Green Data Center Blog

Pulling the Plug: Summer of '08 Sparks Creative Conservation - WSJ.com

WSJ has an article on how people are being creative turning off their air conditioning. It is 2nd most popular article today behind the US bolsters fannie and freddie.

As the article cites, get ready for the electricity price increases.

Pulling the Plug: Summer of '08 Sparks Creative Conservation - WSJ.com

Because many power plants run on natural gas, which has shot way up in price, utilities in every region of the nation have imposed -- or are planning -- big rate increases this year, some approaching 30%.

In response, nearly two-thirds of families are cutting back on air conditioning, according to a recent Associated Press-Yahoo News poll. They're buying ceiling fans and programmable thermostats; burning up hot afternoons in malls and movie theaters; and bombarding blogger Erin Huffstetler, who writes about frugal living, with questions about the merits of tinting their windows dark to block the sun.

I know the Microsoft guys say they save energy cleaning the roof.  Here is one guy who thinks he saves energy by sprinkling the roof.

On hot afternoons, Mr. Newman runs a hose to the roof and douses the shingles for 20 minutes, which he swears lowers the temperature inside. "I don't know if it's all that good for the life span of the roof," Mr. Newman says, "but when it's 110 degrees, I really could care less."

And WSJ even included a story of a bad move in air conditioning.

And Reba Kennedy, who turned off her central air altogether?

Ms. Kennedy now cools just the three rooms she uses most in her San Antonio home, with window units set at 78 degrees. To her surprise, she has found it pleasurable. With her downstairs windows open, she can smell the honeysuckle in her yard. She loves the look of her sheer curtains blowing in the breeze.

Last week, though, when she reviewed her electric bills, Ms. Kennedy found that her sacrifices haven't translated into savings. In June of 2006 -- with the central air on full blast -- she used an average of 26 kilowatt hours a day. Last month? An average of 44.

Harvey Sachs, a senior fellow at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, says that isn't surprising, because window units are notoriously inefficient.

But Ms. Kennedy was upset. Since quitting her job as a business lawyer two years ago to take up writing, she has tried to live simply and frugally; conserving energy is central to that goal.

Are you crazy enough to succeed? - Behavior- msnbc.com, Possible explanation for Extreme Green Behaviors

Saw this MSNBC article and it provides a possible explanation for some people who are obsessed with Green practices that have no science backing their actions.

Are you crazy enough to succeed? - Behavior- msnbc.com

I'm at the Obsessive Compulsive Disorders Institute (OCDI), a residential treatment center in McLean Hospital — Harvard's psychiatric center — to see if my own OCD problem wasn't just my secret but maybe also the secret to my success. All my adult life, intrusive thoughts have alternately halted my progress and saved my ass, and I'd finally like to separate the bad from the good.

The medical director at the center, Michael Jenike, M.D., is both a maverick and a pioneer in the OCD community. He founded this facility, the first of its kind, to help sufferers of what he considers the most agonizing of psychiatric disorders.

"I had a 17-year-old who had kidney cancer that was going to kill him in 5 or 6 months. He also had a bad case of OCD. He said he'd rather get rid of his OCD and live only 6 months, than get rid of the cancer and live with the OCD. That's when it first hit me: This is some serious stuff."
The people seeking treatment at OCDI do not have the minstrel-show version of the disorder acted out by Tony Shalhoub in Monk or Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets. The institute's residents are seriously impaired. They have the kind of shattering anxiety that would make the rest of the OCD world — roughly 1 percent of all adults, 2.3 million of them in the United States alone — want to scrub their hands. The real numbers could be even higher, because OCD may be underdiagnosed and undertreated. Half of all OCD cases are serious — and that's the highest percentage among all anxiety disorders. On average, people flail about for 17 years and see three or four doctors before they find the right care.
That horror aside, OCD has become cool. Perhaps it fascinates us because it forces otherwise normal people to carry out insane acts — acts that they know are insane. It has great dramatic tension. We secretly enjoy the dissonance of a perfectly rational man becoming convinced that he is fatally contaminated and washing his hands with bleach and a scrub brush, only to repeat the whole routine 10 minutes later. Paging Lady Macbeth.

For any you have started a green program in your company, I am sure you are familiar with people who could possibly be put in the category of having a Green Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

A CIO Recommends Avoiding kW based Pricing. Why?

Duncan Scott, CIO at DTZ, a global real estate company is quoted in UK’s Computing web site to avoid kW based pricing in the short term.

“Datacentre providers have started to price by kilowatt and not by server footprint and performance, and those prices have gone up by 30 per cent in the past month,” said Duncan Scott, CIO at global commercial real estate management company DTZ Holdings.

“Inevitably we will have some kind of formula such as that used by the airlines that includes distress and passes the costs on.

“It is a bit of a stand-off at the moment. The question is what the price of oil is going to do next. Are the providers going to completely change their business model based on the oil price? My advice is avoid kilowatt pricing at the moment but accept that it is going to come eventually.”

The author of this article supports this idea that the shock of what the bills actually are would be a change IT cannot adapt to So delay the inevitable.

A $200-per-barrel oil price would be a jolt for IT, said David Tebbutt, programme director at analyst Freeform Dynamics. “This may wake people up to the true cost of IT, and move the cost of electricity from facilities budgets to IT,” he said.

“The cost of IT infrastructure would go shooting up. But you are not going to solve the problem quickly. You can get staff to behave differently and economise on power, but you can’t transform IT infrastructure at a stroke. It can take years.”

This is a new take on what to do about high power costs.  Don’t tell people, because if they saw the bill, they wouldn’t be able to adapt quickly.  Sounds like internal politics to not put a group on the spot as to what they will do to save energy.

As crazy as this sounds, maybe people do want to hide the energy bill, and avoid the problem. Sounds logical for an IT group that is understaffed, budget limited, and has no idea on what to do to make a green data center and green IT services.

Microsoft Employee, Blogs a Response to NYTimes article on Climate-Change Ranking

The Green PR wars are escalating and the latest report from Climate Counts is covered by the NYTimes.

Craig Berman, a spokesman for Amazon.com — which scored 5 this year, up from zero in 2007 — also shrugged off the scores. He noted that Amazon had made “significant progress” in reducing packaging and otherwise reducing its carbon footprint.

Companies that showed marked improvement were far more exuberant. Google, which has pledged to become carbon neutral, rose by 38 points, to 55. “Projects that had been years in the making came to fruition,” said Bill Weihl, Google’s green energy czar.

The NYTimes article makes no mention of Yahoo or Microsoft.  This interesting that Google gets better scores than Yahoo, even though Yahoo has achieved carbon neutrality for 2007 by buying carbon credits.  Yahoo scores 37.  The Yahoo green staff have got to be pissed.

Microsoft employee, Lewis Curtis, blogs a response to the NYtimes article.

Today, in the New York Times, the Climate Counts group gave an impressive rating to Google 55 while rating Microsoft at a 38.   They quoted Google's commitment to go carbon neutral.   

Google is a heavy user for energy and all of their green token projects have been tiny.  I predict they have spent more money marketing their green projects than the actual projects themselves.

Also, if they have a commitment to be carbon neutral, why don't they release their real carbon footprint numbers?  in the spirit of openness and "do no evil", why don't they disclose the real progress or allow the public to tour their centers to see the real work being done to improve environmental impact?

Apple was given a very low rating of 11.   I think it's comical in the interview with the New York Times, Apple blamed much of their carbon footprint on their users. 

So let talk about Microsoft:

Microsoft is one of the only massive web solutions companies that allows customers to tour their datacenters to see the real  environmental improvements to increase efficiency and decrease environmental impact.

From presentations from Microsoft's datacenter team to the public, it's explained how we measure and how granular we measure and what specific steps Microsoft takes.   I've worked for many large tech giants and at this point, I haven't seen a more open model to the public. 

also:

Microsoft as developed the most aggressive power saving features in the world for client and server computers.  There are significant power savings capabilities for consumers and administrators to control to reduce energy consumption of their operating system experience.

Microsoft's .Net platform has capabilities for developers to write power aware applications in WPF (windows presentation foundation) to reduce power drain on client systems.

In the last couple of years,(many would be surprised) Microsoft now offers some of the most consolidation infrastructure options to reduce the number of servers and clients in an IT organization.

Microsoft invests significant amounts of money into the Microsoft Research group to design solutions for consumers and corporations reduce environmental impact. 

Microsoft offers some of the most pervasive remote worker solutions in the world.

Microsoft has invested significantly in websites, concerts and public campaigns to  help consumers learn how to reduce environmental impact (much of it not relating to our product line).

In reality, it's easy to see how critics can pick apart organizations through their narrow lens.  I predict that we will see more of these models in the future.   But, I hope the environmental sustainability market matures to a better state than this.

Microsoft's Mike Manos Opening Keynote Uptime Institute, Green Enterprise Computing

The opening of the Uptime Institute Symposium started with Pitt Turner, saying "what are we doing here?" Green Enterprise Computing is a timely topic for the industry event. I've seen Mike present before, and here is what I got out of Mike's latest presentation as new information to digest.

1. Mike's call to action for all was to stop being information hogs, and to share with the industry. He gave numerous example, and here are a few Mike shared.
2. Mike emphasized that in spite of a focus on technology. Microsoft has found having the right people and processes makes bigger impact than technology . Mike states over 50% of data center outages are caused by human error. This contrasts a common method to invest in multiple layers of infrastructure redundancy to achieve uptime.Mike was proud of Microsoft's ability to have a 100% facilities uptime over 7 years by implementing strong and disciplined maintenance programs. Also, redundant infrastructure creates more energy waste.
3. Technology is not the only answer to energy efficiency. People are the opportunity. Microsoft achieved a PUE improvement from 2.2 to 1.8 with no new technology just by people making changes to existing systems in one of their older facilities.
4. Mike didn't say this, but bottom line he emphasizes an Amazon.com approach in getting data on everything, and they'll figure out what to do with it after by giving people the information to do the right thing.

It is amazing thing  to see how Microsoft has risen from nowhere a year ago to be the leader in the Green Enterprise Computing with Mike Manos, delivering the opening keynote.

I'll keep blogging more, but I should socialize for now.

For good notes on what Mike presented previously at AFCOM Data Center World go to John Rath's Blog post.

Microsoft Green IT blogger - IT Pro experience, B.S. in Environmental Science, and certified Environmental Auditor

Part of the fun writing my blog is connecting with people who have interest in the Green Data Center. One of the interesting people out there is the Microsoft blogger Little Miss Enviro Geek. Her blog has only 7 entries, but given her background of being an IT Pro, a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science, and being a certified Environmental Auditor in June 2008, she has the right experience.

It's Earth Day, and Microsoft have a great new website so you can love it up with the trees...

So its Earth Day today - what does this mean and what is Microsoft doing to celebrate?

Quite simply, Wikipedia says Earth Day is "...intended to inspire awareness of and appreciation for the Earth's environment".  The earth is affected by everything we do and we are affected by everything on earth in some way - so a day to recognise this justified I think!  :)

Microsoft launched a new website today to celebrate: http://www.microsoft.com/environment/ it looks fantastic.  Find out here things like:

• How is Microsoft committed to the environment;
• What are the business solutions from Microsoft that you can implement - quite cool here is the Dynamics Dashboard for tracking energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions http://www.microsoft.com/environment/business_solutions/articles/dynamics_ax.aspx - LOVE IT!
• Find out ways to help the environment, through PC energy savings and cool tools;
• Watch a video on best practices for Data Centre management;
• Check Microsoft Environmental news;
• Research the latest Software Showcase from Microsoft Partners.

This is excellent information to help you, my fellow geeks, develop strategies around 'green' or environmentally sustainable IT - think about including environmental information as part of your next business case to help get it up to executive management sign-off - they are all thinking about Corporate Social Responsibility (environment being just one area under CSR) and this might be the tipping point you need to get your dream Unified Communications infrastructure or Windows 2008 Hypervisor environment!  ;-)

Attendees comment on Mike Manos 's keynote at Data Center World

OK, one more post on Mike Manos's keynote from an attendee.  Seemed worthwhile as it gives a different perspective than datacenterknowledge and searchdatacenter.

The Michael Manos keynote this morning at Data Center World was inspiring. Michael doesn't read off of note cards and you can tell that he not only knows this material inside and out, but that he is passionate about it. I gained a number of things from this talk -- including him mentioning that their new Chicago facility will have upwards of 200 shipping containers pieced together like the RV campsites like I have talked about in previous posts.
Here are my notes from his talk:

• Microsoft challenges: 15x growth on servers, 9x growth on egress, 15x growth on power, 3x growth on number of data centers.
• 30% of the audience had active prograMicrosoft to monitor and measure power in their data center
• Next to nobody in the audience knew what their carbon emissions were for their data center
• Sustainability regulation 'is' coming ; not if, but when
• How many are working on green programs? 30% (audience)
• Industry challenges/minefields:

1. sustainability reporting & efficiency reporting
2. data center inventory globally becoming a challenge
3. increasing power densities at the rack level
4. power costs
5. green-washing
6. expertise shortage
7. organizational structures
8. increasing capital cost barriers
9. innovation hoarding
10. heterogeneity versus homogeneity mindsets.

And the post goes into more detail and pretty much covers everything Mike presented.

John Rath good notetaking.

AFCOM interview with Microsoft's Mike Manos and Christian Belady

Searchdatacenter.com reports from AFCOM with a dual interview with Microsoft's Mike Manos and Christian Belady, titled Microsoft spills the beans on its data center strategy at AFCOM.

On Tuesday, April 1, Microsoft Senior Director of Data Center Services Michael Manos delivered the keynote presentation at AFCOM's Data Center World conference. The company has opened its kimono in non-Redmond fashion -- sharing its insights on data center operations with anyone who's interested. We spoke with Manos and Microsoft Principal Power and Cooling Architect Christian Belady about Microsoft's experience with a rapidly expanding data center footprint, the problems the company has faced and challenges for the industry ahead.

What does Microsoft have to offer the AFCOM attendee?
Michael Manos: Most of the presentation focuses on two things. One is to talk about the challenges we've faced at Microsoft. But more importantly, we're going to talk about what everyone at this conference is going to face over the next two to three years and, to a large degree, show how Microsoft has solved these problems.

How much of the secret sauce of operating your data centers can you give away without losing the competitive advantage?
Manos: What's competitive advantage, and what's the right thing to do? You see people solving the same problems in different ways over and over. There is not a key driver or direction to the industry because we are solving the same problem 30 other people just solved. We have to share the findings that each of us is coming up with in order to make an impact on the industry at large.
Christian Belady: The industry is very fragmented. There is a loss of efficiency opportunities. If we share and others share, we start having a converged vision of what should be in the future.

Speaking of convergence, it seems like the message has taken hold in terms of infrastructure efficiency metrics like power usage effectiveness. Lots of data centers now work to make the power-and-cooling infrastructure as efficient as possible. But when will we get to the next step: measuring useful work? For example, what is the usefulness of an "efficient" server that runs an application twice a month?
Manos: I think it's coming. Some [of our] product groups have started to make the transition. You can't get there without effective monitoring in place. Also, exposure of that information to the developers is key. Most developers never think about energy, but we have a program that charges our developers for the energy they use. Measuring and exposing that internal chargeback brings focus to the product groups. You can't get there unless you can effectively measure what you're doing and expose it.
Belady: We're looking at using containers inside our future data centers. One of the things we like about them is we can take a bunch of servers and look at the output of that box and look at the power it draws. At the end of the day, we can determine, "What is the IT productivity of that unit? How many search queries were executed per box? How many emails sent or stored?" You can get into some really interesting metrics. A lot of people say you can't look at the productivity of a data center, but if you compartmentalize it -- not as small as the server level, but at some chunk in between -- you can measure productivity.

I've heard rumors, Google is contemplating its data center disclosure given Microsoft's big moves.  Wouldn't it be great if we had Google and Microsoft competing to show who has the most efficient data centers and who is greener?

Google chose the path of being an electric company with its renewable energy initiative. Microsoft took a different path and chose to help people immediately save energy in their data centers. Who chose the greener path?  Let's see what Mike Manos presents at his next keynote at the Uptime Institute's Symposium 2008.

# of employees in FedEx and UPS Data Centers less than Google, How Efficient is Google's Infrastructure

My post on # of employees in Google and its competitors data centers has been popular. 

Keeping up with the idea I found an article about FedEx's # of employees 100

Meanwhile, FedEx could land soon. The company’s back-up center won’t mean a tremendous number of jobs, possibly 100 or so. But the jobs for these centers pay above average median income in the range of $70,000-$80,000 a year.

And UPS's # of employees 125

Windward is somewhat of a mixed-use facility – about 125 people (support personnel) work at the data center. The increase in chilled water temperatures has not affected human comfort in any way.

There have been articles about how efficient Googles' infrastructure is, but if you make the leap of faith that Google really does have 200 data center employees, then how efficient is their infrastructure?

IT management at Google is decentralized. The company has neither a CIO nor CTO, but it's brimming with senior-level engineers and other technologists. They include Bill Coughran, VP of engineering for systems infrastructure, who oversees the distributing computing programs that power Google's online applications, and Eustace, who's responsible for product R&D. Sergey Brin isn't just Google's co-founder--his day-to-day job is president of technology. Merrill, brought in as senior director of IS three years ago, now is responsible for internal engineering and worldwide support.

He then takes a jab at CIOs--which he describes as a title used by "old-world companies"--at other companies. "Most people in my job try to control. 'Here are the three things you can buy.'" Merrill explains. "I try to control as a little as I possibly can but make it easy to work within parameters that I know how to work with."

Especially when you consider how many data centers they have in the US.  It is tough for many of us to believe in the 200 #, but Google needs to keep that # out there to protect their tax breaks.

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.