Saving IT Energy This Xmas Holiday - Cornell beats Stanford

SearchDataCenter.com has an article about how Stanford University shuts down utilities saving them $250,000, but their IT infrastructure stays up and running.

Over the Christmas holiday vacation, Stanford University shuts down the utilities in more than three-quarters of its 220 buildings on campus but like most organizations, its IT infrastructure stays up and running, said Susan Kulakowski, campus energy manager.

The Stanford, Calif.-based university saves about $250,000 in utility costs during the annual shutdown. It could save more if a portion of its IT infrastructure shut down, but that's not an option, Kulakowski said.

"There would be a big outcry if we tried to shut down our servers. We scale down IT staff and shut off utilities in other areas, but our students and staff still use the system over the break, so we have to have it available," Kulakowski said.

SearchDataCenter.com searched in vain for an enterprise that shuts down servers over the holiday break and came up with this: Even the most idle servers are kept awake at all times because the prospect of shutting down is just plain scary.

I understand SearchDataCenter.com's frustration finding an enterprise that shuts down servers. I got around this problem, by finding someone who was in the right position to implement the idea, and discussed the benefits of demo'ing the concept. Cornell Medical school's BioMedicine has been turning off servers and the users don't even notice.

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 (thanksgiving). 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.

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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.

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Dream or Nightmare of Measuring power within devices

It is a nice dream to have power consumption measurements built into IT devices (pc, laptop, servers, storago, and switches).  The problem is this is not a high priority for any vendor and it will be done at minimal cost for development and production to provide a checkbox feature. This method is why wake-on-lan is so unreliable no one uses it once they figure out how inconsistent Windows and the devices are for this feature, and how different implementations from vendors cause frustration for users.

Power management as much as we would all love it to be built in to devices is going to be inaccurate an inconsistent. The google guys say they measure power consumption of their servers by tracking the cpu utilization <link>.

But, I think a more elegant way is to measure the power consumption on in a labo and a sampling of production units while collecting data from Windows Device Manager on an inventory of enumerated devices while collecting performance monitoring data for cpu, IO, RAM, monitors, and other power consuming devices.

Closed loop feedback systems are one of the architecture methods I use to think about whether systems have been thought through for how the system provides data on its operations.

Closed loop feedback is a well proven technique, but surprisingly is not used much in IT systems.

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Climate Savers Smart Computing Catalog Does not work

InfoWorld wrote in a blog about the problems with Climate Savers Smart Computing Catalog.  Having worked at Apple and Microsoft and advised multiple marketing teams and their efforts to create logo programs and product catalogs for Win 3.1, Win95, Win 2k, WinXP and Vista, I can tell you they never work when it is up to the supplier to fill out the catalog.  I remember on WinXP the catalog was dominated by a handful of companies like IBM and Novell who filled out every version of products in the software catalog.

When you go to the Climate Savers Smart Computing Product Catalog.  You get the following possible results from the vendors. Lenovo - 71, Dell - 24, Fujitsu - 26, Fujitsu Siemens - 21, HP - 38, Sun - 1.  And here is example of an entry.

OptiPlex 745 Energy Smart DT

SKU:
Category: Desktop
Manufacturer: Dell
Website: Visit Product Site
Sales Contact Phone:
Sales Contact Email:
Description: Energy Star 4.0 qualified, EPEAT Silver qualified, Intel processors, select graphics cards, one or two HDD, other add-in modules accepted. > 80% efficient power supply.
Available In: North America, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Middle East & Africa, Japan, Latin America

The InfoWorld blog is a good report on the current state.  But, even over time it will not get better, because the suppliers are not going to present their products in way that answers a simple question of "what device should I buy if I want to spend $1,500, and energy consumption is one of my top issues?"

Climate Savers green catalog proves unripe
Filed under: Hardware

I've had green hardware and gadgetry on the brain these past couple of weeks, no doubt thanks to the holiday season. If you're looking to stock your home or your office with some energy-efficient computing wares -- not just PCs but also mobile devices, servers, and software -- you might consider perusing the Climate Saver's Smart Computing Product Catalog.

The catalog contains 317 product listings (at least as I write this), which you can sort by product category (Desktop, Mobile, Server, and the oh-so unhelpful Other), manufacturer, and/or region -- that is, where the product is available.

While somewhat useful, the catalog could certainly use some sprucing up. For example, it doesn't have a particularly elegant UI -- the word spartan would be far more apt. Further, when you perform a search, you're presented with a long list of product names, the product type, and the manufacturer name. You don't get any more details until you click the product name. It would make more sense to add at least one descriptive sentence below each product name in the search results page. Otherwise, a user has little incentive to randomly click uninformative product names such as "Surveyor" or "Z-One Digital IBA."

Clicking on a product name takes you to a page where you'll find a product description, a link to the vendor site, and sometimes and image. Said description might be a basic list of specs -- or a wordy description of the product, clearly written by the vendor's marketing team as opposed to a neutral third party. Pricing information is notably absent.

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