IBM partners with Australia's Largest Power Network to be part of the Energy Supply Chain Management

IBM has strategically targeted being an IT solution for Electricity and Water. This press release is IBM's latest move.

Country Energy to Tackle Carbon Emissions Through Development of Intelligent Network With IBM

Australia's Largest Power Network Joins Global Effort to Improve Network Reliability, Energy Efficiency, and Enhance Use of Renewable Energy

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA and ARMONK, NY - 17 Apr 2008: Country Energy, manager of Australia's largest power network, today announced a global collaboration with IBM (NYSE: IBM) aimed at developing and deploying an Intelligent Network in Australia. As part of the announcement, Country Energy has become the first utility outside of the United States to join the Intelligent Utility Network Coalition, a global group of companies working with IBM to accelerate the adoption of 'smart grid' technologies and business solutions.

An Intelligent Utility Network is a digital, open standards-based network of sensors, metering, communications, computer processors, and analytics which connects an entire utility company -- from power plant to plug. These connected systems provide a utility with near real-time data and information to better manage the grid infrastructure, enabling fewer and shorter power outages, improved customer service, and the ability to source and deliver power more efficiently, including renewable energy.

Country Energy is pursuing the Intelligent Network concept to improve reliability, support the growth of renewables like solar and wind, and make energy efficiency simpler for customers.

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Survey Quantifies Energy Waste in IT Development and Test Centers, 59% would consider turning off idle Computers

Cassatt ran a survey of of Data Center professionals, and published a press release.

Cassatt Survey Finds Massive Data Center Energy Waste in Development and Test Centers, but 59 Percent Would Consider Turning Off Idle Computers

Two-thirds of Data Centers Are Addressing Energy Efficiency Concerns With Long-Term Projects Like Server Consolidation and Virtualization, but Some See Quick Benefits of Server Power Management

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 22, 2008 – Nearly two-thirds of IT and facilities personnel consider their data center energy efficiency “average” or worse – and their development and test environments might be the biggest cause of that, according to a survey conducted by Cassatt® Corporation, a leader in providing software to make data centers more efficient.

More than a quarter of survey respondents said that greater than 60 percent of their development and test servers are idle during off-peak hours.  There is some good news, though:  62 percent are working on a data center energy-efficiency project now or expect to within the next year, according to the “Cassatt 2008 Data Center Energy Efficiency Survey.”   And, contrary to conventional wisdom, 59 percent would consider turning off computers that are idle.

One of the first areas I advise clients is to start energy savings projects in their performance, development, and test labs to quantify the savings, allowing them to  filter the greenwashing from real savings. Even though everyone wants to get solutions in the data center, it makes sense to take the first steps in your labs. Few labs need to run 24 x 7, and there are multiple servers that can be turned off.  But, as Cassatt mentions in its study.

“Less expected,” Coleman continued, “and very problematic for the industry, are the findings that show that many companies simply don’t measure their power consumption at all, or do so at a very superficial level.  If you can’t measure it, as they say, you can’t manage it. And it may be that companies are fixing only part of the problem with initiatives based on incomplete information. While organizations are showing a willingness to try some new ideas, many are still ignoring simpler solutions that could help them with energy efficiency almost immediately.”

The biggest problem is people are not measuring their power consumption. A Toyota Prius works because its instrument panel gives you feedback on your performance and efficiency.

Other interesting parts from Cassat's survey are:

  • “Green” motivation = money:  Cost and capacity constraints are the two strongest motivators for an energy efficiency strategy, cited by 68 percent and 57 percent of respondents, respectively.  Even so, 39 percent of companies are motivated by environmental responsibilities.
  • IT and facilities still aren’t talking much:  Almost half of respondents (46 percent) said their facilities and IT teams touched based infrequently, not at all, or they weren’t sure how often.
  • Self-serving advice?:  End users say they get their primary guidance regarding data center energy efficiency from parties with a stake in their spending – system vendors (49 percent) and power and cooling vendors (46 percent).  Other experts, like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Uptime Institute, and the Green Grid, ranked much lower.
  • Missing good advice?:  More than 38 percent of respondents are unaware that the EPA recommends turning off idle or unused servers to save power.
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    Data Center Container Makes PUE and other performance metrics easy to measure

    Nicholas Carr's Rough Type blog jokes about Microsoft's container data centers being a trailer park.  But, he appends his blog later quoting the searchdatacenter interview with Mike Manos and Christian Belady.

    UPDATE: There's more on the data center philosophy of the 'Soft Boys in this interview with Manos and one of his colleagues. On the attraction of containers: "One of the things we like about them is we can take a bunch of servers and look at the output of that box and look at the power it draws. At the end of the day, we can determine, 'What is the IT productivity of that unit? How many search queries were executed per box? How many emails sent or stored?' You can get into some really interesting metrics. A lot of people say you can't look at the productivity of a data center, but if you compartmentalize it - not as small as the server level, but at some chunk in between - you can measure productivity."

    This is one advantage Microsoft will gain from going down the path of containers in that it will be easy for them to use the containers as a unit of measure for PUE and compute capability metrics. As they update the hardware in a container, they will be able to make comparisons between versions. They will now have 220 possible mini data centers (containers) to experiment on what are the right combinations - storage, memory, processors (AMD/intel), SSD, network configurations, power systems, etc. This is going to let them experiment and have a standard unit of comparison.  This is innovative.

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    ISO Launches Standard for Energy Management

    ISO has launched a project committee to develop an international standard for energy management following their successful examples of ISO 9000 and 14000 series.

    ISO has just approved the creation of a project committee mandated to develop an international standard on energy management.

    The standard will provide all types of organizations and companies a practical and widely recognized approach to increase energy efficiency, reduce costs and improve their environmental performance by addressing both the technical and management aspects of rational energy use. The standard is intended to be broadly applicable to various sectors of national economies, including utility, manufacturing, commercial building, general commerce, and transportation sectors, and therefore, could have influence on as much as 60 % of the world’s energy demand.

    ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden commented: “The urgency to reduce GHG emissions, the reality of higher prices from reduced availability of fossil fuels, and the need to promote energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources, provide a strong rationale for developing this new standard building on the most advanced best practices and existing national or regional standards”.

    Following the successful examples of the ISO 9000 series on quality management and the ISO 14000 series on environmental management, the project committee ISO/PC 242, Energy management, will consider the development of a standard containing relevant terms and definitions and providing management system requirements together with guidance for use, implementation, measurement and metrics.

    The intent of the new ISO/PC 242 series are:

    • provide organizations and companies (utilities, manufacturers, commerce, buildings, transportation, both private and public) with a well-recognized framework for integrating energy efficiency into their management practices
    • offer organizations with operations in more than one country a single, harmonized standard for implementation across the organization
    • provide a logical and consistent methodology for identifying and implementing improvements that may contribute to a continual increase in energy efficiency across facilities
    • assist organizations to better utilize existing energy consuming assets, thus reducing costs and/or expanding capacity
    • offer guidance on benchmarking, measuring, documenting, and reporting energy intensity improvements and their projected impact on reductions in GHG emissions
    • create transparency and facilitate communication on the management of energy, promote energy management best practices, thus reinforcing the value of good energy management behaviours
    • assist facilities in evaluating and prioritizing the implementation of new energy-efficient technologies
    • provide a framework for organizations to encourage suppliers to better manage their energy, thus promoting energy efficiency throughout the supply chain
    • facilitate the use of energy management as a component of GHG emission reduction projects.

    The secretariat of ISO/PC 242 will be held jointly by the ISO members for the United States and for Brazil: ANSI (American National Standardization Institute) and ABNT (Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas).

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    The Monetary Value of Energy in the Data Center

    With the interest of Greening a Data Center, the cost of energy has a behavior impact on your organization.

    Lewis Curtis and I were chatting earlier today and he posted his ideas on his blog.  It gets you thinking and to save you time I cut and paste the complete post below.  I am working on my own ideas and it will be out next month.

    Datacenter energy consumption is rarely a operating cost issue.

    From a chat with Dave O'hara today,  I thought I would blog some thoughts around datacenter energy consumption and some common confusion concerning costs.

    Do organizations with dedicated datacenters save money when they install more efficient servers and reduce energy consumption? 

    Short Answer:  Rarely

    Why?

    It all is associated with how most dedicated datacenters negotiate energy consumption with utility companies (operating cost issue).   Usually, they negotiate rates at blocks of energy consumption in fixed buckets.

    Therefore rule #1:  do not run out of energy,  rule #2: do not leave energy supply stranded (pay for it and not use it).   In other words:  Overprovisioning and Underprovising

    Overprovisioning:  you run out of energy in the datacenter (worst sin in the datacenter)

    • TTM (time to market) is significantly impacted
    • Datacenter systems become brittle  (small energy changes can down center)

    Underprovisioning: you strand energy your organization already paid for: (very bad)

    • company is wasting money (that's money that could be going into something useful)

    There is fine balancing act to managing these issues in your datacenter.

    At the end of the day,  we usually have a fixed bucket of energy consumption at a given rate which manage for our datacenter.

    So why architect IT solutions which reduces the consumption of energy? 

    Answer: Reducing the velocity of datacenter expansion in your organization (capital costs)

    As your organization grows in scale and complexity at a given rate, the need build more and more competitive  IT solutions increases at a related velocity.   

    As IT solutions expands, organizations need more datacenter capacity to accommodate the business's growth needs.   This expansion is only successful as long as the given IT solutions provide value above the capital of costs of building and operating new datacenter capacity. 

    Some Challenges of building new datacenters:

    • Regulations and oversight cost are increasing
    • Cost of datacenter infrastructure are significantly increasing  (PDUs, Cooling solutions, etc..)
    • Negotiated blocks of energy consumption are significantly increasing in price

    Therefore, energy efficiency ultimately is about slowing the velocity of datacenter expansion for organization (capital costs).

    If you can slow your build cycle from 1 new datacenter every 9 months to 1 datacenter to every 13 months can be a significant business value for your organization.    Slowing forecasted datacenter expansion velocity.

    And ultimately, this is not only good for the environment, it's good for the bottom line. 

    Lewis

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