Category: Random

It’s the weekend before the holiday season and just like last year I find my self at an US airport making my way home… just in time for Christmas.

Sitting at the airport lobby, listing Christmas songs, I can’t help to reflect on the past year.

A lot has happened and things changed a lot. I have left OCOM (LeaseWeb/EvoSwitch/Dataxenter) after 2 years in September this year. Something that some of my peers in the market didn’t expect, but was long overdue. For too long I couldn’t identify myself with the way the company was run and its strategy. No good or bad here… just a big difference of opinion on vision and execution.

The last 2 months I have been able to talk to lots of different organizations in an effort to see what my next career step should be. I needed some time to recuperate from my little USA adventure with LeaseWeb & EvoSwitch. It was a great project to participate in but all the travel took a big toll on my personal life and me.

I also learned how passion for your work can be killed and what it takes to be sparked again. And how people are motivated by the Why in their jobs.

I had some good conversations with DCP board members Mark and Tim about my frustration in the lack of progress in the datacenter industry. It felt like I have been doing the same datacenter and cloud talks for the last 3 years, and things still didn’t move. I wanted to have the opportunity to really make a difference.

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The cloud market is hot. The IAAS market sees a lot of growth and new IAAS providers seem to entering the market on a daily basis. Enterprise IT shops are exploring the usage of public cloud solutions and building their own private cloud environments.

IAAS distributions like OpenStack and CloudStack seem to have thriving communities.

Organizations that are successful in deploying IAAS solutions, either for customers or internal use, see rapid growth in demand for these services.

IAAS services still need IT equipment to run on and datacenters to be housed in.  While there has been a strong focus on making the datacenter facility and IT equipment more energy efficient, not much is know about the energy efficiency of software running these IAAS services.

The Amsterdam University of Applied Science (HvA) lanced an energy consumption lab focused on energy efficient software called SefLab 1,5 years ago.

Several EU Datacenter Pulse (DCP) members donated time and equipment to the research during the launch.

During the start of the SefLab students and researchers got familiar with the research facility and its equipment. They did a webbrowser compare on energy usage. (results on the SefLab website)

Now that the lab is operational, its looking for new area’s of research. One of the focus areas is the development of IAAS distributions like CloudStack, OpenStack, etc.. and their energy efficiency; what are the effects of architecture choices?, is their a difference in energy efficiency between the distributions ?, what power-manager & reporting elements are missing from the distributions ?

The HvA and SefLab are looking for:

• IAAS distribution users willing to participate in the research. This is possible in several ways ranging from active participation in formulating research questions, managing a subproject, and supervising student projects, to participating in workshops and events of the project.
• IAAS distribution communities willing to participate in the research. Future development of IAAS energy management components can be tested and validated in the SefLab facilities.
• Vendors willing to support the effort with knowledge transfer and hardware/software donation.
• Industry groups willing to support the effort in knowledge transfer network.

The research done by SefLab is really end-user driven, so this is a natural fit with DCP’s strategy.
Details can be obtained by contacting jan.wiersma@datacenterpulse.org

DCP members will be updated on the projects progress using the LinkedIn DCP member group.

See full call for participation here.