Citi wins Green Data Centre Award

Citi Data Center Wins Environmental Award. 

Upon completion in June 2008, this data center will save up to 25
percent on electrical energy consumption, compared to conventional
data centers. In addition, 16,000 megawatt hours will be saved each
year, the equivalent needed to power 3,000 average family homes. The
amount of carbon dioxide escaping into the atmosphere will be up to
11,000 tons less annually than conventional centers of its size. Savvy
water management, including natural drainage of almost 90 percent of
the rainwater, will save up to 46.5 million liters in water usage
every year.

   Head of Citi Realty Services for EMEA, John Killey, said, "Citi's
commitment to ensuring sustainability lies at the heart of all its
major projects and the new EMEA data center is no different: "From
inception, through construction to operation, a rigorous,
resource-efficient, balanced and holistic approach has been adopted
that integrates sustainability without compromise to performance or
reliability. The result is a project that pioneers solutions
transferable to other geographies and applications.

   "The award also recognizes the role that outstanding cooperation
between Citi's Real Estate and Technology groups along with their
design and construction partners has played in ensuring sustainability
is in the fore front of this project," Killey added.

A group of us had the pleasure of having Harvey Cobbold who is responsible for Citi's Data Center construction on our Green Data Center panel discussion at IT Forum. Behind the scenes of any Green PR release is a team of people who have been working on the project for years. These are the people who are now being recognized by their companies and industry as doing the right thing for the environment.  Great Job Harvey!!!

Harvey is currently the Director of IT Transformation for Citi in EMEA, where he is responsible for:

•The selection and design of the New EMEA Data Centres. 
•The Migration and consolidation of the existing Data Centres in Europe as part of Citi’s Global Data Centre Strategy 
•The deployment of new technologies into this environment and the optimization and transformation of the technology as it is migrated 

Key to this strategy is the adoption of green technologies, both as a strategic direction and to deliver operational efficiency. 

Harvey joined Citi in 1998, to take over responsibility for the European data centers.  He has 25 years of Operational and Engineering experience in IT Infrastructure within the finance industry. 

Harvey graduated in 1979 from Imperial College, where he studied Computing Science. 

Computing Science. 

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Story of Stuff - A Green View of Stuff

Charles Earnest a Seattle Green Festival Catalyst sent an interesting link to The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard that tells

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

And, she discusses the PC obsolesnce.

There would be an interesting story for Servers in a data center in that a typical life cycle is 3 years before server hardware is osbsoleted out of a data center and possibly accelerating to even shorter times given the fast pace of energy efficiency improvements.  Jim Lynch in a technet article discusses how PCs are recycled.

One of the most amazing aspects of the Community MAR program is that it is able to supply licenses for Windows® 2000 and Windows XP for only $5 USD. MARs supply these licenses—over 200,000 a year—on refurbished PCs to nonprofit organizations, schools, libraries, colleges, and, in the U.S., technology-access programs for low-income or disabled individuals. In this way, Community MARs reach those on the wrong side of the digital divide, providing access to educational and employment opportunities.

Shouldn't the same be available for Servers?  One statistic I've heard is that 30% of servers are sold to Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Think of how many communities could benefit from the servers powering search.  The problem is it is easy for a corporate culture to recycle servers.  It is far to easy to scrap the IT hardware to insure protection of intellectual property. All it takes is one law suit to scare the attorney's to make it a corporate policy that all IT hardware will be destroyed.

Google has a good excuse in scrapping/destroying their server hardware in that who can run anything on their non-standard hw. What is the environmental impact of Googles' server hw ewaste vs. its latest renewable energy initiative? 

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Changing the role of the Performance Lab to measure Power and Cooling

2  posts Google's  The Case for Energy-Proportional Computing

Energy-proportional designs would enable large energy savings in servers, potentially doubling their efficiency in real-life use. Achieving energy proportionality will require significant improvements in the energy usage profile of every system component, particularly the memory and disk subsystems.

and Green Marketing and Green Hype

I'm watching with mixed emotions as more and more vendors start to describe their products as addressing challenges associated with reducing power and cooling in the data center. On one hand, clearly it's a monumental challenge -- and opportunity. On the other hand, I'm starting to see vendors with thinner and thinner claims start to add this message to their marketing drumbeat. That's not a good thing.

point out the challenges coming in determing energy efficiency, and you will need to measure the results.

The answer can be relatively simple.  Add Power and Cooling measurements to your performance labs capabilitise and RFPs.  Some people are adding Green requirements to RFPs, but Green is not a well enough defined area.  Instead ask for the true power consumption under max load and idle for the configuration delivered. This should be a # that is relatively easy for your performance labs to verify when measuring the power draw from IT HW.

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IBM is upselling its inefficient data centers

IBM made its big announcement awhile ago of going green and how the can virtualize huge server installations.

But, does anyone else think something is wrong that the same company you have trusted for years to design and support your data center actually built an inefficient wasteful energy consuming infrastructure is now selling new services to replace what they built?  They should know how to replace what they built, but no guarantees.

There is more consolidation going on in this space as HP bought EYP.

Being Green in data center operations is not something new, but it is a new way to create awareness to sell new services.  Beware of greenwash.

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Dynamic Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) to real world dynamic energy efficiency

I've updated this entry with a post at /2008/01/dynamic-pue-rea.html and appended this post with the entry.

PUE = Total Facility Power / IT Equipment Power

I am about ready to write on the subject of energy efficiency measurements and how PUE should be calculate over time and conditions, and I was fortunate to find a blog entry on this by Ken Oestreich.

Why? Because IT departments operate at greatly different levels; peak (maybe during the day) as well as off-peak (perhaps nights/weekends). Ideally, the data center should know how to adapt to these conditions: re-purposing "live" machines during peak hours; retiring and temporarily shutting-down idle servers during off-peak; removing power conditioning equipment when not needed; turning off specific CRAC units and chillers when not required (i.e. cold days and/or off-peak hours). We need an efficiency metric that indicates how data centers operate Dynamically.

Cornell Medical's Biomedicine compute servers shut down in this condition, but they are not to point of having control over their cooling systems.

My plan is to write on  a customer who is dynamically measuring PUE over different operating conditions, changes in outside temperature, over time of filling the room with servers, within a facility in different colo rooms, and comparing other facilities.  Ken is right in tha PUE will change at various times. It is important to know the conditions and the theoretical PUE should be, and then you can determine if your power and cooling systems are not performing as expected.

I hope to have this article out by end of year.

Below is my continuation from /2008/01/dynamic-pue-rea.html

Dynamic PUE real world use

I've been meaning to write about PUE, and have been stumped in that It is defined as a metric, and in the Green Grid document referenced it makes no reference that is dynamic. In reality PUE will be a dynamic # that changes as the load changes in a room. How ironic would it be that your best PUE # is when all the servers are running at near capacity, and shutting down servers to save power will increase your PUE? Or your energy efficient cooling system uses large amounts of water in Southern California where it is just a matter of time before water shortages will cause more environmental issues?

What helped me to think of PUE as a dynamic # is to think of it as quality control metric. The quality of the electrical and mechanical systems and their operations over time are inputs into PUE.  As load changes and servers will be turned off the variability of the power and cooling systems influence you PUE.  So, PUE can now have a statistical range of operation given the conditions.  This sounds familiar.  It's statistical process control.

Statistical Process Control (SPC) is an effective method of monitoring a process through the use of control charts. Much of its power lies in the ability to monitor both process centre and its variation about that centre. By collecting data from samples at various points within the process, variations in the process that may affect the quality of the end product or service can be detected and corrected, thus reducing waste and as well as the likelihood that problems will be passed on to the customer. With its emphasis on early detection and prevention of problems, SPC has a distinct advantage over quality methods, such as inspection, that apply resources to detecting and correcting problems in the end product or service.

For example, a breakfast cereal packaging line may be designed to fill each cereal box with 500 grams of product, but some boxes will have slightly more than 500 grams, and some will have slightly less, in accordance with a distribution of net weights. If the production process, its inputs, or its environment changes (for example, the machines doing the manufacture begin to wear) this distribution can change. For example, as its cams and pulleys wear out, the cereal filling machine may start putting more cereal into each box than specified. If this change is allowed to continue unchecked, more and more product will be produced that fall outside the tolerances of the manufacturer or consumer, resulting in waste. While in this case, the waste is in the form of "free" product for the consumer, typically waste consists of rework or scrap.

By observing at the right time what happened in the process that led to a change, the quality engineer or any member of the team responsible for the production line can troubleshoot the root cause of the variation that has crept in to the process and correct the problem.

This last point of observing at the right time what happened in the process that led to a change ultimately what needs to be achieved with a dynamic PUE system.  Without a system like this and mindset, you wouldn't know how to fix PUE problems. Which is what I think is wrong with a static PUE mindset.  You need a closed loop feedback to monitor the PUE and see if it is performing as expected given the operating conditions and load.

Note: the point about breakfast cereal reminds of Microsoft's Mike Manos, Sr. Director Data Center Services, and his first job working in Rice a Roni operations, learning process control, which is probably why he has invested in software from OSIsoft to help monitor PUE.  Cornell uses the same SW as well.  For more details see Microsoft's Jeff O'Reilly presentation or Cornell's Jason Banfelder presentation.

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