Green Data Center Blog

Microsoft Demos Auto-Shift: Energy-Aware Server Provisioning at TechFest

Microsoft Research has a post about one of their Green projects at their TechFest event.  If you are not familiar with Techfest here is a google news search and the Microsoft website.

Auto Shift: Energy-Aware Server Provisioning

Green, as we now know, is, indisputedly, the new black. Seems like you can't turn on the television or pick up a newspaper to read about the latest green initiative. Lots of people are talking.

Feng Zhao is doing something about it.

Zhao's Networked Embedded Computing group is showing a TechFest demo called Auto-Shift: Energy-Aware Server Provisioning, which addresses server resource management for Internet services, such as Live Messenger and Hotmail. Data centers for such services require potentially expensive decisions about how many computers to allocate and how those are deployed.

"No. 1," Zhao says, "you have to buy the servers. No. 2, once you buy a server, you have to manage it. And third, you have to have an infrastructure, such as power supply. In this particular study, we looked at the power usage of the servers that are running one of our largest Web services. If you look at the load as it varies over the course of the day, it peaks around noon and slows down around midnight. That clearly shows that not all the servers are needed all the time. Can we shut down some of the servers? Can we actually save energy?"

This demo is the same paper I referred to earlier in another post.

The blog entry continues with the following points made by Feng.

"We also have all these sensors in the data centers," Zhao says. "Some of the machines work harder than others. If we can move the workload around, from hotspots to cool spots, the air conditioning doesn’t have to work as hard, because of the efficiency of cooling the hottest spots. If you move that workload and even out the temperature disparities, that means good energy savings. Incorporating environmental-sensor readings such as temperature and humidity, and couple that with smart scheduling and workload migration, and we believe we can even save more resources."

That sounds green, indeed--and economical, too. 

"What it translates to," Zhao concludes, "is that you use less power and that, with these smarts, we can figure out that maybe we don’t need to buy that many machines to start with, because we can do the same work, with very little difference in performance, and actually run it on a smaller set of machines. Reduce energy cost and reduce hardware investment in the first place--that would reduce service cost, reduce staffing, and reduce the space you need to build."

IBM VC 2008 Green Datacenter Prediction

VentureBeat has an article by Drew Clark, Director of Strategy and co-founder of IBM's Venture Capital group. This is consistent with another presentation I saw from IBM on Green Technology.  Here are some of the key points.

Green Datacenter. The “greening” of the datacenter will continue to be a top priority for corporations as the cost of simply powering the center begins to exceed the cost of the servers and devices in it. Key drivers to help reduce the overall carbon footprint and run more efficient centers will include intelligent sensors and advanced analytics to monitor and improve equipment utilization to reduce downtime and provide comprehensive operational visibility. Green datacenters are also increasingly becoming part of corporate social responsibility campaigns, so expect increased focus here. 

Beyond investment in alternative energy, there will be a great demand for technologies that allow energy consumers (businesses and homeowners) and producers (utilities) to monitor, manage, distribute and use energy more efficiently. Look for more investment in companies in the areas of energy efficiency, advanced water management, intelligent utility networks, energy caching and storage, and demand-side conservation and smart metering tools.

Meanwhile, leading-edge companies are evaluating Web-based platforms that provide service-based access to a range of infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes. As these Google-like “clouds” evolve and mature over the next 2-3 years, we’ll begin to see them strongly influence the next phase in enterprise datacenter architecture.

In addition, one of the greenest uses of data centers will be through mobile phones which have small resource usage are always on, connected to data center web services.

Industry analysts are predicting that by 2010 there will be 1 billion people (almost a third of the world’s population) accessing the Web via a mobile screen. This is obviously game-changing. The social-community-based approach of Web 2.0 will increasingly become part of this mobile landscape in 2008.

Bee's Give Idea for More Efficient Web Servers

Lewis Curtis sent an interesting link to an article about energy efficient web servers derived from how bee's communicate.  It's great to see people discovering the road to efficiency is based on closed loop feedback systems.

An intricate honeybee dance has generated a big buzz among scientists by serving as the model for an Internet server system that adapts in response to changing user demand.

Tovey said his collaboration with Seeley demonstrated that the communication provides a “beautiful” feedback loop to prevent one flower patch from being abandoned while another is depleted. For a superior patch, more bees will shake it on the dance floor and recruit workers to join them. As the nectar level drops from all the hubbub, the bees take longer to fill up, delaying their repeat performances back at the hive. The drop-off in dance routines gives scouts returning from alternative sources a better chance to create their own dance fever and transfer worker allegiances. With the shifting allocations, the system continually equalizes itself and offers a steady stream of nectar.

“We imitated that aspect of what honeybees do, and we’re trying that out on the Web center’s hosting problem,” Tovey said. So far, the method has reduced energy prices by 15 percent to 20 percent, with only a slight dip in revenue. Oxford and Georgia Tech have taken out a provisional patent on the energy-saving application, though Tovey said his team is still refining the methodology.

IT Process Automation Vendors

Part of a Green Data Center is  process automation to minimize the resources to make changes, and make the changes faster. This article on searchdatacenter.com points to findings from the Gartner Data Center Conference.

Organizations are increasingly ready to invest in IT process automation (ITPA) technology, software that

aims to make IT operations more efficient, according to findings from the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas last month. According to David Williams, a research vice president at the Stamford, Conn.-based research firm, , about one-third of attendees had moved beyond the tire-kicking stage and were ready to buy.

And goes on to highlight vendors in this space.

Three of the most visible independent IT process automation vendors are NetIQ Corp., Opalis, and Optinuity Inc., and all have recently announced new IT process automation products. In October 2007, NetIQ introduced a software platform called Aegis that automates predefined workflows for such processes as patch management, virtual machine provisioning and incident management and integrates with existing service automation tools from third-party vendors. In November 2007, Opalis launched a new version of its Opalis Integration Server that enables IT process automation within service-oriented architecture and provides a testing environment for IT process workflow prior to deployment. Also in November, Optinuity introduced its Oasis, a system that integrates and automates policy management, monitoring and job scheduling for IT operations.

What's the reason for all this vendor activity? Both Williams and Mann say that the time is finally right for automation due to the complexity of IT infrastructures and taxing workloads of IT staff. "IT process automation has been around as a concept for a long time," said Mann. "Because of the growing complexity of IT, data centers are looking to either simplify their environments or fill gaps with automation tools that enable half the staff to manage the same workload." Williams points to other specific drivers of the IT process automation market. "High availability, disaster recovery and ITIL are all pushing data centers to seek operational efficiency gains," he said. "Using IT process automation tools to eliminate repetitive, manual processes is a good way to achieve that."

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.

Technet Magazine Article - Build a Green Data Center

The following is article I wrote for Technet to kick off the Green Data Center ideas in their magazine.  Results so far show it is the most popular article in the issue, and has higher than normal customer feedback and a very good rating.

My next article in the works is about one of Microsoft's Data Center and how they have built a greener data center.

http://blogs.technet.com/tnmag/archive/2007/10/26/green-computing.aspx

Green is the hot topic these days, and the concept is having an impact on the way people think about datacenters. Companies around the world are announcing ways to save energy and reduce costs by buying new hardware and services. Yet, there is little guidance on how you can take action to control energy costs.

In our cover story for the October issue of TechNet Magazine, Build a Green Datacenter, Dave Ohara explains some of the issues you should consider when planning for more efficient computing resources. Dave looks at ways to measure energy consumption, defining the requirements for a green datacenter, and where to look for more information and support as you get the planning process underway.

Green Data Center Blog Launched

The Green Data Center blog is launched today to provide a place for people to learn how to build greener data centers.