Tag: servers

Technology / Software

Data Center War Stories talks to SAP’s Jürgen Burkhardt

And we’re back this week with the second installment in our Data Center War Stories series (sponsored by Sentilla).

This second episode in the series is with Jürgen Burkhardt, Senior Director of Data Center Operations, at SAP‘s HQ in Walldorf, Germany. I love his reference to “the purple server” (watch the video, or see the transcript below!).

Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone welcome to GreenMonk TV. Today we are doing a special series called the DataCenter War Stories. This series is sponsored Sentilla and with me today I have Jürgen Burkhardt. Jürgen if I remember correctly your title is Director of DataCenter Operations for SAP is that correct?

Jürgen Burkhardt: Close. Since I am 45, I am Senior Director of DataCenter Operations yes.

Tom Raftery: So Jürgen can you give us some kind of size of the scale and function of your DataCenter?

Jürgen Burkhardt: All together we have nearly 10,000 square meters raised floor. We are running 18,000 physical servers and now more than 25,000 virtual servers out of this location. The main purpose is first of all to run the production systems of SAP. The usual stuff FI, BW, CRM et cetera, they are all support systems, so if you have ABAP on to the SAP in marketplace, you, our service marketplace, this system is running here in Waldorf Rot, whatever you see from sap.com is running here to a main extent. We are running the majority of all development systems here and all training — the majority of demo and consulting system worldwide at SAP.

We have more than 20 megawatt of computing power here. I mentioned the 10,000 square meters raised floor. We have 15 — more than 15 petabyte of usable central storage, back up volume of 350 terabyte a day and more than 13,000 terabyte in our back up library.

Tom Raftery: Can you tell me what are the top issues you come across day to day in running your DataCenter, what are the big ticket items?

Jürgen Burkhardt: So one of the biggest problems we clearly have is the topic of asset management and the whole logistic process. If you have so many new servers coming in, you clearly need very, very sophisticated process, which allows you to find what we call the Purple Server, where is it, where is the special server? What kind of — what it is used for? Who owns it? How long is it already used? Do we still need it and all that kind of questions is very important for us.

And this is also very important from an infrastructure perspective, so we have so many stuff out there, if we start moving servers between locations or if we try to consolidate racks, server rooms and whatsoever, it’s absolutely required for us to know exactly where something is, who owns it, what it is used for etcetera, etcetera. And this is really one of our major challenges we have currently.

Tom Raftery: Are there any particular stories that come to mind, things issues that you’ve hit on and you’ve had to scratch your head and you’ve resolved them, that you want to talk about?

cix

Psst! You wanna buy a data center?

Well, ok not an entire data center but my share of the CIX data center.

As I have mentioned before, I am moving to Spain in July. When I move, I will no longer be able to make a meaningful contribution to the further development of CIX and in that scenario it would not be helpful of me to hold onto my shareholding.

This is an opportunity for someone with a passion for data centers/hosting to purchase an interest in Ireland’s newest and Greenest data center at a very early stage in its business life. The buy in price now will be cheap compared to how much the shares should be worth in a couple of years.

Because of its strong focus on energy efficiency from the outset, and the open approach we took in the build, CIX has received a lot of very positive publicity. This has obviously translated into goodwill, business enquiries and servers in racks.

Whoever buys the shares will need to be able to commit serious time to further growing CIX’s business (and therefore their investment).

For the right candidate with the correct technical skills my business partners would be willing to be very innovative around how the funding is set up so don’t think big money to buy into this.

If you are interested in this opportunity, drop me a mail or give me a call to discuss.

Blogging, Search Engines, Technology

Technorati resurrects the Marquee tag…

Technorati have overhauled their site completely. Some of the changes are great and some we could do without, frankly!

The best change is that they have drastically sped up the site. I dunno did they add more servers or simply optimise their queries (I suspect the latter) but the site and particularly searches are now running a whole lot faster.

The next great change is that they have moved the blog searches to a page of its own. You can now find blog searches at s.technorati.com. The searches return relevant results and make subscribing to searches a whole lot easier than heretofore.

On the downside, on the main Technorati page they have a scrolling bar of tags along the top – make it stop! I thought we had killed of the Marquee tag people!!!

New Technorati homepage

Overall, the new design seems to be getting the thumbs up from most reviewers. This can only be good as with the rollout of Google’s excellent Blogsearch tool, reasons for using Technorati were becoming fewer and fewer.