Carbon Monitoring Satellite Bites the Dust

February 25, 2009 Dave Ohara

There was lots of news about NASA’s Carbon Monitoring Satellite. Unfortunately, it failed to reach orbit and came down in Antarctica.

In this recent undated photo provided by Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., a Taurus XL rocket with NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory on-board, sits on the launch pad. The rocket carrying the observatory blasted off early Tuesday morning, Feb. 24, 2009, from the base, but apparently failed to separate from the launch vehicle and splashed into the ocean. (AP Photo/U.S. Air Force, Senior Airman Cole M. Presley)

NASA rocket failure blow to Earth watching network

By SETH BORENSTEIN – 1 day ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new satellite to track the chief culprit in global warming crashed into the ocean near Antarctica after launch Tuesday, dealing a major setback to NASA's already weak network for monitoring Earth and its environment from above.

The $280 million mission was designed to answer one of the biggest question marks of global warming: What happens to the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide spewed by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas? How much of it is sucked up and stored by plants, soil and oceans and how much is left to trap heat on Earth, worsening global warming?

"It's definitely a setback. We were already well behind," said Neal Lane, science adviser during former President Bill Clinton's administration. "The program was weak and now it's really weak."

Failure was caused by

NASA officials said a protective cover on the satellite didn't release and fall away, and the extra weight meant the satellite couldn't reach orbit.

IBM and HP’s Green Data Centers

February 25, 2009 Dave Ohara

Ovum has an article about IBM and HP’s efforts in Green Data Centres.

Graham Titterington

IBM and HP move towards green data centres

Recent announcements from IBM and HP show that energy consumption in the data centre is now attracting high-level attention in both enterprises and IT vendors. Graham Titterington compares these two initiatives and puts them into a wider perspective.

IBM announced enterprise additions to its Project Big Green this week, a week after HP announced its Sustainability Laboratory. Both vendors have a history of interest in this area, but HP has achieved a higher profile for its efforts. The HP announcement included long-term data centre issues while IBM concentrated on new product releases to help in this area. However, there were large areas of agreement and overlap in the two presentations, and both said that energy use has become a high-level concern for enterprises, which will grow in importance. Both see an immediate opportunity for savings in energy use with a strong financial investment case through monitoring and intelligent control systems. IBM talks of the payback period from investments in this area being less than two years. Both back these claims with case studies, although at this early stage these are thin on the ground at present. The environmental payback period may be longer where this involves hardware replacement.

Comparing Smart Cooling vs. Monitoring.

The medium term - monitoring and intelligent control

HP claims it has achieved a 40% energy saving at a new data centre it has recently built in Bangalore by deploying its 'smart cooling' technology. IBM claims similar savings in the short term by deploying its current technology including its new monitoring systems. Tivoli monitoring software has been extended from processor monitoring to include all aspects of the data centre facility. It monitors kilowatts of power consumption, and not just processor utilisation. It provides connections into several important business activities to make it an attractive proposition for business:

HP is taking inventory of energy consumption along the supply chain.

HP has shown a commendable attention to lifetime issues in its green IT agenda. This is continuing in the current announcement. It points out that the energy required to smelt bauxite into aluminium to make a server is equivalent to the energy the server will use in two years of its life. It is now embarking on a project to build up a database of lifecycle energy consumption to create a comprehensive database from which lifecycle issues can be more accurately evaluated. It promises to put the results in the public domain, and is appealing for partners to help populate this.

Microsoft Research Predicting Problems in the Data Center

February 25, 2009 Dave Ohara

Microsoft posts on its Techfest event and Predicting Problems in the Data Center.

Moises Goldszmidt (above), principal researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, is showing a pair of demos, in conjunction with lab colleague Mihai Budiu, that examines performance in data centers.

"The challenge," Goldszmidt says, "is: How do I summarize thousands of machines and hundreds of metrics and find the key elements over that huge space that's giving us surprises, such that I can let it retrieve that fingerprint? How do I do that automatically?"

The demo is called Predicting Problems in the Data Center.

"We are using very sophisticated machine-learning techniques," Goldszmidt states, "that build automated models that are able to extract the main characteristics of each one of these crises."

The value of such work is readily apparent.

"Eighty percent of the time, we're predicting one hour in advance a set of actions we need to do to mitigate a problem," he says, resulting in "less downtime, less latency for our clients using our services. Our services are more efficient to run, because we don't have to have that many people look at the problem."

Decoupling – Energy Efficient Words in Stimulus Package

February 19, 2009 Dave Ohara

Earth2Tech has a post on energy efficiency and the Stimulus package.

The Most Important Words in the Stimulus Package for Energy Efficiency

Written by Katie Fehrenbacher

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Posted February 20th, 2009 at 12:00 am in Policy

The most important provision in the stimulus package for promoting energy efficiency in the U.S. could be a piece of ambiguous language wrapped up in a section on state energy grants. A few sentences encourages states to consider a policy for utilities known as decoupling (though the stimulus text doesn’t name it specifically) in return for energy grants. Decoupling, a strategy that has proven successful at promoting energy efficiency in states like California, disconnects utilities’ sales from their profits, and thus encourages utilities to implement energy efficiency programs. The text in the stimulus bill doesn’t require decoupling per se in order to get funds, but requires the state governors to get certification from their respective commissions that the states in question will:

“…seek to implement…a general policy that ensures that utility financial incentives are aligned with helping their customers use energy more efficiently and that provide timely cost recovery and a timely earnings opportunity for utilities associated with cost-effective and verifiable efficiency savings, in a way that sustains or enhances utility customers’ incentives to use energy more efficiently.”

What is the excitement?

Fans of energy efficiency were electrified when House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) introduced “decoupling” as a condition for state energy grants in the House’s version of the stimulus package. But the language in the final package, which Obama signed into law this week, was toned down from Waxman’s original provision.

…

Reid Detchon, executive director of the Energy Future Coalition, said: “Most utilities make more money by selling more energy than they do by saving it. Flipping that incentive structure is the key to unlocking greater national investment in energy efficiency.”

But get ready to prove your energy efficiency with monitor. Note from the above text, the word verifiable. This means you need to prove your energy savings for a green data center.

“…seek to implement…a general policy that ensures that utility financial incentives are aligned with helping their customers use energy more efficiently and that provide timely cost recovery and a timely earnings opportunity for utilities associated with cost-effective and verifiable efficiency savings, in a way that sustains or enhances utility customers’ incentives to use energy more efficiently.”

Data Center opinions on Obama’s Effect

February 19, 2009 Dave Ohara

SearchDatacenter has a post with a variety of IT opinions.

The Obama effect on IT operations: Data center panel weighs in

Will President Obama's campaign promises bring change for data centers? How will increased oversight of financial systems affect IT operations? Continued digitization of health care? Increased likelihood of passing carbon cap-and-trade legislation that would affect energy prices? Incentives for green business?

W e asked our data center advisory board, made up of CIOs, facilities execs, admins and analysts, how the Obama administration will affect IT operations.

If I was going to place bets i agree with Christian Belady’s comment.

Prepare to report on carbon emissions for the data center
I think one of the things that we can expect is that companies will be required to report carbon emissions, and a significant part of the emissions will be from data centers. Many of you may know that I have advocated the importance of measurement over the years, and those who have embraced [a measurement strategy] will find carbon reporting trivial.

For Microsoft, tools like Scry can report carbon emissions already at the server, rack or data center level. A few other companies are doing the same. For the rest, adoption and investment of real time measurement techniques will need to happen fast. As a result, companies will have to spend much of their resources making this happen in an unforgiving economy -- not the best place to be.

-- Christian Belady, P.E., principal power and cooling architect, Microsoft