Google 250kW green data center Videos and PDF for improving PUE from 2.4 to 1.5

May 24, 2011 Dave Ohara

If you are looking to improve the PUE of a small data center (250kW), Google has shared its best practices they have implemented at 5 locations.

The question I asked Google's Joe Kava was what he thought the PUE could go to with more load in the facility. The current load is 85 kW in a 250kW capacity. PUE is currently at 1.5 and more load in theory bring PUE to 1.35-1.4, but there will be step function when an additional CRAC unit needs to be brought on line.

There are 4 CRAC units in the room and now only 2 are run while the other 2 are back-up. After a week of operation, the operation is flipped evening out the wear on equipment and insuring the back-up cooling is operational.

Here is a PDF that describes the whole project - Google's Green Data Centers: Network POP Case Study.

Here is before and after images of the airflow. Joe said Google samples data once a second to monitor the power and cooling systems in the room.

A 10 minute video goes along with the white paper.

If you want to segment the 10 minute video into specific areas of interest here are 5 video segments you can view.

Data Center Efficiency Best Practices Part 1 - Intro and Measuring PUE

Data Center Efficiency Best Practices Part 2 - Manage Airflow

Data Center Efficiency Best Practices Part 3 - Raise the Thermostat

Data Center Efficiency Best Practices Part 4 - Utilize Free Cooling

Data Center Efficiency Best Practices Part 5 - Optimize Power Distribution

An example of Carbon Reporting for Data Centers, HSBC

December 2, 2010 Dave Ohara

Yesterday, I blogged on The Green Grid CUE metric.

Will CUE be as popular as PUE? Don't think so

Today the Green Grid announced the CUE metric, Carbon Usage Effectiveness metric to help measure the carbon impact of IT equipment.

CUE is defined as

The carbon emissions divided by your IT load. Provides a ratio of kg/CO2/kWHr where the best is 0. Note you can be near zero with hydroelectric or nuclear power sourcing.

Later in the day I had a chance to run into Christian Belady and clarified that I meant no disrespect to the idea of CUE as he was the editor for the document. I explained most of what I saw people say out there was reporting, but little discussion or analysis. Getting people to debate a topic is what gets the idea to spread. Christian is a forward thinker and said he is always open for debate, and took no offense to my blog post.

To illustrate the point of how some companies are reporting their data center carbon footprint, check out HSBC’s environmental site.

Footprint management

The changing size and shape of a corporation is an ongoing challenge for those responsible for measuring and managing its environmental footprint. There a number of different ways to set a boundary around which parts of the organisation are included in target-setting and monitoring. At HSBC, our aim is to communicate our progress transparently, and, in response to stakeholder feedback, we updated our approach to setting and reporting environmental targets in 2009.

Data Centre’s are called out separately.

What about data centres?

Until 2009, data centres had not been subject to targets to reduce carbon emissions. We now have targets to improve the energy efficiency of our eight largest Group data centres by between 2 per cent and 8 per cent in 2010.

HSBC is in the process of building new highly efficient data centres, built to international green building standards such as BREEAM and LEED. We have chosen to separate data centres from the targets for the rest of our buildings because we are working through a programme of consolidating these facilities. This means that sometimes during a handover period, two are operating at once, or data centre operations are moving from one country to another, which can skew the data.

And hereee is the data center power footprint.

The Green Grid’s CUE and WUE are reporting per Kwhr. But, many are reporting on a per full time employee.

Carbon emissions

Our target is to reduce carbon emissions per FTE by 6 per cent between 2008 and 2011.

Water use

Our target is to reduce water use per FTE by 11 per cent between 2008 and 2011.

Thanks to some helpful people in the financial sector they have been pointing me to where various companies are reporting the data center impacts.

I am starting to believe the financial sector may the group who leads the rest of the industry in environmental/sustainability reporting.

Will CUE be as popular as PUE? Don't think so

December 2, 2010 Dave Ohara

Today the Green Grid announced the CUE metric, Carbon Usage Effectiveness metric to help measure the carbon impact of IT equipment.

CUE is defined as

The carbon emissions divided by your IT load. Provides a ratio of kg/CO2/kWHr where the best is 0. Note you can be near zero with hydroelectric or nuclear power sourcing.

I think a simpler way to understand the metric is.

You can pick your CEF by site selection.

You can pick your PUE by data center design.

Multiple them and you get the CUE.

But I think this is a metric that will not be popular. Why? Because what is really important to many people is the total number of metric tons of CO2. That's an easy number for people to understand.

PUE is an easy metric for people to grasp as the closer to 1.0 the better. PUE is discussed much more than DCiE.

The news is being spread by the Green IT press.

James Niccolai at PC World.

Green Grid Creates Metrics for Carbon and Water

By James Niccolai, IDG News

The Green Grid consortium, which developed the widely-used PUE metric for measuring energy efficiency in data centers, is developing two more metrics to address carbon emissions and water usage, it said Thursday.

Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge.

Green Grid Creates Metrics for Carbon, Water
December 2nd, 2010 : Rich Miller
Expanding its focus on sustainability, The Green Grid today announced the creation of two new metrics to measure carbon and water use in data centers. The new metrics, Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) and the upcoming Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), are designed to build upon the momentum of The Green Grid’s widely-used Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric.

Penny Jones at Data Center Dynamics.

The Green Grid gives birth to two new metrics

Carbon and water are the next targets of the standards body

(12/2/2010)

Penny Jones

The Green Grid is going beyond PUE, unleashing two new metrics on the data center industry it said it hopes will gain the same amount of global traction – CUE and WUE.

Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is now used around the world to measure the amount and effectiveness of power used within the data center. It is hoped that CUE (carbon usage effectiveness) and WUE (water usage effectiveness) will create some more particular challenges in the data center.

One way to view metrics is to change behavior.

Is CUE a ratio of carbon emissions for power going to drive changes in behavior?

Is the total Carbon impact a number people can understand?

You could have a low CUE with horrible IT utilization and a high total carbon impact. Or you could have a high CUE, high utilization IT with lots of private cloud type of technologies and a low total carbon foot print.

What behavior do you want to drive?

I think the intent is right, the question is whether it will change behaviors.

Green hype decreasing now that Green is no longer a sure win

July 13, 2010 Dave Ohara

I think we have all noticed the green, environmental, sustainability hype is not as much in the news. Newsweek covers this topic.

A Green Retreat

Why the environment is no longer a surefire political winner.

Scott Dunn / Getty Images

Just three years ago the politics of global warming was enjoying its golden moment. The release in 2006 of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, had riveted global audiences with its predictions of New York and Miami under 20 feet of water. Within 12 months, leading politicians with real power were on board. Germany’s Angela Merkel, dubbed the “climate chancellor” by her country’s press, arranged a Greenland photo op with a melting iceberg and promised to cut Europe’s emissions by 20 percent by 2020. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who called climate change a scourge equal to fascism, offered 60 percent by 2050. In December 2007, the world got its very first green leader. Harnessing the issue of climate change, Kevin Rudd became prime minister of Australia, ready to take on what he called “the biggest political, economic, and moral challenge of our times.” Now, almost everywhere, green politics has fallen from its lofty heights.

The hype of 2007 is catching up to reality.

There are other ways green policies have lost their innocence since 2007. In many ways, green projects have become just another flavor of grubby interest politics. Biofuels have become a new label for old-style agricultural subsidies that funnel some $20 billion annually to landowners with little effect on emissions (only Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol produces any significant savings; America’s corn ethanol and Europe’s biodiesel do not). Germany’s solar subsidies, a signature project in the country’s battle against climate change, are perhaps the most wasteful green scheme on earth, producing a mere 0.25 percent of the country’s energy at a cost to consumers of as much as $125 billion. A leading member of Merkel’s Christian Democrats in the German Parliament says there is growing unease both in his party and in the Bundestag “about the scary monster we’ve created that is sucking up ever larger amounts of money for a negligible effect.”

I've told people many times going green is not a binary thing, it is a commitment of a way to do things. Getting the allocation right when you think of the environmental impact of your actions.

In other words, some of the money spent on current policies that often have only limited efficacy might be better spent on other measures, including protection against the worst effects of warming. What’s more, current economic worries are a reminder that every dollar spent on solar cells or biodiesel is a dollar less for education and other budget priorities. If that means climate and environmental policies in the future will be more stringently measured in terms of the tradeoffs involved given finite resources, that would be a lasting benefit that even Kevin Rudd might appreciate.

It's why a green data center is not identified by a LEED rating or a low PUE.

You can make a greener data center, but it is not simple.

Read the rest of the Newsweek article to get a reflective look at past actions.

OSIsoft expands Sustainability program, hires EPA ENERGYSTAR's Andrew Fanara

April 19, 2010 Dave Ohara

There have been some interesting changes in the data center industry as executives move to Microsoft, eBay, and Apple. OSIsoft bagged the latest knowledge transfer, getting EPA ENERGYSTAR's Andrew Fanara to join their company.

OSIsoft® delivers the PI System®, the world’s leading highly scalable and secure infrastructure for the management of real-time data and events, and for connecting people with the right information, at the right time, to analyze, collaborate, and act. With more than 14,000 installations across oil & gas, power & utility, pharmaceuticals, data center, chemical, pulp & paper, metals & mining, and other process industries, the OSIsoft PI System® is the flexible foundation for establishing a culture of continuous improvement at the plant, across the enterprise, and throughout the value chain. Leveraging the PI System, companies improve asset performance, increase energy efficiency, mitigate risk, centralize knowledge, and optimize production to drive profitability and remain competitive.

To green the data center there are a few people who I try to have regular conversations with and one of them is Andrew Fanara. While skiing a month ago, Andrew let me know he was thinking of leaving the EPA to join the private sector, and was talking to a variety of companies that were interested in leveraging his experience in the data center industry.

We discussed many different types of companies that could use Andrew's skills and provide a good environment to work on developing new methods For example, a place where he could be more innovative and react faster to market and technology changes. #1 suggestion is to work at place that allows him to leverage his existing business network and make it stronger, and more influential.

One of the companies he was talking to was OSIsoft. I've known the OSIsoft executives about 5 years. And, have had the pleasure of going to the last four OSIsoft user conferences which is where I met Mike Manos. Even though Mike and I overlapped at Microsoft, we didn't connect until OSIsoft had an executive summit to discuss the energy industry.

I think highly of the OSIsoft capabilities, but to give Andrew another perspective, I called in a favor and had him talk to a Microsoft executive who could compare OSIsoft's capabilities as a technology partner vs. others. The Microsoft executive confirmed that OSIsoft is one of the top software vendors in the energy industry and are leaders in energy efficiency enabling better use of natural resources.

Many data center insiders are sad to see Andrew leave the EPA, but I see this as a great step in knowledge sharing. There will be new people who will take over Andrew's responsibilities and energy efficient data centers will continue with future specifications for storage and data center buildings. Andrew will take what he has learned at the EPA, and apply it to private industry.

At OSIsoft his new job will entail working on sustainability (green) programs through OSIsoft's global customer base which is currently at 14,000 installations, enabling Andrew to get his "hands dirty" with in depth projects.

More than 14,000 customer installations

65% of Global 500 process and manufacturing companies use the PI System

100% of the Global Top 5 Producers use the PI System

Strategic alliances

We would sometimes joke we eat dinner out more often (at data center events) than with our spouse and we'll be having our next dinner meeting in a week at OSIsoft's user conference Apr 26 - 28.

This year the Users Conference focuses on how real time information is the currency of the new decade, and we have a packed agenda that covers this in depth. We start with a great series of executive keynotes about innovation and solving real business problems-click on the titles to read the details.

Congratulations to OSIsoft and Andrew Fanara for connecting in an exciting area - corporate sustainability.