AMD Data Center Makeover: 90% virtualization, replacing Oracle with Hadoop

Walking in the almost vacant, cave-like building, it still looks like a trucking depot until AMD took over more than two years ago and converted it into a data center.

Although the 153000-square-foot building looks more like an idle warehouse, Dominguez and Bynum see a space full of data halls where AMD, the chipmaker, runs the entire North American business and engineering work.

Two executives are driving a data center consolidation project for AMD, from Texas, California to Colorado and Canada, where existing facilities in various parts of North America will be closed and operations centres will move to Georgia. This is only part of the effort made by AMD to merge 18 data centers into 2, one of which will be located in the suburbs of Atlanta, and another in the Malaysian saber.

Dominguez is AMD's global vice president and chief information Officer, Bynum is the vice-president of global infrastructure and operations, and Margaret Lewis is the head of AMD's software program. The trio, who recently led a group of journalists, outlined plans to rebuild the building, including the benefits of putting all of the company's IT operations in the data center, and how the consolidation plan made all businesses more responsible and efficient.

They also stressed that AMD wanted to use the new data center as a showcase for corporate customers to see what they could do with AMD products.

"We use all of AMD's technology in this datacenter," Bynum said. "You can run the entire data center based on AMD, that's what we do." ”

AMD, as a chip maker and other mature technology provider, is undergoing an important shift, moving, cloud computing, large data, and massive computing, which has revolutionized the industry, and AMD is trying to get out of its own path. Led by CEO Rory Read, AMD focused on revenue growth, such as ultra portable devices, high-density servers, embedded systems, and semi-customizable chips. The move helped AMD regain profitability in the third quarter of 2013, with the goal of making these products half the revenue of the next quarter, which would reduce reliance on the PC market.

AMD's Dominguez says the company is also looking for ways to make internal operations more efficient, including reducing the number of running applications and how the leadership approves and manages internal IT projects, covering everything. He says AMD wants to cut costs, improve efficiency and productivity.

The Data center consolidation plan is part of the effort to make it more efficient and cost-effective for the hosting business by leveraging the products and patents that AMD has developed and accumulated over the years. Two years ago, like many other organizations, AMD used a lot of it funding to maintain (70%) rather than innovate (30%).

"We're trying to overturn that," Dominguez said. He added that the company seeks to spend 80% of its money on innovation. Thanks to the move, AMD is now spending 60% on innovation and 40% for maintenance, he said.

The company's management wants to move all of North America's data centers to facilities in Georgia by mid-2015, but Dominguez and Bynum say they want to do it by the end of 2014. The overall impact of the integration plan on the number of AMD operations is not yet clear, but the results of the closure of the facility in Texas Austin to Georgia are encouraging, and the relocation was completed in September 2013.

According to Bynum, the AMD data center chose Georgia because Georgia's electricity was cheaper and the state's tax breaks. Executives say the concessions, combined with the transfer of Austin's data center and the sale of Texas parks, could save 8.5 million of dollars a year.

The Georgia's facilities can accommodate 10 1500 square feet of data halls, but only 2 are currently available. Most of the remaining space in the building is old warehouses, and they will be rebuilt as more data centers are merged here. Each data hall is equipped with a refrigeration and power room. The two operating data halls have an area of 6000 square feet and are equipped with about 204 racks of IT equipment. It now uses about 1.2 megawatts of electricity, but it has a capacity of up to 2 MW. The capacity could also be expanded to 10 megawatts, according to company officials.

AMD reduced the Austin facility's 289 rack IT equipment to 160 and the power consumption from 2.8 MW to 1.2 MW. The company uses a variety of methods to cool data centers and systems, including hot channel controls between racks, higher cooling water temperatures (which means less infrastructure for traditional data centers) and, if possible, the use of fresh outdoor air in some southern states.

The data center handles 31,000 tasks per hour, with a total of more than 23 million tasks per month.

Through consolidation, AMD can use more modern devices to update it, helping to save space and power requirements and operating costs. For example, AMD's more than 90% data Center environment is being virtualized, and before the data center migration, 76% of the physical servers and 72% of virtual servers were discarded and rack space was saved by 45%.

AMD said that the single or dual-core operation of the old server was HP and Dell's 2 to 16 nuclear Hao long processor replaced, memory up to 256GB. The four rack servers that have been running for four years have been replaced by a more modern and efficient system, saving costs. The data center also uses a number of AMD-acquired SEAMICRO companies ' business systems.

"To my surprise, we had so many devices when the company was about to migrate the Austin Data Center, and we didn't know that. "I'm very surprised," Dominguez said. ”

Change is not limited to hardware. AMD has made great changes in software, such as turning Oracle's relational database into a system using Apache Hadoop, using Apahce HDFs as the Apache HBase for Distributed file systems, and other Apache The Foundation technology runs on the Dell server supported by our Hao long processor. According to AMD Lewis, this change improves performance and saves money.

She mentions AMD's work in the open source community, not only the Apache Foundation, but also the open computing project Facebook advocates, including the development of Open 3.0 server boards. AMD's new data center, she says, also helps show what it can do with open technology in the data center.

The concept of open computing is a new concept. "People choose it to try." ”