Green computing

Overheard - Hot aisle / cold aisle containment

In any push air-conditioning arrangement, two components need the most amount of power: the compressor and the fan. In a hot aisle - cold aisle arrangement, the need for cold air is reduced drastically because it’s needed only for the servers and not the entire room. Smrutiranjan Das, Hot aisle - cold aisle design best practices for data centers

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is hot aisle - cold aisle contaiment.

Overheard - Degaussing

“Outside of physical destruction, degaussing is a very reliable means for erasing backup tapes. The problem with basic degaussing is that there’s not a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ confirmation that the destruction has indeed taken place. So, ideally, both degaussing combined with physical destruction would be best to ensure nothing’s going to be recovered.” Kevin Beaver, Secure data destruction options for old backup tapes and disk

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is degaussing.

Overheard - Energy Star 5.0

Only 25 percent of PCs could qualify for Energy Star 5.0 compliance. Andy Patrizio,  Dell Goes Green With Energy Star 5.0 Push

The changes from Energy Star 4.0 to 5.0 are in three main areas:

- minimum power supply efficiency was raised from 80 percent to 85 percent.

- the formulation of criteria changed to get a measure of annualized kilowatt hour power usage based on typical energy consumption metrics.

- the AC power conversion rises to 87 percent efficiency.

PUE - Power usage effectiveness

A typical data center facility spends almost half of its energy consumption on the systems powering and cooling the computers inside — and not on the computers themselves. Google, Efficient Data Center Summit

Last October, Google disclosed details about its data center energy usage, saying it was averaging a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.21 across its six company-built data centers. To put that into perspective, a PUE of 1 means every watt goes to computing machines. A PUE of 1.5 means that half the power goes to non-computing functions like cooling or lights.

Six months later, Google says it’s got that number down to 1.19.  So how is the search giant doing it? For a long time, nobody knew.  Google’s infrastructure was top secret. But then in early April, Google held a summit and gave everyone a peek behind closed doors. Surprisingly, what they seem to have done was follow the KISS principle. Relatively speaking, they are keeping things simple.  They have their own proprietary servers and the data centers themselves are just about as lean as you could imagine. Google’s made several tours available on YouTube — and this one (below) of a data center built out of shipping containers is just amazing.  There are over 45,000 servers housed in 45 containers.  Talk about utility computing — this container tour sure looks like a utility plant to me!

At the summit, Google reps shared best practices, saying:

The best practices we’ve presented here are the main reason we’ve been able to achieve our PUE results and can be implemented in most data centers today.

• Measure PUE (Circuit transformers)
• Optimize power distribution (High efficiency transformer and UPS)
• Manage airflow (Close-coupled cooling — Eliminate hot/cold mixing)
• Adjust thermostat  (Raise cold aisle temp)
• Use free cooling  (Chiller bypass, water-side economizer)
• Use free cooling  (Chiller bypass, water-side economizer)

Overheard - What color is your meter MAID? Green

Data center managers are starting to recognize that 70 percent to 90 percent of their data is not transactional in nature, but rather, persistent data that is rarely changed, and infrequently accessed…The key to managing persistent data is to deploy storage systems that are tuned specifically to its needs. One technology that is ideally suited for persistent data is MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) storage. Will Layton, Getting Ahead of the Data Storage Energy Crisis: The Case for MAID

Tonight I’ve been reading about MAID and how it can help cut energy costs in the data center by limiting the number of spinning disks.  This week’s buzzword (besides Obama) seems to have been “intelligent power management.”

Ironically, according to a CDW Corp. report titled “Energy Efficient Information Technology,” 94 percent of IT executives with purchasing responsibility said they cared about energy efficiency but had no idea how much energy their IT operations used — even though they realized that that knowledge is critical to energy reduction efforts.  CDW should have sent them all this list of low-hanging-fruit energy savers from SearchSMBStorage.com

Overheard: PCs can consume as much as 10% of your home’s energy bill

PCs can consume as much as 10 percent of a home’s energy bill and give off as much carbon dioxide as a family car. Martin LaMonica, Edison: Free energy-saving PC software

Verdiem offers a free download of their software that monitors desktop Windows PCs and puts them in low-power mode when they’re idle. It’s called Edison. Microsoft and The Climate Savers Initiative are both supporting the launch of Edison.

Overheard: EcoRAM is the perfect marketing name

Flash doesn’t need to constantly refresh the data on the chip the way that DRAM does, so it consumes about a tenth of the power when handling a gigabyte of data. Stacey Higginbotham, In a Flash Spansion Cuts Power

Traditionally, the way to handle more information has been to buy more servers in order to get more DRAM (Micron is offering lower-power DRAM as a “green” product). Spansion hopes to change all that by using a proprietary Flash memory called EcoRAM that replaces DRAM.

Overheard: Your PUE number is like golf

“Your PUE number is like golf — the closer to 1, the better. At least that has always been the common wisdom. The goal, says experts, is to reduce your PUE. But sometimes an IT energy efficiency project can play games with that number.” Mark Fontecchio, How a virtualization and server consolidation project could hurt your PUE

Overheard: Are data Center efficiency metrics purposely obtuse?

I have come to the realization that this industry does a wonderful job in telling its members WHAT to do, but lacks to follow-up with the HOW. Michael Manos, Struggling with CADE, McKinsey / Uptime Metric

Lots of buzz about the Uptime Institute’s symposium on IT Energy Efficiency and the study McKinsey released called Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency . It’s interesting that Michael Manos estimates that only 10% of data center managers measure the efficiency of their facilities. Could it be because it’s almost impossible for the average Joe to get the data they need to plug in the formulas? Or could it be that they’re waiting for a clear winner in the proposed metrics? Try this one out for size: CADE.

CADE is the new metric-of-the-week.

CADE (Corporate Average Data center Efficiency) = (Facility Efficiency) x (Asset Efficiency)

Facility Efficiency is defined as (Facility Energy Efficiency) * (Facility Utilization)
Asset Efficiency is defined as (IT Energy Efficiency) * (IT utilization)

Suppliers to large enterprises will need to prove their green credentials with an audit

Those organizations with strong brands are helping to forge the first wave of green sourcing policies and initiatives. These policies go well beyond minimizing direct carbon emissions or requiring suppliers to comply with local environmental regulations. For example, Timberland has launched a “Green Index” environmental rating for its shoes and boots. Home Depot is working on evaluation and audit criteria for assessing supplier submissions for its new EcoOptions product line.

Gartner Highlights Key Predictions for IT Organisations and Users in 2008 and Beyond