Zen and the Art of Data Center Greening (and Energy Efficiency)

Whether you are a believer in or a skeptic about GHG’s role in global warming, you need to pay attention to how much power you consume and how much GHG is produced by using that much power. Continuing the previous blog about the U.K.’s cap-and-trade policy, called Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC), I would like to dig into a little bit more here. The bill is not terribly simple and there is even a workshop to help you understand it. So I’ll keep it simple and just give some highlights here. Those who want to study it further may want to reference what Mike Manos of Digital Realty Trust (DRT) cited—three good sources of information for the CRC:

U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change short presentation
Wikipedia
The “CRC User Guide” by the U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change

As Manos describes it:

The main purpose of the CRC is a mandatory carbon reduction and energy efficiency scheme aimed at changing energy use behaviors and further incent the adoption of technology and infrastructure.

In effect it is an auction based carbon emissions trading scheme designed to operate under a Cap and Trade mechanism.

All organizations including governmental agencies who consume more than 6000 MWh in 2008 are required to participate. The mechanism is expected to go live in April 2010.

Manos gave a table to compute what level of data center consumes 6,000 MWh or more per year. It depends upon PUE, but a roughly 5 MW data center will consume that much power. A 5 MW data center is no longer considered so big. Big ones are on the order of 50 MW and more. So many large data centers, including Manos’s DRT data center, fall into this category.

Jim Smith, CTO of DRT, in his five-minute video, talked about this issue from the U.S. perspective:

At least two regulatory forces, namely the state and federal governments, will make power prices very volatile.
Things will change and you need to get ready for change.

His recommendation is to:

Start measuring your power consumption.
Develop and compute your data center metrics, such as PUE.
Study the law to understand the criminal charge part of it.

This issue and others were be discussed in detail in the DatacenterDynamics conference on July 17.

The outlook for energy stewardship, corporate carbon risk, and how to maximize performance per watt in your data center whilst balancing the requirements for availability and agility.

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