Green Data Center Blog

A Look Inside Microsoft’s Green Data Center Efforts, Educating Enterprise Developers and Sys Admins

Microsoft hosted a panel discussion at TechEd 2008 in Orlando.  The panel was moderated by George Cerbone with Mike Manos, Lewis Curtis, Beth Humphreys from Microsoft. Additional panel members are Kathy Malone and David Platt.

The video is here. Don’t hesitate to just hit play, and listen to the audio while you are surfing the web.  It has some good perspectives.

Lewis Curtis presented first his past experiences over the last year working on Green IT at Microsoft.

Mike Manos presented why going Green is a business responsibility to save energy and has monetary savings.

Beth Humphreys shares her experiences in customer engagements discussing Green IT.

Kathy Malone talks about her efforts to build compliance systems and a green IT developer community.

David Platt, a recognized .NET developer expert, explains why developers are not creating green applications. His view is green should be an OS function, and developers don’t have enough time for this.

Mike Manos brings up a good rebuttal that once Microsoft changed to an energy based chargeback system, the business units started to understand the impact of their SW on their energy bill, and have chosen energy efficiency vs. a focus on only performance.

David Platt continues to make the point developer costs and power is negligible, repeating his point that the energy efficiency is the responsibility of the OS, and none of the effort should be taken on by the developer.

The good thing is the rest of the panel think David Platt is wrong.

Kathy Malone makes excellent points on compliance systems.

This video gives you an idea of some of the people in Microsoft who are driving the Green Data Center efforts to the software developer community. 

I am glad I caught Lewis’s post.

Changing Behavior, follow up to Christian Belady's point at Energy Efficiency Workshop, NY starts posting calories on restaurant food

Microsoft's Christian Belady made the point at last week's Energy Efficiency Strategy Workshop that Changing Behaviors are best done by a change in charge back methods.

Another proof of Christian's point is what is happening in NY as the state requires calorie disclosures on restaurant food.

New Yorkers try to swallow calorie sticker shock

600 calorie muffins? The first city to adopt law faces unappetizing surprises

Although touted as "fat free," a slice of banana chocolate chip cake at Starbucks packs 390 calories, as New Yorkers discovered when the coffee chain began displaying calorie counts to comply with a new New York City law.

Nora Cara was flabbergasted.

She was about to order her usual morning coffee and muffin at Dunkin’ Donuts when she saw the new calorie labels. The chocolate chip muffin she had her eye on was 630 calories.

“I was blown away,” said Cara, a 27-year-old homemaker from Forest Hills in New York City. “I’m not a no-carb type of person, and I usually don’t even think about it. But you pick up a little muffin with your coffee, and it has 630 calories in it? That’s a bit extreme!”

New Yorkers have been in the throes of sticker shock since this spring when the Big Apple became the first city in the country to implement a law forcing chain restaurants to post the calorie count of each food in the same size and font as the price.

People will change their IT behaviors if they saw the Power and Carbon impact of their actions.  I am sure a lot of people will be surprised with the #'s, just like this.

1,360 calorie salad
Many New Yorkers are finding that even the foods they thought were lower calorie really aren’t. Vicki Freedman, who lives in Manhattan, watches her weight and always tries to choose a light option when eating out. But the 26 year old just discovered that the Friday’s pecan-crusted chicken salad, served with mandarin oranges, dried cranberries and celery, has 1,360 calories.

“That surprised me the most because they market it as a healthy option,” she said. “It’s like false advertising. You think it’s better than the burger and the fries. It’s misleading.” (The cheeseburger served with fries is, indeed, 1,290 calories.)

Microsoft's James Hamilton Presents "Where Does Power go in Data Centers and How to get it Back?"

James Hamilton has a blog post about his attending O'Reilly's Foo Camp and his presentation on "Where does Power go in Data Centers and How to get it Back?"

The title for my session was Where Does the Power go in Data Centers and How to get it Back?  I didn’t show slides but much of what we covered is posted at: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/TalksAndPapers/JamesRH_DCPowerSavingsFooCamp08.ppt.  In the session, we talked through how contemporary large data centers work first looking at power distribution. We tracked the power from the feed to the substation at 115,000 volts through numerous conversions before arriving at the CPU at 1.2 volts. We then talked about power saving server design techniques.  And then the mechanical systems used to get the heat back out.  In each section we discussed what could be done to improve the design and how much could be saved.

Our conclusion from the session was that power savings of nearly 4x where both possible and affordable using only current technology.  For those participated in the session, thanks for your contribution and  for your help. It was fun.

James comes to the conclusion there is a power savings of 4x. If  you are curious as to how he comes to this look at his slides.  One of his ideas that flies in the face of high density computing is Thin Slice Computing.

Intel IT: Relevance of Architecture – Closed Loop Feedback System

I found this following blog post on Intel’s Expert Center for IT best practices. It’s kind of a long post, but makes good points on the importance of architecture for Manageability and Automation which are key methods for a Green Data Center

Intel Open Port: Intel vPro Expert Center Blog: Relevance of Architecture: Part 3 - How Architecture Can Help

The primary role of architecture is to provide an orchestrated plan to meet short term and long term Manageability & Automation (M&A) objectives. Architecture is all about technical planning and can enable reduced operational costs and agility if done correctly. I strongly believe that architecture can help accelerate the rate of change and provide real value for "M" and for "A".

The below graphic is one which does a good job of articulating the need for a manageability bus.

 

Unfortunately, he misses the simplicity of explaining what you need is a closed loop feedback system as he has this diagram which is drawn backwards.

This is the diagram he should have used. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory

I am amazed at how often the IT community misses the opportunity to use control theory to explain management systems.  Most IT systems actually run open loop.

On a related topic I had a chance to meet with a fellow consultant, Michael Emanuel who has worked on IT management tools, and knows of a company developing some innovative solutions to the challenge of building a closed loop management tool for a Green Data Center.  After I  have had a chance to review the product features, it will be in a future blog post.

Microsoft Grabs Leadership Positioning in NetworkWorld Article

After 2 days at the National Data Center Energy Efficiency Workshop and Energy Star, I was looking for a way to summarize some of the issues covered for the 150 attendees.  NetworkWorld reported on the workshop, and did the work for me.  So, let me highlight some parts.

Good incentives boost data-center energy efficiency

By Nancy Gohring , IDG News Service , 07/09/2008

A Microsoft executive shared techniques the company has used, including new kinds of employee incentive programs and internally created automation tools, to reduce the energy consumption of its growing data centers.

The methods he described could help other companies that use or operate data centers reduce costs, said experts who also spoke at the data-center efficiency strategy conference put on by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency in Redmond, Washington, on Tuesday.

While there are plenty of technology solutions for improving data-center energy efficiency, not many companies are using them, said Christian Belady, principal power and cooling architect at Microsoft. "It boils down to a behavioral problem, not necessarily a technology problem," he said.

Microsoft decided to change the incentives for workers as a way to encourage them to use the most energy-efficient techniques. Traditionally, the various business groups within the company were charged for using the company's data centers based on the amount of floor space required to stack the servers that their services used. That spurred a drive within the business units to minimize the space they used, often through the use of extremely dense servers. Those servers, however, sucked power and required more cooling, Belady said.

Now, Microsoft charges business units based on the amount of energy consumed by the servers that host their services. "We moved from cost as a function of space to cost being a function of power," he said.

That shift made individual business units conscious of the number of DIMMs (dual in-line memory modules) they had at their disposal, for example. "Now those DIMMs are costing you power, and you're getting a year-over-year chargeback for those DIMMs," he said. Such charges make the business units less likely to require more memory then their services actually need, he said.

Other industry speakers are quoted.

Incentives are also changing at utility companies in ways that can benefit enterprises. "As a facility manager my incentive isn't to sell you more electricity, but to give you the tools to be more efficient," said Francois Rongere, segment supervisor with PG&E's high technology energy-efficiency team. "My bonus is based on how much savings you have done in my territory."

Those energy savings often translate into real money from the utility. Ray Pfeifer, who works with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, was recently involved in a series of experiments with companies to try to quantify how certain changes to their data centers affected energy usage. He said that many of the implementations were 100 percent funded by utilities, which often offer incentives to companies for investments that can cut their energy usage.

While that may be good news to the enterprise, the utility incentives only show how behind the curve businesses are in general, said Brill. "It's appalling to me that we have to have utilities offering incentives to do what's good business sense," he said.

Thanks to Nancy Gohring for writing a good article.

Closed Loop Cooling & Monitoring System - Opengate Data Systems

Part of attending the http://www.energetics.com/datacenters08/ conference is I am able to catch up with a lot of people in a good networking environment. Jason Dudek from APC is one of person who I have worked with off and on for over 10 years.  Jason wanted to make the point that he has a lower carbon footprint as he drove to a park and ride, took a bus, and he is riding his bike home. So, yes he wins the lowest carbon footprint for the day.

But more important Jason pointed me to http://www.opengatedata.com/ who have a closed loop cooling & monitoring system for legacy equipment in a data center.

They have a Cooling System

SiteX Rack Airflow Control Systems

SiteX Rack Airflow Control Systems provide reliable, redundant and easily scaleable closed-loop pressure control to eliminate bypass and maintain proper rack to IT equipment airflow in a variety of rack fan configurations.

Network versions allow remote management and alarm notification for superior intelligence and visibility of critical information over Ethernet. Integrate with SiteX HD Fan Trays or use with your existing rack fans.

Deliver predictable temperatures to your IT equipment and achieve the highest degree of data center cooling efficiency with SiteX from Opengate Data Systems.

• Effective Rack Airflow Control for the highest degree of efficiency and availability
• Reduce or eliminate CRAC over-provisioning by providing physical separation of cool supply and hot return airstreams
• Report rack airflow capacity for future application deployment
• Couple CRAC cooling to IT equipment heat loads, raising return air temperatures and improving CRAC and chiller efficiency
• Report rack airflow rate for CRAC/H airflow delivery control

and, a Monitoring system

SiteX HD Environment Monitoring

Effective environment monitoring with up to 16 temperature and humidity sensors plus three additional I/O ports for water, smoke, and door open position sensors in a 1U rack-mount device.

Communicate using HTTP, HTTPS, XML or SNMP and use DHCP to automatically connect to your network.

Customize alarm limits and behavior using the configuration page. Visibility of critical information with the highest degree of reliability can be ensured with SiteX HD from Opengate Data Systems.

Environment Monitoring Series PDF

SiteX HD™ Environment Monitoring
Effective environment monitoring and visibility of critical alarms over Ethernet.

EM160
Environment Monitoring with 16 sensor ports + 3 I/O ports

EM160D
Environment Monitoring with 5 sensor ports + 3 I/O ports

EMS10
Temperature Sensor, 12 Foot* Cord

EMS20
Temperature / Airflow Sensor, 12 Foot* Cord

EMS30
Temperature / Airflow / Humidity Sensor, 12 Foot* Cord

EMS40
Water Sensor, connect to I/O port

EMS50
Smoke Sensor Kit, connect to I/O port, requires 120V source

EMS60
Door Open Sensor, connect to I/O port

EMS700
Camera, Web Enabled

Microsoft PUE articles, Part 1, 2, & 3

Microsoft has posted the complete set of PUE articles in 3 parts.

Part 1 - http://blogs.msdn.com/the_power_of_software/archive/2008/06/20/microsoft-s-pue-experience-years-of-experience-reams-of-data.aspx

Part 2 - http://blogs.msdn.com/the_power_of_software/archive/2008/06/27/part-2-why-is-energy-efficiency-important.aspx

Part 3 - http://blogs.msdn.com/the_power_of_software/archive/2008/07/07/part-3-what-s-your-pue-strategy.aspx

What makes this unique is Microsoft is educating the SW developer and architects on PUE, and have highlighted the blog on the MSDN Patterns home page. Life will be a lot easier to work together when developers understand data center efficiency issues like PUE.

Welcome to The Power of Software blog, a new undertaking by the patterns & practices team. As you may know, our traditional focus has been on building guidance that helps software architects and developers successfully design and build applications.

This blog is a slight departure from that. We’re exploring ideas relating to Green IT and the ways we, as a company, can use energy more efficiently. Some currently planned subjects include ways to save energy through the use of software and ways to optimize datacenters. All posts will be written or reviewed by subject matter experts, just like other patterns & practices projects.

We hope this starts a dialog with the community—please let us know the topics that interest you.

RoAnn Corbisier
Editor

EPA/DOE Energy Efficiency Strategy Workshop

For the next two days I am at http://www.energetics.com/datacenters08/ conference on the Microsoft campus. If you want you can listen to this conference live.

Dear Data Center Stakeholder,
Please see below call-in information for the National Data Center Energy Efficiency Strategy Workshop and ENERGY STAR Server Stakeholder meeting for July 8 & 9.  Agendas are available at www.energetics.com/datacenters08.  Presentations and discussion notes will be posted to the conference and ENERGY STAR Web sites shortly following the meetings.
Call-In: (203) 480-8000
Toll Free: 866-500-6738
Passcode: 7217735
Please note that Day 1 discussions are currently underway and the Day 2 meeting is scheduled to begin at 9:00 a.m. PT tomorrow morning.
We hope you can join us.

The first presentation reviewing on Implementing Best Energy Management Practices is Christian Belady.

Christian started out his presentation making the point that he and Andrew Fanara from the EPA have lowest carbon footprint point getting to the presentation, but I have them both beat as I had a 3 mile drive. Christian's drive is 12 miles, and Andrew's is 20 miles.  But, Andrew and I both have Christian beat overall as we have home offices.

Christian starts his presentation efficiency is a behavior problem. People are being charged by space. The behavior change is charging by power. Relevant metrics used by Microsoft are  PUE/DCiE, DC Utilization, Server Utilization, Cost (move from cost/space to cost/power).

Microsoft End results, focusing on changing behavior.

• Optimization of data center design
  • Follow best practices
  • Adoption of new technologies
  • Optimization of code
  • Engineer of data center
• Right Sizing
  • Elimination of stranded compute
  • Elimination of stranded power and cooling

Content will be posted on http://www.energetics.com/datacenters08/

Putting IT on a Diet, Double the Success by Keeping an Energy Diary

I wrote an article for TechNet on Putting IT on a Diet.

MSNBC provides data that show people doubled their weight savings when they used a food diary.

Writing down every morsel doubles weight loss

Dieters who kept daily food diaries were more successful, new study says

By Steve Mitchell

MSNBC contributor

updated 1 hour, 47 minutes ago

In the struggle to lose weight, picking up a pen might be just as useful as putting down the fork.

That’s according to a new study that found that people who kept daily food diaries lost twice as much weight or more as those who didn’t keep a tally of their meals.

Nearly 1,700 Kaiser Permanente study participants agreed to exercise and adopt a healthy diet, but those who took the extra step of keeping track of what they consumed got something of a booster charge in their weight loss.

A good tip to keep in mind when putting your own Green IT/Data Center program in place. If you want to automate your diary data collection you should look at a tool like http://www.osisoft.com/Industries/Information%20Technology/.

Fluctuating power quality and power loss in equipment

Lack of information to correlate IT load and power consumed by IT assets

Inefficient cooling system operations

Lack of information to correlate server IT load and cost of power

Inadequate performance monitoring and condition-based maintenance of equipment

Difficulty in performing capacity planning in terms of power, cooling and IT resources

Microsoft Launches New Blog for Energy Efficiency Best Practices

Microsoft launched a new blog called “The Power of Software.” This looks like a site you should add to your rss feeds. I am.

Welcome to The Power of Software blog, a new undertaking by the patterns & practices team. As you may know, our traditional focus has been on building guidance that helps software architects and developers successfully design and build applications.

This blog is a slight departure from that. We’re exploring ideas relating to Green IT and the ways we, as a company, can use energy more efficiently. Some currently planned subjects include ways to save energy through the use of software and ways to optimize datacenters. All posts will be written or reviewed by subject matter experts, just like other patterns & practices projects.

We hope this starts a dialog with the community—please let us know the topics that interest you.

RoAnn Corbisier
Editor

The first entry is by Christian Belady and Mike Manos on Microsoft’s experience using PUE in their data centers.

Microsoft’s PUE Experience—Years of Experience, Reams of Data

This short series of articles describes how Microsoft uses Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), an industry standard metric for the efficiency of a datacenter. Being able to measure and monitor the effective power consumption of a datacenter in terms of the computing power it contains provides a way to ensure that you make best use of resources while minimizing your environmental footprint. This first article introduces PUE and looks at the issues that it can help you to resolve.

Part 1—"What Color is your Datacenter?"

Imagine if a child were to draw a picture of your datacenter. Does it look green, or is it a glowing orange or even as black as night? Look at the individual pieces of equipment in your datacenter—are any of them green?

If you want the picture of your datacenter to look greener (more energy efficient), you could try upgrading items to more energy-efficient equivalents, as if they were pieces of a puzzle that can simply be replaced. This upgrade method is what many companies are using as a way to convince themselves that they are reducing energy costs. The problem is that, unless you look at the big picture and understand how the pieces fit together, you could end up being disappointed with the outcome.

Figure 1 shows an example of how the painter Seurat demonstrated a scientific approach to painting called pointillism, where the artist uses combination of color dots to create an image that is harmonious and effective, while minimizing the number of colors used. This approach is analogous to management telling their datacenter team, “I want a good looking picture where everything works together and uses as few resources as possible.”

A simple idea needs a simple metric to work. In Seurat's paintings, it is a visual test. For a datacenter, it is an efficiency value—"Tell me what the energy overhead is to run the IT equipment". Microsoft has been using this approach as long as anyone can remember, and when industry groups like The Green Grid started promoting a metric for datacenter efficiency, Microsoft was an early supporter and contributor to the standard as they had years of experience with their own datacenter efficiency metrics.