Industry Leader Roll Call* at The Green Grid Technical Forum - Microsoft...Here; Yahoo...Here;Google... Google... Is Google Here?

The Green Grid Forum held a Technical Forum in SF Feb 5 - 6, 2008.

An unprecedented opportunity to "Get Connected to Efficient IT", The Green Grid Technical Forum is a unique industry event designed to bring members and other industry stakeholders together to further The Green Grid’s mission of advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.  Attendees will learn about The Green Grid’s Data Center Metrics, current and emerging techniques for managing data centers for efficiency and future technical deliverables from the organization.  The Green Grid will also host discussions with leading industry policy-makers from around the world.

Part of going Green in a Data Center is to figure out what works, and this event was a great opportunity for industry leaders to exchange ideas. There were over 300 attendees registered for the event, including the biggest of data center operators; Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. Well, not Google as they didn't show up. Which is confusing given Google's claims of being an environmental leader. Google's Green Energy Czar says

we launched the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which aims to set efficiency standards for power supplies and dc-to-dc converters, both for servers and also for desktops. It’s about taking what we’ve done on the server side and getting some of the same efficiency improvements on the desktop side where there’s a huge opportunity in terms of total savings.

Google's motto is "do no evil." Given Google operates more servers than anyone else should "do no evil" include participating in The Green Grid Technical Forum? Google has taken on the environmental task by starting projects like Renewable Energy Initiatives, but wouldn't it be better if Google helped validate data center best practices?

Why didn't Google join The Green Grid?

As a side, someone saw Microsoft's Christian Belady, talking to Yahoo's Christina Page.That would have been a fun conversation to list to.

* I was just joking about the roll call analogy.

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Will Higher Energy Efficiency Increase Consumption?

SearchDataCenter.com's Mark Fontecchio writes Has green computing increased data center energy consumption?

Some skeptics of the green computing wave say that more energy-efficient data centers won't necessarily minimize overall energy consumption. In fact, they say it will lead to greater energy use. There's an important factor missing from the equation, say green-computing detractors: increasing consumer demand.

Mark cites Christian Belady and Lewis Curtis in his article. On first read I've accepted Christian and Lewis's ideas when I read them a couple of months ago.

Their argument goes like this: The more efficient a product, the more you use it, and it ends up consuming more resources overall than it did when it was less efficient. Christian Belady, a former technologist at Hewlett-Packard Co. who now works at Microsoft, compared data center energy consumption to the cost of gasoline. If the price of gas were to decline as significantly as the price of compute performance per watt has for IT equipment, you'd probably put a generator in your house and run everything on gasoline instead of electricity.

Coincidentally, I found articles about Boeing's planes

One of the concerns voiced about the advent of the new, more fuel-efficient aircraft (as well as its apparent popularity, as orders are outpacing analysts’ earlier projections) is the potential for a “rebound effect” similar to that seen with increases in fuel efficiency in light-duty vehicles—i.e., the decrease in fuel consumption (and thus, operating costs) leads to an increase in vehicle miles travelled.

and Cars on the same subject of increased efficiency will increase consumption.

Meanwhile, the bulk of the money spent on transportation infrastructure was directed to building more and bigger highways. We could have subsidized bullet trains and more light rail systems, but we didn't.

Now, many of the environmentalists, politicians and scientists who made the case for boosting vehicle fuel efficiency are turning their attention to the problem of how much we drive -- and the legacy of 20th century land use and transportation choices.

So, do I agree with Christian and Lewis. I think the issue can be looked at another way like the Rashomon Effect. There are multiple forces driving increases in data center services with many of the services free.  So, even though the data center operators decrease their costs by having higher efficiency, the cost impact is not visible to the user. Given most data centers don't monitor their power bills, I don't think they even know they are more efficient, so the analogy of gas efficiency doesn't necessarily apply.

Let me propose another question

Is being Green (traveling less, using the web more) driving up data center consumption?

To stir things up I'll send this post to Lewis and Christian. Plus, I am going to have dinner with Lewis Curtis this week, and we can this subject. Maybe, I can find out how his latest Green Data Center presentation went at TechReady 6. 

On a side, it would be interesting to know if Prius drivers do drive more. I found this poll. And, I may ask this question given I am writing this blog from a Toyota Dealer.  :-)

View Poll Results: How many miles do you drive your Prius

<5,000 miles/year

4
2.72%

5,001 - 7,500

13
8.84%

7,500 - 10,000

17
11.56%

10,000 - 15,000

36
24.49%

15,000 - 20,000

26
17.69%

20,000 - 30,000

34
23.13%

30,000 - 40,000

15
10.20%

>40,000

2
1.36%

Voters: 147. You may not vote on this poll

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When will Power Costs Exceed Labors Costs in the Data Center

Reading this post about Eco-friendly Skies brings up the point that energy costs exceed labors costs for the airline industry. It may take a while for the Data Center to reach this point, or it may depend on how you count your staff. If you count only the staff to run the physical infrastructure of the data center, this point may have already reached for many. Maybe this is a way to get the attention of executives how big electricity bills are.

On my flight out to Seattle to research Boeing's advances, I pause as I leave the plane to ask the pilot if flying any differently could reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. He sets me straight. "It's not about greenhouse gases," he says. "It's all about fuel burn." From 2000 to 2007, the price of aviation fuel in the U.S. swelled by 115.6 percent, and fuel has topped labor as the number-one operating cost of the airline industry. Airlines, always concerned about fuel costs, are now obsessed with them. The nearest-term way airlines can reduce this expense (and reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions in the process) is to change how planes are flown.

Also the obsession with performance vs. efficiency is illustrated by this Boeing story.  Wouldn't it be great if server vendors picked up the Airbus/Boeing practice of being accountable for the energy efficiency promised?  When the 787 ships, if the customers don't achieve the promised energy efficiency, then Boeing is forced to account for the lack of efficiency.

Jeff Hawk, the Boeing Environment and Certification director who has worked on the 787 since 2002. He says that before the Dreamliner, Boeing had been planning to build a faster plane. He pulls out an off-white model of the original design, the Sonic Cruiser, which looks like a cousin to the Concorde. The Sonic Cruiser, streamlined like a barracuda, was to fly at the edge of the speed of sound.

"On a transatlantic flight, it would save about an hour or two," Hawk says. "It flew 20 percent faster but produced the same amount of fuel burn." The design concept crumbled when the airline industry was blindsided by the September 11 attacks in 2001. Passengers avoided the skies, and the industry lost $25 billion in just three years. Meanwhile, fuel prices crept upward and fuel efficiency became a top priority. Boeing decided to divert technologies being used to build a faster plane into building a more fuel-efficient one. Composite material planned for the Sonic Cruisers—carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic that's 70 percent the weight of aluminum—was carried over to the 787.

Engineers squeezed every efficiency they could from the airplane's classic shape. Among other tricks, they created a longer and thinner wing to generate more lift and less drag. As one part of the airplane became more fuel-efficient, so did the next. "If you have a low-drag airplane, you can use a much more efficient engine," Hawk explains. "That less-powerful engine is smaller. It's lighter too. A smaller engine means less drag. Instead of 20 percent faster, we were 20 percent more fuel-efficient." That efficiency has been a major selling point. Boeing has pre-sold 738 airplanes to 51 customers, making it the most successful release of a commercial jet in the company's history. It's also good for global warming, Boeing says, because 20 percent less fuel burn translates into 20 percent less greenhouse gas produced.

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Microsoft Research Data Center Paper, Simulating Energy-Aware Server Provisioning and Load Dispatching for Windows Live Messenger

Microsoft Research has another paper on creating a Green Data Center by turning off servers. The paper has been well received and the authors will present at USENIX Networked Systems Design & Implementation conference in April 2008.

The specific scenario they have studied is Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger Servers, combining the challenges of a connection-intensive Internet service (Windows Live Messenger) with turning off servers.

Energy consumption for hosting Internet services is becoming a pressing issue as these services scale up. Dynamic server provisioning techniques are effective in turning off unnecessary servers to save energy. Such techniques, mostly studied for request-response services, face unique challenges in the context of connection servers that can host a large number of long-lived TCP connections. Such servers usually limit on how many new connections they can accept per second and, therefore, a server cannot be fully utilized immediately after it is turned on. Moreover, before a server is turned off, all its active connections need to be reconnected or migrated to other currently active servers. In this paper, we characterize unique properties, performance, and power models of connection servers, based on a real data trace collected from the deployed Windows Live Messenger. Using the models, we design server provisioning and load dispatching algorithms and study subtle interactions between them. We show that our algorithms can save a significant amount of energy without sacrificing user experiences.

The simulated energy savings ranged from 20 to 30% depending on the server-initiated disconnection rate.

Microsoft Research also published a paper on saving Disk Energy in a data center.

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UPS Avoids the EBay Mistake, Being Fined for Air Pollution from Diesel Generators in their Green Data Center

Many of you have read the SearchDataCenter article about United Parcel Service’s Green Data Center efforts.  The interesting part behind the scenes is UPS runs its diesel generators frequently and stays in compliance with local emissions standards.  A $79,200 mistake eBay made.

Given Georgia’s water shortage jeopardizing nuclear power plant operations, a reliable power supply seems an issue.  Digging a little deeper, I found it interesting that CARMA.org has UPS listed as a power plant.  Then I found this article in Diesel Progress with details on how UPS installed an Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) system to allow to meet the Georgia EPA emissions standards, and run the diesel generators when spot demand power prices go above 7 cents/kWh.

Parrino said Windward uses the generator sets during a total loss of utility power, during brownouts/voltage swells or grid instabilities, during power switching activities from other users on the nearby grid, during maintenance or troubleshooting by Georgia Power, as well as peak shaving when the cost of electricity exceeds 7 cents/kWh.

Windward developed a program that would put the facility in compliance with the clean air requirements, and allow it to obtain a new air permit that provides the facility the flexibility to run its generators in the ways best suited to the data center a any time of the year, as well as to not degrade engine performance.

But, there is now a bureaucratic overhead for UPS as a power plant.

As easy as it was to obtain the approval from GA-EPD, complying with the quarterly air permit reporting requirements was painstakingly difficult, the project team members said. Windward’s air permit had many requirements scattered throughout that had to be compiled into a simplified format.

Examples of this are minute-by-minute logging of the urea injection rates, then obtaining 60 minute averages for each gen-set. With six gen-sets logging an average of 130 hours of runtime annually, the database becomes very bulky in a short amount of time. Other reporting requirements include cumulative run-hours on the first of every month. From the cumulative run-hours, the monthly run-hours are then computed.

If I was UPS I would consider installing the power generation software solution from OSIsoft.  Pat Kennedy, OSIsoft’s CEO also pointed out that if you were in San Diego you could turn on your generators before a blackout, but if you were in SF you would have to wait for the blackout before switching on your backup generators.

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