Data center power management

Jun 2 2009   3:10PM GMT

CA to buy some Cassatt assets

Posted by: Mark Fontecchio
Cassatt, CA, Data center power management

Last month we reported that Cassatt Corp., a data center energy management software company, was nearing bankruptcy. The CEO said they had been unsuccessful in finding any suitors.

That has changed, as CA announced this morning that it would buy some of Cassatt’s assets, including patents, technology and staff. According to the CA press release:

Cassatt’s Rob Gingell, executive vice president of Product Development and Chief Technology Officer, and Steve Oberlin, Chief Scientist and co-founder, have joined CA, along with their team of developers, engineers, and other key employees. In addition, CA has acquired several Cassatt patents and patent applications, as well as other intellectual property.

Cassatt’s founder and CEO Bill Coleman will not be moving to CA — it’s unclear why.

Cassatt made its name by selling software that controlled a server’s power consumption by putting it to sleep when it wasn’t processing any work, though it was trying to also make a name for itself in the cloud computing space. Just yesterday we wrote about Cassatt’s recent user survey on data center energy efficiency, which had some bright points and sore spots.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. It will be interesting to see whether CA will incorporate the server sleeping technology into its own systems management software, but from the looks of the press release, it seems like CA will use the technology mostly to push some kind of cloud- or utility-based computing infrastructure. Our guess is that CA will probably run into the same issues as Cassatt did if they try to encourage users to shut down unused servers. The mentality against it within IT is just too strong. We’ll see.

Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff has a piece on the deal, going into some detail about why he thinks Cassatt was doomed — mainly because it was a small company trying to sell cutting-edge software to big companies. Not often is that a recipe for success:

Automation technologies such as Cassatt’s address very real problems. But they’re tough for a small company to sell for a couple of reasons.

The first is that they remain on the leading edge of the adoption curve. Large IT departments are indeed handing off more and more operations to their management software. But relinquishing control of data center operations has long been a slow and incremental process.

The second is that automation software is primarily interesting at large scale. If you only have 10 servers, you probably don’t feel a pressing need to automate. It’s when you have a thousand servers and you can’t run things manually any longer that you are most driven to turn to software for help.

But adopting a management platform for large swaths of a data center is a big commitment and requires a level of trust that enterprises are more likely to place in a CA, Hewlett-Packard, or IBM than they are in a start-up–however great the products.

Jay Fry, a Cassatt marketing guy, weighs in on the CA-Cassatt deal, addressing Haff’s points by saying that an acquisition by CA makes adoption of Cassatt’s technologies by large companies more likely. Unlike Coleman, Fry will be moving over to CA.

Jun 1 2009   6:03PM GMT

Cassatt survey on data center efficiency: Some great findings

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

Data center power management software and cloud computing company Cassatt Corp. has a great survey out now on users’ perceptions of data center efficiency. What makes the survey especially powerful is it’s in its second year, so it can be compared to last year.

Jay Fry from Cassatt has a couple blog posts on the survey, and takes a detailed look at how the results this year differ from last year (check out our own report on Cassatt’s survey last year). I won’t go into all the details of the posts, each of which are worth your time to read, but here’s a quick bullet list on some of the findings:

Good

• More companies have a corporate “green” initiative
• More people know how efficient their data center is, and are measuring it
• More companies have a data center efficiency program in progress
• The IT/facilities gap is shrinking

Bad

• Fewer companies can justify shutting off servers when they’re not being used
• Users are still going primarily to vendors to get information on data center efficiency (as opposed to the media or industry groups like The Green Grid and The Uptime Institute)

Check out Fry’s first post and second post for all the details.

Mar 12 2009   11:43PM GMT

Sorting through data center utility rebates

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

There’s a good chance that your utility company has an incentive program in place if you boost your data center energy efficiency. But sorting through the programs can be a hassle, and dealing with the back-and-forth with the utility company can as well.

In addition, said Adam Fairbanks, vice president of data center services for Bluestone Energy Services, data center managers have enough on their plate. They’re more concerned with keeping their facilities online, not looking for utility rebates.

Bluestone is a consulting firm that serves as a middleman between data centers and the utility company. It looks to get data centers utility rebates. By coming into the building and doing an audit, Bluestone can determine if there needs to be a more detailed technical assistance study, and then report on how much money you can save by implementing the utility rebate program.

Fairbanks said that utilities will usually pay for half of this assistance study, and in the end, the utility company itself sends the end user a letter detailing how much of a rebate the utility will give if you move forward with energy efficiency measures.

Data center utility rebate programs from Pacific Gas & Electric have made the most headlines in the data center world, but Fairbanks said utilities up and down the East Coast, in the Midwest and on the West Coast offer incentive programs. Not all of them are as specific as PG&E’s, which for example has one specifically for server virtualization projects. Most of them just give a rebate based on how much power you can prove you’ll save through an energy efficiency project.

Is hiring Bluestone or another consultant worth it? It could be by lessening your own headache, and if Bluestone can prove that the utility rebate will save you more than you have to pay Bluestone in the first place. Then again, if you have the in-house expertise and knowledge to do it yourself, go for it. Exploring your utility’s rebate programs is a great way to pick up some extra savings.

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 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.

Dec 1 2008   2:53PM GMT

Data center location and the cost of power

Posted by: Mark Fontecchio
DataCenter, Data center power management, PUE

What costs more in your data center, server hardware or power? Well, it depends on your zip code.

James Hamilton, an architect at Microsoft, recently wrote about the cost of power compared to servers in large-scale data centers. He concluded that servers cost more than power in cooling — in Hamilton’s scenario, the server hardware costs three times more than power. Take a look:

Hamilton made available the spreadsheet on overall data center costs that he created to make the calculations.

Two assumptions caught my eye: one on the cost of power, which Hamilton put at $0.07 per kilowatt-hour (kwh); the other on the power usage effectiveness (PUE) being 1.7.

According to the Uptime Institute, the average PUE is 2.5. This average was calculated using data from Uptime’s data center user members, many of which are large companies running large data centers. So I plugged that PUE number in instead. A worse (higher) PUE number leads to higher power costs, because there is more power being wasted.

On the cost of power, I wasn’t sure whether $0.07/kwh was cheap or not. It seemed cheap to me, but I’m not that familiar with power rates. I went to a Web site run by the Energy Information Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Energy. The EIA publishes a regular newsletter called Electric Power Monthly that has these rates. The data I looked at was in a spreadsheet called Average Retail Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector, by State.

As it turns out, location matters a lot. The cheapest location for power is West Virginia, where the industrial rate is 4.34 cents per kwh. If you build a data center there with a PUE of 2.5 and use Hamilton’s spreadsheet,  server hardware costs three times more than power. If you build it in Hawaii, where power costs 29.51 cents per kwh, then power costs more than twice as much as server hardware.

The national industrial rate in August was 7.61 cents per kwh. Using that assumption to build a data center with a PUE of 2.5, server hardware costs about 80% more than power.

Nov 26 2008   9:05PM GMT

Eco-efficient IT Research Director discusses conservation tactics

Posted by: Caroline Hunter
Data center power management, Green data center

At the recent 451 Group Third Annual Client Conference in Boston, I spoke with 451 Group Eco-efficient IT Research Director Andy Lawrence about the energy-efficiency politics, tools and financial considerations at play in the enterprise now. Data centers may soon outdo the airline industry in contributinng to global warming. To learn about how to approach energy conservation in the data center check out a video of the discussion.

Nov 19 2008   4:52PM GMT

EU launches Code of Conduct for Data Centers

Posted by: Bridget Botelho
Virtualization, DataCenter, data center consolidation, Data center power management, Green data center, Data center policies, EU Code of Conduct for Data Centers

The Sustainable Development and Energy Innovation of the U.K.’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has challenged the IT industry to prevent further climate change with the official launch of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centers on November 19.

The Code of Conduct was created in response to increasing energy consumption in data centers and the need to reduce the related environmental, economic and energy supply impacts. It was developed with collaboration from the British Computer Society, AMD, APC, Dell, Fujitsu, Gartner, HP, IBM, Intel, and many others.

Those who choose to abide by the voluntary Code of Conduct will have to implement energy efficiency best practices, meet minimum procurement standards, and report energy consumption every year.

The UK is also the first country in the world to approve legally binding climate change laws to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; data centers in the U.K. are responsible for about 3% of electricity use, and the goal is an 80% reduction in greenhouse gasses by 2050.

America is far behind Europe with climate change policies, but it looks like it might finally be getting its act together in terms of protecting the planet. Climate change legislation and carbon emission regulations promise to become a reality under President-elect Barack Obama, who has pledged to enact global-warming legislation.

Unfortunately, the legislation would impose a cap-and-trade system on utility companies that could raise the price of power an estimated 20% across the board, so getting as efficient as possible before the legislation takes effect would be a wise move.

To that end, vendors have come up with highly efficient servers and lower watt CPUs that perform just as well as their higher power predecessors. There is also software to control power consumption and to cap server power usage, and finally reliable virtualization software to increase server utilization, so there really are no excuses for running under-utilized systems these days (and if there are excuses, I’d love to hear them).

Sep 26 2008   2:03PM GMT

Data center solar power: like a dusty, basement treadmill

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

A colleague sent over a link yesterday about Microsoft installing solar panels on its new San Antonio data center. Pretty neat, huh? Solar panels in the data center? I think so, too, except Microsoft isn’t actually doing it.

That’s what Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge revealed in an update to the post. As it turns out, Microsoft isn’t going to use solar power at the data center yet. In fact, it’s not going to even install the solar panels. And because of that, data center solar power there is like the treadmill gathering dust in your basement — ready to be used, but rarely actually used. From the post:

While Microsoft discussed plans to install solar panels at the San Antonio data center during Monday’s media event, the system won’t be operational in the near future. “While it is indeed sunny quite a bit of the time in San Antonio, the economics for solar are not yet a good fit for this facility,” said Mike Manos, general manager of Global Foundation Services for Microsoft. ”As solar technology advances, we anticipate that solar may become a more viable option within a few years. As a result, we have enabled our building to accept the technology and weight of solar panels when the technology matures.”

Oh, OK, so the building’s foundation and infrastructure have the ability to handle solar power, but won’t yet because it’s not financially viable. That’s fine. I understand that it’s difficult to power energy-hungry servers with just the sun’s light. I visited AISO.net’s solar-powered data center last year, and saw how they needed two big solar panel arrays just to power a row of servers and the data center it sits in.

What Microsoft should do instead is put those dusty treadmills to work. Install them in a room somewhere, hook them to some wires, and turn Microsoft employees into gerbils. Treadmill power should be where it’s at. You can encourage exercise at work and power your data center at the same time. For the record, I would also approve the use of elliptical machines, stationary bikes and other fitness equipment to power Microsoft’s data center. So how about it Pelamis, where’s your Cardio Energy Converter?

Aug 28 2008   1:26PM GMT

Powering down your servers

Posted by: Mark Fontecchio
DataCenter, Data center power management

I didn’t know this, but I guess yesterday was “Power IT Down Day.” Hewlett-Packard, Citrix and Intel joined forces to propose the idea of asking PC users to install power management software that can decrease the power use of their machines when not in use.

I found out about “Power IT Down Day” this morning from Ken Oestreich, the director of product marketing at Cassatt Corp., who wrote a blog post about “Power IT Down Day” in his Fountainhead blog yesterday. Oestreich wrote that, although it’s a good idea, Power IT Down Day is also “missing the boat” because its sponsors stress PC power management, but not server power management. He goes on:

At the time of this writing, the official website at HP showed over 2,700 participants, saving an estimated 35,000 KWh. But here’s a sobering statistic: At a recent Silicon Valley Leadership Group Energy Summit, Cassatt piloted Server power management software. The organization using the software operated a number of its own data centers — and the case study findings showed that if this software were used enterprise-wide, the annual savings could be 9,100KWh for this enterprise alone.

You’ll never guess what Cassatt does. That’s right! It makes server power management software.

But the fact remains that Oestreich has a point. In a report to Congress last year, the federal Environmental Protection Agency recommended server power management as one way to reduce data center energy levels. Other industry groups like The Green Grid and The Uptime Institute recommend the same.

The good news is that data centers are listening. In our own purchasing intentions survey last year, only 18% said they were using power-down features on their servers, with another 13% saying they planned to sometime last year. Those numbers have since jumped. According to our new survey results from this year, 31% have implemented power-down features, and another 22% said they plan to sometime this year.

So I guess data center managers have gotten the hint. Maybe “Power IT Down Day” doesn’t have to be extended after all…