Equinix wins energy savings award from Silicon Valley group

Major data center colocation company Equinix scored an energy award from the Silicon Valley Leadership Group this week for the energy-efficient design its data centers.

Equinix has received almost $1 million in rebates from the city of Santa Clara for the energy efficiency measures, which include using airside economizers and variable frequency drive (VFD) fans in their data center infrastructure equipment.

The company estimates that the airside economizers save $300,000 per year and the variable speed fans save $51,000 per year. See “Data center air-conditioning fans blow cost savings your way” and “Data center cooling: airside and waterside economizers” for more information on these cost-saving data center technologies.

NSA to build massive $1.6 billion data center in Utah

Last week President Barack Obama signed a war spending bill that, among other things, gets the ball rolling on a massive National Security Agency data center that is estimated to cost $1.6 billion over the next four years.

The data center would be built at Camp Williams, a military base just south of Salt Lake City. The 200-acre data center site would have 65 megawatts of total electric load, which is about the same amount of power used by all the homes in Salt Lake City. About 30 megawatts of that total would be for the IT load, according to military documents, with room to expand up to 65 megawatts. According to government records:

Installed infrastructure will support 65MW technical load data center capacity for future expandability. The design is to be capable of Tier 3 reliability. Power density will be appropriate for current state-of-the- art high-performance computing devices and associated hardware architecture.

Congress last week passed and Obama signed the bill authorizing the start of the NSA data center construction, with initial spending approval for $169.5 million. The agency hopes to begin construction of the facility in September and finish by next May. Some other details from the project:

REQUIREMENT: This project is required to provide a 30MW technical load data center and infrastructure for 65MW technical load data center capacity to support mission. The project will include the following:

Site

• Facility design goal will be to the highest LEED standard attainable within available resources and will include: sustainable site characteristics, water and energy efficiency, materials and resources criteria, and indoor environmental quality.
• Mechanical and electrical plants are to be housed in separate structures to prevent transfer of noise and vibrations to the data centers

Facilities

• Data center technical load of 30 MW distributed across raised floor are the design parameters for the facility.
• The infrastructure support and administrative areas will be designed to support state-of-the-art high-performance computing devices and associated hardware architecture.
• Slab floor loading of approximately 1500 pounds per square foot (PSF)
• Enhancements to the building for IT and security include construction as a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF), as well as, requirements related to Antiterrorism Force Protection (ATFP).

Structural

• Technical load will be distributed across the data center areas.
• Seismic considerations are to be made in the facility design.
• Data center areas are to have depressed concrete slab construction with a load bearing capacity of 1500 pounds per square foot (PSF).
• Facility command and control contained in a central modular office component.
• Facility will have a loading dock with vehicle bays, three (3) of which are to be equipped with dock levelers sized to handle tractor trailers.

Electrical

• Technical load capacity is 30 MW with loads distributed evenly across the data center areas.
• Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) to either PDU level or distribution panel level if required
• Dedicated substation for each critical UPS.
• UPS and generator backup for facility systems.
• Generators will include Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) pollution control equipment, chemical storage tanks and feed system.

Mechanical

• Chilled water system to support both air and water cooled equipment.
• Each data center area is to have air cooled and water cooled equipment with Computer Room Air Handlers (CRAHs) located external to the raised floor area. The piping headers / systems are to be designed to accommodate future expansion.
• Back-up capability for mechanical equipment.
• Cooling Towers
• Air distribution redundancy for CRAHs.
• Fire Protection - Double interlocked pre-action fire protection system for all electrical and mechanical support spaces.
• Wet pipe for administrative and raised floor areas per DOD standards.

Security systems

• Video surveillance
• Intrusion detection
• Access control system

Yahoo! to reportedly turn data center 10 degrees for better cooling

The designs for a new Yahoo! data center in western New York have changed - by 10 degrees.

The engineering firm for the future 180,000-square-foot facility told local planning officials in Lockport, N.Y., that it was changing its design plans by 10 degrees to improve cooling. This according to Orest P. Ciolko of the Wendel Duchscherer engineering firm.

“That has to do with the prevailing winds during the months we need cooling,” Ciolko told The Buffalo News. Ciolko said that computer modeling done by Yahoo!’s designers “realigned the pods so the prevailing winds will blow directly into louvers on the sides of the buildings,” according to the story.

Apple to reportedly build $1 billion data center in Maiden, N.C.

Apple will reportedly build its huge new East Coast data center in Maiden, N.C., according to local media and Data Center Knowledge.

According to the reports, the facility will be built in Maiden, N.C., a small town of about 3,300 people in the western part of the state, about an hour north of Charlotte. The $1 billion price tag is supposedly what Apple’s investment will be over the course of nine years, and the facility is expected to employ at least 50 full-time employees. The North Carolina Department of Commerce estimates that the data center will create more than 3,000 jobs total, many of them related to facility construction.

Microsoft hires Yahoo data center exec

Microsoft recently hired Kevin Timmons to lead Microsoft Global Foundation Services (GFS), the company’s data center services organization. From Microsoft’s data center blog:

Kevin brings a wealth of knowledge and passion in this space, most recently serving as vice president of Operations at Yahoo!, where he led the build-out of their data centers and infrastructure. Before that he was a director of Operations at GeoCities, and prior to that he served as a senior software engineer at Marconi Dynamics.

Kevin is known as a hands-on leader with a great grasp on the issues in his field and a keen interest in increasing energy efficiency. One of the key ways he has approached that challenge was by closely measuring efficiency at each data center and using PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) as a key metric—a strategy that helped build more efficient data centers.

Timmons was hired to replace Mike Manos, who left Microsoft earlier this year to join data center real estate company Digital Realty Trust.

CRG West changes name to CoreSite — a Carlyle Company

Data center colocation provider CRG West changed its name to CoreSite — a Carlyle Company this week. CoreSite Senior Vice President David Dunn said the company changed the name to reflect its more unified culture, and to better identify with its parent company. Dunn said the company plans to continue to build efficient data centers that meet the needs of a majority of its customers, which are primarily Uptime Tier 3 facilities designed for concurrent maintainability.

New York Times Magazine story on data centers

The New York Times Magazine this weekend will have a story on the data center industry. The story, “Data Center Overload,” is already online.

Major sources in the article include Michael Manos, the former data center pro at Microsoft who is now at Digital Realty Trust, as well as Ken Brill from The Uptime Institute. The author also spoke to Chris Crosby from Digital Realty Trust, Jonathan Koomey, the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory scientist who wrote the study a couple years ago on data center energy consumption, and other sources from Microsoft.

The only issue with the story I have is the author seems to equate the cloud with all data center infrastructure, which isn’t the case. Other than that, it’s a pretty good overview of the industry.

EPA releases documents on Energy Star for storage

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has now started down the road to developing an Energy Star spec for storage equipment. Late last month, the EPA released the first version of its Energy Star spec for servers, and it continues to work on making enterprise data centers more efficient. (At least for now, it seems that most data center managers are indifferent to Energy Star for servers.)

This week the EPA released a framework document for Energy Star storage equipment. Among other things, it looks like the spec will cover direct attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS) and storage attached network (SAN), hard disk, tape, optical, solid state, hybrid storage, and bladed storage. The EPA has a dedicated Energy Star site for storage if you want to check it out.

Energy Star for servers: Unexpected impact on data center efficiency

This blog post was written by SearchDataCenter.com contributer Julius Neudorfer.

It’s out! After several years, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released the first version of the Energy Star specification for servers. Now, how fast can we adapt?

It was created through a solid collaborative effort between government and major equipment vendors. The spec addresses many areas of power usage and waste in the power supply (and redundant power supplies) for servers. Until now, there has been no standard for server power supply efficiency — the existing Energy Star program covered PCs but exempted servers. Most server manufactures have been voluntarily improving their power supply and server energy efficiency, but few published their complete specifications. The spec also addressed standby power and efficiency at less than full load. In fact, it calls for a minimum of 85% efficiency at 50% of rated load, and 82% at only 20% of rated maximum. This is an extremely important step forward, since many servers normally run with dual power supplies, each one only loaded at 20-30% of its maximum rating due to load sharing (under 2N, they normally never operate above 50%). The spec also calls for the second (redundant) power supply to have a static loss of 20 W or less. This is a major improvement to the fixed losses found in typical servers with dual power supplies.

The spec covers more than just power supplies. It even limits the idle power of hard drives to 8 W and memory to only 2 W per gigabyte. (Note: There are some limitations on this, but is part of the requirements.)

Power management is required! Moreover, the spec mandates that idle servers must draw much less power than existing servers and that power management must be enabled when shipped. Until now, most manufacturers shipped servers with the power management disabled, and most IT shops never used or chose not to enable it. In fact, the Energy Star spec calls for a base server with one CPU to draw only 55 W at idle. This is about one-third or less of the typical single CPU server, which can draw 150-200 W at idle.

However, the spec excludes blade servers! Due to the complexity of blade chassis, power supply options and server blades from different vendors, this first standard wisely decided not to further delay the release date to include blade servers. (This is still being worked on and is expected to be addressed later this year.)

I predict the specification will have unexpected effects on data center efficiency in the future. While at first blush all this should save energy in the data center, this is just the first of many mandated server and IT equipment energy-efficiency regulations that will impact the relatively flat power curve of data centers. Until recently, most servers and IT equipment drew a substantial amount of the maximum power, even while idle. As these new servers begin to replace older equipment, it will begin to be felt and seen in the IT power load, which will vary much more widely that it does today. This means the UPS and cooling loads will become much more dynamic and will require more responsive, scalable infrastructure systems to operate efficiently (on demand) at peak power and cooling loads as well as low loads.

The data center infrastructure of the future will need to be responsive to continuous and rapid changes in power demands and especially to moving and changing cooling loads, as IT equipment powers up and down in different areas of the floor. As this new paradigm evolves, The “smart” data center of the future will use advanced power management systems to interactively broker and negotiate power requests (and perhaps charges and rates) from IT equipment to the UPS, intelligent PDUs and, most importantly, intelligent cooling systems, which will need to adapt to varying heat loads while trying to operating efficiently.

Stay tuned as this specification develops. As they say in the auto business, “Your actual mileage may vary”

Data center pro Michael Manos draws a comic strip, so I do too

Michael Manos, the former data center pro at Microsoft who is now at Digital Realty Trust, just wrote a blog admitting his childhood dream of being a comic strip artist. So he gives it a try here. It’s data center related:

Not bad, although I don’t think Manos would be offended if I told him he should keep his day job. Actually, Manos inspired me to do one of my own. Here goes (mine isn’t data center related, but it’s in color!):