This is the ongoing commentary of Dr. Zen Kishimoto on news, trends, and opportunities in environmentally sustainable data centers. Keywords: data center, green IT, energy efficiency, facilities.
After I bumped into the same person three times in a row in October at data center–related conferences and other events, I decided that something or someone must be telling me I need to spend more time with him. Tom Canning is a data center consultant at Arch Rock, which manufactures sensors for buildings and data centers and makes a network technology and an energy management application to collect, aggregate and analyze data like power consumption, temperature, and humidity.
Tom Canning
Actually, Arch Rock is not totally new to me. Several years ago, I met Dr. David Culler at his Berkeley motes meeting when he was still with UC Berkeley. Later, I learned that he founded his own company while taking a sabbatical or something like that. At that time, Arch Rock was targeting buildings and factories for its business, which did not interest me too much. Later, the company added data centers as target customers. After repeated meetings with Tom, I decided to pay a visit.
Unlike other meetings I’ve had with other companies, this meeting was over lunch. I did not take any notes or record the conversation, so I am writing this from memory. Roland Acra, CEO, joined us for lunch.
Roland Acra
Arch Rock is in the same general space as the likes of SynapSense, Sentilla, Sensicast, and OSIsoft—in the business of measuring power consumption, temperature, humidity, air pressure, and chiller performance. One thing different about Arch Rock is its insistence on the use of standard IP technology, including on the sensors. Equally, Arch Rock’s Energy Optimizer application is based on open IT standards that enable easy data import and export with other enterprise applications for analysis or budgeting or alerts. Certainly, IP has become the protocol of choice for several network types and is growing in its application areas. However, in the building management system (BMS) space, IP is usually not spoken. Arch Rock installs its wireless IP-enabled gear where new visibility enabled by battery-based wireless mesh networking brings advantages, such as around data center racks and aisles, and it provides an interface with other protocols such as Modbus towards legacy power or cooling equipment where IP is not implemented. Although IP may not be the most efficient protocol compared to proprietary approaches, Arch Rock’s FAQ states quite convincingly why IP is fine in its product.
As for data centers vs. other buildings, Roland felt that people in the data center space seem to have less of a mental barrier to installing their gear, mainly because they are more technically oriented. Also, from a business point of view, data centers require more sensors than other types of buildings and, thus, represent bigger sales volume. The following is a screen shot of Arch Rock’s Energy Optimizer (AREO) product for data centers.
AREO screen shot
Speaking of installing a large number of sensors, I asked whether Arch Rock employees install the sensors or whether the company partners with others. After having its employees install the gear, Arch Rock lets customers install it. According to Acra, installation goes smoothly. This is very important because it usually takes a lot of adjusting in the configuration of sensors. The IP-based approach used by Arch Rock means that there is a widely available skill set of IP-trained professionals to deploy the sensor networks, which – along with the auto-configuration and self-healing properties of the Arch Rock technology – makes installation easy and robust.
I have talked to the measuring companies mentioned above in the past and plan to talk to others in the near future. The more I talk to these companies, the more confused I get about the market they are in. But after bouncing ideas with Roland and Tom, I think I can say something a little more reasonable about this space.
Even though measuring power consumption at rack level is certainly a good way to obtain more-accurate information, the vast majority of data centers measure power consumption at the UPS level (if they measure it at all), according to the draft Energy Star for data centers. Unlike power, measurements for temperature, humidity, and air pressure need to be taken at each rack.
It appears that it will be a few years before this sensor-oriented measuring technology enters the mainstream. The market is in an early stage, allowing multiple entrants into the space and waiting for someone to break out of the pack and take a leadership position.
I repeat here what I told Roland. It is very difficult to develop a technology and make a product out of it. But measuring as a concept is simple and even trivial, and there are only so many ways to measure the limited number of useful data types. Once sensor-based measurement becomes the standard, it will become a commodity and will be integrated into a bigger system. Then differentiation should come from such things as execution, alliance, distribution, and ecosystem. As for sustainability extension, Roland felt that it would come after Arch Rock’s current technology entered the mainstream.
Any new technology requires somewhat lengthy market traction if there is no external pressure. The cap-and-trade bill may die in the U.S. Senate this year, but the most recent executive order mandating the preparation of the GHG emission reduction target for the year 2020 is real. Who knows what may happen in the year 2010 and the years immediately following it? That is why I cannot help but keep my eye on a company like CSRware, where Mark Thiele from VMware recently became CTO.
Posted By Zen Kishimoto,
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Sustainability is a broad term that covers many things. It is difficult to tackle the whole system at the enterprise level, so I’ll use a divide-and-conquer approach and focus on IT first. After all, I have been working on green IT. IT can make a big contribution to sustainability in two distinct ways. The first is to become more energy efficient and sustainable itself. The second is to use it to make other things more energy efficient and sustainable.
Regardless, IT sustainability requires a basic activity: measurement. In order to gauge something’s status and its improvement, we first need to measure its attributes and set metrics. With the measured data and derived metrics, we can make improvements and verify their effects. For example, data center attributes include power consumption, GHG emissions, water usage, and e-waste. I’ve said before that measuring is one thing that anyone can do to start improving data center energy efficiency. I am now extending this idea to measure what appear to be important factors for sustainability.
In previous blogs, I’ve written about a few companies that provide a technology to measure power consumption, temperature, and humidity in data centers. Most of them install their own sensors at servers and other equipment, collect and aggregate the measured data, and display the processed data in a dashboard-like display. Power consumption, GHG emissions (converted from power consumption), temperature, and humidity are straightforward attributes. Data availability depends on the installation of sensors and related infrastructures. The most recent EPA Energy Star effort for data centers assumes that power consumption will be measured at UPSs, as it is at the majority of data centers in the U.S. now. Therefore, the sensor and its related measuring infrastructure are more advanced technologies than most.
How do you measure water consumption and e-waste processing? If there is a sensor or meter attached to the water sources and discharge places, this information may be collected automatically. If there is no such infrastructure, do you enter the usage information by hand? This is a new area and I am not familiar with it. E-waste is much more difficult. There is no automated way of tracking e-waste processing. The information regarding the processing of e-waste needs to be handled and entered into the system by hand.
Another question I have is how the companies that do not collect their own data but process the data collected and aggregated by other tools enter those data into their system. For example, OSIsoft takes care of more than 400 protocol and data formats for further processing. So many kinds are necessary mainly because each company has its own protocol and data types. How does CSRware actually enter power consumption, water usage, and e-waste information into its system? What is the minimum requirement to use its system?
I will start researching all of these questions and construct the IT sustainability picture from both the first point (the sustainability of IT itself) and the second point (the sustainability supported by IT).
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