Green Data Center Blog

Price of Going Green, WSJ article

The WSJ has an article about the reality of costs for going green in the home.

In fact, earning back the green premium can take years, not counting rebates and incentives that may be available from government agencies. Enermodal calculates a payback period of more than 10 years for the most extreme green measures, including super-efficient furnaces and water-thrifty faucets. Systems integrator Solar Depot estimates a solar hot-water system will pay for itself in eight to 10 years, depending on the climate, site and home size; a solar radiant floor-heating system will take five to six years. But considering the average U.S. homeowner lives in a house only seven years before moving, many will need more than the hope of lower utility bills to inspire a green remodeling. (And some green products, such as bamboo floors, don't save any money.)

Data centers going green shouldn't run into the same problem, as a 10 mW data center is the equivalent of 10,000 homes, so energy ROIs are much quicker.

Greening the Branch Office with Windows Server 2008

Microsoft is launching Windows Server 2008 today, and one of the features which will get little press coverage is Windows Server 2008's Branch Office features and how they can help Green the Branch offices by reducing the hardware required in the branch office, and leverage central resources more efficiently.

With features such as Read-Only Domain Controller, BitLocker Drive Encryption, Server Core, and network protocol improvements, Windows Server 2008 is a great platform for the branch office. And now, through a virtualization component that Cisco will be embedding in their WAAS appliances, Cisco will offer Windows Server 2008 as part of their WAN optimization solution.  This means that IT can offer all of the performance and availability benefits of having base IT services in the branch office without the need for extra hardware. In fact, deployment is all centrally managed, entirely through software!

And Cisco is one of the partners in the Branch Office solution.

Cisco WAAS:

Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) is a WAN optimization solution that improves the performance of TCP-based applications operating in a WAN environment. The basic idea is to accelerate access to servers and applications that have been centralized into corporate data centers. This provides LAN-like application performance for branch office users while taking advantage of the IT infrastructure simplification that comes from centralization.

This certainly sounds like a win-win situation for customers, but we need to look a little deeper to understand why Cisco and Microsoft decided this was the next major area of collaboration for our companies.

Base IT Services:

When you centralize servers you quickly find out that there are some critical services that branch users and IT pros alike depend on. There are services like DHCP and DNS, that are required for just about everything, and then there is the “little” matter of managing printers, print queues and print driver distribution in the branch. And finally, users need to authenticate, process login scripts, and apply appropriate policies to connect to corporate resources – most often through Microsoft Active Directory®.

All of this infrastructure is provided by Windows Server for many Microsoft and Cisco customers. Customers have been talking with us about continuing to provide these services in the branch – even if they want to centralize everything else – and eliminate the need to deploy multiple physical devices into each branch office.

Cisco has their blog entry.

What makes that so interesting to our customers?

Several things:

1) The ability to flexibly design branch office IT architectures to meet information and business requirements, while actively lowering management cycles and cost.

2) Reducing IT devices in the branch, while still delivering required end user experience and local services (can you say print server, DNS, DHCP?)

3) Leveraging the network, and the benefits of WAN optimization (Cisco WAAS) coupled with virtualization, to enable the ideal mix of local branch and centralized data center services. Selectable by the customer.

I've tried to get the attention of some people on this subject, but Branch Offices tend to be much lower priority for the data center staff. I'll place bets almost no one thinks of their branch office in their Green Data Center strategy.

Ask.com talks on Quincy's Power Advantage

DataCenterKnowledge writes a post on ask.com's public statement on Quincy's Power Advantage.

Greg Fennewald, senior director of data center strategy for Ask.com, discussed the economics of power at last week's meeting of the Grant County Economic Development Council. Fennewald spoke about why his company decided to locate in Moses Lake, Washington, where it opened a new data center in December. The savings on electricity, he said, are "quite significant."

"When our place is full, it's going to need about 4,000 kilowatts pretty much flat 24-7," said Fennewald. "That's going to cost about $70,000 a month. To have the same amount of demand in a higher energy cost place like Manhattan or San Francisco, over $300,000. That's a lot of money, and that's per month, so take that times 12, big bucks. There's some good reasons why you see folks going to Quincy, Wenatchee and other places within a 150-mile radius of here. There's a lot of things this area has to offer."

Which reminded me of a dinner conversation I had months ago with the Peter Horan, the CEO of Interactive Active's Media and Advertising division which includes ask.com. We spent a good 10 minutes talking about power and how it was critical factor in data centers. Peter has always been a technical executive and it was refreshing to hear he gets the issues of building a Green Data Center.

Iowa Gov. wants more Renewable Energy and Reduce Energy Consumption, exempts Google's Council Bluffs Data Center

MSNBC has an article about renewable energy and reducing consumption.

DES MOINES, Iowa - Gov. Chet Culver called Monday for producing more renewable energy and reducing energy use by 5 percent.

"The good news here is we have a lot of support, both public and private support," said Culver, speaking during a telephone conference call from Washington, D.C., where he was attending a National Governors Association meeting.

Much of the conference is devoted to energy issues, and Culver said it was a good opportunity to focus on the topic, which has been a centerpiece of his first term as governor. He and legislators already have agreed on a $100 million fund that will finance alternative energy projects in the state.

And conveniently dances around the energy needs of Google's Council Bluffs data center project.

Allowing utility regulators to set a statewide goal of reducing energy use by 1.5 percent a year, and eventually trimming the use by 5 percent. Some economic development projects, such as a Google Inc. data center under construction near Council Bluffs, will require additional energy, but Culver said he's focused on reducing base demand.

So in the end are the Iowa citizens subsidizing the increased power use by Google's data center? And, the governor is able to claim energy savings while bottom line he transferred the energy consumption to Google.

How much power will Google's Iowa data center consume?  According to permits it could be 76 mW in its 1st phase.

IT a "Black Eye" for those who want to be Green

Canadian Technology news discusses a Green IT summit in Calgary.

"We generally change for one of two reasons – inspiration or desperation," business philosopher and best-selling author Jim Rohn once said.

The same principle, it seems, holds true in the realm of green IT.

If positive reasons don't do the trick, then the dire consequences of environmentally unsustainable practices will soon cause North American companies to change their ways.

That's likely to be a key message emerging from the Green IT Summit that flags off in Calgary today – going by the pre-summit interviews that ITBusiness.ca did with some of the participants.

An analyst at The 451 Group makes the point.

“IT has to work quickly to become green or we're a black eye to those that want to be green,” he says. And there's a lot of work to be done.

Wacker has even invented his own law to explain datacenter power inefficiency: “Anything that is free or inexpensive is misused.”   

Servers, he says, have long fit into that category.

NRDC, Building Green

The NRDC has a site which provides guidance on a Building Green: From Principle to Practice. It does a nice job of summarizing the process, and it is supplied by an experienced Architecture firms.

Even though this site wasn't intended for data centers, it provides good guidance on the stages of a Green Data Center project which many companies follow, but haven't taken the time on how to explain what they are doing.

Good leadership is important to the success of any building project, but it is particularly vital in green building efforts. Some members of your building and design team may not be accustomed to thinking about a building as a single, well-integrated system -- a key strategy in green construction -- so make sure everyone you're working with is committed to thinking ahead and working collaboratively.

The best green strategies achieve multiple objectives with a single solution. The earlier you decide to build green, the more opportunities you'll have to maximize the synergies in your building's design and performance.

Oscars Go Green, Year 2

In this year's Oscars, there are specifics on what they did this year to be green.

With support from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, 100% of the energy used for the telecast, the red-carpet arrivals show and the Governors Ball will be supplied by renewable windpower.

All of the generators used for the production, for press support and the red carpet arrivals area are powered by a fuel mix that includes biodiesel.

Among the vehicles made available by General Motors for use by production staff and presenters are zero-emission hydrogen-powered cars and hybrids.

Nearly all food serviceware for events associated with the Awards Presentation is either reusable or biodegradable/compostable.

The programs, invitations, RSVP cards, envelopes, parking passes and other printed materials include a minimum of 30% postconsumer recycled content.

This is much better than last year's announcement where they told the audience how they should be greener, but gave little specifics on their own Green efforts.

They make no mention of the IT equipment, but they do have executive support for their Green efforts and partnership with the NRDC.

Hollywood – Building upon work initiated a year ago, Academy President Sid Ganis announced today that ecologically intelligent practices have once again been incorporated into the planning and execution of the upcoming 80th Annual Academy Awards presentation on Sunday and related events.

The Academy’s green initiative, which includes several energy-saving strategies, is being carried out in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a non-partisan environmental and advocacy organization.

“Last year, in planning and producing the Oscar® show, we chose supplies, resources and services designed to reduce Oscar’s ecological footprint,” said Ganis. “This year, with the guidance and support of the NRDC, we’ve been able to do even more.”

Energy Efficiency Drives Higher Consumption, Downside of Virtualization?

OK, I was on vacation this week, so I didn't write as much, and I wasn't planning on doing much work. But, I made a call to Microsoft's Christian Belady to discuss some energy saving ideas from the top of Stevens Pass.

If you haven't skied Stevens Pass, on the backside, you ski right under high voltage power lines from the Columbia Basin's hydroelectric dams, and you can get close enough in some areas that you'll feel get a slight charge holding your pole up in the air.  So, thinking about power feels like the right thing to do.

After talking to Christian, I was thinking about his point on energy efficiency driving higher consumption, and where it could be illustrated in a specific case.

An interesting scenario is in virtualization. If you take an existing IT environment and virtualize servers, you assume a reduction in energy costs. But now, with users creating VMs easier than physical servers by removing the physical server barrier, how long is it before new VMs are created at a rate faster than the physical servers?

Will Energy Efficient VMs drive higher energy consumption over the long run?

It would be interesting to know after people have virtualized environments, enjoyed their energy savings, what happens to their energy consumption after users have adjusted to the new VM environment.

Are people missing the point because they are not thinking about life cycle management of servers, and what the impact is of virtulization?

Microsoft Creates Video Measuring Desktop Power Efficiency in Their Lab

One of Microsoft's labs created a video on measuring power consumption on desktop devices. This video is appropriate for someone who is new to measuring energy consumption on the desktop.

So how much power do your PCs draw?  And how do you figure that out?
Those were the questions that I asked Grant after he recently updated the machines in some of the classrooms he manages.  His problem was even more complex:  He needed stronger/better/faster machines, but he was at capacity on his circuits, so he needed to do it without increasing power draw.
In this video, Grant walks us through some of his methodology in measuring and benchmarking power consumption on a few machines, and shares the results with us. 
It leads to some interesting conclusions, and some good food for thought for anyone trying to make energy conscious decisions around PC purchases.

In this video they use the Watt's up device, but hopefully, they'll put the Smart Watt device in their small server room.

Energy Efficient Mermaid (Mobile Earthquake Recorder in Marine Areas)

One of the areas where Energy Efficiency is in their DNA are remote sensor engineers. The Microsoft Research team who wrote this paper are responsible for sensorweb and were Xerox PARC guys.

I found this article on the Economist, and it reminds me of some people who are investigating battery operated sensors in the data center to collect power and environmental data. Why would someone go with battery power, because the easier you can install a device in data center on its own network and power, the easier it is to deploy. The costs to deploy monitoring solutions that assume they'll plug into the existing data center network infrastructure will many times be more than the cost of the equipment.

To do that, they need to float near the sea floor, since most of an earthquake's energy travels through the rock rather than the water. So a Mermaid can operate at a depth of up to 1,500 metres (about a mile). When she hears something that might be pertinent, she runs the signal through her on-board computer to decide just how significant it really is. If it does turn out to be significant, she surfaces by pumping air into a bladder and makes contact with a satellite that has been co-opted into the project. Once she has delivered her message, the air is sucked back out of the bladder and she returns to her gloomy underwater station.

The main engineering problem Dr Simons faces—apart from making something that will work reliably in the salty ocean depths—is energy conservation. When a Mermaid runs out of power, she dies. That power is provided by lithium-ion batteries and is reckoned sufficient for between 50 and 100 surfacings.

One of the ways Dr Simons saves power is in the computer. The decision to surface is made by an algorithm that depends on a mathematical function called a wavelet. This divides an earthquake wave into separate components which can be studied independently. That allows the computer to restrict energy-intensive high-resolution analyses to those sections of the waves that really need it. The other sections receive a more cursory (and thus less power-consuming) glance.