing, especially for web serving, has been left with heavily burdened systems made of technology bits voracious for power, producing more heat than can be removed, and requiring more systems management attention than a playground of preschoolers eating high sugar candy.
It is no surprise that web serving firms have both begged and threatened system architects to develop, design, and produce systems built to accommodate the task of offering digital connectedness to the vast numbers of users flocking to “get online”.
Trends on a Collision Course – Digital Connectedness: Part 2
The second trend is the global demand for digital connectedness.
Let’s start with the significant paradigm shift on how humans connect with each other; digital communications rapidly displacing all other means of communications. Sometimes this digital interaction replaces more traditional methods of communication such as letters and land line telephone calls. Often it’s a replacement for submitting and consuming news of world events. It seems that everyone is becoming an amateur journalist (I’m self reflecting, at the moment) and newspapers are more easily accessed in more locations digitally than in hard copy.
The Numbers
To understand the size and impact of this trend and put this growing global connectedness into perspective, we’ll start with the approximately 7 billion humans the U. S. Census Bureau estimates live on planet Earth.
For those 7 billion individuals, The International Telecommunications Union estimates that there are 5.3B mobile phone subscriptions in the world, accounting for more than three quarters of the world’s population. Although the analysis shows most developed nations average slightly more than one mobile phone subscription per person, access to mobile phones is becoming more common than not. The ITU also estimates 90% of humans live in a place with access to a mobile network. Source: Global market statistics 2011.
Can we reasonably see mobile phones as a harbinger of total digital connectedness for the world?
According to internetworldstats.com, there are nearly 2 billion internet users in the world.
Additionally, IDC reported in 2009 that 530 million individuals accessed the internet via mobile device and that more than 1 billion would be doing so by 2013.
Finally, according to geekazine.com, more data was transmitted over the Internet in 2010 than all previous years combined.
According to empirical, logical, theoretical, and intuitive analyses, individual standard of living and social freedom are positively impacted by digital connectedness. But the barriers of offering digital connectedness are deeply rooted in the capacity of the connected to provide a funding basis for the necessary infrastructure, whether through direct fees or reasonably focused advertising based in the expected spending of the consumer. Therein lies a global tension: how does one achieve the benefits of digital connectedness for economic advantage without first achieving a threshold of economic capability? Nonetheless, demand for digital connectedness is anticipated to rise significantly.
However the costs for this digital connectedness, using current technology models, will likely be more than the budgets of many of those demanding it. From the graphic below, we see that the next large group of individuals to demand digital connectedness will have much lower capacity to fund that connectedness than what the wealthy have come to consider normal. This demand will necessitate a completely new model of the scale out enterprise offering digital connectivity at significantly less cost to each user.
The Case for Change
So the two trends in digital connectedness - the need to offer more connections profitably and the demand to access the Internet at dramatically lower total costs - are reaching the point of collision. One or the other is going to get the worst of the damage, while the scale out enterprise data center owner will get crushed in the middle.
Any enterprise seeking to serve the exploding demand of less financially capable users will be facing the triple crises of infrastructure costs, energy costs, and management costs. These crises won’t be met by the types of incremental adaptations on a theme we’ve seen over the last couple of decades.
Historically, in the absence of change in the breadth and intensity of product use, designers will typically focus on improving the product’s durability, usability, and efficiency. Seldom does fundamental design change come in such steady state conditions. But clearly we face anything but steady state conditions for the world’s digital connectedness.
So Back to the Garage
Yep, I’m pumped, and because of this, each member of my family is being asked to list their most important “future values” for the garage and help minimize the clutter. I suspect it may take a bit of time to reach an agreement but when we do, we will realize that many items we found we “couldn’t live without”, don’t actually provide contributing value for the future. The end result? I’ll finally be able to park the family car in the little building designed specifically for that purpose. Speaking of garages - do you recall that HP was founded in a garage? But that’s another story.
For more information on HP’s Project Moonshot, extreme low-energy server technology or other hyperscale information, check out www.hp.com/go/moonshot or follow us on Twitter at @HPHyperscale.
