HP Sets New Milestones in Data Centre Energy Efficiency (23-Oct-07)
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Full story: HP Sets New Milestones in Data Centre Energy Efficiency (23-Oct-07)
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HP today announced the largest deployment to date of its Dynamic Smart Cooling technology in a next-generation research data center located in Bangalore, India. HP Labs, the company’s central research organization, wanted to demonstrate the scaling of its cooling technology in a real-world, heterogeneous data center environment. The result is one of the most sensor-rich data centers in the world, yielding a 20 percent reduction in cooling power consumption upon startup.
Once fully optimized, the Dynamic Smart Cooling-based data center is expected to save 7,500 megawatt-hours (MWh) annually -- equal to the power consumption of more than 750 U.S. homes -- and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 7,500 tons annually.
The project involved consolidating 14 lab data centers in Bangalore into a high-density, 70,000-square-foot data center, one of the largest in India. The data center is composed of a mix of older legacy equipment and newer server racks and blades, which is common for IT environments deployed in production today.
Real-time data center air-temperature measurements are obtained from a network of 7,500 sensors deployed on the IT racks -- the most ever deployed in a single data center. An agile mechanism responds to facility failures, anomalies and brown outs.
When fully optimized, the data center is expected to yield up to a 40 percent reduction in energy consumption over today’s typical data center cooling methods.
“This is a great example of research that pushes the boundaries of today’s technology to address challenges companies will face in the future,” said Shane Robison, executive vice president and chief technology and strategy officer, HP. “HP continues to set the bar for energy-efficiency initiatives that both make business sense and reduce environmental impact.”
The implementation of Dynamic Smart Cooling technology at the Bangalore data center was conducted remotely from HP Labs in Palo Alto in conjunction with the HP Systems Technology Software Division team in Bangalore. In the future, HP plans to use the data center to advance technology through research on management of physical resources, including power profiling and data analysis.
“Among IT executives’ greatest concerns today are power, cooling and energy efficiency,” said Jerald Murphy, senior vice president and research director of the Robert Frances Group, a Westport, Conn.-based IT consulting and research firm. “As companies look for solutions that help move them toward highly efficient data centers, they need to make smart changes today. IT executives should look at creative approaches such as those from HP research, which highlight smart approaches to power consumption, proving that companies can reap incredible power savings without having to completely rebuild their data centers.”
Dynamic Smart Cooling consists of advanced software residing in an intelligent control node that continuously adjusts air conditioning settings in a data center, based on real-time air-temperature measurements from a network of sensors deployed on IT racks. The technology actively manages the environment to deliver cooling where it is needed most, enabling essential cost savings and improved utilization to customers.
Unlike other industry solutions, Dynamic Smart Cooling actively manages data center cooling while reducing cooling power consumption. Dynamic Smart Cooling was released for general customer availability earlier this month.
- Source: SuperComputing
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HP Optimises Data Centre Power Use (24-Oct-07)
The data centre with its huge potential to gobble power and generate heat has long been the focus for green computing initiatives. And quite rightly so. The alternative is arrange rooms so that cold air is delivered to where it's needed most, usually by careful room and rack planning. This still leaves the possibility that power is being wasted because each area has to be designed for the worst possible environmental conditions.
Just under a year ago, HP Labs started talking about Dynamic Smart Cooling. The idea was to place a network of temperature sensors on the racks, providing information back to a control centre which, in turn, controlled the cooling fans in real-time. Such an approach was designed to minimise the energy requirements and, therefore, the costs. And as a by-product, of course, reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere.
All very well, but competitors complained that this was merely an announcement of future intent. A touch of greenwash, perhaps? Except that Hewlett Packard could demonstrate the system working in the labs. Now, though, the company has its first internal data centre implementation running and and has announced its general public availability.
The first site outside the laboratory is in the company's newly-consolidated data centre in Bangalore. This 70,000 square foot centre is already operational, although it has yet to bring up all of the planned 2,500 racks. The company's six new US data centres are scheduled to be ready in early 2008.
All of these data centres are the result of consolidation and this is, "when the power bill hits you in the face," according to John Sontag director of virtualization and datacenter architecture for HP Labs. In Bangalore, the issue is complicated by the fact that the centre has its own diesel-powered generators and a requirement for diesel oil storage. This is because public power supplies cannot yet be relied on in this part of the world.
With diesel oil in India providing a kilowatt-hour for around 25 cents, Sontag estimates an ROI of six months for the Dynamic Smart Cooling system. Where power costs are lower, the payback time will obviously be higher. Perhaps twice as much in California, say. The company estimates power bill savings of up to 40 percent over conventionally cooled datacentres. Once fully optimised, the Bangalore operation (a consolidation of fourteen centres), is expected to save Hewlett Packard 7,500 megawatt-hours annually and reduce carbon emissions by approximately 7,500 tons. (Based on the figures given, that suggests the DSC cost was just under a million dollars. Anyone from HP care to comment?)
The DSC can be retrofitted to existing data centre racks and legacy equipment. It just requires that the fan drives be variable-speed and have industry standard controls. The controller (accessible remotely as a web service) is the smart bit, able to calculate what fans need to run at what speeds to deliver cooling to the right places at all times. Sontag explains that if a modern high density (30kW) rack loses its cooling, it could overheat in 90 seconds. By the time a human has received and reacted to a warning, it would already be too late.
It's certainly a seductive argument. Hewlett Packard believes it's first with such an intelligent adaptive system. Others will, no doubt, follow. Systems that respond to changing needs will remove a lot of risk from data centre planning while at the same time cutting both energy bills and carbon emissions.
- Source: IT Director
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HP Data Centre Cooling Efficiency (25-Oct-07)
HP shows what can be done in Bangalore - but is that the right place for a data centre?
HP has announced that its new consolidated data centre in Bangalore is on track to show 40 percent cooling efficiency savings through Dynamic Smart Cooling (DSC) use.
The centre is a 70,000 square foot building, at Whitefield on the outskirts of Bangalore city, which will house about 2,500 racks of computer equipment. It has been built to replace 14 existing centres. HP says that there are five temperature sensors per rack, fitted to the front and back; that will be 7,500 sensors in total. These send readings over wire to a control system which uses algorithms to adjust fan speed and the amount of chilled water circulated to cool the IT equipment in the data centre.
The argument is that, instead of trying to cool the room uniformly, you cool the hot spots more than the cool spots. This is obviously logical and sensible. The control system can also respond, HP says, to 'facility failures, anomalies and brown outs.'
HP expects that, When it is fully optimised, the data centre will yield up to a 40 percent reduction in energy consumption over today’s typical data centre cooling methods. That is with taking into account the Bangalore electricity generation.
Unreliable electricity utility The Bangalore centre doesn't appear to be a very clean, environmentally speaking, data centre. HP provides no actual figures for its greenhouse gas emissions. HP hasn't sourced any of its power needs for Bangalore from solar power, wind power or bio fuels. Reading between the lines HP has made the best of a quite bad job in the power supply area at Bangalore.
HP also has not said anything about cold aisle-hot aisle rack design. The company says the new data centre is composed of a mix of older legacy equipment and newer server racks and blades, which is common for IT environments deployed in production today. In other words it is not kitting it out with brand new racks in enclosed hot aisle-cold aisle design layouts.
Shane Robison, HP's CTO, said: "HP continues to set the bar for energy-efficiency initiatives that both make business sense and reduce environmental impact."
Suppose HP had built its new data centre at The Dalles in Oregon, where hydro-electric power is plentiful and cheap, and where Google and Microsoft are building vast data centres, what would the GHG emissions then have been compared to the Bangalore centre?
With the Bangalore centre powered by dirty diesel fuel generation then HP is polluting the environment, in terms of annual data centre GHG, far more at Bangalore than it would if it located it in Oregon and ran it off clean hydro-electric power and emitted no GHG at all from its energy consumption.
Installing DSC in Bangalore is much, much better than nothing but it is, when all is said and done, just a bandaid.
It may persuade other data centre users to invest in DSC, which would be a good thing though.
The situation at Bangalore is exacerbated by the local power supply being unreliable. That means, for HP, it has had to provide its own diesel-powered generation facilities. This dirty method of power generation will pump tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. HP doesn't say how much CO2 or other greenhouse gases (GHG) the new data centre pumps into the atmosphere but does say its DSC use is expected to save 7,500 tonnes of CO2 annually, roughly equivalent to removing 2,800 cars off the road annually.
HP Labs spokesperson John Sontag is reported as saying that DSC will save HP 7,500 megawatt-hours annually.
A kilowatt-hour of electricity at the new centre costs HP about 25 cents. So a megawatt-hour will cost $250 and HP is saving $1,875,000. Sontag has also said that the ROI on DSC at Bangalore is six months, which puts the installation's cost at around $1 million.
Power costs in California are seven to fourteen cents per kilowatt, ironically much cheaper than Bangalore, so ROI there would be over a much longer period.
- Source: TechWorld
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