Green Data Center Blog

Bush Official targets Data Centers as "Centers of Enormous Waste"

Google has decided to get in the renewable energy business, but I think the public and gov't would much prefer Google share its energy efficiency methods.

A Bush administration official has identified data centers as centers of enormous waste. It is only a matter of time before the environmental groups go after data centers. 

And, I do think there is bad behavior in data centers which needs to be changed. I was talking to a person who works with a large retailer and he found that the data center server utilization was 7%.  People need to learn how to turn servers off.

UNITED NATIONS (BetaNews) - US Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency Alexander Karsner, speaking this morning before a United Nations conference on the technology industry's responsibility for the global environment, said that as the world's data centers become more clustered and crowded, they expend too much space and electricity and generate too much heat and emissions. As such, Sec. Karsner said, the typical enterprise data center has become "a center of enormous waste."

Google Electric Company - Core Competency?

Larry Dignan on http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=7149

Wrote a blog about the issue of Google getting into the energy business. This somehow seems like it is in Google's DNA when faced with make vs buy, they favor make.  They've done this with their OS and Servers they run their platform on.  Now, they are extending out to make their own electricity.

This reminds of Microsoft's Keyboard and Mice business. Microsoft long time ago diversified into making their own keyboards and mice, and even though it has done well over the years, it never brings in the margins Microsoft gets in its software business. If Google does sell energy, it's margins are going to be effected, and shareholders will ask that the energy business be spun off.  Creating the Google Electric company.

And this green effort is taking up management time. In a statement, Page, Google president of products, said:

“We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers. We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal. There has been tremendous work already on renewable energy. Technologies have been developed that can mature into industries capable of providing electricity cheaper than coal. Solar thermal technology, for example, provides a very plausible path to providing renewable energy cheaper than coal. We are also very interested in further developing other technologies that have potential to be cost-competitive and green. We are aware of several promising technologies, and believe there are many more out there.”

Dell Hugging More Trees - Pushes Greener Image

Interesting how Dell has identified Green as a way to go upscale.

From this fortune article,

This wasn’t about Dell going soft; instead, the tech baron’s new green streak is part of the company’s new image. No longer content to be known simply as a low cost leader – bargain-basement technology is out of vogue these days – he is instead positioning the company as an inspirational technology maker that’s conscious of the environment while it’s building cutting-edge gear.

For more information on market perception of Green you can go to http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/pressrelease.cfm?id=3620. The following is the most interesting part

Says Board, “To some extent the rank order of these brand mentions seems to mirror their prominence in the Tech landscape, if you factor in Apple’s increased exposure in recent years. At the same time, it’s something of a ‘halo index,’ in that there’s precious little information available to consumers for them to really assess how green one Tech firm is versus another. So when we see a Kodak, Sony or IBM emerge here, to some extent we’re seeing more generalized brand affinity being transferred to this green dimension. Of all the brands here who might see an unexpected opportunity, Gateway may be the most intriguing.”

Adds Board, “These results, along with other data we see, convince me that at least for American consumers this is emerging as a key issue – probably not a universal factor any time soon, but important enough to enough Americans to matter to Tech firms. The interesting paradox for the market leaders, or those who would be, is that this may rapidly become a table-stakes expectation for many consumers – ‘of course, I expect prominent brand X to care about the environment and act accordingly.’ However, while this is emerging as a cost-of-entry issue, it isn’t clear that any one Tech firm can carve out sustainable differentiation around green behaviors and positioning. Our data suggest a bit more skepticism about Tech brand commitments to green issues among younger Americans than among those age 55-plus.”

“One last point is that while American consumers use Tech products from brands based all over the world, brands that are headquartered in the U.S. dominate the more prominent green mentions – Japan-based Sony is the only exception. These U.S.-based brands have manufacturing and R&D facilities deployed globally, dealing with a highly variable patchwork of local expectations regarding environmentally friendly practices. This suggests that as American consumers increasingly value green Tech practices, and have related expectations for U.S.-based Tech brands, it’s increasingly important for these brands to monitor their environmentally-oriented practices worldwide. When that article inevitably hits the newswires about their manufacturing in a faraway place, they want it to be good news.”

When Are SLAs going to list Green as a requirement?

I had an informal meeting with a Distribution Logistics executive.  It was fun trading distribution stories of shipping things in interesting ways around the world.  Distribution logistics was an area I developed interest and expertise at while at HP, and believe it or not Apple Computer recruited me from HP to work on their distribution system, and I was escorted out the door the day I said I took a job at Apple Computer.  When I left Apple to go to Microsoft as a TrueType font expert, escorting me out the door was a given.

One of the good lessons I learned working on distribution is to think of things as boxes and the value of the boxes.  Don't get attached to the products, they come and go, the important thing was to figure out how to move boxes efficiently and quickly. Working on IT systems in many ways are information distribution logistics systems.

One of the interesting Green discussions we had is one of the businesses this executive owns is a dozen executive hotels for corporations. Corporations have adding Green factors as part of the requests. How many things do you have to do to be Green. He's talked with his maintenance staff, and they've installed compact fluorescent light bulbs, and looked at list of other things to do, making ROI calculations. The problem is being Green is not a binary thing, it is a commitment, but some people are treating it is a purchasing criteria. 

After thinking about this executive's situation, I would recommend that he first do an inventory for those things he can promote as Green right now, then after creating the customer Green marketing document, see how many are satisfied. You could set your staff off on thinking of Green projects, but you need to be prepared to educate people how to think in the big picture of whether their green idea is really green or not. If not careful, this can be a demoralizing task as employees are frustrated their ideas are not adopted. This is reminiscent of the employee suggestion box, but Green can introduce a fanatical treehugging factor and people are highly motivated to make a difference.

Be careful, and watch out when Green gets added to IT requirements, it is only a matter of time before it shows up.

See http://greenm3.typepad.com/green_m3_blog/2007/11/a-green-data-ce.html for more about making a commitment vs. binary.

Did you turn off the lights (or servers) when you left the office this weekend

This is my 3rd thanksgiving week in the NY area, and for past 2 I have visited Cornell Medical University’s department of Biomedicine to talk about energy savings in their data center.

Why would I make a point of visiting this department during my vacation holiday.

This facility is one of the only places I know of that turns off servers when they are not needed. For IT Pros they do the equivalent of turning off the lights when they leave the office this holiday weekend. Think about how many servers are running these next 4 days from Thurs – Sun with no load on them. Would anyone notice if they were turned off?

The amazing thing is the Biomedicine department has been turning off their servers in a high performance compute cluster for the past 6 months and the users don’t notice a change in service, because they turn off and on the compute nodes in response to the job queue. There aren’t going to be that many research scientist submitting jobs on Thanksgiving day. And, as each compute job is completed and sits idle, there is an automated system that turns off the servers. When new compute resources are required as new jobs are submitted on Monday, the machines are turned back on.

To put this in #’s there are 100 servers in the compute node which each consume as much power as six 60 watt light bulbs, and when idle drop to consuming three 60 watt light bulbs of electricity. So, if this weekend they can turn off half the machines, they’ll save one hundred fifty 60 watt light bulbs of electricity. This project is implemented by Jason Banfelder, Vanessa Borcherding, and Luis Gracia at Cornell Weill Medical University, and this team can tell their parents this holiday weekend that yes we did turn off the lights in the office when we left the office.  Actually, when they left the servers were probably at 100% utilization, and as jobs completed idling servers, they were turned off.

Happy Thanksgiving.

In the future, I'll add a posting with Jason's team to describe how they turn on and off their servers.

Audience Analysis of Green Data Centre Panel at IT Forum

Microsoft allowed us to have a panel discussion, but this panel was not meant as a product pitch.  We had wide industry interest in this subject, but we did not want to make this a product pitch for how companies have greenwashed their products.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwash for a description of this practice.  Let the buyer beware.

As much as Green is topical, we had no idea how many people would attend the session.  Given IT Forum are the technical implementers, this was a good chance to see if the issues are getting down to this audience.

As much as we wanted to fill the room, we ended up with an attendance of less than 1% of the conference. The people who did attend were a still a good sample of getting read on the questions and interests.

We surveyed this sampling to see how many were implenting energy monitoring systems, and it was about 10% of the audience, but given these were people of the 1% who chose to attend the conference, then the number is probably less for the total audience.

The rest of questions and interactions indicated that we are still in the early stages of education and awareness, tranisitioning from the early adopters like Microsoft and Citibank's data centers to customers who are looking for best practices and tools.

Green Data Centre Panel Discussion

Well, we succesfully presented best scoring panel presentation at IT forum.  For those attendees who attended IT forum, you'll be able to listen to the discussion and how the panel picked on Mike Manos. :-) We didn't have the Jerry Springer moment, but the conversation was lively.

As the moderator, I couldn't ask for a better group of guys to kick off this discussion at IT Forum.  Kevin Sangwell from Microsoft did a great job of recruiting speakers for the event.

The comments tell the story.

very good, hardware vendors, chip manufacturers, large companies able to demonstrate what they are doing to reduce the carbon footprint....however it appears microsoft are not doing very much to reduce this footprint! Lets see some commitement from MS.....such as supporting/promoting competitors virtualiastion products. I felt that this format for a session was very progressive and interactive. Unfortunately, the discussion was sidelined a few times and I didn't think the session had enough time to run its course. Good session. Should have been longer Dissapointed that this was the only coverage at ITForum, I would have liked to here something about Microsoft's strategy for solving power consumption in good software design. This was a very good session. I would have liked to continue it but we ran out of time. I got a lot of usefull information. See http://unthrottled.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3B07BABB3D3318AA!580.entry for Mike Manos' post.

Abstract:

The spiralling cost and environmental impact of data centres is driving some in the industry to design Green data centres. This panel includes representatives from hardware and software vendors plus data centre managers who will share their insight, debate the relative merits of going Green and share the lessons from early adoption.

Speakers:

• Mr Kevin Sangwell - Microsoft
• Mr Nigel Bridgeman - HP
• Mr Michael Manos - Microsoft Data Centers
• Mr Ed English - Dell
• Mr Dave Ohara - Green M3
• Mr Kevin O'Donovan - Intel
• Mr Harvey Cobbold - Citi Data Centers
• Mr Ramon Huesa - AMD

Mike Manos presentation IT Forum - Special Event for Early Bird Attendees

Mike Manos presented at a special event for IT Forum as part of thank you for the attendees who registered early.

Kevin, Arlindo, Frank, and I (http://greenm3.typepad.com/green_m3_blog/2007/11/microsoft-it-pr.html) sat in and were thoroughly entertained with the presentation, and had some good laughs.

One of the most amazing things is Mike was faced with the challenge of presenting during lunch (it is bad to be the presentation keeping people from food) and presenting in the auditorium which seats over a 2,000 people with glaring lights in your eyes. He couldn't see past the first 10 rows to read the audience, and see if anyone was leaving.  Well I didn't see anyone leave and 96% of the people turned in feedback on the session. This was the highest feedback rate of any presentation at the conference, and a great indication of what people thought about the topic of how Microsoft runs its data centers.

 

Mike had over a dozen people come up after to ask questions.

For those of you who attend IT Forum in EMEA, you can look forward to Mike being on the list of speakers for the next IT forum.

See http://unthrottled.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3B07BABB3D3318AA!574.entry for Mike's entry on his presetation.

Microsoft IT Pro Evangelists Love Green

I left Seattle 7a on Monday, and arrived 7a on Tues in Barcelona to a sold out 2007 IT forum http://www.mseventseurope.com/teched/Itforum.

Thanks to Arlindo Alves http://blogs.technet.com/aralves/, Frank Koch http://blogs.technet.com/chitpro-de/, and Kevin Sangwell http://blogs.technet.com/sanger/; we have momentum building for customers to think about Green Data Centres and how IT can be more efficient in its use of resources.

The early movers/innovators in this area have already increased the efficiencies of their data centers, developing an energy supply chain strategy, saving millions in energy costs.

On Thurs Intel is presenting the following talk.  An interesting Green solution they are presenting is highlighted below on how they are communicating to powered down systems.

SPN203 System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 - Driving Remote Out-of-Band Management

Lawson Guthrie , Dave Randall

Come see how Intel and Microsoft are enhancing secure management of remote PCs with agent-less, hardware based management solutions. Through Intel vPro and Centrino Pro Technologies coupled with Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) or SMS 2003, find out how you can securely manage, inventory or rebuild operating systems without requiring the client agent. You can even make BIOS changes, maintenance and repair tasks if systems are powered down or the OS is non-responsive. You’ll also get a preview of the capabilities of out-of-band management with Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) and System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007.

Thu Nov 15 10:45 - 12:00 Room 111

First #1 rank for Google Search results = GreenM3

Part of creating this Green Data Center Blog was to learn more about blogs and how to get increase visiblity through search.  I posted an entry about Google Electric Company.  And, when going through my typepad stats I found I was getting hits from www.google.com/search to this post.  I went to google search entered "google electric", and I am the #1 search result.

Pretty cool for only one month of blogging.

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Web	Results 1 - 10 of about 5,670,000 for google electric. (0.22 seconds)

Green Data Center Blog: Google Electric Company - Core Competency?

Google Electric Company - Core Competency? Larry Dignan on http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=7149. Wrote a blog about the issue of Google getting into the ... www.greenm3.com/2007/11/google-electric.html - 17k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

EnviroPolitics Blog: Search this: A Google electric car

We're still not sure, but for a simple overview of the relationship, check out: Meet Google's Think Electric Car from EV World. ... enviropoliticsblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/search-this-google-electric-car.html - 95k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Kodachrome Quixote: The New GE- Google Electric

The New GE- Google Electric. Worth a quick read. It's been very interesting to watch Silicon Valley emerge as a counterweight to Detroit for more "clean ... kodachromequixote.blogspot.com/2007/06/new-ge-google-electric.html - 104k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Trivia: Google's electric bill - BanglaCricket Forum

In one blog, I have read that google is planning for clean, cheap nuclear energy (!?!) to cope up with their electric power consumption which is their ... banglacricket.com/alochona/showthread.php?t=18048 - 88k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this