Achieving a Deeper Shade of Green (Aug-07)

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Revision as of 14:02, 19 August 2007

MI Summary

Achieving a Deeper Shade of Green Servers are increasingly performing at a higher rate; however this coincides with them using more power. One of the main concerns with regards to data centres is that the cooling and electrical costs currently represent up to 44% of a data centres total cost of ownership, furthermore due to the high rack power levels used enterprises are spreading out their servers in order to cool them, this poses the problem of using up valuable and expensive floor space.

There is clearly a need for data centres to improve their energy efficiency; experts believe that there is no single right way to create a green data centre but it is thought that a productive first step is to conduct an energy efficiency audit; this will allow areas of high energy use to be pinpointed.

Further improvements include virtualisation and replacing older IT equipment with newer, more energy efficient models.

Achieving a Deeper Shade of Green

Text of Article

RESPONDING TO CUSTOMER demand for better performance, IT vendors have in the last five years delivered faster and denser servers, lower-cost storage and more flexible networking equipment. The higher performance that these provide, however, comes at a price—they are more power-hungry. What’s more, today’s high-density servers, storage systems and networking gear emit large quantities of heat that tax cooling systems.

“Data centres are at a tipping point. Most were commissioned 10-15 years ago and were designed for hardware power levels much less than what are being shipped today. Core IT accounts for 30 percent of total electricity used in the typical data centre, just behind the chilled cooling tower needed to cool the facility,” said Hemant S. Shah, ASEAN Executive (Strategic Growth Business), Systems & Technology Group, IBM Singapore.

Cooling and electrical costs currently represent up to 44 percent of a data centre’s total cost of ownership, and senior IT executives now rank power and cooling among their top five concerns, he added. Left unchecked, the cost to power and cool servers in the future may well equal the cost of acquisition. According to an IDC report on Worldwide Server Power and Cooling Expenses, the cost of powering and cooling the installed base of servers is projected to grow four times compared with the growth rate for new server spending.

In addition, the much higher rack power levels have caused enterprises to spread out their servers in order to cool them, using up valuable and expensive raised floor space. Still, hot zones are common in data centres that can cause servers and other critical hardware to work harder, which can threaten operating stability and resiliency, reduce the useful life of the hardware, and impose a higher administrative burden on the IT function.

Gaining Higher Energy Efficiency Clearly, opportunities abound for enterprises to make their data centres greener while lowering TCO and optimising operating efficiency. Although there is no single right way to create a green data centre, experts believe that the most productive first step for CIOs is to conduct an energy audit. This checkup offers a real-time profile and model of the data centre’s energy use conditions and makes it possible to pinpoint areas of high energy use.

The enterprise can then take steps to reduce its energy needs. These steps can range from infrastructure upgrades such as upgrading chillers or uninterruptible power supplies to uncomplicated measures, including removing under-floor cable blockages and rearranging racks to improve airflow, and turning off servers that are not doing any work.

IBM, which announced in May that it will redirect US$1 billion per year across its businesses to mobilise the company’s resources to dramatically increase the level of energy efficiency in IT, offers a free Web-based tool for enterprises to self-assess their energy efficiency. It also provides a range of services that help customers identify their IT requirements, capabilities and capacities; assess their energy efficiency and identify areas for improvement; and optimise airflow and space utilisation. Supported and delivered by a new global ‘green team’ of more than 850 energy efficiency architects from across IBM, these services leverage new software tools and technology, including:

• PowerExecutive, an energy management software tool that can provide clients with a view of the actual power used, as opposed to benchmarked power consumption, and can effectively allocate, match and cap power and thermal limits in the data centre at the system, chassis or rack level.
• New capabilities in Tivoli management software that monitor power consumption, allow users to set power policies, track energy usage, and minimise energy consumption via server provisioning and de-provisioning.
• Mobile Measurement Technology, a new technology from IBM Research that measures three-dimensional temperature distributions within data centres.

Renewing, Virtualising Besides upgrading infrastructure, improving airflow, and turning off standby servers—and, for very large enterprises, consolidating many legacy data centres into one or several energy efficient ones—what CIOs can also do to make their data centres greener is replace older IT equipment with newer, more energy-efficient models with smaller form factors that can significantly reduce overall power and cooling requirements and free up valuable floor space. For example, blade servers reduce power and cooling requirements by 25 to 40 percent over 1U technologies. While it may seem financially unwise to replace equipment before it is fully depreciated, the advantages that new models can offer—lower energy consumption, plus two to three times more computing power than older models—combined with potential space, power and cooling recoveries are enough to offset any lost asset value.

Virtualisation is another way to reduce data centre energy needs, said Alex Tay, Regional Consultant, IBM ASEAN. By eliminating the approach of dedicating a single workload to a single server—with each server having a low utilisation rate—and spreading the total workload over a single virtualised server that functions at near maximum capacity, virtualisation can result in a data centre with fewer machines and lower power and cooling needs.

“Servers use energy and give off heat whether they’re in use 100 percent of the time or 15 percent of the time, and the difference in electrical consumption and heat generated between those two points is insignificant. This means a server that is only 15 percent utilised will cost as much to run as a server that is fully utilised,” said Tay. A virtualised environment also is typically more resilient than a dedicated server environment, he added, and can be centrally managed from a single point of control. Aside from servers, virtualisation can also be applied to storage setups and applications.

• Source: CIO

For an overview on the topic(s), see also

• Data Centre