Green Data Center Blog

Linux Ready to go Green, next is Windows vs. Linux comparison?

News.com interviews Linus Torvalds at linux.conf.au, saying Linux is ready to go Green.

In an interview at the linux.conf.au conference, the developer of the Linux kernel admitted that the operating system was lagging behind on power-management and energy-diagnosis tools.

"It is an area we were pretty weak in a few years ago and just building up the infrastructure took a long time, but now we are at a point where we have most of it done," Torvalds said.

"That doesn't mean we are done. Now we have an infrastructure in place... we have the tools to measure power and notice when the power is higher and why that is, which is pretty important. Before, it used to be a black box," he said.

This is just the start of putting power management in the OS, now they are going to have the work of making drivers power aware.  All it takes is one legacy driver to keep a system in a higher power state.

With Windows Server 2008 default power management turned on and shipping power management since Windows 2000, it will be interesting to see power comparisons between Windows and Linux in regards to performance per watt.

But, I think to do big power savings in a green data center you need a power management system which works across multiple systems.  The amount of power you'll be able to save on individual machines is best when you can turn them off.  Linux is playing catch up to Windows, but they could  change the game by providing the infrastructure to do power management across systems.

Google Hires Former State Senator to Manage Community Relations in Lenoir, NC, protecting its $165 mil tax break for data center operation

Again thanks to the analysts at www.t1r.com for sending me the local paper article about Google's data center in Lenoir, NC. It's great the press is on top of this. My previous post on why 200 employees has had a of traffic, and this one should get your attention as well.

The globally ambitious, California-based Internet giant is working to establish itself in a close-knit world that's decidedly un-Silicon Valley, mixing with local civic groups and donating charity Christmas trees for a public display, amid strict secrecy the company says its project requires.

Lenoir native Stephen Clay, 57, is so pleased about Google's arrival that he hung a "Clay Insurance Welcomes Google" banner outside his business near downtown. He also attended a Google AdWords training seminar to learn about how its advertising works.

But he and others said they still wish they knew more about the center and how it will benefit the community. Visitors aren't allowed on the construction site, which is ringed with barbed wire.

Residents who have tried to sneak a closer peek say they've been run off by security guards. And employees are limited in what they can say about the project's specifics.

"People talk about it all the time," said Anita Watters, 40, the assistant manager of Miller Hill Grocery, just up the street from the data center. " `Area 51.' It's all this secretive stuff. They're so hush-hush about what they're doing over there ... I hear all kinds of (speculation)."

The most interesting nugget though is that Google has hired a former state senator to manage the community relations. It's a small price to hire the senator to protect google's 30 year $165 million tax break.

The Lenoir project sparked criticism after it was announced last year, in part because it received state and local incentives valued at up to $165 million over 30 years.

As a result, Google has worked to improve its outreach. In April, it hired consultant Matt Dunne, a former Vermont state senator and gubernatorial candidate whose career has focused on bringing together entrepreneurship, community service and politics, to listen to residents and inform them about the company.

Yet he must also manage expectations and explain the competitive reasons data centers are built and operated in secrecy.

In Lenoir, Dunne said, he's encountered a mix of hope and concern: Hope that Google will single-handedly transform the economy and worries that the company won't hire any local workers; excitement about a second building phase and concern that Google employees won't live in or near Lenoir.

Google is not going to be another Broyhill or Bernhardt - furniture companies that for decades were dominant and paternalistic employers in the region - nor is it moving its headquarters to town. Though large, the data center will employ about 200 people, not 8,000, Dunne said.

I wonder how much pressure Google is going to be on to prove they have 200 employees. In this article they listed 3 Google employees, 197 more to go. If the press could get access to the permits they could see the # of parking spaces applied for.

Google declined to say how large the data centers will be, but permits on file with Caldwell County call for one $15.4 million, 139,797-square-foot building and another, $24.5 million, 337,008-square-foot building.

Those permits, incidentally, are not listed under Google, but under the name Lapis LLC. Ask to make a copy, and you'll be told it needs to be cleared by a lawyer first.

"I just wanted to be a part of (Google), a part of the culture," said Jennifer Crump, 35, of Morganton, a former stay-at-home mom who earned an associate's degree in information technology and was hired earlier this month as a data center technician assistant. "It's so different from what we have around here."

Lenoir native Walter Brameld, 30, worked in an Atlanta data center but got burned out and moved home, figuring he'd have to take "a McJob." Then he found out about Google. Once the site location became public, he'd drive past it to reassure himself it was really coming. He was hired in October.

Jacobik, 42, an Air Force veteran and father of seven who previously managed a data center for Oracle in Austin, Texas, oversees Google's Lenoir operation and another planned outside of Charleston. In and around Lenoir alone, he has addressed more than a dozen civic groups, including Rotary, Kiwanis and Ruritan clubs.

North America behind Europe and Asia in Green IT, says Info-Tech Research Group

Here is a press release by Info-Tech Research with specifics how North America lags Europe and Asia in Green IT.

When it comes to taking action on green IT initiatives, a new study by Info-Tech Research Group finds that enterprises in North America lag behind those in Asia and Europe. Respondents from North America are also less concerned with their carbon footprints than those from the rest of the world, with nearly one-fifth reporting low to minimal levels of concern about climate change.

"People in North America tend to believe that newly industrialized countries like India and China wouldn’t have the means or interest to support green technologies," said Aaron Hay, research consultant with Info-Tech Research Group. "In reality, the study paints a very different picture as North America is failing to keep pace with the adoption rates of green IT techniques in emerging economies."

In addition to the implementation of quick win policies, the study revealed that almost double the amount of respondents from Asia reported the adoption of major initiatives such as "green RFPs" favoring acquisition of energy-efficient solutions and technologies.

HP's Consolidation Project runs into Organizational Issues, needs CEO Support

WSJ writes an article about Taming Technology Sprawl and how consolidation is HP's main method to save energy and costs.

Consolidation is a strategic tenet of H-P Chief Executive Mark Hurd, who has trimmed costs and improved operations since he was named to the post in early 2005. Mr. Hurd's goal for the IT project: Cut the percentage of annual revenue spent on IT by more than half. In 2005, Mr. Hurd says, H-P spent $4.2 billion -- about 5% of 2005 revenue -- to maintain its IT systems; he wants that to drop to 2% by the end of this year.

They ran into typical issues like underestimating the # of computer programs and not allocating a large enough budget as a result.  But, the bigger problem they ran into is vice presidents who didn't want to take orders from the CIO.

In H-P's case, obstacles surfaced as early as December 2005. At the time, several vice presidents "really dug in" and resisted, says Mr. Mott. Some units said, "'We're not going to give you a cost-benefit analysis (for why we use the IT we have). We're just going to tell you what product we want,' " the chief information officer says.

In the end HP needed support from their Board and CEO to make the project continue.

To address such issues, Messrs. Hurd and Mott got a mandate supporting the project from H-P's board. Mr. Mott says he also learned the importance of telling employees about the consequences of not cooperating. He told difficult executives that doing a cost-benefit analysis of their IT use "isn't really a choice," and, backed by Mr. Hurd, threatened some with termination. "Saying 'this is a policy and if you don't follow it you'll be in violation' was a powerful thing," Mr. Mott says.

"There are going to be booby traps all along the way if you have a culture like we do at H-P," Mr. Hurd cautioned the chief information officers, adding that the solution is to get management support from the top. "Getting the CEO lined up is hard, and that's the key person," he said.

This is a good lesson to learn for a big Green/Energy saving project in your data center like a consolidation project.  Without support from your executive staff, the VPs and other business unit owners are going to be one of your top organizational issues in going Green.  As soon as you start talking about PUE, and equipment efficiencies executives will wonder why you are bothering them with the details.  At the core of any green program is change.  And change will be resisted by organizations who don't see the downside of not supporting the change. Don't bother the execs with the technical details, focus on the issues of instituting changes required to support a Green Data Center.  List those changes that need to be supported, and get the support from your management.

Note: part of the inspiration for this post is a question from a friend who wants to discuss Green Data Centers at an executive conference.  We're stuck in that the details appeal to CIO and his staff, but without the buy-in from the CEO too many projects will fail as business units resist the changes required to go Green.

Google follows Microsoft's Lead, Hired a Power and Cooling Expert from HP

Christian Belady has been widely covered in in the industry and was a big hire for Microsoft. Google followed Microsoft's lead and hired his successor at HP, Christopher Malone.  Christian and Chris's names are listed on many HP papers.

¹  HP, Christopher Malone, PhD, Christian Belady, P.E., “Metrics to Characterize Data Center & IT Equipment Energy Use”, Digital Power Forum, Richardson, TX (September 2006).  Energy-to-Acquisition Cost Ratio (EAC) is defined as the ratio of the 3 year cost of power and cooling for IT equipment to the acquisition cost of the IT equipment. For instance, the EAC for blades, 1U, and 2U servers may be greater than 100%. This indicates that the 3 year cost of power and cooling exceeds the cost of the hardware.
³  HP, Christopher Malone, PhD, Christian Belady, P.E., “Metrics to Characterize Data Center & IT Equipment Energy Use”, Digital Power Forum, Richardson, TX (September 2006) & “How to Minimize Data Center Utility Bills”, HP C. Belady, P.E., Sept 2006, https://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7881&pg=1&topicID=0
⁴  HP, Christopher Malone, PhD, Christian Belady, P.E., “Metrics to Characterize Data Center & IT Equipment Energy Use”, Digital Power Forum, Richardson, TX (September 2006) & “How to Minimize Data Center Utility Bills”, HP C. Belady, P.E., Sept 2006, https://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7881&pg=1&topicID=0

I would say Microsoft got the best guy picking first. Also, it will be interesting if Google & Microsoft go down the path of water cooled servers as both Christopher and Christian were believers of water cooling while at HP.

UPS Avoids the EBay Mistake, Being Fined for Air Pollution from Diesel Generators in their Green Data Center

Many of you have read the SearchDataCenter article about United Parcel Service's Green Data Center efforts.  The interesting part behind the scenes is UPS runs its diesel generators frequently and stays in compliance with local emissions standards.  A $79,200 mistake eBay made.

Given Georgia's water shortage jeopardizing nuclear power plant operations, a reliable power supply seems an issue.  Digging a little deeper, I found it interesting that CARMA.org has UPS listed as a power plant.  Then I found this article in Diesel Progress with details on how UPS installed an Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) system to allow to meet the Georgia EPA emissions standards, and run the diesel generators when spot demand power prices go above 7 cents/kWh.

Parrino said Windward uses the generator sets during a total loss of utility power, during brownouts/voltage swells or grid instabilities, during power switching activities from other users on the nearby grid, during maintenance or troubleshooting by Georgia Power, as well as peak shaving when the cost of electricity exceeds 7 cents/kWh.

Windward developed a program that would put the facility in compliance with the clean air requirements, and allow it to obtain a new air permit that provides the facility the flexibility to run its generators in the ways best suited to the data center a any time of the year, as well as to not degrade engine performance.

But, there is now a bureaucratic overhead for UPS as a power plant.

As easy as it was to obtain the approval from GA-EPD, complying with the quarterly air permit reporting requirements was painstakingly difficult, the project team members said. Windward's air permit had many requirements scattered throughout that had to be compiled into a simplified format.

Examples of this are minute-by-minute logging of the urea injection rates, then obtaining 60 minute averages for each gen-set. With six gen-sets logging an average of 130 hours of runtime annually, the database becomes very bulky in a short amount of time. Other reporting requirements include cumulative run-hours on the first of every month. From the cumulative run-hours, the monthly run-hours are then computed.

If I was UPS I would consider installing the power generation software solution from OSIsoft.  Pat Kennedy, OSIsoft's CEO also pointed out that if you were in San Diego you could turn on your generators before a blackout, but if you were in SF you would have to wait for the blackout before switching on your backup generators.

Microsoft Research Publishes Study Saving DiskEnergy in a Microsoft Data Center

Adding another Microsoft Research paper on saving energy by turning off Windows Live Servers in addition to the below about DiskEnergy.

Appended Feb 4, 2008

Microsoft Research has been applying some of their resources to Microsoft Data Centers.  The latest public information is being presented at the Usenix FAST conference in February 2008.  If you want to read their paper you can go to here.

Power consumption is a major problem for data centers of all sizes which impacts the density of servers and the total cost of ownership. This is causing changes in data center configuration and management. Some components already support some power management features, for example server CPUs support dynamic clock and voltage scaling that enables power requirements to be reduced significantly during idle periods. Storage subsystems do not have power management and are consume a significant amount of power in the data center. Modern enterprise grade disks require approximately 10W when idle. As storage requirements generally increase in data centers, the number of disks in data centers is increasing proportionally.

Based on 1-week long traces of core servers in our data center, we have found that there are significant periods of idle time during which disks can be spun down, and even longer “write-only” periods during which all I/O operations are writes. Based on this we have developed a technique called “write off-loading” which allows disks to stay spun down during these write-only periods, by temporarily off-loading the write requests to other volumes in the data center. Our results show that this provides power savings of 45—60%. This work will presented at the Usenix FAST conference in February 2008.

We believe that write off-loading is a viable technique for saving energy in enterprise storage. In order to use write off-loading, a system administrator needs to manage the trade-off between energy and performance. We are designing tools to help administrators decide how to save the most energy with the least performance impact.

Appended Feb 3, 2008.

Based on this post, we can expect more content from the Microsoft Research group in regards to data center technologies.

Royal Bank of Canada gets the issues for Environment and Water - Executive Commitment

Back in Oct 2007 a month before I started the Green Data Center Blog I ran across some folks at RBC, and found out about their environmental commitment. RBC launched their corporate commitment by their president & CEO Gord Nixon sending out a letter to their staff. Here is a short excerpt from his letter.

Our clients, especially those from the boomer generation, expect to see companies like RBC making a difference in the world. All our research tells us that water shortages will be one of the most significant environmental and humanitarian challenges of the coming decades, and that is the reason we have decided to focus our efforts here. If you’re interested in reading more about the RBC Blue Water Project.

Over the coming months and years, we will be announcing new initiatives as part of the Blueprint, including a focus on reducing our own environmental impact. I know that some parts of RBC are further ahead than others in this area, but the Blueprint will ensure that we’ll all be moving in the same direction, and making an effort to do better everywhere.

The RBC Environmental Blueprint will be available online shortly.

RBC has executed a carbon offset program for its online applications.

We use approximately 715 megawatt hours of energy per year to operate the primary and backup systems that power our online applications. According to Environment Canada's Interim Guidance on Performance Measures for Greenhouse Gas Emissions, this energy use produces approximately 244 metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year. To offset the environmental impact of these emissions, we have purchased high quality carbon offsets – a unit of greenhouse gas emissions validated to have been removed from the atmosphere.

RBC is one of those companies who wants to be a leader in environmental sustainability.

We believe that preservation of the environment is fundamental to the sustainability of our communities, our clients and our company. And we believe that we can help to preserve the environment, while at the same time providing both short- and long-term benefits to our shareholders, clients and employees.

Microsoft Research Announces RFP for Power Aware Computing, $500,000 available

Kim Shearer, Microsoft Research's Sustainable program manager just posted this project on their web site.  Microsoft just announced its Power Aware Computing Request for Proposals 2008 to non-profit colleges or research institutions.

Current work in sustainable and power aware computing suggests two fundamental principles for work in the area. The first is the principle of pay for play, suggesting that the power consumed by a computing device should be proportional to the demand placed upon the system. Systems today typically consume approximately 70% of their maximum load power at idle which defeats this goal. Secondly there is a goal of treating power or energy as a first class resource. There exists a significant body of resource management work largely revolving around attaining maximum performance. It is important that energy efficiency be given a role of equal importance in resource management.

This worldwide RFP seeks to stimulate novel research into increasing energy efficiency, thereby reducing the power consumption of computing. We are soliciting work that has the potential to become part of a large research portfolio, and we encourage proposals that are outside the usual line of enquiry.

The total amount available under this request for proposals (RFP) is $500,000. Microsoft Research anticipates making approximately 5 awards averaging $100,000, with a maximum of $150,000 for any single award. All awards will be made in $US. Awards are generally made as unrestricted gifts to the institution. Outside the United States other local restrictions may apply to the terms of the award. For current policy regarding non-U.S. countries, please refer to http://research.microsoft.com/ur/us/fundingopps/faq.aspx.

Water is a Critical Resource for a Green Data Center

In my Dynamic PUE post I made a point that water could be overlooked in an overzealous focus on PUE.  Without plentiful inexpensive water many cooling systems would be in serious problems.  Some data centers have wisely looked at how they integrate with a municipalities water system, and some are using gray water in their cooling system.

By coincidence MSBNC posted an article on how the drought in the Southeast could shut down nuclear power plants.

“Water is the nuclear industry’s Achilles’ heel,” said Jim Warren, executive director of N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, an environmental group critical of nuclear power. “You need a lot of water to operate nuclear plants.” He added: “This is becoming a crisis.”

An Associated Press analysis of the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors found that 24 are in areas experiencing the most severe levels of drought. All but two are built on the shores of lakes and rivers and rely on submerged intake pipes to draw billions of gallons of water for use in cooling and condensing steam after it has turned the plants’ turbines.

Water rights are a complicated issue, and many times the first rights go to livestock. If you want to read an interesting perspective on water and the American west check out Cadillac Desert.