Commentary of Dr. Zen Kishimoto on news, trends, and opportunities in environmentally sustainable data centers and energy efficiency: data center, green IT, energy efficiency, facilities, smart grid, cloud computing.
The SVLG Energy Summit just ended. It gathered more than 500 people.
AltaTerra will prepare a summary report on the conference. The next big thing
for SVLG is the third annual conference on data centers. AltaTerra was involved
in the second conference in several capacities, such as chairing a panel
session on carbon and data centers, participating in program preparation, and
editing case study reports. This year, AltaTerra is contributing as a
programming committee and will prepare a summary report on the conference.
Here’s the brochure for the 2010 Data Center Efficiency Summit.
My Upcoming Panel at BrightTalk Efficient Data Center Summit
Posted By Zen Kishimoto,
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Updated: Thursday, April 15, 2010
I will be moderating a panel titled
"Data Center Efficiency via IT Optimization, Standards, and Collaboration” at the
BrightTalk Efficient Data Center Summit April 21, from 11 a.m. PDT, as you can
see here.
Energy consumption by U.S. data centers has been increasing, and some are
running out of power for their growing number of servers and other IT
equipment. To make the matter worse, IT equipment generates excessive heat,
which must be rejected, and cooling requires more power.
Power crisis and energy
efficiency, as they relate to data centers, have been discussed at many
conferences and meetings. In this panel, we will take a different angle on
three topics. One is IT energy efficiency improvement. A 2007 EPA report looked
at five different scenarios for the past, present, and future of data center
power consumption. Each scenario is defined by the energy efficiency of both IT
and facilities. Of course, the facilities side is important, but the very
reason to have IT equipment is to support business needs. IT comes before facilities,
and we need to consider IT equipment energy efficiency as such. Each of the
five scenarios has a different degree of the following to achieve a different level
of energy efficiency:
Turning off of unused
servers
Virtualization
Power management
Hardware refresh
Storage equipment
efficiency
The EPA study was conducted
in 2006. In the four years since then, IT energy efficiency technologies and
practices should have become more innovative. First, we would like to explore
that. Second, several data center organizations advocate different metrics,
technologies, and practices for energy efficiency. Doesn’t it make sense to
have one set of standards for everyone to use, eliminating the confusion? Third,
to produce a single set of standards, all these data center organizations must
get together and collaborate rather than continuing individually to develop
their own, all of which may be slightly different.
Summing up, these are the
three topics:
IT energy efficiency
optimization
Standards
Collaboration
We are fortunate to have four
experts in data centers and data center energy efficiency for this panel:
Richard Garrison, board
member of the 7´24 Exchange California chapter and senior principal at Alfa
Tech Cambridge Group
Jon Haas, director of Eco-Technologies
at Intel and board member of The Green Grid
KC Mares, co-chair of
the SVLG Data Center Energy Efficiency Demonstration Program and president of
MegaWatt Consulting
Dean Nelson, founder and
chairman of Data Center Pulse and senior director of eBay
We expect a lively conversation on these topics. Again, you can join
us for this webinar at your desk at 11 a.m. PDT on April 21. See you then.
In "Open Sourcing Data Center Design,” Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge
today wrote about a new effort to transform data centers. When I first saw the
headline, I thought his article was about applying open source software to data
centers. I worked with MySQL and JBoss in my previous life and got very
interested in this.
But when I read on, I realized that the idea is not the use of open
source but the use of the philosophy of open source, which is open and freely
sharable. Let’s refer to Miller’s posting:
The Open Source
Data Center Initiative aims to "provide a platform for stable,
secure, efficient and sustainable state-of-the-art operations that can be
replicated world-wide, accomplished through public/private investment.”
The people and organizations behind it:
[Mike] Manos is working with Dave Ohara of Green M3,
Enginuity Worldwide LLC and the University of Missouri.
Manos is quoted as saying:
"This Open Source Data Center Initiative is focused
around execution. It’s focused around putting together an open and free
engineering framework upon which data center designs, technologies, and the
like can be quickly put together and standardize the [way] both end-users and
engineering firms approach the data center industry.
"If you think of the Linux movement, and all of those
who actively participate in submitting enhancements, features, even pulling
together specific build packages for distribution, one could even see such
things emerging in the data center engineering realm.”
What is the difference between the Open Source Data Center
Initiative and existing industry groups like SVLG, Data Center Pulse, 7x27,
Critical Facilities Round Table, and The Green Grid?
Manos is quoted as saying it’s this:
"These groups have been out
espousing best practices for years. They have been pushing for change (for the
most part). They do a great job of highlighting the challenges we face, but for
the most part have waited around for universal good will and monetary pressures
to make them happen.”
I wonder
what other organizations have to say about it. I know Mike Manos was a member
of Data Center Pulse. I will moderate a data center energy efficiency panel in
an event put together by BrightTalk. One of the
themes of the panel will be collaboration. I wonder whether the Open Source
Data Center Initiative can collaborate with other existing organizations.
Google Inc won approval from U.S.
energy regulators to act as a power marketer, which will make it easier for the
Internet search giant to obtain renewable energy to run its huge data centers.
This news was reported by several other media sources, including:
But my attention is on the last two paragraphs in the NYT article:
Information technology and telecommunications
facilities, such as those that Google owns, account for approximately 120
billion kilowatt hours of electricity annually—or 3 percent of all U.S.
electricity use, according to the Energy Department.
Rapid growth in the U.S. data center industry is
projected to require two new large power plants per year just to keep pace with
the expected demand growth, the department says.
As I reported back in 2008, according to the report published by EPA for the U.S. Congress in
2007, data center power consumption doubled from 2000 to 2006. In 2006, data
center power consumption was roughly 1.5% of the whole nation’s. Without any
remedy, this figure will double again by 2011, requiring multiple power plants
to accommodate the increase.
The EPA report considered five scenarios, two of which aggressively
apply state-of-the-art technologies and operating methods to curb such an increase.
There has been no update on this report since 2007, and it is hard
to tell whether the trend has been curbed. The 3% figure cited in the NYT article
is often obtained by doubling 1.5%. As a very rough estimate, it may be true,
but groups like SVLG and its members have a lot of efforts under way to curb
the increase. We need an update of the EPA report now to assess where we are in
terms of data center power consumption.
Remember the success of the SVLG Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit in October? Because of some scheduling difficulties, not all the case studies have been added to the SVLG site yet. But we at AltaTerra are doubling our efforts to edit those reports for publication, As each report becomes ready, SVLG puts it online. We encourage you to visit the website from time to time because those case studies are very useful if you want to enhance your data center energy efficiency, which is a hot topic. See this site for the DOE grants on data center energy efficiency.
DOE’s Paul Scheihing gave a talk on what DOE is doing to improve data center energy efficiency. Scheihing is in charge of the Industrial Technologies Program (ITP) at DoE, http://www1.eere.energy.gov/industry/ into which data centers are classified.
Here are some of the projects DOE is working on:
DC-Pro—Free profiling software to show how power is consumed at a given data center; gives you both PUE and DCIE.
Training program—Under development with ASHRAE.
Certification—To certify professionals for energy assessment at data centers.
R&D—Stimulus money–based program; award to be announced in November.
Scheihing also talked about the DOE program called Save Energy Now.
Andrew Fanara of EPA gave a presentation on what the agency has been doing about Energy Star for IT gear. Even though many articles and blogs have been written about on the subject, this 11-minute video is a good summary that can help you understand it.
Fanara talked about Energy Star for:
Desktop computers
Server computers
Data centers (the next webinar is November 12, see here)
For some reason, he did not touch on Energy Start for storage devices. Towards the end of his presentation, a slide stated that EPA uses PUE instead of EUE, which was described in the webinar at the end of September (see my previous blog)
Fanara did not mention this point, but Bill Tschudi of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory asked about it. Fanara acknowledged that EPA uses PUE rather than EUE.
Posted By Zen Kishimoto,
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Earlier this year when we began planning the 2009 SVLG Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit, we proposed a session on data centers and carbon footprint. At that time, the subject was not deemed appropriate, because the theme of the summit was energy efficiency in data centers. As time passed, awareness of the carbon footprint of data centers grew as the U.S. House of Representatives passed the cap-and-trade bill, and the subject was discussed in other data center–related conferences like DatacenterDynamics in San Francisco and Data Center World in Orlando.
About a month before the summit, we proposed including both carbon footprint and cloud computing, another strong interest in the data center field. Both ideas were accepted. Then our Don Bray put together a carbon panel with the following excellent participants:
Christine Page, Director of Climate and Energy Strategy, Yahoo!
Andy Broer, IT Energy Sourcing Czar, Cisco
Mark Thiele, Director of Business Operations, VMware
Ben Machol, Manager of Clean Energy and Climate Change, U.S. EPA
The room was packed with many interested people. The video clip below shows the first eight minutes of the panel. Don Bray set the stage, including a set of questions for the panelists.
A lot of interesting points were made, but since this was the first time for such a discussion, it stayed at the strategic level. As the U.S federal and state governments impose more regulatory changes, data center operators will receive the impact both directly and indirectly. We can cover the subject again next year at a tactical level as well as at a strategic level.
I plan to make the entire session available once I master the editing function of the video camera. AltaTerra believes this is the area data center operators will pay more attention to, and we can provide expertise and help to them. For the carbon management research report, check this and for a case study report, check here.
Many experts and well-known people gathered at the SVLG Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit. At the breakfast table, I happened to be sitting next to THE Rich Miller who publishes multiple detailed blogs of high quality every day.
Rich Miller
Reversing his role, I chatted a bit and asked him some of the questions I ponder when I read his blogs.
Question: What did he do before this? Answer: He was a writer who had been trained to write well.
Question: How can he write so many blogs of high quality every day? Answer: Each blog can be in many different stages. Some are continuations of previous ones, and others are written over several days.
Question: Where is he based? Answer: New Jersey.
Question: Did he come just for the summit? Answer: Yes. I felt good because he felt it was even worthy of his time.
I have been reading his blogs since I made the transition from IT to Green IT/Green Data Centers, and I have learned a lot from them. For me, seeing him was like seeing a celebrity. And he was very nice. People, read his blogs (and mine as well)!!
We finally had the summit, attended by more than 400 participants, 100 more than last year. It was a success, with 24 case studies and many presentations. Every session I attended was packed with people who were eager for new data backed up by real experiments and use.
I feel a sense of accomplishment because I spent a lot of time preparing for this summit as a volunteer with other talented experts who volunteered their time. We encountered a few difficulties, but we managed to solve those problems. It was an invaluable experience for me.
Let me list some of the highlights of the summit. I will discuss each one in more detail in future blogs.
Cloud computing: As it was at Data Center World, cloud computing was given a lot of attention, including a keynote speech and a cloud panel. Unlike IT folks, facilities folks may not be very familiar with cloud computing. The impact of cloud computing on data centers is hard to assess at this point, but it will have a huge impact on the data center market.
EPA/DOE: Two points are noteworthy. First, both EPA and DOE are pretty active in the area of data center energy efficiency. Second, EPA is now saying it will use PUE instead of EUE, which is very confusing.
IT fan and ASHRAE’s new scope: ASHRAE recently set a new scope for temperature and humidity for telecom and computer gear, allowing higher temperatures on the data center floor. Hotter intake air makes a server’s fan work harder, consuming more power on each server. This is ironic because this improves PUE but consumes more power overall. In the Chill-Off 2 experiments, this was tested and shown quantitatively. Manufacturers need to develop a new generation of servers to accommodate ASHRAE’s new scope.
NetApp’s new data center: This brand-new data center with air economizer is impressive. NetApp was awarded more than $1M for retrofitting its existing data center in Sunnyvale.
Data Center Pulse’s new stack: It is good to have standards in general, and the data center field is no exception. We discussed version 2 of the stack.
Carbon: The idea of having this session was questioned earlier this year, but as time went on, interest increased rapidly. Our Don Bray moderated the excellent panel of four.
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