Intel’s Brently Davis, manager of Intel’s data center efficiency project is quoted in Baseline Magazine.

This isn’t some bogus green data center initiative, executives say. This is an efficiency exercise that saves the green that matters most in these tough economic times.

“Our main concern is not about being green,” says Brently Davis, manager of Intel’s data center efficiency project. “It is more so about being efficient, figuring out how we can run our computing environment better.

The problems Intel face are the same as any company.

Intel developed Davis’ group within its IT operations department just so it could tackle such issues. “You’ve always got to pull people in to help look horizontally,” he says. “A lot of times, the focus of IT groups is myopic: They like to concentrate on their own vertical. But you’ve got to have a horizontal overview, and I think that’s what we try to help them do.”

Their solution was to get finance people on board.

One of the first things that Davis did to make that happen was to bring in the financial folks to get a clear picture of spending beyond the overarching price tag—to see where the dollars were going. That’s the key step in any efficiency project, he says.

“You can’t do this if you don’t understand what you’re spending,” Davis says. “We brought in our finance team and said, ‘Pull all of this stuff together so we can figure out what we’re spending. Put these numbers together, get it validated and make sure it makes sense.’”

Intel reconciles issues with standardization.

Standardization Begets Better Utilization

With the business case laid out and the “but why-ers” on board, Intel is now putting all the logistical puzzles into place. The first step has been to work on standardizing the environments and practices to reduce redundancies and improve the way all the data centers work together. Because, as Davis says, when Intel surveyed the data center landscape in 2006, it had 150 centers and “there was no synergy to anything; we were all over the place.”

And executes with specific goals.

This was enabled through a number of strategies, including virtualization, grid computing and cloud computing. And it was coupled with efforts to do a better job refreshing servers—replacing them with fewer servers along the way.

Before the program started, Davis reported that by 2014, Intel was on track to move up from 90,000 servers to 225,000 servers. The goal, he says, is to keep that number at 100,000 in six years’ time and reduce the cost and power draw of each of these servers significantly.

“The only way we could do that was by getting off the old hardware,” he recalls. “We were just as guilty as everyone else. We were sitting on servers that were possibly seven or eight years old. We needed to start refreshing those servers to reduce the power consumption in the data center.”

I had blogged before about Sun’s Modular Data Center.

What I missed was their entry on page 15 of the document where  Sun discussed how they consolidate 32 different server labs into one space and achieve a a PUE of 1.28.

Efficiency in Sun’s Santa Clara Software Datacenter
In 2007 Sun completed the largest real-estate consolidation in its history. We closed our Newark, California campus as well as the majority of our Sunnyvale, California campus shedding 1.8 million ft2 (167,000 m2)from our real-estate portfolio. One example in this consolidation is the Software organization’s datacenter, where 32,000 ft2 (2,973 m2)of space distributed across 32 different rooms was consolidated into one 12,769 ft2 (1,186 m2) datacenter. In the end, 405 racks were configured in this space, using an average of 31.5 ft2 (2.9 m2) per rack. The initial power budget was 2 MW (out of 9 MW overall), with the ability to expand to 4 MW in the future. This design supports today's current average of 5 kW with the ability to grow to 9 kW average per rack. Keep in mind that even though the averages are 5 kW and 9 kW, racks ranging from 1 kW to 30 kW can be deployed anywhere in this datacenter.

We measured the power usage effectiveness of the Santa Clara Software organization’s datacenter, and if any single number testifies to the value of our modular design approach, it is the PUE of 1.28 that we were able to achieve. By using our modular approach, which includes using a high-efficiency variable primary-loop chiller plant, close-coupled cooling, efficient transformers, and high-efficiency UPS, an astonishing 78 percent of incoming power goes to the datacenter’s IT equipment.
Figure 4. Our Santa Clara Software organization’s datacenter achieved a PUE of 1.28, which translates to a savings of $402,652 per year compared to a target datacenter built to a PUE of 2.0.

In traditional raised floor datacenters the efficiencies worsen as densities increase. Our Pod design is efficient from day one, and remains efficient regardless of density increases.

Even though Sun compares its savings to a PUE of 2.0.  Most likely the PUE was over 2.0 given the 32 labs were scattered in conventional office spaces, not in a data center.

Note that the Santa Clara datacenter is a Tier 1 facility, by choice, with only 20 percent of the equipment on UPS. Choosing Tier 1 was a corporate decision to match the datacenter with the functions that it supports. The design approach is the same for our Tier 3 datacenters with one exception: the amount of redundancy. As you increase the redundancy (to N+1 or 2N) you can lose efficiency. If you make the correct product and
IT LoadChiller PlantRC/CRAC LoadsUPS/Transformer LossLighting78.57% PUE=1.28
16 The Range of Datacenter Requirements Sun Microsystems, Inc.
design decisions that make efficiency the highest priority, you can maintain a PUE of 1.6 or less in a Tier 3 datacenter.