Green = Savings = Efficiency, said Ken Brill

Monday morning at TUI: 442 participants from 13 countries are
sitting in the audience today.

 “Emerging regulatory measures” is a term that came up again today as yesterday evening. Let’s fix our own house, is the mantra among vendors, and users seem to agree: we know our own challenges and what will work in-house, and we want to address them before any federal agencies step in.

 Server consumption is expected to double between 2005 and 2010, resulting in a need for 30 extra power plants over the next 10 years. We are still growing so rapidly it is hard to get our arms around the problem. In 2006 and 2007, according to Ken Brill, the top 1/3 are running at a compound growth rate of 27% per year, up from a CAGR of  7% in the previous time period of 1999 – 2005.

Enterprise data centers greater than 5,000 sq feet represent 39% of the total landscape.

 For those of you doing your carbon footprint discovery, the Green House Gas (GHG) produced per server is four tons, whether it sits in a Tier II, Tier III, or Tier IV data center. The total annual expense per server in a Tier II is $1,320 or 1,870 in the Tier III, or $2,020 in Tier IV data centers.

 Ken Brill said that the 2007 Design Charrette concluded:

 1- “Industrial plants consuming similar amounts of energy have serious engineering competence”, said Ken Brill. That means, they don’t tolerate the waste that we (IT professionals) do. This requires a top-down corporate governance policy: bottoms up won’t accomplish a 50% increase in efficiency, unfortunately.

 2- “The potential savings from IT energy efficiency far overwhelm anything that can be done by facilities.” And the silver bullet is not to build a new data center. Start making the changes in the 3-5 year appliances, not the 8 – 10 year CAPEX investments such as air handlers.

 3- Lack of leadership and lack of empowerment are the most serious challenges we face today. Senior level executives don’t understand the future implications of current cost trends for data centers. It should be part of your daily job, not a special project, to work toward energy efficiency in your data center.

 Ken asked of the audience: Uptime wants to work with 10 companies who will make a commitment to reduce their data center energy consumption by 50% over the next 12 – 18 months. Sign up now!

 

The first keynote today was about DC power: a presentation from www.validusdc.com by CEO Rudi Kraus. Just transformation of 10% of US data centers from AC to DC would save three gigawatts of power. 

 What follows is a basic overview of DC power as provided in that talk. Usually I abbreviate data centers to DC, but today, I am using DC as in Direct Current, and spelling out ‘data center’. Hope it is not too confusing.

 Data centers today are no longer commercial properties, really, they are more like industrial properties based on their capacity requirements and consumption of energy.  All of the production lines in industrial plants run on DC. IT can  benefit from DC, an enabling technology, in the data center because:

· all server and storage devices are DC;

· all energy storage and renewable energy systems are DC; and

· higher voltage distribution uses less copper and distribution; and

· at less than 600V, DC remains within UL and National Electric Code (NEC) guidelines.

 DC in newly design data centers is straightforward and easy to implement. It is more difficult in retro-fits where you have a mix of traditional (AC) equipment.

 It is cost effective and simple to go straight from your utility to DC in your data center but it isn’t the norm because of conventions – by that I mean how the industry has evolved. 

 The power grid supplies AC power that goes through your UPS and converts it to DC power. It charges your back-up (DC) batteries. (Backup batteries need to be there to make up for the minor “sags” in electricity that happen continually, and to bridge the time between power outages and the generator startups – usually less than 30 seconds.) 

 Power is converted back to AC a 2^nd time, and transformed to a lower voltage AC. At that point it is fed into the power supply of the server, which converts it back to DC, because all servers run on DC power.

 All of these transformations result in efficiency losses and additional heat that needs to be removed from the data center. Having a DC data center results in two conversions instead of five: fewer equipment components, and single points of failure – always higher reliability, and lower Total Cost of Ownership.   Power, cooling and processing are simplified in this process. You can run air conditioning off the DC as well as all your IT equipment (routers, storage, etc.).

 

So where is the problem? Old myths live on.

 The perception of risk (safety) is the biggest reason people are not jumping up to install DC in their data centers. Safety is always a question in customer minds, but all of the endpoints are at 48 volts, a touch-safe voltage, according to Underwriters Laboratory.  All of the 600 volts DC cabling is distributed in conduits with coordinated breakers that clear any short-circuits(faults).

 There is one more aspect of this conversation about DC we haven’t touched upon yet. That is the volume of copper, steel, and plastic that make up the components that could be eliminated if AC were replaced by DC throughout the data center. Any company looking to have a lower carbon footprint would be interested in the impact on their supply chain: it would be “lighter” if you used less copper and steel.

 

Following the DC presentation, Mark Monroe of www.sun.com said computer processing power will increase 100,000 to 1 million times over the next 25 years and bandwidth is growing faster than processing power. GDP has been growing at 2-3% p.a. but recent companies launched, such as YouTube are growing at tremendously faster rates than conventional companies. YouTube served 2.5 billion videos in one month, as an example. Those are renamed ‘Redshift’ companies within Sun, expanding capabilities beyond traditional technologies,, making business out of IT – online auctions, social networks, etc. In contrast, ‘Blueshift’ companies grow at GDP rates, producing “real” goods like bread or transporting goods. Shifting electrons is the “light” part of the economy.  You can leverage IT to replace the physical, achieving on average a 10:1 overall efficiency. For every 1 watt you spend on electricity, you save 10 watts of power in the real world.

 How many companies can be in Redshift? Lots, going forward. The applications they do, such as high performance computing, discovering genomes, calculating derivatives, will consume 60 – 75% of compute cycles over the next five years. Infinite work exists for them. Scientific computing is becoming affordable so that more enterprises can consume some of it. Frontier airlines, for example,  take financial modeling to a new high with internal programs to take advantage of geographic differences in fuel prices. Spinoffs from the space program (such as Teflon pans) help the rest of us: spinoffs from the Redshift companies, such as fresh air cooling, DC power systems, will also filter down to the enterprise.

 

‘What can IT Execs do right now to increase energy efficiency?’ Is the name of the roundtable I attended right before lunch. The conversations meandered along many different paths:

 1. Turn off servers: Finding zombie servers is a high priority. In some data centers 8% of the servers turned out to be just junk – nobody ever got fired for leaving a server running although the reverse is true, they have been fired for turning off a server. Interviewing users, application support staff, and otherwise investigating low utilization servers needs to be done. ‘Mini-links’ among business users support access to data rather than doing productive work, for example. Mercury interactive was named as a good detection tool: a summer intern with a clipboard is another solution.

 2. “your ox gets gored!”: Implement chargebacks for IT usage. Business units come at the data centers with a request like this: “I have a server. You install it”. The fastest thing IT can do to stop server sprawl is implement charge-backs to business units. This one behavioral change is more effective than any short-term technical solution.  That silly phrase means that if you won't pay for services, you don't get any! 

Good asset management in your data center means you know who the big spenders are. By implementing chargeback models, you have a new conversation with your teams: one that focuses on cost first, and energy second, and learning takes place on both sides. At AOL, 60 % of facilities’ costs are energy related.

 3. Virtualize: In one instance, regarding virtualization, consumption growth of images from virtualization is outgrowing the consolidation effort. The pace of the images is accelerating faster year after year. Useless virtualization servers are creating the same situations that existed in the real world previously.

 4. Treat efficiency as one of your performance metrics: Here is a common problem: A plant manager knows exactly what goes into his plant; but in IT, the facilities manager and the IT manager “share” that knowledge – it isn’t embodied in a single person. No one owns the master plan upfront for a new data center. It is handed off from IT to facilities managers, CIO doesn’t own it, the Facilities VP doesn’t own it. Pass this paragraph on to your organizational development managers: here is an opportunity for change management.

One panelist said 70% of machines in the data center are running a single application and 70% of the applications are running on the remaining 30 machines. When you drive down the cost and time to deploy new virtual servers, demand goes up. Disciplined management of new virtual machines is NOT the norm.

Have a green day!

 

 

 

Comments

[Piyush]

Energy efficient and green storage technologies are the need of the hour. Virtualization is one solution. Maybe holographic data storage and the much touted IBM Racetrack, but these are still far away.

I agree with what you have to say about implementing energy efficiency measures, these are small measures but implemented all-round in the organization they really do add up.