What is the latest way to Green the Data Center?

October 6, 2010 Dave Ohara

I just got back from Data Center World in Las Vegas, and a couple of question I was asked were.

Seen anything good at the show?

Do you see anything as big changes in the data center industry?

After a long night out on Tuesday night with some amazingly smart data center people it hit me what is changing the data center industry. People. There are more people who are thinking holistically of the role data centers play in IT. The past ways of building data centers are many times wasteful, inflexible and expensive.

There are now people who have software backgrounds who are working on data centers. There are process engineers who are working on data centers. The role of data center designer building to align with the companies business is part of a business strategy. Twitter is the latest to announce they are going to a custom data center.

Importantly, having our own data center will give us the flexibility to more quickly make adjustments as our infrastructure needs change.

Finally, Twitter's custom data center is built for high availability and redundancy in our network and systems infrastructure. This first Twitter managed data center is being designed with a multi-homed network solution for greater reliability and capacity. We will continue to work with NTT America to operate our current footprint, and plan to bring additional Twitter managed data centers online over the next 24 months.

The rapid growth of the data center construction driven by companies who are hiring expertise into their company to build efficient, flexible and cost effective data centers to align with business objectives is where companies are gaining competitive advantages.

A common problem in colocation data centers is the end user’s perception that a cold data center is a good data center. It is people’s beliefs that drive misperceptions on what a data center should be. The innovative people are breaking the myths created by the analyst community and marketing departments on what a data center should be.

One of the main reason I went to Data Center World in LV was actually to go to a private party at PURE nightclub.

I will name no one who was there, but for those who were there you know who was, and I wanted to document the event as how it is significant to drive change in the industry. Many of the people there I have blogged about as they are some of the most innovative thinkers. People are driving the greening of data centers not technology.

We had four cabanas outside with a great view of the city.

I met the organizer of the event for the first time in Dec 2009 when interestingly enough I went to PURE for his private party. The first one was fun with about a dozen. Yesterday’s party had about 3 dozen. He was able to get an amazing attendee list.

At the last minute we got a confirmation someone was flying in at 9p and he could make the party, as many of his ex-coworkers and present coworkers were there. His last minute acceptance I shared with another visionary who I met at the show who had his “500 MW of power” data center team with him and he changed his travel plans to attend the party as he realized when else could he connect with some of the other people there. Plus he’s partied at PURE and knew how much fun it would be.

We had a few more people who were able to bring some forward thinking end users and land owners as well, so it wasn’t just data center designers.

Writing this blog post at 10p on Weds night, it is kind of surreal that just 24 hours ago, I was in LV with some of most amazing data center people.

The tagline “What happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas” may describe a typical late night party. But, I think what happened last night at the PURE nightclub was a connecting of people who have a passion for the industry rarely seen, and their ideas will leave Vegas.

People are going to drive the greening of data centers and changes in the industry. Not a vendor’s technology. Not, new standards or an analyst report.

Dec 2010 is Gartner Data Center World and many of the same people will be back in Vegas. We’ll see if the party master can pull off another event, but he is going to have a tough time topping last night.

Greening the Data Center moves to Network Gear

October 6, 2010 Dave Ohara

ZDNet covers a new silicon standard for network gear to use less energy and be greener in the data center.

Green moves to the datacenter network silicon level

By David Chernicoff | October 5, 2010, 9:27am PDT

Summary

Low-level energy savings across your corporate networks becomes a hardware possibility with the newly ratified IEEE standard.

With the ratification of the IEEE Std. 802.3az-2010 Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard the energy savings mantra of the green movement dives deep into the underlying infrastructure of your datacenter networks. The new standard is intended to allow energy savings at the network silicon level by reducing power demand when there are periods of reduced link utilization.

Broadcom announced the Silicon to support the 802.3az standard.

Broadcom Corporation today announced that it has the industry's broadest portfolio of available silicon solutions supporting the newly ratified IEEE Std. 802.3az-2010 Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard.
This extensive portfolio includes switch silicon that spans entry level unmanaged to enterprise and metro class switches; single, quad and octal Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) physical layer devices (PHYs); dual and quad 10GbE PHYs; 10/100 and 1GbE controllers, and 10GbE converged network interface controllers (C-NICs).

Broadcom EEE-compliant products offer energy savings of up to 70 percent or greater and provide customers with end-to-end silicon and software solutions that enable faster deployment of energy efficient networks.

HP integrates new servers with POD containers for faster, cheaper, smaller IT solutions

October 5, 2010 Dave Ohara

HP announced new servers for solution providers.

Accelerate application performance and efficiency for service providers

When supporting a business model based on large-scale application service delivery, service providers need to consider every CPU, millisecond, watt, dollar and square foot to gain a competitive advantage in the market.

The new HP ProLiant SL6500 Scalable System features a common modular architecture that can scale from one node to thousands while delivering breakthrough energy efficiency and performance of up to 1 teraFLOPS per unit of rack space. This standard platform can be highly customized and tuned with the HP ProLiant SL390s G7 server and HP ProLiant SL170s G6 server to meet varying application demands, such as high-performance computing, web services, cloud computing and hosting.

As part of HP's Converged Infrastructure.

HP is targeting the solution provider market with this current announcement.

HP POD-Works and HP PODs are ideal for any service provider / enterprise customer requiring:

Quick IT deployment using HP POD-Works and HP Factory Express

Pay as you grow to minimize up front capital outlay - add additional HP PODs as you need more datacenter space

Decrease operating expenses with PUEs as low as 1.25

HP POD meets demanding requirements for service providers

High efficient power distribution delivering 3-phase power through the HP POD, 240V within racks, and supporting N+N power redundancy

Easily accommodates very dense IT deployments supplying up to 600kW in a 40ft/12m HP POD, and 290kW in a 20ft/6m HP POD

US Military orders use of renewable energy

October 4, 2010 Dave Ohara

Greening the data center is not easy. Greening the US Military seems even harder. The NYTimes writes on the US military's use of renewable energy.

U.S. Military Orders Less Dependence on Fossil Fuels

Aaron Favila/Associated Press

Oil tankers that were set on fire in Pakistan. The convoys that haul fuel to bases have been sitting ducks for enemy fighters.

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Published: October 4, 2010

With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels.

Renewables are strategic for US military.

“If the Navy comes knocking, they will build it,” Mr. Mabus said. “The price will come down and the infrastructure will be created.”

Yahoo VP Data Center Operations preaches Information Factory mindset as way to green the data center

October 4, 2010 Dave Ohara

I had the chance to meet Scott Noteboom at Data Center Dynamics in Chicago last week, but missed his talk as I was hosting the other hall while he presented. We had a nice discussion though later, and discussed the Yahoo Chicken Coop design as I had a chance to interview Chris Page 2 weeks earlier.

Yahoo's Data Center Future, Industrial Data Center Revolution

I had a chance to talk to Chris Page, Yahoo's Director Climate and Energy Strategy at Yahoo! Inc. I've had the opportunity to watch Chris's presentations over the years at various data center conferences, and I was curious on what she had to share after three years at Yahoo!.

Luckily at AFCOM's Data Center World I got a chance to see Scott present the same talk again. I really liked Scott's presentation as he presented on many topics I discussed a year ago like The Data Center as an Information Factory. Here is what I wrote a year ago.

Nov 04, 2009

Can you Green the Data Center? Maybe if you think in terms of an Information Factory

I have been writing on the Green Data Center topic for over 2 years with 1,000 blog posts. And, one of the things I have found is the name “data center” is not an accurate description to the layman of what data centers do. Are data centers the “center of data”? In the past there was one corporate building that was the place where data was housed for the corporation. The standard for Fortune 500 companies now is to have multiple data centers around the world to provide information availability, disaster recovery, and reliability. How can there be multiple centers of data? If you green the data center what am I supposed to green? These multiple centers? How?

What I propose is a more accurate description of what data centers are in this economy. The Data Center is an information factory, a building that makes information suitable for use with information machinery – servers, storage, and networking hardware. Information is the raw material input into the factory. Software running on the hardware processes information increasing the value. Like any other manufacturing process electricity is used to power and cool the machinery. How much power is used to run these information factories, in 2006 1.5% of the US electricity production was in data centers, doubling 2000 consumption, growing at a 12% annual rate.

The above is an image Google uses to illustrate its green Information Factory (aka data center).

Here is Scott's talk

with a point made to demand three things - speed , performance, cost.

Scott makes the point about Castles vs. Factories.

Which looks like my point about Fortresses vs. Factories. :-)

Aug 06, 2009

Data Center Site Selection - Are you building an Information Fortress or a Flexible Information Factory?

Mike Manos writes a long post on his blog driven by Microsoft’s recent decision to move Windows Azure out of Washington State.

The Cloud Politic – How Regulation, Taxes, and National Borders are shaping the infrastructure of the cloud

Yahoo suggests a change in site selection, innovation, and efficiency which leads to a greener data center.

I could go on about things I liked about Scott's talk as so much of what he presented are ideas I have discussed on this blog. But, talking about ideas is not nearly as interesting as showing the results.

Yahoo is setting the bar to share its current data center practices which align with a green data center.

Yahoo!