IBM and Digital Realty Trust Discuss Modular and Scalable Data Centers

February 20, 2009 Dave Ohara

Data Center Dynamics Focus magazine has an article about IBM and Digital Realty Trust’s efforts on Modular and Scalable data centers.

Modular and Scalable the Way of the Future

19 Feb 2009

by Ambrose McNevin, Editor, DatacenterDynamics FOCUS

Two of the main proponents of the industrialisation of the data center are IBM and Digital Realty Trust, both of which believe that building and equiping data centers is a complicated business, made ever-more complicated when approached by traditional means

Applying industrial manufacturing principals to data center design and construction delivers huge benefi ts, according to IBM and Digital Realty Trust (DRT) And a key part of it is treating generators, UPSs and chillers as components in order to drive out costs at a capital and operational level.
Steve Sams, vice president of global site and facilities for global technology services at IBM, says the company has come to the conclusion that data center design needs to change radically. IBM believes that customers have shifted the way in which they buy technology. Where once they bought a big chunk of IT, used it up and bought another big chunk, technology purchasing has shifted to an on-demand model.
But, says Sams, data centers are still stuck in a paradigm from 30 years ago, where they are built in great big chunks, used up bit by bit and then another is built. “That approach is not capital or operationally cost-effi cient because you spent a ton of money but you are only using a fraction of the capacity you’ve just bought. So we are moving toward a scalable modular design in construction. Customers are buying what they need and then adding to it either from a power and cooling density or fl oor space perspective,” says Sams.

Microsoft has their posts on the concept as well.

http://loosebolts.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/our-vision-for-generation-4-modular-data-centers-one-way-of-getting-it-just-right/

http://blogs.technet.com/msdatacenters/archive/2008/12/08/microsoft-s-generation-4-data-center-vision-the-architects-perspective.aspx

Google should be coming soon.

Amazon I don’t know if we’ll here anything about their data centers for a while, but James Hamilton does continue to blog about the rest of the industry.

GE’s Green Data Center Products & Superbowl Ad

February 2, 2009 Dave Ohara

GE had their Eco/Green ads at the superbowl.

And Green2tech discusses GE’s new data center products.

GE Hawking Green Data Center Gear, Too

Written by Katie Fehrenbacher

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Posted February 1st, 2009 at 9:00 pm in Energy

General Electric’s energy division was its break in the clouds last week offering a spot of sunshine amidst grim earnings. GE is continuing that energy push in 2009 with a major smart meter marketing campaign (Super Bowl!), and on Monday touting a more unusual area: energy-efficient data center products. GE says it has made one of its own data centers more energy efficient using about 30 GE products, and — surprise, surprise — the conglomerate says those services and products are for sale for data center developers.

Frankly I never thought of GE as a company that needs a lot of computing power, but GE’s chief technology officer, Greg Simpson, explained to me that GE has at least five large data centers it owns, and the company uses the equivalent of hundreds of data centers worth of computing power if you consider shared space in third party-owned data centers as well as distributed computing gear in GE facilities. GE needs that much computing for activities like employee communication and services, engineers using software to develop products, and tracking items in the supply chain.

All that computing power means energy-related costs for GE, and cutting costs is particularly important in the economic downturn. GE decided to focus first on a data center in Ohio, which has 29,000 square feet of raised floor, 3,800 IT systems, and consumes 24 million kWh of power annually. For the retrofit GE installed more than 30 products — from energy monitoring software, to energy efficient lighting, to a reverse osmosis water system.

The result, GE says, is an 11 percent reduction in the annual energy used to cool the data center, a savings of 2-3 million gallons of water per year, and a 50 percent reduction of the use of chemicals to treat the water. Before the retrofit the data center was a moderate power hog that had a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) score of 1.75. The metric, which measures the energy efficiency of data centers, is monitored by The Green Grid organization — a PUE of 1 is excellent, and PUE of 2 is not so good. Simpson says GE hasn’t determined the new center’s PUE metric just yet because it’s too new, but it will likely be considerably better.

Microsoft Gets More Time to Work on its 4th Generation Data Center

January 26, 2009 Dave Ohara

Microsoft’s Mike Manos and Arne Josefsberg blog about their delay on Microsoft’s 4th Generation Data Center.

Building a Better Mousetrap a.k.a. Optimizing for Maximum Efficiency in an Economic Downturn

By Arne Josefsberg and Mike Manos, January 23, 2009

As you might have read in Microsoft’s Q2 FY09 earnings release yesterday, the company has announced cost management initiatives due to the global economic downturn. And with the earnings release back in October, Microsoft announced a reduction of projected capital expenditures by $300 million to our data centers. You might be thinking that the data center team is pulling our hair out trying to figure out how to meet our goals given the new constraints. After all, we need to continue supporting a growing base of more than 400 million Hotmail users and over a billion Live Search queries each day, plus 250 other services for Microsoft, including a fast-growing online services business for enterprise companies and the new Azure platform that software developers are beginning to use to create new services.
But we’ve been preparing for lean times for a while. This recession is the ideal backdrop to implement small changes that target big needs. Frugality drives innovation, and limited resources are just another forcing function to develop creative solutions to infrastructure needs. For our industry, this means more reasons to identify the small tweaks to products or operational approaches that can unlock big opportunities.

This slow down reminds of the opportunity I heard that Boeing’s IT Department was able to use the time the Machinists were on strike to perform maintenance and purchase upgrades they didn’t have time to do when they were in production.

The construction companies and the employees may not feel good about the delay in Microsoft’s and Google’s data center construction. But, the delay is good use of resources, and allows each company to spend more time in design.

As David Gauthier and Christian Belady have said their goal in the 4th generation data center is to change the costs for data center construction.

While we expect these modular innovations to reduce capital investments by 20%-40% or more depending on class, we also expect considerable reductions in operating expenses related to electricity and water consumption. Designing from the start for environmental sustainability has allowed us to focus on using less construction material up front, less energy and water during operation, and also allows us to recycle and reuse components at the end of their useful life. No longer will we be governed by the initial decisions made when constructing the facility. We will have almost unlimited use and re-use of the facility and site. We will also be able to use power in an ultra-fluid fashion moving load from critical to non-critical as use and capacity requirements dictate.

Google Throttles Data Center Spending, Is it Good or Bad?

January 22, 2009 Dave Ohara

DataCenterKnowledge reports on Google’s data center spending announcements.

Google Throttles Back on Data Center Spending
January 22nd, 2009 : Rich Miller
Google (GOOG) spent $368 million on its infrastructure in the fourth quarter of 2008 as it scaled back its ambitious data center building boom, idling a $600 million project. The fourth quarter capital expenditure (CapEx) total, which was included in today’s earnings release, was less than half the $842 million Google spent on its data centers in the first quarter of 2008. Here’s a look at the recent trend:

1Q 2006: $345 million

2Q 2006: $699 million

3Q 2006: $492 million

4Q 2006: $367 million

1Q 2007: $597 million

2Q 2007: $575 million

3Q 2007: $553 million

4Q 2007: $678 million

1Q 2008: $842 million

2Q 2008: $698 million

3Q 2008: $452 million

4Q 2008:$368 million

Is this Good or Bad?

I think it is good as it shows Google is adapting to its customer requirements. With the slowing economy, many Google groups have reigned in their growth forecasts, shouldn’t the date center construction slow as well?

What would be bad is if Google built relentlessly building more capacity than it needed.

The benefit Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have is they can think on scale the rest of the public can’t. They fill data centers in a fraction of time others do. So, data center construction can more closely match server deployments, and IT is a cyclical business.

Highmark Greens its Data Center, Long Term Costs of Energy Efficiency projects?

December 22, 2008 Dave Ohara

Data Center journal publishes a press release on IBM’s efforts to green the data center for Highmark.

IBM Helps Highmark Optimize “Green” Data Center

Written by Press Release

Thursday, 18 December 2008

IBM has announced it has partnered with Highmark Inc. to transform Highmark’s energy-efficient data center in its Harrisburg, PA location. For Highmark, Pennsylvania’s largest health insurer, a commitment toward a healthier environment will help to create healthier communities.

An increasing number of companies are implementing initiatives to reduce the risk of climate change’s impact. Highmark’s active role in green business projects was awarded a prestigious honor by Computerworld magazine, which ranked it as a top “green” information technology company for 2008.

“A significant percent of our IT costs are driven by actual computing systems -- the hard drives, servers and storage appliances. At Highmark, we are always looking for opportunities to reduce our power footprint. IBM has shown us how we can improve efficiency in our data center – both to reduce our environmental impact and to support our offerings to the community,” said Mark Wood, director of data center infrastructure at Highmark.

This is an IBM press release article.

Facts not presented is the length of time before changes in the environment warrant a data center tune-up. Without data, it is hard for the customer to know when maintenance provides a good ROI.

IBM continues the marketing in the press release.

IBM's technologies and services are aimed at helping clients sharply reduce data center energy consumption. The data center is an area of information technology (IT) that can reap substantial and lasting benefits by using 'greener' technology. IBM's analysis of Highmark's data center included a data center energy efficiency assessment and a thermal analysis using IBM's Mobile Measurement Technology (MMT), which measures 3D temperature distributions within data centers to discover where improvements are needed.

Which this reminds me why in general press releases don’t make it into this blog. They are just marketing announcements.

I would be more curious as to the long term maintenance costs to maintain their data center energy improvements. This is all dependent on the customers use of the data center which is why there is great opportunities for condition based maintenance.