Groves Green IT

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!

 

 

 

 

 

October 14 2010 - 3rd SVLG DC EE Summit

Have you registered yet? if not, here is the link. The registration fee jumps on October 1st so get your early pricing over the next few days.  If you are an international journalist with credentials, and would like to attend at no charge, please contact me by email so that I can arrange a pass for you.  We were covered by the European and Japanese press last year and would like more post-event articles published. I will be moderating a panel the morning of the event, October 14th at Brocade corporate headquarters.

Did you see this article I wrote for Rich Miller's blog? I covered Paul Brenner's novel use of waste heat from his data center at Notre Dame University - it warms the greenhouse for tropical plants. 

It seems to me that from a big picture perspective, we now have enough knowledge and experience to shed load from our data centers nationwide, and mitigate grid overload.  The roughly 3% of total electricity load used by data centers and everything connected to the data center is about the same as the peak load that the grid  nationwide needs to turn down in emergency situations or climate-induced loads (i.e., really hot days when everyone uses their airconditioner).  We now know how to proactively address that demand response situation in our data centers, AND we are reading about new servers, racks, and equipment that will use 50% less energy than existing models on raised floors today.  I like to think of the data center load as a shadow grid, one that can ease the tension in the real consumer power grid on an as-needed basis. 

Now back to the other conundrum - water, drought, and chilled water systems.  It has been a year since I started to write about drought conditions in the same areas of the country as our data center clusters are located.  But that has not gained traction in the minds of end users, to my knowledge. Any comments?  Have a green day!

Any international journalists with credentials residing in Silicon Valley that would like to write about SVLG DC EE Summit?

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!

 

 

'Energy Star for Storage' Stakeholder meeting in San Jose CA on July 20, 2010

Last week’s Stakeholder meeting for Energy Star for Storage was very well attended and an excellent example of diplomacy and tact in action.  I was so impressed with the way that all the parties with diverging interests made their point patiently as the complexities of the emerging technologies in storage evolved and created obstacles to simple language and easy to use guidelines.

 

The most important and urgent reason for convening this stakeholder meeting is that in the case of servers, assets were sitting idle and went unnoticed until experts began to assess their load.  This might well be true in the case of storage devices as well, and as an industry, we do not yet know whether the ROI on those assets is being well used, or wasting away. So, with the premise that with well defined states, you can collect data, it is time to focus now on the topic of storage energy efficiency.

 

Representatives from Climatesavers, Ecos, EMC, EPRI, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NetApp and Oracle filled the audience in downtown San Jose at this meeting facilitated by Stephen Pantano and Al Thomason of ICF as well as and hosted by Una Song, Energy Star Lead, Storage for the US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)

 

At the highest level, the disk and controller configuration are the most meaningful factors for energy.  These need to be defined by capacity not access.  Should these be defined by controller quantity and controller configuration, followed by disk quantity and disk configuration?

 

The challenges understood at the beginning of the meeting are:

          What can be qualified?

          How can it be sold?

          How will it be used?

What will customers fix/replace, improve after their initial purchase      that might make the systems more or less energy efficient?

 

First there were definitions to sort through: ready idle versus deep idle, offline idle v online idle, resulting in discussions about the intent v the naming of a particular point in time within a technology.  That was followed by a ‘data management and output’ discussion that eventually gained agreement that power and temperature fluctuations are not as well defined in storage as on servers, and latency, not frequency is the most important parameters to measure. It was also observed that the quantification of energy efficiency savings will be difficult on some key elements of storage, for example on de-duplication.  So this is one element that might be noted and set aside for future data sets or future versions of the Energy Star specifications.

 

Some small samples of storage appliances yielded preliminary data that there is little difference between power supply usage, whether they are on servers or storage, but this needs to be validated with a larger study.

So the proposed scope of the first version of the Energy Star guidelines will include online and removable storage, and then expand to larger systems and near-online products in specific configurations. The plentitude of customized configurations is the conundrum in this committee – there are so many ways to design storage depending on technologies, pricing models, space, cooling, etc. that conforming to specific configurations is not a viable outcome.

The EPA/ICF team was very pleased that this meeting had elicited comment on a lot of the complexities of the potential guidelines and said they didn’t mind at all that no clear decisions had been taken – “too early in the process”, said Stephen Pantano.  Have a green day!

A fun week in Silicon Valley

Many of my readers have never met me because they live outside the USA and only know my blog; 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.

On Wednesday, July 14th, approximately 50 of us convened at Chevys  Mexican Restaurant in Redwood City, CA for Happy Hour. We named ourselves the Data Center Drinkers, the short name for the Bay Area Data Center Happy Hours, I think. Greg Pettine  deserves a huge thank you from all of us because Lee Technologies bought drinks for everyone. Those of you who were unable to make it, please join us at the next event in San Francisco on August 25, to be hosted by one of our other generous invitees - to be named as soon as I know.

KC Mares and I started planning an event like this earlier in May  because it had been so long since we had gotten together to stay in touch - since the SVLG Data Center Summit last autumn? The Green Grid in February? anyway a long time.  A lot of people that showed up were from KC's email list and they turned out to be different from my list - and so very pleasant and enjoyable.  What I heard is that new data centers seem to be in the planning process, but not locally - local design, engineering, construction companies are teaming up with architects to build outside of Silicon Valley, outside of California.  This resonates with my own assessment of the local market - flat! But I hear there is lots of activity building data centers in the Midwest and the North East.  I think those people are using Recovery Act funds more effectively...

I arrived at Chevy's from a 20th Birthday Party event at DPR Construction, invited by Mark Thompson. It was a great party at their Redwood City corporate headquarters, and I met a few of my colleagues from the data center construction industry celebrating along with them.

The following day, Thursday, I stopped in to Everett Thompson of WiredRE's workshop on state of the art data centers. I learned more than I thought I would from the Siemon speaker Carrie Higbie, Global Director of Data Center Solutions and Services at Siemon  - what a source of knowledge she offered on cabling alternatives and best practices.  John Rueter, Account Director at Bloom Energy also presented on the use of fuelcells for data centers.

WiredRE's event audience was a whole different group of attendees than at Chevys- and the only person I recognized there besides Everett was Kevin Heslin, who spoke to the audience about the very low expectations of efficiency the US government has of data centers - referring to the well known statistic that most servers run at 6 - 10% load even today. This low asset utilization percentage would not be well tolerated in the manufacturing sector, and Kevin was hinting that the flashlight's glare is getting closer and closer to data centers, hence the PUE agreement announcements earlier this week See report issued titled Recommendations for Measuring and Reporting - Overall Data Center Efficiency posted on The Green Grid's URL

And next Tuesday, I plan to attend the ENERGY STAR Data Center Storage stakeholder meeting in San Jose, facilitated by Stephen Pantano of ICF International. See you there and meanwhile, 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!

re Organizational changes required to facilitate IT energy efficiency

I posted a blog yesterday about my perspective on what needs to be addressed to advance energy efficiency in data centers. Today I received notice about a new book  on the topic of engaging resistance to change authored by my colleague Aaron Anderson, Director of the Executive MBA program at San Francisco State University.  I expect we can all learn from the book how to motivate change within ponderous enterprises.

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!