Green data center

Mark Bramfitt leaves PG&E, and a gap in data center utility relations

Northern California utility Pacific Gas and Electric Co. made headlines by finding novel ways to offer rebates for energy efficiency in the data center. The company’s programs have become a model for other utilities in the state and around the world. Mark Bramfitt had headed up PG&E’s data center energy initiatives, until last Thursday when Bramfitt announced he was leaving PG&E.

John Sheputis, CEO of Fortune Data Centers and a recipient of nearly $1 million in PG&E data center efficiency rebates was at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit when Bramfitt broke the news.

“The reaction from the crowd was impressive… and for good reason. Mark is an excellent speaker, a very well known entity in the valley, and among the most outspoken people I know of regarding the broader engagement opportunities between data centers and electricity providers,” Sheputis said. “No one has done more to fund efficiency programs and award high tech consumers for efficient behavior.”

Bramfitt and PG&E started focusing on data center utility rebates and incentives in 2006. According to Bramfitt, PG&E’s data center program saved three megawatts of load in 2007, and doubled that in 2008 saving seven megawatts. But getting IT pros to jump through the hoops to get the rebates was a difficult task.

“The effort Mark was undertaking was critical and immensely difficult,” said Mark Thiele, Director Business Operations R&D at VMware and co-founder of Data Center Pulse. “I sincerely hope that PG&E hires someone to pick up where Mark left off. However, if his replacement is to be successful, I think s/he will have to do more to bring the public and government agencies into the fight. It’s possible that getting new blood, as well as renewed enthusiasm for the effort will be just what the doctor ordered.”

“PG&E had the leading program in the US to reward the end user for their efficiency choices, but it was rather difficult to obtain the rebates,” said Dean Nelson, data center director at Ebay. Many companies found the effort not worth the return. I think Mark Bramfitt had some very good successes and all the right intentions but lacked the future support within PG&E to continue. I believe it is crucial that the utilities (all of them) interface with their corporate customers, and each other, to decrease consumption and optimize efficiencies. I hope that PG&E has plans to fill this position and/or refocus the program to make it simpler for data center users to take advantage it. They have momentum and should continue. Killing it would be a mistake.”

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”

Cassatt survey on data center efficiency: Some great findings

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.

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.

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.

Local official wants to build data center powered by methane

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.

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

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.

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.