Energy Management shows up as a Vancouver Olympic event

January 22, 2010 Dave Ohara

CNET news has a post on the Vancouver Olympics reporting on the energy consumption from Olympic buildings.

A new Olympic sport: Tracking building energy

by Martin LaMonica

While people are watching the Olympic Games, building managers will be watching their energy dashboards.

Energy management software company Pulse Energy on Friday showed off an energy-monitoring system developed to make the Olympic Games in Vancouver more efficient.

Building energy is the latest spectator sport in Vancouver.

(Credit: Screenshot by Martin LaMonica/CNET)

The software gives facilities managers a real-time readout of energy consumption at different venues. By tracking that data, building managers can make adjustments to save energy, such as turning off equipment that's not in use. The information is also available online at VenueEnergyTracker.com.

BC Hydro has been trying to attract data centers to the BC area.

Here is more information about VenueEnergyTracker.

about the venue energy tracker

BC Hydro and the Vancouver Organizing Committee of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) created the Venue Energy Tracker to showcase the innovative sustainability measures implemented in various 2010 Winter Games venues and associated sites through an energy management software.

challenge

The communities involved were challenged with producing world class facilities with a minimal environmental footprint, while maximizing the long term legacies for their residents. The Venue Energy Tracker communicates the energy consumption and savings being realized by various partner venue buildings.

actions

Employing the latest in energy management software technology, BC Hydro with the energy tracking software tracks, analyzes and reports on real-time energy consumption from the venue sites in order to see energy and green house gas savings and set benchmarks from which similar venues can compare themselves to.

Learning from past Games, applying best practices in green design, construction, and occupant engagement, the communities were able to mitigate local and global sustainability challenges and embrace opportunities to make a difference. Actions taken include implementing green building features, including but not limited to: implementing energy saving technology, sequestering BC Pine Beetle wood as a construction material, rainwater capture and reuse, waste heat reuse, targeting LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) building certification, and incorporating green principles and practices into operations and events.

Facebook Prineville Data Center Announcement Pictures

January 22, 2010 Dave Ohara

Here is something you don’t see from the other Data Center ceremonies a bunch of pictures on Facebook.

If you are looking for the news on the site go here /2010/01/facebook-data-center-115-pue.html.

Here the execs who get there ceremonial ground breaking photos.

And, here are the engineers. On the right is Amir Michael, ex-Google data center hw engineer.

From a PR pespective look at the numbers in less than 24 hours.

Where is Prineville in Oregon?

Here is Central Oregon Economic Development President Roger Lee and Facebook’s Director of Site Operations Tom Furlong.

And more pictures.

In these pictures were no vendors or contractor logos just Facebook. Good job on their PR team to make the Facebook logo standout.

Facebook Data Center, 1.15 PUE

January 21, 2010 Dave Ohara

Just added some pictures from the ground breaking ceremony /2010/01/facebook-prineville-data-center-announcement-pictures.html

Facebook and Prineville, OR officials have made the announcement Facebook is building a data center. Let’s bounce around to the various news reports.

To start i like KTVZ.com post, because it gave a link to the Facebook site about the data center.

Hundreds of construction jobs, 35 permanent ones come to Prineville as Facebook builds its first owned data center (artist's rendering-Sheehan Partners Ltd.)

It will be first owned by Internet social-networking giant

From KTVZ.COM news sources

Gov. Ted Kulongoski announced Thursday that Facebook, the world's leading social networking service, with more than 350 million users, will locate a multi-million dollar data center in Prineville.

The months-long secret was revealed at a midday announcement at the 124-acre site near the Prineville airport, on the west side of town. Here's the rest of the governor's announcement, followed by Facebook's own 'fact sheets' about the project:

…

More information about the project as well as ongoing updates will be available athttp://Facebook.com/prinevilledatacenter.

So when you to the Facebook site.

Prineville Data Center

Just Fans

Prineville Data Center

Economic Impact

Economic Impact It is Facebook’s hope that the construction, staffing and supplying of the Prineville Data Center will have a positive impact on the Crook County/Prineville economy. ...

January 11 at 5:21pm · Comment · Like · Share

Susie Dill Atlee likes this.

Prineville Data Center

Environmental Practices

Environmental Practices Fact Sheet Facebook’s Prineville Data Center, the first built and owned by the company, will be a leader in the data center industry in terms of reduced environmental impact and energy use. ...

January 11 at 5:19pm · Comment · Like · Share

Prineville Data Center

What is a data center?

A data center is just what the name implies: a central location that houses thousands of computer servers, which are networked together and then linked to the outside world through fiber optic cable...

December 13, 2009 at 8:54pm · Comment · Like · Share

RECENT ACTIVITY

Focusing on Green Data Center area Facebook reports.

Environmental Practices

Share

Monday, January 11, 2010 at 5:19pm

Environmental Practices Fact Sheet
Facebook’s Prineville Data Center, the first built and owned by the company, will be a leader in the data center industry in terms of reduced environmental impact and energy use. Facebook is committed to operating sustainably and has vigorously pursued new technologies to meet that commitment. The data center will also be Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified.
Energy Use
The Prineville Data Center will be one of the most energy efficient facilities of its kind in the world.
Energy use in the data centers is measured in terms of power usage effectiveness (“PUE”), which is determined by dividing the amount of power entering a data center by the power used to run the computers in it. A typical data center has an average PUE of 1.8. This means that for every 1.8 watts that go through the utility meter, one watt is delivered to the computer infrastructure.
Facebook’s Prineville Data Center will use a number of technologies to achieve a power usage effectiveness ratio of 1.15.
The new, energy-efficiency technologies Facebook will utilize here include:
• Evaporative cooling system – This system uses evaporation of water to achieve cooling as opposed to the more traditional chiller systems that requires more energy intensive equipment. It is anticipated this facility will use this process approximately 60% to 70% of the year. For other times, outside air economizer mode will be used.
• Airside economizer – The facility will be cooled by simply bringing in colder air from the outside. During low humidity times of the year, the evaporative cooling system will be used to meet server humidity range requirements.
• Re-use of server heat – A portion of the excess heat created by the computer servers will be captured and re-used to heat office space in the facility during the colder months.
• Proprietary Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) Technology – All data centers must have an uninterruptible power supply to bridge the gap between a power outage and the ability of backup generators to kick-in. The Prineville Data Center will use a new, patent-pending system for UPS that reduces electricity usage by up to 12 percent.
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Certification
The Prineville Data Center is being designed to achieve the USBGC LEED Gold level certification. In addition to the industry-leading energy efficiency designed into the facility, the data center will also feature:
• Use of rainwater to maintain landscaping and for gray water use in the facility.
• Use of low Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) finish materials.
• Use of Energy Star Compliant appliances.
• Use of low water consumption technologies such as automated faucets and low flush toilets.

DataCenterKnowledge will most likely get the highest traffic with its post.

It’s Official: Facebook is Oregon’s Company X
January 21st, 2010 : Rich Miller

An architectural rendering of the new Facebook data center planned for Prineville, Oregon.

Facebook’s first company-built data center will be in Prineville, Oregon, the company confirmed today. The new facility will be among the most energy efficient in the industry, Facebook said, and will provide the social network with headroom for its fast-growing server and storage infrastructure.

DataCenterDynamics mentions evaporative cooling and heat recovery.

Facebook data center to use evaporative cooling; server heat will warm offices

there is a Facebook blog post by Jonathan Heigler, VP of Operations as well.

Breaking Ground on Our First Custom Data Center

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by Jonathan Heiliger Today at 10:24am

We have come a long way from our roots in a Harvard dorm room, when Facebook was only available at some colleges and run on a single server. Now with more than 350 million people worldwide and our service and business continuing to grow, we must constantly scale our technical infrastructure to meet the demand and deliver you a fast, reliable experience. An important step along the way is to build a custom data center so that we can design it to meet our unique needs.

Where is Data Center Innovation developing? Facebook as an example

January 21, 2010 Dave Ohara

I’ve bounced around a bunch in many parts of the data center ecosystem. The big data center operators, the construction companies, the engineering companies, the outsourced maintenance companies, the data center equipment companies, the IT equipment companies, and the software companies.

So, where is the innovation coming from?

Is it coming from the people who design and build data centers?

Is it coming from the equipment vendors?

Or is it coming from the customers who have gotten tired of the way the data centers have been designed and built?

Data centers are high profit margin buildings compared to the rest of the construction industry. Why? Because they are so complex and feature creep is prevalent. And with this complexity comes big budgets and prestige to be in charge of the data center construction so territorial battles will exist as to who is responsible for the construction. The majority of which are done by real estate and facilities department in companies.

But, you look at the big data center operators and the standard is to have the data center construction be integrated with the data center operations team. If you could see the organizations in Microsoft, Google, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, and Yahoo you would find the data center construction is integrated mainly with data center operations, not real estate and facilities.

Why is this important because as much as real estate/construction based people want to own the job, they have almost no idea how their data center designs interact with IT services. They barely know the IT hardware let alone the SW running to provide customers services. What sane person puts a group of people responsible for design and construction of commercial office space for people in charge of the place to host information services? Well almost everyone does except the enlightened companies.

As an example of data center innovation coming from the IT group DataCenterKnowledge references Facebook’s efficiency of the data center.

Designed for Efficiency
The new design foregoes traditional uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and power distribution units (PDUs) and adds a 12 volt battery to each server power supply. This approach was pioneered by Google, which last year revealed a custom server thatintegrates a 12 volt battery, which the company cited this design as a key factor in the exceptional energy efficiency data for its data centers.

Facebook will most likely shortly announce its data center in Prineville, OR.

Facebook to Build Its Own Data Centers
January 20th, 2010 : Rich Miller

A look at the fully-packed racks inside a Facebook data center facility.

Facebook has decided to begin building its own data centers, and may announce its first facility as soon as tomorrow. The fast-growing social network has previously leased server space from wholesale data center providers, but has grown to the point where the economics favor a shift to a custom-built infrastructure.

“Facebook is always looking at ways to scale our infrastructure and better serve our users,” said Facebook spokesperson Kathleen Loughlin said last week. “It should come as no surprise that, at some point, building a customized data center will be the most efficient and cost effective way to to do this. However, we have nothing further to announce at this time.”

One of the data center engineers at Facebook is ex-google, Amir Michael.

Amir Michael

Hardware and Data Center Engineer at Facebook

San Francisco Bay Area
Computer Hardware
Current

Hardware and Datacenter Engineer at Facebook

Past

Hardware Engineer at Google

Intern at Cisco Systems

admin at Connectix

Hardware Engineer
Google Inc., Mountain View CA,
Responsible for data center electronics including: cooling systems, electrical distribution, and monitoring.
Wrote specifications and requirements in cooperation with mechanical engineers for various data center
control projects. Managed vendors and coordinated with manufacturing engineers and commodity
management teams to deploy finished products.
Embedded power measurement device for servers. Designed electrical schematics, printed circuit
boards, and wrote the software. Hired and managed two interns to advance project development. The
project resulted in the savings of several million of dollars in energy costs.

What is causing more change/innovation in the industry the real estate/construction data center consortium or guys like Amir at Facebook networking with the other data center innovators at Google, eBay, and Yahoo in the bay area?

The Art of the Green Data Center – Wind, Water, and Energy

January 19, 2010 Dave Ohara

Julius Neudorfer wrote an article on Feng Shui and the Art of the Data Center.

Feng Shui and the Art of the Data Center

Data Center | Blog Post | Julius Neudorfer, Thursday, January 14, 2010

Tags: Cooling Systems, Green Technology

I am in the midst of designing a new data center for a client and have been trying to balance the requirements of costs, space limitations, maximum number of cabinets and the flexibility to meet the rising and ever-changing power density of the IT equipment loads. Of course, high energy efficiency is a given. In addition, the client is especially concerned about esthetics and how it will look when a visitor enters the room.

My wife was reading a book on Feng Shui and suggested that I begin to incorporate it into my thinking. Not having enough time to become a Feng Shui master by the project’s deadline, I did some quick reading and found this definition:

Feng Shui is an ancient art of placement to bring balance and harmony to a physical space. The loose translation of Feng Shui is 'wind and water.' Feng represents the wind that carries the chi (energy) throughout a space. Shui is the water that meanders underneath the earth transporting chi.

Julius makes the connection to data centers here.

And while I don’t think that they had a data center in mind when Feng Shui was first introduced hundreds of years ago, I found a strong parallel to the data center’s infrastructure in the definition. The three elements that are mentioned, wind (airflow), water (chilled water) and energy (power), all apply to the operation of a data center and of course, we also want to bring “balance and harmony to a physical space”.

This brings up an interesting view of the use of Wind vs Water – Air cooling vs. Water Cooling, a debate that reminds me of people arguing political views.

What most miss is in the spirit of Feng Shui your goal is to be in balance and harmony with the physical space. Some sites are better for wind, some for water while watching your energy use.

If I hear someone debate air vs. water for specific site, the conversation’s are usually resolved quickly with a mutual understanding.

Why is this debate so heated? Many times it is fueled by equipment vendors who have proxies (people) for their technology.