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.
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.
We are getting ready for the second SVLG Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit 2009. If you’re not familiar with it, please see my previous blog.
It is a volunteer-based data center energy efficiency validation project, including host data centers and technology vendors. Innovative IT and facilities technologies and practices will be presented with actual data that are collected from real operations. The press release and some more details will be available soon after Labor Day. Mark your calendar for this event on October 15. See you there.
REVISED: Announcing the Second Annual SVLG Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit 2009
Posted By Zen Kishimoto,
Friday, July 31, 2009
Updated: Monday, August 03, 2009
Some readers told me that my previous post regarding the announcement on the Second Annual SVLG Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit 2009 was too sketchy and wanted me to elaborate on it. So here is more about the conference.
First, let me give you some context and background information. A data center is a special building where a large number of servers and other IT equipment and devices, along with facilities equipment like power and cooling gear, are placed and a massive amount of power is consumed every hour of every day throughout the year without any interruption. As many applications and services, such as games, e-commerce, storage archiving, and social networking, move online (cloud computing is one such trend), data centers to support them are being built at an unparalleled speed. In spite of the market downturn, colocation data center operators are thriving. The average power consumption of each rack used to be 1 kW, but it is now 10 kW and, for some racks, even 20 kW or 30 kW. The power consumption density of data centers has increased at a tremendous pace, although the total power consumption in the office environment is still greater than that of data centers.
The U.S. Congress, when alerted of the trends, ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to report on the past, present, and future of power consumption by data centers. In 1997, EPA published a lengthy and comprehensive report presenting five scenarios. Although the report is theoretical in nature, with server deployment (of various kinds) and its power consumption information modified by the impacts of virtualization and recent power reduction technologies, the trend was clear. In 2006, power consumption doubled as compared with that in 2001. Unless some drastic measures are taken, it is expected that consumption will double again by 2011, requiring another ten power plants.
Under each of the first three scenarios—status quo, current status, and improved data centers—power consumption goes up, but under the last two scenarios—best practices and state-of-the-art data centers—power consumption goes down.
This result is great, but it is mostly theoretical. Following the publication of the report, Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG’s home page), a nonprofit organization with more than 300 member companies in Silicon Valley, initiated the verification of the EPA’s results and conducted a series of experiments with participating companies. The result was published at SVLG Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit 2008 (data center energy summit). The conclusion is given in the final report, and the conclusion is that the results presented in the EPA report were validated by real experiments.
Now this summit will be repeated this year. A long-awaited announcement has been made. Reserve October 15th for attending the Second Annual SVLG Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit 2009.
I think this summit is very different from other data center conferences because:
It uses the theoretical work of the EPA report as a base and attempts to validate it with real experiments.
All the participants, planning committee, and project teams, are voluntary, and objectivity is the ultimate goal, without intensive commercialism or heavy marketing of particular products or services.
The experiment results are peer validated and no one-sided, market-oriented results will be given.
In addition, many movers and shakers of the data center market will get together and provide state-of-the-art technologies and discuss how data centers can be made more energy efficient. If you are an IT executive or practitioner, you will learn how your IT loads impact your whole data center’s efficiency. Conversely, if you are a facilities operator, you will see how you can make your facilities’ gears impact IT operations. In my opinion, this is a must-attend conference. Also, do not forget to check out our research report on how to green your data centers.
Rich Miller of Data Center
Knowledge wrote an article on the Internet Archive being hosted in a Sun
container.
There was a good picture
of the interior on his blog. I happen to have taken a picture from the outside.
Here it is. The archive is next to a container that will be used for Chill-Off
2, along with Silicon
Valley Leadership Group’s data center energy summit project.
Dean Nelson of Sun has a comprehensive blog on this subject.
There are way too many groups and consortia in the green (energy efficient) data center space. These are some of them:
7x24 Exchange
ASHRAE
Critical Facilities Roundtable
The Green Grid
Information Technology Industry Council
Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) data center energy project
Each group publishes useful information and statistics in collaboration with other organizations. Writers and analysts gather information from them in the form of white papers, press releases, conferences, individual interviews, and so on. It would be nice to have them share their expertise and data at some central location and to disseminate the information.
I first saw Dean Nelson of Sun in June 2008 on the stage at the SVLG Data Center Energy Summit. Since then, I have followed his blog, and recently I finally met him. I was very much interested in his Data Center Pulse (DCP) initiative and Sun’s green data centers. I had a chance to visit him at one of his data centers, where we talked about his data centers and DCP.
Dean Nelson at one of Sun’s data centers Since Sun’s data centers are written about everywhere, I would like to touch on DCP, whose membership is limited to data center owners, operators, and users. (I can’t join them since I do not belong to any of those categories.) The goal of this organization is “to track the pulse of the industry and influence the future of the data center through discussion and debate.”
The DCP website is full of information, and Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge has a good article about it (see it here). Rather than give an overview of DCP, I would like to talk about their thoughts on alignment. In discussing DCP, Dean showed me one slide on alignment (see here). Miller also covered this in his blog.
Looking at the figure on page 6 of this, I found one group missing: media/analyst. I asked Dean about it, and he suggested talking to the person in charge of alignment. I will meet with this person and see if they will allow media/analysts to become observers so that we can help to spread their invaluable information. I will report on progress in a future blog.
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