www.greenm3.com at a Data Center Construction “topping-out”

May 11, 2009 Dave Ohara

I am writing this blog entry from a data center site where they just had the “topping-out” ceremony.

"Topping out" is the term used by ironworkers to indicate that the final piece of steel is being hoisted into place on a building, bridge, or other large structure.1 The project is not completed, but it has reached its maximum height. To commemorate this first milestone the final piece of iron is usually hoisted into place with a small evergreen tree (called a Christmas tree in the trade) and an American flag attached.2 The piece is usually painted white and signed by the ironworkers and visiting dignitaries (figure 1). If the project is important enough (and the largesse of the contractor great enough) the ceremony may culminate in a celebration known as a "topping out party" in which the construction crews are treated to food and drink.

I signed my name and www.greenm3.com on the topping-out steel beam.

After all the signatures.

And ceremony pictures. (Below are the iron workers)

One reason the ironworkers observe the topping out custom is the simple fact that they are the first workers to reach the top of the structure. I guess the impulse to commemorate the achievement is similar to that of mountain climbers-or astronauts landing on the moon for that matter.3 Topping out the structure means the end is in sight for the "raising-gang"-the men who actually set the iron in place. There is more work to be done, and ironworkers will be involved in some aspects of it, but the heavy work is done and the raising gang is almost out of a job. While no two topping out ceremonies are the same, they usually have some combination of a tree, a flag, the ritual signing of the final beam, and a party.

The beam is put in place.

An interesting piece of trivia is the symbolism for the Christmas tree.

The custom of decorating the uppermost point of the structure with an evergreen tree is a tradition that predates the structural-steel industry in America by hundreds of years and has old Northern European roots. Although the topping out tree has ancient roots there is no consensus among modern ironworkers as to what exactly the tree symbolizes, or when and how it came to be used by the ironworkers. According to The Ironworker, the union's official publication, "for some the evergreen tree symbolizes that the job went up without a loss of life, while for others it's a good luck charm for the future occupants"(1984:11). Other accounts attribute the tree as signifying simply that "we [ironworkers] did it" (Kodish, 1989:2).

Little scholarship has been published on this custom. Most of what has been published has appeared in newspapers, popular magazines and engineering trade journals. One can get a feel for the age and scope of such tree rituals from James Frazer who discusses tree worship extensively in The Golden Bough. (Indeed, the title of the book itself is an allusion to tree worship.) For example, in Chapter Ten, "Relics of Tree-Worship in Modern Europe," Frazer reports that it was common practice in spring or early summer for the people to go into the woods and cut branches and fasten them to every house (1922:139). Frazer further remarks, "The intention of these customs is to bring home to the village, and to each house, the blessings which the tree-spirit has in its power to bestow" (1922: 139). The evergreen tree's ability to survive the harsh Northern European winter must have made it a powerful life-affirming symbol.

Problem: Carbon Neutral Marketing Paints an Environmental Target on Companies, Google’s Latest Pains

May 10, 2009 Dave Ohara

News.com has a post on Google’s Carbon Neutral marketing.

May 7, 2009 2:42 PM PDT

Do Google's carbon offsets add up to much?

by Martin LaMonica

Google, a company that runs power-hungry data centers, employs thousands of people, and operates a corporate jet, said on Wednesday that it was carbon neutral for the past two years. How so? Offsets.

The idea of a carbon offset is to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions of a company or person by investing in a project that reduces emissions from the atmosphere.

Google sees offsets as an imperfect method for lowering their total carbon footprint, among other efforts. To detractors, offsets are essentially greenwashing when companies do little more than buy offsets to meet their environmental sustainability goals.

There are many routes an offset purchase can go: wind energy farms, siphoning off methane from landfills, or making buildings more energy efficient. There's an entire industry around offsets, which can be voluntary--as Google has purchased--or regulated in countries that have climate change regulations.

Without offsets, a company--no matter green--would have a hard time claiming to be carbon neutral simply because energy consumption means pollution. Achieving carbon neutrality is complicated by the fact that there isn't universal agreement on how to account for a company's carbon emissions: should it include just a company's operations or also its supply chain and end use of its products?

But, here is part of the problem. This article was posted on May 7, 2:42p. Three days later, May 10, this article is still at the top of the home page on news.com. This means news.com is getting lots of traffic on this article as it is a combination of google, environmental, and questioning google’s action.

I had a nice conversation with Bill Weihl at Uptime’s conference, and he is a technology geek like many of us, and not a marketing guy. What seemed like a simple thing to do to discuss 2 years of carbon neutrality actually made Google a target for many environmental groups.

Even hard-core climate activists see offsets as problematic. Climate advocate Joseph Romm, who writes for the Climate Progress blog, calls them "rip-offsets."

The problem ultimately comes down to how effective offsets are in actually reducing emissions, he says. Offset claims are very difficult to verify, and doing a lifeycle analysis of an offset project--what is the exact net reduction of a landfill methane project?--are very easy to fudge, according to Romm.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office last August published a report saying it's particularly difficult to ensure "additionality." In other words: does a purchased offset truly represent an greenhouse gas reduction above and beyond business as usual. For example, some offsets were tied to a company that was already forced to capture methane to meet existing environmental rules.

Some may see this coverage as bad PR, limiting what can be discussed on this topic and controlling the sharing of information.

But, I think Google will roll with the coverage, and keep up their efforts with more information. Because, now millions of people have heard Google is carbon neutral. Yahoo, Dell, and ebay are all carbon neutral as well, but none of them get the coverage Google does.

Larry Ellison Discusses Purpose of Sun HW, mentions Energy Efficiency

May 8, 2009 Dave Ohara

Reuters has an interview with Larry Ellison regarding plan’s for Sun.

Q. Why does Oracle, a company that prides itself on high
margins, want to get into the low-margin hardware business? Are
you going to exit the hardware business?

 A. No, we are definitely not going to exit the hardware

business. While most hardware businesses are low-margin,

companies like Apple and Cisco enjoy very high-margins because

they do a good job of designing their hardware and software to

work together. If a company designs both hardware and software,

it can build much better systems than if they only design the

software. That's why Apple's iPhone is so much better than

Microsoft phones.

Here are the two questions that mention energy efficiency.

 Q. Oracle's done integrated hardware and software design
with the Exadata database machine. But Exadata uses standard
Intel chips. Are you going to discontinue Sun's SPARC chip?

 A. No. Once we own Sun we're going to increase the

investment in SPARC. We think designing our own chips is very,

very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these

days. Right now, SPARC chips do some things better than Intel

chips and vice-versa. For example, SPARC is much more energy

efficient than Intel while delivering the same performance on a

per socket basis. This is not just a green issue, it's an

economic issue. Today, database centers are paying as much for

electricity to run their computers as they pay to buy their

computers. SPARC machines are much less expensive to run than

Intel machines.

Q. Is your plan to use SPARC to compete by lowering a data

center's electricity bills?

A. No. Our primary reason for designing our own chips is to

build computers with the very best performance, reliability and

security available in the market. Some system features work

much better if they are implemented in silicon rather than

software. Once we own Sun, we'll be able to plan and synchronize

new features from silicon to software, just like IBM and the

other big system suppliers. We want to work with Fujitsu to

design advanced features into the SPARC microprocessor aimed at

improving Oracle database performance. In my opinion, this will

enable SPARC Solaris open-system mainframes and servers to

challenge IBM's dominance in the data center. Sun was very

successful for a very long time selling computer systems based

on the SPARC chip and the Solaris operating system. Now, with

the added power of integrated Oracle software, we think they can

be again.

Modeling the Path to Higher Efficiency Servers - PUE for Servers?

May 8, 2009 Dave Ohara

James Hamilton has a good post on the next point of server differentiation being efficiency at very high temperature.

Next Point of Server Differentiation: Effiiciency at Very High Temprature

High data center temperatures is the next frontier for server competition (see pages 16 through 22 of my Data Center Efficiency Best Practices talk:http://mvdirona.com/jrh/TalksAndPapers/JamesHamilton_Google2009.pdf and 32C (90F) in the Data Center). At higher temperatures the difference between good and sloppy mechanical designs are much more pronounced and need to be a purchasing criteria.

The infrastructure efficiency gains of running at higher temperatures are obvious. In a typical data center 1/3 of the power arriving at the property line is consumed by cooling systems. Large operational expenses can be avoided by raising the temperature set point. In most climates raising data center set points to the 95F range will allow a facility to move to a pure air-side economizer configuration eliminating 10% to 15% of the overall capital expense with the later number being the more typical.

James gives 3 downsides to higher temperature.

These savings are substantial and exciting. But, there are potential downsides: 1) increased server mortality, 2) higher semi-conductor leakage current at higher temperatures, 3) increased air movement costs driven by higher fan speeds at higher temperatures. The former, increased server mortality, has very little data behind it. I’ve seen some studies that confirm higher failure rates at higher temperature and I’ve seen some that actually show the opposite. For all servers there clearly is some maximum temperature beyond which failure rates will increase rapidly. What’s unclear is what that temperature point actually is.

In my early career at HP I worked as a reliability engineer and stress tested equipment in extreme cold and heat, analyzing failures. This problem reminds me also of one of the lessons I learned working in distribution logistics at HP and Apple, it is cost prohibitive to design the 99.9999% packaging to ship things, and you need to strike the right balance dependent on what you are shipping and its value.

Intel, AMD, and disk driver vendors will discus their energy efficiency, but just like packaging design, thermal efficiency is not sexy and what people think about for energy efficiency.

The complexity of this is huge.

We also know that the knee of the curve where failures start to get more common is heavily influenced by the server components chosen and the mechanical design. Designs that cool more effectively, will operate without negative impact at higher temperatures. We could try to understand all details of each server and try to build a failure prediction model for different temperatures but this task is complicated by the diversity of servers and components and the near complete lack of data at higher temperatures.

And, here is where James totally gets it. He says we need models.

We also know that the knee of the curve where failures start to get more common is heavily influenced by the server components chosen and the mechanical design. Designs that cool more effectively, will operate without negative impact at higher temperatures. We could try to understand all details of each server and try to build a failure prediction model for different temperatures but this task is complicated by the diversity of servers and components and the near complete lack of data at higher temperatures.

So, not being able to build a model, I chose to lean on a different technique that I’ve come to prefer: incent the server OEMs to produce the models themselves. If we ask the server OEMs to warrant the equipment at the planned operating temperature, we’re giving the modeling problem to the folks that have both the knowledge and the skills to model the problem faithfully and, much more importantly, they have ability to change designs if they aren’t fairing well in the field. The technique of transferring the problem to the party most capable of solving it and financially incenting them to solve it will bring success.

My belief is that this approach of transferring the risk, failure modeling, and field result tracking to the server vendor will control point 1 above (increased server mortality rate). We also know that the Telecom world has been operating at 40C (104F) for years (see NEBS)so clearly equipment can be designed to operate correctly at these temperatures and last longer than current servers are used. This issue looks manageable.

How do you solve this problem?

One smart guy dev guy, Ade Miller.had a good answer which I hope he’ll blog about soon is calculating PUE for a desktop and server.

So is it more like a equipment PUE vs. data center PUE.

If server vendors started to publish their equipment PUE. What is the IT load of the motherboard, what is the overhead for the power supply and fans? Would we be looking to buy the best PUE servers?

For you who get power supplies, fan, and analog devices, this will make a lot of sense. Oh yeh, I also was program manager on the Macintosh II power supplies, and learned a lot from a great development team.

Two Great People Who Saw the Vision for Green IT Publishing

May 8, 2009 Dave Ohara

I’ve had the pleasure of leveraging two great people at TechNet Magazine, Joshua Hoffman, ex-editor in chief and Matthew Graven, ex -senior editor to publish on green IT and data centers. I use the term “ex-“ because both of these people were hit in latest rounds of cuts at Microsoft as Microsoft shut down the TechNet staff in the NY office.

Joshua and Matthew were both helpful in crafting content that would work for the IT pro audience and providing valuable input as I tried to write content that would make sense and resonate with their audience of IT pros. It was a huge difference to have people who cared about the Green IT topic and think about what to publish vs. most of the vendor sponsored content published in other areas.

I’ll miss the brainstorming of new content as i would throw out many ideas, and Joshua and Matthew would help prioritize.

If you aren’t familiar with TechNet Magazine here is the site with 480,000 unique visitors per month.

Why would Microsoft shut down the NY TechNet Staff? Probably because they want to outsource the work and reduce costs.

But, I think Microsoft just gave up being the leader of the Windows IT pro tribe. For an explanation of the tribe, see this blog post by Seth Godin.

Tribe management is a whole different way of looking at the world.

It starts with permission, the understanding that the real asset most organizations can build isn't an amorphous brand but is in fact the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

It adds to that the fact that what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about.

And of course, since this is so important, product development and manufacturing and the CFO work for the tribal manager. Everything the organization does is to feed and grow and satisfy the tribe.

Instead of looking for customers for your products, you seek out products (and services) for the tribe. Jerry Garcia understood this. Do you?

If you look at TechNet mag as a traditional publication it is expensive. If you look at as leader of a tribe of 480,000 IT pros, how much is that worth?

If anyone is looking for people who know how to publish to the technical audience, send me e-mail and I can connect you with Joshua and Matthew.