Google new initiative to develop renewable energy sources

Wind-Powered Google Data Centers? One Already Exists

Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s new initiative to develop renewable energy sources conjures up images of data centers powered by water, wind, and the sun. No need to stretch your imagination; Google's already got them.

Google's hydro-powered data center on the banks of the Columbia River in The Dalles, Ore., has been well documented. I walked the perimeter of the facility in August. As you can see from my pictures, Google's data center is literally a stone's throw from the Columbia. The juice to power and cool the place comes from a dam a mile or so downstream.

I'm not an expert in these things, but it seems to me that The Dalles would be a good location for wind-powered energy to augment the swift current of the Columbia. The surrounding landscape, hills, and river valley form a natural wind tunnel, at least they did when I was there. Rights of way and public resistance to eyesore windmills would seem to be the obvious barriers.

In the Netherlands, Google has a wind-powered data center nearing completion. Check out these pictures by local Erwin Boogert.

There are caveats to these images of a green Shangri La. In The Dalles, Google negotiated discounted energy rates and tax incentives, so it's able to suck more power at lower costs than other companies. And in the Netherlands, those windmills provide only some of the power. A power plant down the road generates the rest.

But it's clear that Google is intent on using eco-friendly energy sources in lieu of coal-burning power plants. In an article about a new Google data center under construction in Council Bluffs, Iowa, The Des Moines Register notes that Google purchased 1,000 acres of land south of town in addition to 55 acres for the data center itself and another 130 acres nearby. When local farmer Bruce Barnett asked Google's Ken Patchett -- the manager of Google's data center in Oregon -- about how that land would be used, he was told that Google was still thinking about it.

Might those 1,000 acres be used for a wind farm? Google's "renewable energy cheaper than coal" project increases the possibility.

PayPal Says Linux Grid Can Replace Mainframes

A Linux grid is the power behind the payment system at PayPal, and it's converted a mainframe believer. Scott Thompson, the former executive VP of technology solutions at Inovant, ran the Visa subsidiary responsible for executing Visa credit card transactions worldwide. The VisaNet system was strictly based on IBM mainframes.
In February 2005, Thompson became chief technology officer at the eBay payments company, PayPal, where he confronted a young Internet organization building its entire transaction processing infrastructure on open source Linux and low-cost servers. Hmmmm, he thought at the time.

"I came from Visa, where I had responsibility for VisaNet. It was a fabulous processing system, very big and very global. I was intrigued by PayPal. How would you use Linux for processing payments and never be wrong, never lose messages, never fall behind the pace of transactions," he recalled in an interview.

He now supervises the PayPal electronic payment processing system, which is smaller than VisaNet in volume and total dollar value of transactions. But it's growing fast. It is currently processing $1,571 worth of transactions per second in 17 different currencies. In 2006, the online payments firm, which started out over a bakery in Palo Alto, processed a total of $37.6 billion in transactions. It's headed toward $50 billion this year.

Now located in San Jose, PayPal grants its consumer members options in payment methods: credit cards, debit cards, or directly from a bank account. It has 165 million account holders worldwide, and has recently added such business as Northwest Airlines, Southwest Airlines, U.S. Airways, and Overstock.com, which now permit PayPal payments on their Web sites.

Thompson supervises a payment system that operates on about 4,000 servers running Red Hat Linux in the same manner that eBay and Google conduct their business on top of a grid of Linux servers. "I have been pleasantly surprised at how much we've been able to do with this approach. It operates like a mainframe," he said.

As PayPal grows it's much easier to grow the grid with Intel-based servers than it would be to upgrade a mainframe, he said. In a mainframe environment, the cost to increase capacity a planned 15% or 20% "is enormous. It could be in the tens of millions to do a step increase. In [PayPal's] world, we add hundreds of servers in the course of a couple of nights and the cost is in the thousands, not millions," he said.

PayPal takes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and strips out all features unnecessary to its business, then adds proprietary extensions around security. Another virtue of the grid is that PayPal's 800 engineers can all get a copy of that customized system on their development desktops, run tests on their raw software as they work, and develop to PayPal's needs faster because they're working in the target environment. That's harder to do when the core of the data center consists of large Unix symmetrical multiprocessing boxes or mainframes. In neither case is it cheap to install duplicates for developers, he said.

PayPal "pays very close attention to the Linux kernel development process" lead by Linus Torvalds and the kernel maintainers because future capabilities are being debated and resolved through the process, he said.

PayPal has experimented with virtualization and is watching carefully developments in open source virtualization, still a young field. "One place we see the kernel process at work is in virtualization," Thompson said. VMware's ESX Server can run Linux, as can the open source Xen hypervisor; both work outside the Linux kernel but can be linked to its internal operations. A year ago, Torvalds approved the addition of a contributed Kernel Virtual Machine, which runs inside the kernel and makes use of the kernel's own memory management and other functions.

"If we could fully virtualize our middle tier, that would be another step of cost advantage," said Thompson. More fully virtualized data centers also would allow him to shift workloads across the grid, depending on time of day and traffic volumes, which would lead to additional savings.

"We'd love to shift processing capacity to workloads. That would be a tremendous benefit," and slow the need to buy and manage blade servers, even as PayPal continues to grow, he said.

Virtualization also would help him avoid building out another "power center" or new unit of the data center located close to cheap power. Avoiding added power costs is a much higher priority than it was a few years ago, he said.

But he's not ready to virtualize batches of servers here and there. He wants a plan that will allow "virtualization with a layer of intelligence on top of it" to manage virtual resources. He is experimenting with VMware, but before he implements virtualization throughout the data center, he'll wait until he sees the right intelligence materialize to make it manageable.

Does relying on Linux worry him when Acacia Research, through its subsidiary IP Innovation, filed suit in October against Red Hat and Novell for violating its patent portfolio? And Microsoft claims its patents are violated by Linux? Thompson said: "I'm not worried about those statements. I'm familiar with the issue but I'm not worried about it. We have people in our business who are on top of it."