Cool It! Data Centres writes Economist.com

A good friend, Joe Ternasky sent me the link to this Economist article. This article should work well to get the attention of CxOs.

The data centres that power the internet demand a lot of power. Time, then, to make them more efficient

Google

AS ONE industry falls, another rises. The banks of the Columbia River in Oregon used to be lined with aluminium smelters. Now they are starting to house what might, for want of a better phrase, be called data smelters. The largest has been installed by Google in a city called The Dalles. Microsoft and Yahoo! are not far behind. Google's plant consumes as much power as a town of 200,000 people. And that is why it is there in the first place. The cheap hydroelectricity provided by the Columbia River, which once split apart aluminium oxide in order to supply the world with soft-drinks cans and milk-bottle tops, is now being used to shuffle and store masses of information. Computing is an energy-intensive industry. And the world's biggest internet companies are huge energy consumers—so big that they are contemplating some serious re-engineering in order to curb their demand.

The traditional way of building data centres such as Google's is to link clusters of off-the-shelf server computers together in racks. Hundreds, even thousands, of such servers can be combined to achieve the sort of arithmetical horsepower more usually associated with a supercomputer. But the servers all require energy, of course, and so do the electronic links that enable them to work together. On top of that, once the energy has been used it emerges as heat. The advanced cooling systems required to get rid of this heat demand the consumption of more power still.

All of which is expensive. Though the price of computer hardware continues to plunge, the price of energy has been increasing. The result is that the lifetime cost of running a server now greatly outstrips the cost of buying it. A number of researchers are therefore looking for ways to operate big computer centres like the one at The Dalles more efficiently.

The article continues and discusses energy efficient designs by Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, and IBM.

But, one of the main things this article draws attention to is the point,it is time to make these data centres more energy efficient (greener).  Do you hear the sound of gov't regulation coming?  And, the programs are going to be based on the amount of power you consume, not necessarily the price of your power.  So, even though companies have done like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo move to cheap power, and economically they have side-stepped the issue of power costs, gov'ts could still require energy savings programs be put in place.  And once this starts you need a conformance system to validate your results, and now you are in EPA type of audit situation.

Read more

Microsoft Demos Auto-Shift: Energy-Aware Server Provisioning at TechFest

Microsoft Research has a post about one of their Green projects at their TechFest event.  If you are not familiar with Techfest here is a google news search and the Microsoft website.

Auto Shift: Energy-Aware Server Provisioning

Green, as we now know, is, indisputedly, the new black. Seems like you can't turn on the television or pick up a newspaper to read about the latest green initiative. Lots of people are talking.

Feng Zhao is doing something about it.

Zhao's Networked Embedded Computing group is showing a TechFest demo called Auto-Shift: Energy-Aware Server Provisioning, which addresses server resource management for Internet services, such as Live Messenger and Hotmail. Data centers for such services require potentially expensive decisions about how many computers to allocate and how those are deployed.

"No. 1," Zhao says, "you have to buy the servers. No. 2, once you buy a server, you have to manage it. And third, you have to have an infrastructure, such as power supply. In this particular study, we looked at the power usage of the servers that are running one of our largest Web services. If you look at the load as it varies over the course of the day, it peaks around noon and slows down around midnight. That clearly shows that not all the servers are needed all the time. Can we shut down some of the servers? Can we actually save energy?"

This demo is the same paper I referred to earlier in another post.

The blog entry continues with the following points made by Feng.

"We also have all these sensors in the data centers," Zhao says. "Some of the machines work harder than others. If we can move the workload around, from hotspots to cool spots, the air conditioning doesn’t have to work as hard, because of the efficiency of cooling the hottest spots. If you move that workload and even out the temperature disparities, that means good energy savings. Incorporating environmental-sensor readings such as temperature and humidity, and couple that with smart scheduling and workload migration, and we believe we can even save more resources."

That sounds green, indeed--and economical, too. 

"What it translates to," Zhao concludes, "is that you use less power and that, with these smarts, we can figure out that maybe we don’t need to buy that many machines to start with, because we can do the same work, with very little difference in performance, and actually run it on a smaller set of machines. Reduce energy cost and reduce hardware investment in the first place--that would reduce service cost, reduce staffing, and reduce the space you need to build."

Read more

Business Model for Used Servers

cnet newsblog has an article about when used servers cost most than new

GALWAY, Ireland--Think of the Multis Group as sort of the Antiques Roadshow of the server world.

The Galway, Ireland-based company specializes in refurbishing, and then selling, used servers. Refurbished PCs and servers are increasingly in vogue because remanufacturing represents a more environmentally efficient way to recycle old electronics than harvesting components from these old machines or melting them down for raw materials.

Multis Group logo

Multis, in fact, plans to open a 70,000-square-foot facility in Union City, Calif., later this month to refurbish and sell servers for North American customers. That marks a reversal in the usual U.S.-Ireland tech relationship.

Unlike refurbished PCs and cell phones, servers maintain a high resale value that can equal or even exceed the cost of new equipment, said Multis CEO and founder Sean Keenan. Why? Manufacturers might produce only a single server model for 18 months to two years. Corporate customers, however, often don't want to migrate to new hardware that quickly. Instead, they move at a three- to seven-year pace. As a result, they often have a need for discontinued equipment.

People should consider contacting Multis to discuss end of life for their servers and an eWaste plan as part of creating a green data center.

Read more

Microsoft Releases a Set of Best Practices for Energy Efficient Data Centers

Infoworld writes on Microsoft's release of a set of best practices for Energy Efficiency Data Centers.

Microsoft will release a set of best practices for administrators running datacenters, focusing on energy-saving strategies the company is implementing in its own operations, CEO Steve Ballmer said Monday.

Those tips will covers issues such as how to pick a good site for a datacenter, how to deal with heat, and how to manage power consumption, Ballmer said during a keynote presentation at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany.

The move is in response to growing concern over the release of carbon dioxide, one of the byproducts of burning fossil fuels to create electricity. In addition, power demands are ever-increasing, Ballmer said.

"If you look at non-travel power consumption in the world today ... information technology is one of the most rapidly growing power consumers on the planet," Ballmer said. "We think we have a real responsibility ... to reduce power consumption by the IT industry."

The paper can be found at this location.

Let's see if we other big datacenter operators will follow Microsoft. 

Google?

Yahoo?

Read more