April, 2009

Redefining a “green” data center

It is all well and good to talk about building green data centers here in the United States, but what is happening overseas?

Though some of the video teleconference at The Uptime Institute’s show last week was dull, there were some interesting insights into how different parts of the world run their data centers. The video conference had participants in New York, San Francisco, Italy, and South Africa, among other places. When talking about data center energy efficiency, the folks in South Africa had some interesting things to say.

Some countries in Africa have unreliable power grids. Nigeria is one nation that sticks out, and one mentioned during the conference. And so in Nigeria, many data centers are running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, on diesel generators. That’s right: diesel generators. It’s the only way they can guarantee uptime. Talk about running up your carbon footprint.

As the guy from South Africa said, “it goes totally against the green movement we’re talking about.”

But Robert Aldrich, the senior manager of the efficiency assurance program at Cisco, said it just opens up other opportunities for electricity generation. Solar power, for example, becomes a much more attractive option for Nigerian data centers.

NetApp the “unnamed customer” with $1.4M rebate

Another update to the story on data center utility rebate programs: I just heard from Joe Miller, the facilities operations manager for NetApp in North Carolina. Miller told me that NetApp is the “unnamed customer” that Mark Bramfitt was mentioning when talking about a $1.4 million rebate it gave to a customer last year.

NetApp received the money for the design of a new data center in Sunnyvale, Calif. Energy efficiency measures taken at the facility include airside economizers, flywheel UPSes, a variable-speed primary chiller plant, and more efficient transformers. PG&E estimates at the time that the NetApp data center design will save PG&E about 11 million kilowatt-hours of energy every year, which equates to savings of $1.2 annually and a carbon footprint reduction of almost 3,400 tons.

Thanks to Miller for identifying this “unnamed customer.”

Utility: Ratepayers wouldn’t stand for data center rebate program

Following my story on data center utility rebates, I got the following response from Chris Johnston, the national critical facilities chief engineer for Syska Hennessy Group, which does a lot of data center design and construction projects. Here it is:

Some thoughts about this process.

1. This rebate money is not PGE’s (Pacific Gas & Electric) money - that money can only come from their shareholders and you can bet that the shareholders aren’t paying for this. The rebate money is paid out of the rate base, so Microsoft, NetAPP, (Bank of America) and similar users in the same rate class paid for the rebate.
2. The next time another user in the eBay and KP (Kaiser Permanente) rate class gets a rebate, eBay and KP get to pay for it.
3. Eventually, the smarter users who participate get an incentive that is paid by the not-so-smart users.
4. This works in PGE’s service area now, but wouldn’t work elsewhere in the US. I talked with a major utility elsewhere and they said that their ratepayers wouldn’t stand for something like this.
5. The more virtualization is done, the less a data center remains a constant load.

In particular I find it interesting that some utilities claim that they wouldn’t even be able to implement the program because their ratepayers wouldn’t put up with it. This could be quite a roadblock to data center efficiency in some areas.

Google on data center efficiency: Stop making excuses

NEW YORK — Bill Weihl, Google’s green energy czar, told a group of data center operators here that some of them need to stop making excuses for not improving their facilities’ energy efficiency.

After years of secrecy around how its data centers operate, Google has now drawn the curtain to show how efficient its data center facilities are. But during a panel discussion at The Uptime Institute’s conference in New York today, some questioned whether all data centers should be cut in the same mold.

In particular, the question was whether the data center power usage effectiveness (PUE) of some businesses — financial institutions, for example — should be compared to those of search engines such as Google.

“Should a bank have the same PUE as a search engine?” Ken Brill, Uptime founder and executive director. “The answer is no.”

The reasoning behind it is that bank and financial applications require a higher level of uptime than search queries, and thus need more redundancy, which leads to lower efficiency. But Weihl questioned the logic.

“We actually have some Sarbanes Oxley requirements,” he said. “We’re not just a search engine company. We also run very reliable data centers that I think any data center operator here would be proud to run.”

Weihl later added that the discussion sounded like “people making excuses for why the EPA or DOE should not push hard for a standard because, hey, we’re different.”

“To me,  not to be too combative, but that sounds like an excuse for not doing better.”

Currently the federal government is working on developing an Energy Star rating for data centers. Michael Zatz, the manager of the Energy Star commercial buildings program, sees the potential for different categories of data centers, but would prefer that those categories be defined by what kind of work the data centers perform, and not necessarily by what industry they’re in or how they identify themselves.

Michael Manos leaving Microsoft to join Digital Realty Trust

Michael Manos, Microsoft’s senior director of data center services, will leave the company to join Digital Realty Trust’s data center operations.

Manos has been a big part of Microsoft opening its data centers to public view and advocating for measuring energy consumption. He was also one of the leaders of Microsoft’s containerized data center strategy, and introduced a conceptual open-air data center design. But not everything is rosy in the Microsoft data center world. The company announced earlier this year that it was slowing construction of its Chicago and Iowa facilities, and cutting data center capital expenditures by $300 million.

At Digital Realty Trust, Manos will serve as the senior vice president of technical services, overseeing data center construction and design worldwide. Digital is the largest landlord of data center properties in the world.

In a press release, Digital CEO said that Manos “was a tremendous innovator at Microsoft, and his role here at Digital Realty Trust will have an even bigger impact by enabling our customers to directly take advantage of his broad expertise in data center architecture, construction and operations.”

Manos is expected to join Digital Realty Trust in early May. In the release, he is quoted as saying that Digital “has assembled an incredibly talented team of experts in datacenter construction, energy efficiency and operations who have been on the front line of modernizing the way people around the world design and run datacenters. Joining Digital Realty Trust gives me a unique opportunity to play a significant role in creating this new vision of the datacenter and bringing those advancements to the industry as a whole.”

Chris Crosby is also a senior VP of technical services at Digital, and has been the public face of the company at industry shows, giving many technical presentations. Once Manos joins Digital, the two will work side-by-side.

It is unclear how or if Microsoft will fill the vacancy left when Manos leaves.

Sorting through the Google data center summit hype

Over the past week, there has been a lot of discussion online regarding the Google data center energy summit held at the company’s Mountain View facility last week. In particular, there has been a flurry of activity pointing to a video tour inside a Google container-based data center. Let’s step back and take a look at what information was actually new, however.

Container-based data center

Google confirmed what everyone already knew — that the company has a container-based data center. Robert X. Cringely reported this back in November 2005, so it’s not exactly news. But it’s the first time Google actually confirmed the rumors and showed a sneak peek inside. You can take a look at the video below, taken by Data Center Knowledge:

Pretty cool stuff. But as James Hamilton, an engineer at Amazon, wrote in a recent blog post, it’s interesting to note that Google built this container-based data center, but then never returned to that design. In fact, Hamilton thinks that the data center design isn’t optimized for shipping containers: Continued »