Secret to saving electricity costs in Bay Area Data Centers, MOVE!!!

I am back in the bay area and it is amazing the number of server hugging executive decision makers want to have their IT equipment within driving distance.  They have driven up the price of colocation space in the bay area, and ironically the colocation companies don’t want you to be energy efficient, they want you to be energy hogs.  You ever wonder why you are stuck not being to do simple things in colocation space like hot and cold aisles.

What do you do to save energy costs?  MOVE out of the bay area!!!

You look at Google, Apple, and Facebook to reduce costs and scale they move out of the bay area.

Here is a case in point of how the server hugging behavior blinds people to save money.

Power costs in the Bay Area from PG&E is about $0.13 – 0.14 kW.  Silicon Valley Power can save you a few cents, but you are paying over ten cents a kW.  You can go to Pacific Northwest or East in central US and get below five cents a kilowatt.  If you don’t want to move out of state, closer to the bay area you can go to Sacramento and get eight cents a kW.

If you are going to move you need connectivity.  It is one of the reasons you are in the bay area.  Advanced Data Centers is an example we’ll use in Sacramento.

Connectivity

CARRIER NEUTRAL

McClellan Park is strategically located to leverage the multitude of carriers providing both wavelength (metro and long-haul) and traditional data/telecommunications services. ADC is committed to maintaining carrier neutrality and diverse options for its client’s connectivity requirements. Tenants will have direct access to the following carriers and service providers: 360, AT&T, Global Crossing, Level3, O1 Communications, Qwest, Sprint, Surewest, Time Warner Telecom, Verizon Business, and XO.

Power and efficiency

LEED© PLATINUM

USGBC LEED© Platinum pre-certification.

GREEN DATA CENTER DESIGN

By utilizing energy efficiency strategies such as Air Side Economizers, Hot/Cold Isle and Highly Efficient Chiller and Fan systems, ADC uses 38% less overall energy (to operate the same Critical Load) as industry standard data centers according to the 2003 LBNL Data Center Benchmarking Study. This reduces both the burden on the environment and utility grid, while lowering the total cost of data center ownership.

Cleaner power

GREEN POWER

The ADC McClellan Park data center is served by SMUD, one of the nation's "greenest" utility districts. SMUD’s 2009 Power Mix includes 19% eligible renewable energy (biomass, geothermal, wind, solar), 20% hydroelectric and 60% natural gas. Additionally, customers may elect to receive 100% renewable power under SMUD's Greenergy® program.

And oh by the way what all the big boys get moving out of state is sales tax exemption.  You can get it at McClellan AFD as well.

Being located on a former Air Force Base, LAMBRA, an acronym for "Local Agency Military Base Recovery Area", allows our customers to claim a credit equal to the sales or use tax paid or incurred to purchase up to $20 million of qualified property. Qualified property includes high technology equipment, such as computers and electronic processing equipment.

Now, moving may seem expensive, but it is often the easiest way to save money and be more efficient.

Think about moving out of the bay area to save energy and costs.  All the big data center players are.

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Are Cloud Computing Data Centers Green? IBM announces its greenest Cloud Computing DC in North Carolina

I’ve been writing about cloud computing more as cloud computings are more efficient using less resources.  Here is IBM’s latest press release that demonstrates cloud computing is green.

The data center uses advanced software virtualization technologies that enable access to information and services from any device with extremely high levels of availability and quality of experience.  The facility aggressively conserves energy resources; saving cost and speeding services deployment through a smart management approach that links equipment, building systems and data center operations.

“I thank IBM for its continued commitment to North Carolina. This facility promises to be one of IBM's greenest data centers in the world, proving once again that green is gold for North Carolina,” Gov. Bev Perdue said. “Growing North Carolina’s green economy plays a critical role in my mission to create jobs and to ensure our state’s economy is poised to be globally competitive in the long term.”

As I’ve discussed the ideas working with University of Missouri, IBM has taken the same approach working with North Carolina Universities.

The data center is showcasing a cloud computing solution in partnership with North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and NC State University that enables Hillside New Tech High School students in Durham, NC to access educational materials and software applications for the classroom over the Internet from the high school’s computer lab, as well as from any networked device.  This means that the learning environment can be extended to nearly any place at any time without the restrictions many schools face such as limited support, hardware resources and lack of access. The Hillside outreach project with NCCU, using cloud computing as a vehicle in support of education, is one of several such K-12 projects that IBM supports.  The new data center also currently hosts IBM’s global web site, ibm.com, and the IT operations of strategic outsourcing clients such as the United States Golf Association (USGA).

The green features are listed here.


  • Smarter data center management:      Thousands of sensors, connecting IT equipment, data center and building automation systems, provide data that can be analyzed to plan future capacity planning, conserve energy and maintain operations in the event of a power outage.
  • Energy efficiency: The data center uses half the energy cost to operate compared to data centers of similar size by taking advantage of free cooling – using the outside air to cool the data center.  Intelligent systems use sensors to continuously read temperature and relative humidity throughout the data center and dynamically adjust cooling in response to changes in demand.
  • Cloud computing capability:  Support for cloud computing workloads allow clients to use only the resources necessary to support their IT operations at any given moment - eliminating the need for up to 70 percent of the hardware resource that might have been previously needed to perform the same task. The data center also hosts recently announced “Smart Business” cloud computing offerings - each of these solutions can significantly reduce a clients total cost of ownership by up to 40 percent.
  • Built for expansion: Due to an innovative modular design method, IBM will be able to add significant future capacity in nearly half the time it would take traditional data centers to expand.  This design/build method – called IBM Enterprise Modular Data Center  (IBM EMDC) – also enables IBM to rapidly scale capacity to meet demand by adding future space, power, and cooling to the data center with no disruption to existing operations.  This means up to 40 percent of capital costs and up to 50 percent of operational costs may be deferred until client demand necessitates expansion.  The new data center can also quickly and seamlessly expand its power and cooling capacity.
  • New building standards: IBM started building the data center in August 2008 and it began to support client operations within 15 months compared to the industry benchmark of 18-24 months.

In constructing the new data center, IBM renovated an existing building on its Research Triangle Park campus by reusing 95 percent of the original building's shell, recycling 90 percent of the materials from the original building and ensuring that 20 percent of newly purchased material came from recycled products.  The result lowered costs and reduced the carbon footprint associated with building by nearly 50 percent allowing IBM to apply for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification. LEED is a third-party certification program and the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings.

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HP’s 20’ POD Container, $600K for 291kW of data center space, IT equipment not included

HP just announced their 20 foot Performance-optimized Data Center POD.

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HP POD is ideal for any enterprise customer requiring rapid white space growth

  • Quickly create data center space and deploy IT using HP Factory Express rack integration
  • Designed to support requirements for N+N power redundancy
  • Pay as you grow to minimize up front capital outlay - add additional HP PODs as you need more data center space
  • Decrease operating expenses through better energy efficiency with PUEs as low as 1.25

More technical specs are here.

Is this the future of cloud computing data centers?  At numbers that are $2 million per MW of physical data center space before power and chiller plant, it will be interesting to see who buys the HP POD.  

It makes sense to consider a hybrid site that could hook up power, water and network to containers, then another space that is the traditional data center space for equipment.

Maybe on my next trip to the bay area (next week), I should try and stop by HP.  I know the PR team has offered to set up a meeting with the HP container design engineers.  The total costs for a 2 MW data center build out would be interesting to discuss.

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Taiwan’s Cloud Computing Data Center, $31 mil USD investment

China Tech News has an article on two Taiwan institute’s jointly setting up a cloud computing company.

Cloud Computing Center Planned In Taiwan

February 1, 2010

Chunghwa Telecom, Trend Micro, Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute, and Taiwan's Institute for Information Industry will jointly set up a cloud computing center and will invest NTD1 billion to establish a cloud computing company.

According to reports in Taiwanese local media, because of its telecom business and technology advantages, Chunghwa Telecom will be in charge of the basic construction and operation of this new project. Trend Micro will be responsible for the expansion of international market via its subsidiaries worldwide. Industrial Technology Research Institute will be committed to the hardware development; and Institute for Information Industry will combine industry resources to develop cloud computing services and applications.

The Taiwanese see a trend many of us do in that companies could go direct to Taiwan to buy the complete cloud computing data center infrastructure and hardware.

Taiwan's related government departments reportedly plan to create a complete supply chain incorporating a cloud computing-based Internet data center, cloud computing devices and cloud computing services. The entire supply chain will be sold to overseas markets and is expected to gain sales and peripheral business opportunities of USD10 billion by 2014.

Why buy from HP, IBM, Dell when you can direct to the manufacturer?

The Taiwanese have also done a good job of focusing on market segments for cloud computing.

For the application planning of cloud computing, Taiwan will initially establish two major industries focused on the cloud computing medical industry and cloud computing education industry. In the long run, it will develop six cloud computing-based emerging industries, including green energy, tourism, health, agriculture, culture, and innovation.

If you look at their area of focus and overlap it with what I blogged about at Mizzou there is an overlap – health, education, energy, innovation, agriculture.

    1. Food for the Future
    2. New Media
    3. One Health, One Medicine
    4. Sustainable Energy
    5. Understanding and managing disruptive and transformational technologies.
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What does a Cloud Computing Data Center look like? Comparison version 1

There are a flood of cloud computing content out there.  As a thought experiment I start comparing conceptually what cloud computing is versus the existing data centers.  Many take the approach of building data centers to be solid as a rock which interesting enough is an opposite of clouds.  Rock is Earth.  Clouds are water and air, and electricity (lightning).

Below is a first version of thinking about how there are differences between cloud computing data center vs. a Rock data center.

When you start thinking about Cloud Computing as the future, what kind of data center fits business needs? 

I am having some conversations with data center designers on this concept.  Cover up the right side, and only look at the left side.  When I look at the left, who doesn’t want this?  Except maybe those who may their money on the right side.

 

Cloud Data Center Rock Data Center
Water + Air + Energy = Clouds with lightning Earth = building built in a capital intensive redundant manner
Business Alignment to current conditions Over-provisioned for the unknown future, but ironically many times limit businesses
Speed is an advantage for less resources and changing business (minutes) You have no choice so you move at our pace (weeks/months)
Systems integrated to reduce costs for business services Silos of self-optimization are used to prove efficiency
Pay as you go service use Costs are not transparent or directly related to what you use
Virtualized servers, storage, and network abstract discussions to capabilities for business Staff discusses specifications of servers, storage, and networking
Energy efficient and high utilization are standard discussions Energy is viewed as a small cost paid for by someone else
Commodity hardware Specialized hardware
Healthy, growing vendor ecosystem Static ecosystem that is growing slowly, maybe even declining
Exponential growth currently, innovation Declining as users migrate to Cloud, maintenance mode, cost reduction
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