Data Center

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.

Facebook spending big money on data center real estate

Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge did some great research into how much money the social networking giant Facebook is spending on data center real estate a year. The majority of that with Digital Realty Trust and DuPont Fabros. At this point the company does not plan to build its own data centers. For more info on Facebook’s data center growth, check this Facebook video.

Sorting through data center utility rebates

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.

Top ten industry demands from Data Center Pulse

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.

Green Grid Postmortem: Successes and the work ahead

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.