Groves Green IT

130 posts to date, and taking a breather

To all of my colleagues - I've really enjoyed interviewing people for this blog over the last few years, and I've learned so much in the process. 

 

Most of the initiatives that I wrote about over the last few years were news - now they are more commonplace. I think that as a small niche, data center energy efficiency professionals have done an excellent job at monitoring, measuring, and solving inefficiency challenges.  Bravo!  I am going to take off a little time to see whether this blog shouldn't be re-directed at related content.  I am still concerned about the Water Usage Efficiency (WUE).  To my knowledge, nobody has named  the transparency of the supply chain to the datacenter - whether the electricity provided is driven by fossil fuels or not.  All other industrial businesses are tackling this project to include it in their carbon offset calculations.  Since the energy in other industries can also be embedded, the similarities are greater than the differences and we can and should calculate this.  More to do!  Thank you all for your continued readership, suggestions, and contributions.  I'll be in touch again soon.  Have a green day!

Talking with Dr. Bob Sullivan about the Kyoto Cooling fan

I got to know Dr. Robert F Sullivan through several Uptime Institute events over the years and he was tremendously helpful to me two years ago when I was doing research on attitudes toward water conservation among data center operators.  I caught up with him recently and had the opportunity to talk about one of his favorite topics: the Kyoto fan. Dr Bob is best known for his Cold Aisle/Hot Aisle innovations.

Dr. Bob, tell my readers what the Kyoto fan is and why it is both a traditional and innovative product.  

Kyoto Cooling (named after the Kyoto Accord) is an idea created by four young engineers in The Netherlands.  The basic concept has been used in building and industrial air conditioning installations for over 60 years.  In building AC systems a heatwheel is used to precool hot air in summer and warm cold air in winter.  The key component of the system is an aluminum honeycomb wheel that absorbs heat in one airflow stream and dissipates it in another.

In the traditional configuration the system is set up to draw fresh air into the building, precondition the air to lighten the load on the HVAC system and then exhaust the air after it has passed through the building.

In a data center, this design is tweaked so that there are two isolated circulation paths, rather than an intake and exhaust path. The computer room is configured with an isolated hot aisle and the hot air is circulated, the heat is absorbed by the honeycomb wheel, and the cooler air is recirculated back into the computer room. 

The wheel is constantly rotating at low speed and the "hot" wheel rotates into a chamber where outside air is circulated through the honeycomb.  Outside air is returned to the ambient environment, carrying the computer room heat load with it.

This cooling technique is not only extremely efficient on its own but also isolates the computer room from the ambient environment and all the problems associated with bringing huge volumes of outside air into the data center.  This includes dirt, fine combustion particles, gasses, air with low or high dew point.  In this way the energy used or lost to contain these elements is minimized. 

Because of the inherent efficiency of the system and the isolation of the computer room and ambient air, this system works in cold climates, arid/desert climates, and the tropics.  For example, in north and south latitudes the mechanical efficiency (Mechanical load / I T load) may be as low as 0.04, to an efficiency of 0.08 in marine climates, and 0.25 in the dessert of the Middle East and tropics of Singapore.   KyotoCooling provides airside economizer cooling - without the air transfer.

How big is it? How little is it? What are the small and large parameters?

There are many installations in Europe using both the large wheels and the modules. 

The cooling technique is versatile with units as small as 90 kW of cooling capacity, deploying an 8' diameter wheel, a 300 kW using a 12' wheel, a 450 kW requiring  a 14' wheel, and the largest: a 600 to 850 kW system using a 20' diameter wheel. 

Where are some of them currently installed?

There are four installations in North America, one using 90 kW modules, two using 300 kW modules, and one using 450 kW modules.

I recently visited two installations in the US.  One in the northern latitudes of the US has three 300 kW-rated modular units installed.  During commissioning, at 28 F ambient conditions, they were able to achieve 1 MW of cooling with just two units operating, both at 50% capacity.  The second installation has two 450 kW units operating and were able to achieve 1.1 mW of cooling at 40 F ambient temperature without stressing the capacity of the units.  In both implementations, supplemental cooling was not required to achieve these cooling levels.

Tell me how acceptance in Europe has fared vs in the US. 

 There is more pressure to implement economizer cooling techniques in Europe than in North America.  Compliance with the EU rules, plus the higher cost of energy makes highly efficient cooling techniques essential there. In contrast, the drivers in north America are different with less regulation and a lower cost for energy. I’ve found the data center community in North America to be very conservative and risk averse.  There is a bias toward waiting for a "new" technology to be mature before it is considered.  My belief is that some of this is related to job protection – fear of losing one’s job if new technologies do not work.

Thanks Dr. Bob. See you at Symposium on May 11th in Santa Clara? Have a GREEN DAY!

 

16 Terrabytes on an iPad

Sometimes you go to presentation after presentation on supposedly innovative IT products, services, and you just wonder where the excitement is because you can't see it. And then twice a year, you sit in on presentations and your imagination starts to spin as you realize  you are listening to something that is so exciting you can't wait to tell someone about it. 

On February 23rd, Teladata hosted their 3rd all day conference and it was terrific. Since I was hosting a panel, I missed several other presentations but was able to catch the last one of the day with Makesh Khattar of Oracle, Bill Tschudi of LBNL, and Dave Shroyer of Netapp, moderated by Derek Schwartz of Green Data Center Alliance.  As usual Makesh analyzed data with a shrewd eye for what is most important, and his remarks were insightful. One of the first things he remarked was, and I agree, that PUE is most valuable as a tool to measure the progress in your own data center, not in a comparison with someone else. So when you hear bragging about a PUE of 1.02, what goes through your mind? My mind says something like, "I am from Missouri, prove it to me..." (although I am not from Missouri but that is an old saying). You can read a better synopsis of the conversation here, by Rich Miller in DataCenterKnowledge. Thank you also to my panelists who were terrific and offered up great examples of stakeholder engagement best practices: John Rodgers of Kaiser Permanente, Joyce Dickerson of Stanford University, and Ralph Renne of NetApp.  I think we provided valuable content to our audience.

Yesterday I attended the public day of The Green Grid's Technical Forum in Santa Clara, CA, same location as the previous Teladata conference. What most impressed me was the attention now given to water and carbon - which will earn their own WUE and CUE designations to accompany the PUE one we have come to know and abuse. (see above).The emphasis is now on resource efficiency,  not only energy efficiency.

Secondly I was glad to hear Dean Nelson discuss the DataCenter Pulse Chill Off!  results  - he had presented them also at Teladata but I didn't get to hear them.  I find their methodology and commitment to stringent research refreshing. Here is how Rich Miller captured it:

Nelson noted recent research from Data Center Pulse that identified potentially significant power savings from dynamically adjusting the clock speed of CPU processors to match IT workloads. The group’s testing suggests that overclocking and underclocking processors as workloads fluctuate can reduce a server’s energy use by as much as 18 percent.

“There are huge potential reductions (in energy usage) available,” Nelson said. “Why can’t we have control over that chip? Why can’t we have the controls to give us a gas pedal, so that we can throttle up and throttle back?”

Recently released Intel chips already enable that, which brings me to how I spent this morning at a SGI briefing to large customers (NASA, EBay, Facebook, etc.) and what they had to say about  clock speed.  SGI with technology from former innovative companies Rackable and Copan (companies they acquired), has storage and compute intellectual property that is impressive.  But in addition, they are introducing a dashboard called "The SGI Management Center" that allows you to cap power (for demand response applications, and adjust clock speeds in their supercomputing applications where you want to conserve energy as well as provision or patch servers 1000 at a time.  This presentation made me remember why I was mesmerized about IT a long time ago - because there was strategy, implementation, vision, and magic all  in one two-hour presentation. When CTO Dr. Eng Lim Goh, CTO, logged into his data center from the podiu, using his iPad and started a computation that demanded 16 terrabytes of processing power, the audience just laughed with pleasure at the beauty and the simplicity of the example - and it worked too.  When do we need terrabytes and 1000 processors for speedy analysis in real life? The US Post office uses that kind of compute power to sort mail daily and had an ROI in months by identifying fake digital stamps. When I departed, my mind was buzzing with the possibilities of terrabytes of data at my fingertips and the many ways it might be used by each of us to investigate possibilities.  By the way, SGI has a strong sustainability philosophy inherent in their product design. Have a green day!

 

Planning for 2011

Our Silicon Valley Data Center Drinks pals met together Jan 13th, 2010 in Palo Alto - this event sponsored by Schneider Electric (thanks Finn!) and 1E (thank you Michael L!) It is a great event because 50% of the people who show up are regulars and 50% are new to me.

Just hot off the press  (hahaha!- another metaphor that our children won't understand as traditional printing succumbs to the web) Rich Miller's blog with predictions for 2011.

As I state in the above blog, I perceive the data center industry is in disruptive transition today, now that energy efficiency is driving new products, not only innovative best practices. To understand the magnitude of the change, here are two upcoming events you might consider registering for:

February 23 in Silicon Valley, the Teladata conference features four tracks and several case studies. I will be moderating a panel on stakeholder engagement.

May 9 - 12 in Silicon Valley you can catch the Uptime Institute Symposium - without traveling to New York City and paying 5th Avenue prices for hotdogs! Unfortunately Santa Clara can't boast Central Park but maybe next year again, who knows. So look here. And register for earlybird discounts. I'll see you all there.

Stay nimble! Have a green day!

 

CFRT hosts another great event on November 5, 2010

Friday, November 5, 2010, I attended a super Critical Facilities Roundtable event that met its objectives: educating an audience on new ways of thinking.  The context was a new data center campus, three buildings sitting on 18 acres in Santa Clara with gobs of existing fiber and power, waiting to be transformed from a commercial site with some chip simulation data center activity into a hefty 37 MW powerhouse fed by two independent substations and gridline connections.  You know the concept sounds sexy when the competition fills the audience.  In this case, Vantage Data Centers (this is the first of 15 that are planned globally by Silverlake partners) is the vision of James R. Trout, CEO, formerly with Digital Realty and other co-location providers. He firmly believes that in contrast to the lights out data centers that are available everywhere, that Santa Clara customers will pay extra to house their data center in good architecture, landscaped public areas, and office suites next to their data - true server huggers must apply.  He bases it on his years of experience and market research. 

Somewhere more than a year ago in this blog, I asked why the East Coast has some architecturally pleasing data centers and the West Coast doesn't. That will change if Trout has his way. he is re-designing the exteriors of three buildings to hide the 1970s warehouse look for a sleek corporate office look.

This presentation by Vantage was timely. I had spent previous days this week at the Syscon Cloud Computing event also in Santa Clara.  It is obvious that cloud computing is gaining significant ground for all kinds of reasons with all kinds of small, medium, and large customers, the least (reason) of which is that public cloud computing will be more energy efficient since the asset utilization has to be much higher for the business model to succeed. The Rightscale Users Group drew over 300 people, and I was very impressed with the granularity of the data produced. In fact, building on John Koomey's conclusion that the Cloud offers tremendous EE opportunities, it is amazing to me that Rightscale doesn't message that at all. Among current cloud providers, Amazon holds 50% marketshare, followed by Rackspace with 15%, IBM BLue Cloud with 8% and several others with 3-5%.  Wht Amazon does better than anyone else is "spot price accordingly whle marginal cost increase is zero", acording to Sungard's CTO Indu Kodukula, who was also a speaker at the CFRT event (see the content from both events merges in my mind). Well they couldn't get there if the energy efficiency wasn't part of that equation! With higher loads, a cloud may host 10 - 100 customers in a single rack using 4 - 25 kw densities. 

So evidently, no one takes consider of claims by companies such as Tensilica or Tilera that energy efficiency gains at the semi conductor level could be 50% or more.  Wouldn't that suggest that a 40MW data center then has the equivalent horsepower of today's 80MW data center in five years? Multliply that across all existing data centers being built and tell me that there isn't a glut somewhere on the horizon - all the more reason to differentiate your data center today and sign long term leases. HAVE A GREEN DAY!

 

 

 

Report from SVLG Data Center EE Summit in San Jose, CA

The third annual event took place on Thursday Oct 14th, 2010 and it was really successful. It was a full audience and the feedback on the presentations throughout the day was very positive. This resulted from the maturity of the data presented.  Instead of predicting results, presenters offered up examples of their findings - this provided a lot of content granularity. The topics differed from 2009 as they went from what we should do, to what we have done, from the prescriptive to the descriptive. Moreover, there was a sustained effort to discuss the costs: what was spent and how much was saved. I can't cover all the presentations because I didn't see them all, and I am particularly sorry that I missed most of Chill-Off @ cooling presentations.  But the presentations will be online. Stay tuned!

Dave Stevens, CTO of Brocade, the hosting company for this year's event said that there will be 15B devices connected to the Internet by 2015, and there will be 35 Zetabytes of data stored by 2020. Those numbers are too big to really digest, aren't they? Significantly, there will be 4x more data stored outside of data centers than inside.

One of the presentations that I enjoyed hearing was an update about outside air economizers. In a panel led by Bill Tschudi, the ASHRAE whitepaper on the topic was politely shredded.  In every instance of particulate matter, carbon, sulfate, nitrate, chloride, and black carbon, the air economizers were sufficiently robust and servers were unharmed when a MERV  7, 11 or 14 filter was installed.  In practice, with a MERV 11 installed, the air quality was equal to that of HVACs, and where MERV 14s were installed, the air quality was better than more traditional air handling units. (MERV is an industry standard rating, so it can be used to compare filters made by different companies.) That should put the issue to rest.

In 2009, it was estimated that the USA had 1.35 million server closets (IDC). Joyce Dickerson provided this information in her panel presentation that I moderated, in the context of the 200 or so that have been identified at Stanford University - and she conjectures the actual number might be 2x that.  Joyce said that her own analysis showed that they are not all inefficicent - and may run more efficiently at cost per watt than the mission critical data center.  And, she continued, why consolidate if the efficiencies aren't improved and the business units don't want to be part of the larger data center in the first place?  Perhaps consolidation is not the better alternative. Also on the same panel was Victor Garcia, Senior Manager of Facilities at Brocade. Victor had an entirely different scenario because Brocade, in their data center consolidation, had their own Brocade networking gear that made significant contributions to energy efficiency.  They were able to save money with flat floors using no ramps, cutouts, etc., and eight foot custom built racks since they didn't use raised floors.

It became apparent to me that the case studies could be divided as follows: those that saved significant energy with better PUEs, and those where the PUE improvement was not particularly noteworthy but the waste heat was re-used. Both are viable alternatives, although 'using less' tends to rank higher than re-use on most sustainability hierarchies. Here is where you will want to look for the uploaded presentations next week. Rich Miller published photos of the event. Look for more to come from Kevin Heslin. I'll post when they are up. Have a green day!

 

 

 

 

 

Finally! Back to work!

It has been a cooler than usual summer in Silicon Valley with lots of time to ride bikes, hike the hills, and enjoy a beer with colleagues.  Now the season of data center conferences looms large and I sense everyone is motivated to achieve a lot before year end. If you'd like to read more about what I do when I am not blogging, please look here: I consult to companies - service, software and hardware providers, utilities, and agencies in the data center energy efficiency niche to increase their brand and marketshare. You can always email me directly if you'd like to talk about your own marketing plans in this niche.

With a twinge of sadness on my part, I've been asked to shut down the website sponsored by Pacific Gas & Electric next week, the online collaborative community for data center energy efficiency program managers at utilities.  For more than three years, the IT EE collaborative community, founded by Mark Bramfitt, has been the most valuable source  of technical and marketing information for utility program managers, according to the testimonials users provided to us.  PG&E has restructured its various business units  and in this instance, dropped industry leadership with hardly an acknowledgement of its own tremendous contribution to the utilities industry, the DOE, and the vendors who came together to work with utilities nationwide to expand the awareness and conversation about new cooling and energy efficient data enter design.  It takes years to build a corporate reputation and not very long to dissolve it. What a shame.

With Andrew Fanara leaving the EPA earlier this year, that leaves just Paul Scheihing at DOE and the LBNL folks to continue the policy-making units with a 4-year perspective...  Time for BC Hydro, Duke Energy, XCel and others to pull the utilites back into focus.

Bob Hines has already sent out email invitations to previous participants in the 3rd SVLG Data Center Energy Summit, scheduled for October 14, 2010 at Brocade offices.  You can register and read details here. And dont look anywhere else on the SVLG site as I just did because the events section is very out of date! But in fact there was a 2nd meeting of the planning committee (I covered the first one in my June 25, 2010 blog) and with the location secure, the agenda 95% complete, and registration open, it promises to be a great event.

 This is old news to some of you but I just got around to viewing James Hamilton's thought provoking presentation at MIX10, and this blog by James Urquhart captures the essence of the public cloud computing cost advantage, in part, obtained by energy efficiency practices. James also provides this amazing statistic for those of you intrested in the volume of water being used in data centers (I am,  see previous posts!): James says Amazon deploys a data center using 8MW of electricity, and it consumes 200,000 gallons of water per day - yes per day,  in the cooling tower. Have a Green Day!

 

 

Report from the SVLG Energy Summit at Stanford University on June 25, 2010

With a well-designed agenda, mostly engaging speakers, and overflow crowd, this event was a success.  Of course, given my specific interests, I thought there would be more emphasis on data centers and potential energy savings, but nonetheless, it was a satisfying mix of emerging technologies, policies and predictions.  With three sessions that had overlapping presentations, no one could get the entire scope of the content, and there was a lot to absorb and ponder after the event. 

One of the most surprising statistics I learned is about PV solar panels.  The size of the PV solar industry is already one half the size of the semiconductor industry in dollar value. Wow! that was quick, wasn't it? And this despite the change in prices for solar panels declined 50% between 2009 and 2008.  So it is getting harder and harder to make those audacious claims as the price per unit drops at such a precipitous rate.  Competition and innovation are the primary reasons for the drop in retail prices for solar panels.

Another interesting fact that emerged is that the fossil fuel industry as $550B in subsidies whereas renewables have only $50B in  subsidies (annually, I think).  Does that surprise you as well? The fossil fuel subsidies fly beneath the radar - they aren't on the front page of the newspaper business section as the ones for renewables are...this points to what readers consider "newsworthy".

The SmartGrid was a frequent topic of conversation. I think one of the speakers said that 50% of the American population is unfamiliar with the term SmartGrid, or was it 70%? Something unbelieveable to us in Silicon Valley and working on data centers.

Ralph Renne of Netapp and Mark Hydeman of Taylor Engineering spoke on a panel about Building Energy Efficiency Drivers, Regulations and Motivations. So our niche was well represented by those guys.

I was very impressed with the talk provided by Senator Maria Cantwell from the State of Washington.  She authored the Carbon Limits and Energy for America's Renewal (CLEAR) Act,which directs the Sec of the Treasury to establish a program to regulate the entry of fossil carbon into commerce in the US to promote renewable-energy jobs and economic growth.  Her understanding of the importance of moving the economy off fossil fuel is very deep and her commitment to bipartisan collaboration on the topic were evident. 

Thanks Bob Hines for pulling together the day in a flawless event. Have a green day!

national treasures today in our industry

A few weeks back I was sitting in the audience of a Pacific Energy Center meeting room listening to an all day workshop about data center energy efficiency.  I have heard variations on this topic in this forum several times over the last few years, and it is about 80% the same, with changes coming from guest speakers.  Mark Bramfitt usually introduces speakers and in this case, he was a guest speaker himself, having left PG&E late in 2009. 

This time I had an insight that just refuses to let go. I heard Mark Hydeman of Taylor Engineering give his presentation and in one 45 minute talk, he articulated roughly 5 challenges that the industry needs to overcome in order to gain control of data center energy efficiency.  I realized he has a running "punch list" in his brain and that if asked to list all the obstacles/hurdles and challenges needed to create energy efficient data centers, he would have a damn good list at the end of the day.  But I've never seen the list. Have you? (for non english speakers, a punch list is all the things that did not get finished properly when you renovated your house - items that the painters, plumbers, electricians, etc., forgot to complete or hoped you would not notice...)

This though re-occurred to me as I sat in on presentations at Symposium 2010 in New York City.  But this time I asked myself, who else has a punch list? No doubt Ken Brill has one.  Albert Esser has one.  Andrew Fanara has one. They are all in each respective brain - not published anywhere and the rest of us CANNOT see what each considers important and how we, as an industry, can rank our challenges in a way to effectively overcome them. If 30 self-nominated thought leaders put their thoughts on a single website, we could see how different or how similar those perceived challenges are, and make a comprehensive list on what needs to change over the next three years. 

So here is my list of what the industry (we) needs:

1. We need a definition of IT that works globally. The Europeans use ITC and that encompasses so much more than servers, that it changes their perception of the magnitude of the opportunity. I'd like to see the Americas and Asia synchronize their definitions of IT with that of the Europeans.

2.  We all need better access to server sales predictions.  In my work with the utilities across the USA, I can't imagine that the data center energy efficiency programs would be such low priority if key managers understood the growth curve for servers over the next decade.  IDC and its peers need to open up that information for policy makers to understand that even with better designed servers, the enormity of social media usage is driving tremendous energy use.

3. We need qualified, experienced 'Organizational Change' professionals to help us re-invent company structures to reward energy efficiency in IT staff bonus packages. That means HR, Finance, IT, and RE all have to redefine the solution set. To date we have talked around the problem without engaging Organizational Change  professionals in the process - I have not been to a single conference where they are invited keynote speakers to address this challenge.

4. We need to realize that water availability is a looming threat in many of the locations where data centers are clustered. But moving scarce water to data centers will be a much larger problem than building energy sources, so the solutions will take longer to implement. Let's draft a national plan to alleviate stress points in the data center landscape.

So why did I name this blog "national treasures"? Those are knowledgeable individuals and we need to preserve what they know and move state of the art forward from their base. We have 30-plus individuals beginning with Amory Lovins who startled us all by convening a Charrette years ago to alert IT and utilities to the increased demand that would come from data centers.  We don't yet have a mechanism for gathering their ideas and discovering the commonalities in their perspective so that we can better articulate solutions. And then start over again 36 months later when all the dynamics change.  Have a green day! 

Uptime Institute Symposium next week in New York City

I would like to be down in Santa Barbara,CA today with my colleagues at the Santa Barbara Summit on Energy Efficiency, held yesterday and today. I attended last year and it was a great two day event with innovation and research presentations that were made. I hope they post the presentations online as they did last year - in particular, readers of this blog should view presentations on Energy Efficiency Computing on a Large Scale with Rich Wolski, Kathryn Yellick, Robert Sproull, and Fred Chong.

Uptime Institute's Symposium 2010 starting next Monday promises to have a wealth of exciting presentations.  I've heard all the keynote speakers before and they each bring a unique perspective to the theme of Green Enterprise IT. As you know from my last blog, you can hear podcasts from several speakers if you will click here. More are added every day this week and next.

As I was doing research on the sessions I would be attending, I learned about this company. Wow! What an exciting presentation that will be - I am looking forward to it as well as catching up with good friends and colleagues from around the globe.  have a green day!