February, 2009

Feb 24 2009   4:56PM GMT

Top ten industry demands from Data Center Pulse

Posted by: Matt Stansberry
Data Center, Green data center

A new data center user group, built on Linked-In profiles and spearheaded by executives from Sun Microsystems and VMware, held its first in-person gathering last week at Sun’s Santa Clara, Calif. headquarters.

Data Center Pulse (DCP) garnered over 675 online end-user supporters from 400 companies around the world, though only around 30 members showed up in person last week.

The goal of the inaugural DCP conference (more like a BarCamp or unconference) was to develop a list of goals and demands for the data center vendors, and industry groups.

While the founding members of DCP didn’t know what the group’s future would hold or what shape the organization should take — they did have one clear goal: To shape the industry through data center owner and operator feedback.

These are my interpretations of the group’s top ten goals and demands. They are subject to clarification, as they’d bubbled up from working group discussions 30 minutes before they were announced:

1. Align the data center industry organizations (AFCOM, The Green Grid, The Uptime Institute and ASHRAE) under a single international umbrella organization that could speak with one voice for the data center community; bring competing organizations to sit at the same table and collaborate; and to curate a body of data center standards.

2. Develop a data center certification, requiring new data centers to meet certain efficiency criteria, like the fuel efficiency standards on vehicles. It would be a consistent baseline to measure efficiency and drive improvement.

3. Come up with a standard definition of the “data center stack” from top to bottom.

4. Update or dump the Uptime Institute Tier Levels. See Mark Fontecchio’s recent story for more on this topic.

5. Demand data center infrastructure vendors develop more modular products. Stop the fixed, over-provisioned designs. Users want plug-and-play data center capacity

6. The members want an objective way to perform peer-to-peer data center efficiency comparisons. A standard measurement protocol to compare your PUE is against Google and Microsoft. Healthy competition drives efficiency.

7. Users want a common communication standard to monitor all layers of the power delivery system, connecting building management and IT systems.

8. Standardize conductive (liquid) cooling. Encourage ASHRAE to finish and publish a standard on liquid cooling technology. People want to get rid of air.

9. Push vendors to develop higher voltage (480/277volt) servers, allowing users to get rid of one transformer loss and driving up efficiency.

10. Create a repository: A neutral location to house and present data center information. Design best practices, specific server hardware configuration load measurements versus nameplate data, and user-generated vendor evaluations.

Data Center Pulse is gaining a ton of momentum very quickly, and may in fact be able to bring some of these changes to fruition. How do these ten points match up with your data center demands.

Feb 23 2009   8:03PM GMT

Data center high density vs. low density: Is there a paradox?

Posted by: Mark Fontecchio
Data center power, data center cooling

Over at CIO, there is an article about a so-called data center power-density paradox. According to Michael Bullock, the CEO of a data center design consultancy called Transitional Data Services, if you don’t beware the power-density paradox, “it will ensnare you in an unappetizing manner.”

OK, so what is it? Bullock argues that as you increase the power density in your data center, “your efforts to free up space in your data center could boomerang, creating an even greater space crisis than you had before.”

Drilling down, the paradox says that as you use more dense equipment (which places greater demands on power and cooling), you will quickly reach an inversion point where more floor space is consumed by support systems than is available to your IT equipment – typically between 100 and 150 watts per square foot. This translates into greater capital and operational costs, not the reductions you were hoping to achieve.

How much space will you need?  At a power density of about 400 watts per square foot, plan to allocate about six times your usable data center space for cooling and power infrastructure.  So before you embrace high-density as a quick fix to your space problem, make sure you have adequate room to house the additional power and cooling infrastructure, sufficient raised-floor space to handle the increased airflow demands of hotter-running boxes and, of course, sufficient available power to operate the hungry systems and their support gear. If any of these resources are unavailable or inadequate, your data center will not support the increased power density. And you will have wasted your time and money.

Let’s drill down, though, for real. Let’s say you decide your data center needs to process more. As an example, let’s say you need to expand your data center so that you have 1,024 processing cores, which you calculate as 256 quad-core processors. Should you use a power-dense design, such as blade servers, or spread that processing power out amongst 1U rack servers?

Hewlett-Packard’s c7000 BladeSystem enclosure is your blade server design. In a 42U rack, you can fit four c7000s, each of which can hold 16 HP ProLiant BL2×220c G5 server blades, for a total of 64 quad-core Intel Xeon 5400 processors. That adds up to 256 quad-core processors in a single rack. Each c7000 chassis demands 6 x 2,400 watts of power, or 14,400 watts. Multiply that by four chassis and you have 57.6 kilowatts of power in a single rack holding 256 quad-core chips.

Now, let’s use a spread-out design with HP’s DL100 rack servers. A DL160 G5 rack server is 1U and holds one quad-core Intel Xeon 5400 processor. So it will take 256U, or about six 42U racks, to reach the same processing power as a single BladeSystem. Each DL160 server demands 650 watts of power, so 256 of them demands 166.4 kilowatts of power.

To sum up:

• Power-dense design: 1,024 processing cores using blade servers use up 42U of space and 57.6 kilowatts of power
• Less power-dense design: 1,024 processing cores using 1U rack servers use up 256U of space and 166.4 kilowatts of power

According to this, there is no power-density paradox. If you use power-dense equipment, you will use less space and less power.

Now, I realize that cooling a single rack of blade servers would be a ridiculously difficult chore, and would take a lot more effort than a single rack of rack servers. But that would be comparing a single blade server rack to six racks full of rack servers. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Bullock’s point is not lost. If you have a rack of 1U servers, don’t expect to be able to convert that rack to blade servers and provide the same level of power and cooling infrastructure as you presently have. It won’t happen. But that’s a comparison of more processing power to less processing power. Comparing equivalent processing power designs yield no paradox, at least on the power side of the equation.

The cooling side of the equation is a different story, and can be complicated by factors such as airside economizers, which can cool less-dense data centers but can’t cool a 57.6KW rack. So as an example, if you spread your IT equipment out enough, then maybe you could eliminate mechanical chillers altogether. That could not only cut down on space, but on cost as well (which is what matters in the end). Also, your raised floor might be able to cool six racks of 1U servers with normal CRAC units, but you might need to convert to overhead or liquid cooling to cool a single 57.6KW rack properly.

In any event, the issue is not as simple as Bullock makes it out to be. Power-dense equipment will not always lead to more data center power and cooling equipment. Oftentimes, it will lead to less when matched up against a comparable rack-server design.

Feb 19 2009   2:07PM GMT

Local official wants to build data center powered by methane

Posted by: Mark Fontecchio
Green data center, Data center power management

The mayor of Chicopee, Mass., a city of about 60,000 people in the western part of the state, wants to use landfill gases to power a proposed data center in his facility.

According to a story in the Springfield Republican on city Mayor Michael D. Bissonnette being upbeat about Chicopee, he says that he has reached out to Dow Jones — the company that publishes The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and other newspapers — to build “a national data center here with the possibility of generating electricity from the methane at the landfill.” Dow Jones has an office in Chicopee already.

“Keeping what is here is important for both the city and the regional economy,” said Bissonnette, according to the story.

Though rare, using methane to power corporate facilities is not unprecedented. Fujifilm announced in 2007 that it would use methane from a nearby landfill to help power its manufacturing plant in Greenwood, S.C. Last year Google said it would pay for the building of a greenhouse that would reuse methane. The greenhouse is near a data center it’s building in western North Carolina, and paying for it would allow Google to win carbon credits so it could claim environmental friendliness.

Feb 18 2009   6:18PM GMT

HP only one of big four to be off Uptime’s “Green 100″

Posted by: Mark Fontecchio
Green data center

Edit: Uptime made a mistake in leaving HP off the list. The corrected Uptime Green 100 list includes them. So I guess they’re green after all! I’m working on scheduling a talk with some HP execs about how exactly they’ve been green.

I saw today that The Uptime Institute announced its “Global Green 100,” which it described in a press release on the Green 100 as companies that “have showed an exemplary commitment to improving their data center operations, not only reducing their carbon footprints, but also realizing significant financial savings.”

Dell, IBM and Sun Microsystems are on the list. Hewlett-Packard is not. I’m not really sure what that means, but I found it interesting that HP was the only one of the big four server manufacturers to not be part of the list. Other big IT companies on the list include Cisco, EMC, Microsoft and Oracle.

HP did undertake a massive data center consolidation project a couple years ago, but I’m not sure what they’ve done since on the energy-efficiency front.

Feb 13 2009   10:31PM GMT

Green Grid Postmortem: Successes and the work ahead

Posted by: Matt Stansberry
Green data center, Data Center, User Groups

This column was contributed by Deborah Grove of Grove Associates.

Day one of The Green Grid Technical Forum was largely a brag about how much work was done in 2008, and the evidence is truly impressive. I saw how the work done in 2007 paid off the following year because the infrastructure was in place to make white papers, partnerships, outreach and collaboration happen in what seemed to be effortless, well-designed information dissemination.

The Green Grid introduced new interactive tools under development, including the following:

• Free Cooling Map Web tool;
• PUE Calculator tool; and
• Power Configurations Calculator, an online efficiency estimator tool.

The Free Cooling Map, based on weather data, was designed to show where in the U.S. it is possible to obtain free cooling for data center economizers (fresh air or evaporative cooling). Future extension to Europe and Asia Pacific are planned. One map was designed for fresh air (dry bulb) cooling and the other was for evaporative cooling (wet bulb). Upcoming features will allow you enter your data center’s zip code and see how many hours of free cooling you can expect.

The PUE Calculator Tool is designed to accurately compute power usage effectiveness in a consistent manner. The tool will compare data center container designs as well as brick-and-mortar data centers. The measurement system will include power transfer switches, uninterruptible power supply, power distribution units, cooling towers, condenser chiller pumps, fire suppression, security systems, servers and more. The remaining controversy is over air movers (fanless servers) because rack-based air movers could be considered either IT or facility load, depending on your point of view.

Pam Lembke of IBM presented on the Power Configurations Calculator, which allows users to compare efficiency curves on power distribution topologies and create their own topologies based on their own power distribution equipment configurations.

Andrew Fanara, director of the data center energy efficiency program for the Environmental Protection Agency, said he is very pleased and positive about the work done by the Green Grid and expects it to be very beneficial if changes in public policy drive up electricity rates.

Jim Pappas of Intel Corp. said that the level of participation from other industry groups, such as the Storage Networking Industry Association and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers, or ASHRAE, is unprecedented. “Work group volunteers clearly understand that they are there not to get their names known, but rather to get some engineering collateral that helps you get your job done,” Pappas said.

Paul Scheihing of the Department of Energy (DoE) said he has worked with trade groups for many years and gives The Green Grid an “A” for its rapid and high-quality work. A Memorandum of Understanding between The Green Gird and DoE for a 10% energy savings commitment across the industry illustrates that they are serious about making progress.

What’s next for The Green Grid 2010?
Who will be on the podium next year who was not represented this year at The Green Grid Technical Forum? The U.S. Green Building Council, the Ethernet Alliance, the Distributed Management Task Force or the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation? The networking and storage industries are large energy consumers. Will they be at the table?

The Green Grid’s Data Center 2.0 strategy is to integrate software, networking, storage and facilities. Software companies can no longer hide under the radar. We need to bring them into the conversation along with the hardware and infrastructure teams. The invite is out. If you can contribute with your knowledge of service-oriented architecture, Open Applications Group standards or additional software platforms that are energy-aware, there is a seat at the table of The Green Grid

Of course, a lot of the discussion on Data Center 2.0 is still like unbaked bread, with a mushy, doughy consistency. Enterprise applications, for example: What is the right software performance metric? The intelligence in instrumentation is available, but the work groups have to understand what to measure.

Green IT and the economy
The shrinking marketplace was discussed at length in conversations with colleagues from the vendor community. Most of the people I spoke with were fairly optimistic in the face of delayed new sales, believing that our industry will find a way through this recession by exhibiting solid management skills. Perhaps the pessimists didn’t make it to this meeting, or maybe it’s a mark of America’s positive spin that we aren’t discussing the downsizing of the market from the podium. When sales forecasts drop so dramatically, shouldn’t we address them, even from the podium at a technical forum?

The last comment aside, I was pleased to have interacted with so many bright and pleasant people who are doing all they can to move the conversation about data center energy efficiency into the 21st Century.

Feb 11 2009   2:41PM GMT

Measuring data center performance

Posted by: Mark Fontecchio
Green data center, Data center production, Data center power management

There has plenty of talk around the green data center and data center energy efficiency, and one of the players has been The Green Grid, a nonprofit group focused on the topic. The Green Grid came out with power usage effectiveness (PUE), which compares total facility power to IT equipment power.

But in the end, what matters is what your data center does, not how much energy it consumes. You might have a PUE of 1.1, but if your servers just sit there idly all day long, who cares? Data centers are built to perform work, and if they don’t do that, energy consumption doesn’t mean squat. Re-enter The Green Grid.

Over the last year or so, there has been discussion over defining data center performance compared to energy consumed, often referred to as a data center’s useful work or data center productivity. The Green Grid has now come out with eight different proposals for “proxies,” which the group describes as approximations for comparing data center production to data center energy consumption. It compares them to the stickers in car lots that claim a certain miles-per-gallon rating, right down to the warning that “your mileage may vary.”

And before companies start comparing each other’s data center production, a warning from The Green Grid:

Comparisons between data centers would be valuable in a marketing or evaluation sense, but it is unlikely that any proxy for data center productivity will be comparable across multiple data centers. Rather, the primary use for a proxy will continue to be an indication of improvement over time for a single data center, and very constrained comparisons between data centers that perform the same function.

The data center production proxies

Proxy 1: User-defined measure of useful work divided by energy consumption. This proposal defers to the user to define useful work in a data center. That could be the number of emails sent, or the number of database queries handled. Whatever the case, it’s up to the user to define and measure it.

• Pro: User gets to define useful work
• Con: That definition could vary from application to application and server to server, making an overall measure of the data center difficult
• Measured in tasks per kilowatt-hour (kwh)

Proxy 2: Green Grid-provided measure of useful work divided by energy consumption. Through The Green Grid, Intel Corp. will provide a software development kit with an application programming interface that you can install on a subset of your IT equipment. It will report data from software running on those servers, which can be converted to useful work and compared to energy consumption for that subset. That number can then be extrapolated for the entire data center.

• Pro: Provides a standard way to measure useful work across applications
• Con: Requires download and running of external software
• Measured in tasks/kwh

Proxy 3: Sample workload divided by energy consumption of a subset of servers. The Green Grid says it will provide a bunch of sample workloads that users can run on a subset of servers. The user decides which sample workload best describes what the overall data center does. The workload is run to get a measurement of work completed. That is divided by energy consumption and extrapolated for the entire data center.

• Pro: Similar to current benchmarking tests in the data center
• Con: Mixed-workload data centers might not benefit as much, and sample workloads must be made to work on as many server platforms as possible
• Measured in tasks/kwh

Proxy 4: Bits per kilowatt-hour. Add the total number of bits coming out of all outbound routers, and divide by energy consumption.

• Pro: Easy to set up and measure, with an easy-to-understand result
• Con: Uncertainty about whether all bits are created equal
• Measured in megabits/kwh

Proxy 5: Server utilization using SPEC’s CPU benchmark. Measure CPU utilization over a period of time with the existing CPU benchmark from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC), and divide by energy consumption.

• Pro: Easy to implement, schedule and understand
• Con: Benchmark is not available on all server platforms, and only measures the CPU utilization of the application in question, and not underlying framework such as the operating system and systems management tools
• Measured in jobs/kwh

Proxy 6: Server utilization using SPEC’s power benchmark. Same as the previous proxy, but this time using the SPEC power benchmark, which measures performance compared to power for a server.

• Pro: Easy to implement, schedule and understand
• Con: SPEC power results depend on manufacturers publishing updated measurements for their server products
• Measured in power-weighted jobs per kwh

Proxy 7: Compute units per second trend curve. Group your servers by the year purchased. A server produced in 2002 equals one million compute units per second. The value then increases or decreases by a factor of seven every five years depending on when the servers were purchased. Add the total number of compute units and divide by energy consumption.

• Pro: No software needed and no benchmarks to run
• Con: Bias toward newer servers and a lack of comparison of different servers released in the same year
• Measured in millions of compute units per kwh

Proxy 8: Operating system workload efficiency. Calculates the number of operating system instances and compares that number to the power being used at that time.

• Pro: Provides good high-level estimate of efficiency and utilization
• Con: Not as granular as some might want (ie., what if the operating systems aren’t even running applications?)
• Measured in operating instances per kwh

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Wow, that’s a lot of proxies! Let us know which one or ones you like, and which ones you think are stupid. The Green Grid plans to digest comments from its members and the data center user crowd for at least a few months, and then decide sometime after that which one it favors. The group has even set up an online survey on the proxies, so you can let The Green Grid know which you prefer.

Feb 4 2009   2:33PM GMT

Tidbits from The Green Grid Technical Forum

Posted by: Mark Fontecchio
Green data center, Data center design, Green Grid

The Green Grid Technical Forum continues today in San Jose. Yesterday was for members only; today it’s open to anyone. I spoke yesterday to two board members, John  Tuccillo from APC and Mark Monroe from Sun Microsystems. They updated me on some of the things going on with The Green Grid, which was formed a couple years ago to address the growing issue of data center power consumption. Here’s a rundown on a few of the details.

Data center design guide

Starting this year, The Green Grid will start putting together a data center design guide, something it’s calling Data Center 2.0. It’s aiming to release the first draft of the design guide in February 2010, a year from now. The guide will purportedly be a top-to-bottom look at how to build an efficient data center, looking at everything from design to construction to operations.

Data center Second Life

Tuccillo and Monroe also told me plans for The Green Grid Academy, which the group sees as a way to more easily disseminate information, metrics and tools that they’ve created. As Tuccillo said, “we need to embed deeper learning so the material can become second nature.” The concept: A user goes to The Green Grid Academy, gets themselves an avatar, and is then walked through a virtual world set up as a vendor-neutral data center. The user can then choose to take classes on various elements of operating a data center, such as Green Grid metrics.  It will be free. Right now it is available only to members, as the group wants them to vet it and find any bugs. They hope to have it ready for everyone in the first half of this year.

“This will give us a platform for end user type education,” Monroe said.

Making data center end user progress

When The Green Grid formed more than two years ago, it was mostly a conglomeration of vendors, and it took some heat because of that. Even now, the board of directors all come from vendor companies — AMD, APC, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun.

But it has made some progress in bringing more end users into the fold. Last fall it formed an end-user advisory council, a 10-member group whose members include data center users from AT&T, British Telecom and eBay. Their job is to guide the board of directors so the focus of The Green Grid doesn’t lean too far on the IT supplier side. They’re involved in the data center design guide mentioned above, for example. And The Green Grid has been strict about who gets on the advisory council. A company like Microsoft could conceivably have a representative on there, since it’s one of the largest builders of data centers in the world. But The Green Grid determined that any IT vendor could not have representation on the end user council.

In addition, Tuccillo and Monroe said they’re growing their end-user ranks. The Green Grid has 200 members now, with about 18% or 36 members being solely end users.

Feb 2 2009   7:04PM GMT

Data center fan efficiency hubbub from ASHRAE

Posted by: Mark Fontecchio
Data Center airflow, data center cooling

The following is a guest post from Vali Sorell, an associate partner in the critical facilities division at the Syska Hennessy Group. Sorell was a speaker at the ASHRAE Technical Committee (TC) 9.9 sessions in Chicago last week, and had some comments about our story on data center air-conditioning fans.

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We all agree that reducing the fan speed saves energy, regardless of whether that fan is driven through a VFD (variable frequency drive) or if that fan is driven by an EC (electronically commutated) motor. The person from 365 Main stated that “it’s not worth the extra cost to have fans run at a lower speed for such a short time.” That misses the point - the fact is that it IS possible to save energy at all times, and that lower speed does not occur for a short time. That lower speed occurs forever! This is best explained by an example.

Assume a data center has 100 CRAC units, 80 of them are needed to meet the loads, and 20 of them are needed for redundancy. This amounts to 25% redundancy, which is very typical for most data centers. Let’s also assume that the load is constant from now till forever (meaning that the part load conditions are not considered, i.e. they are history).

Case 1: 80 units running at 100% speed consume 80/100 = 80% of the possible fan energy use.
Case 2: 100 units running at 80% speed consume 80/100 x 80/100 x 80/100 = 51% of the possible fan energy use.

Compared to normal operation, using all of the available redundant CRAC units at variable speed (regardless of whether that variable speed is achieved by EC motors or VFD’s) consumes 100%-(51%/80%) = 36% less fan energy than running the load-required complement of CRAC units at full speed. That’s not a small amount of energy!