HP offers 3-D thermal mapping for data centers (25-Jul-07)
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HP offers 3-D thermal mapping for data centres (25-Jul-07)
HP is expanding its IT operations services business, by offering 3-D thermal mapping tools that detect and manage data centre hotspots. HP Thermal Zone Mapping displays a three-dimensional model of the data centre which identifies the flow of hot and cold air. This allows customers to locate potential trouble spots and arrange air conditioning for better efficiency. The addition of thermal modelling follows HP's Dynamic Smart Cooling' (DSC) service unveiled last year. DSC uses temperature monitors attached to server racks which can alter the air conditioning aimed at the unit when necessary. HP claims that customers can reduce data centre cooling energy costs by up to 45% by using the two services together. Pricing for the services starts at around $10,000 for a check-up. A top-tier implementation which includes 3-D thermal mapping runs at an average of about $100,000.
Text of Article
By Austin Modine in Mountain View
Published Wednesday 25th July 2007 21:40 GMT
Hewlett-Packard is expanding its IT operations services business, offering 3-D thermal mapping tools that detect and manage data center hotspots.
HP Thermal Zone Mapping displays a three-dimensional model of the data center that identifies the flow of hot and cold air. This allows customers to locate potential trouble spots and arrange air conditioning for better efficiency.
Since 2003, HP Services has analyzed data center heat flow using physical inspection and dimensionally-challenged thermal photographs. According to HP, the addition of 3-D computer modeling will give IT managers a better —ahem— perspective, letting them run scenarios that test the impact of layout or infrastructure changes and potential air conditioning unit failures. The services also make it possible to identify appropriate settings for periods of high computing demand.
The tech was developed by HP Labs, the company's central research facility.
The addition of thermal modeling follows HP's Dynamic Smart Cooling service unveiled last year. DSC uses temperature monitors attached to server racks which can fluctuate the air conditioning aimed at the unit when necessary.
HP claims that customers can reduce data center cooling energy costs by up to 45 per cent by using the two services together.
Pricing for the services starts around $10,000 for a check-up. A top-tier implementation which includes 3-D thermal mapping runs at an average of about $100,000.
The HP cooling service faces competitive heat (oh ho ho!) from IBM's Big Green Project (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/22/ibm_project_big_green/), announced in May. The company is redirecting $1bn per year across its business to offer a similar energy efficiency team for data centers.
- Source: The Register
Ovum's Analysis (27-Jul-07)
HP adds to its green data centre offering
Ian Brown
HP has added a new element to its portfolio of green data-centre services. HP Thermal Zone Mapping produces a three-dimensional model of exactly how much and where data-centre air conditioners are cooling. End-users can then arrange and manage air conditioning for optimal cooling.
Comment: HP, IBM and Sun are involved in an arms race to prove that they are greener than the next guy. IBM's throwing $1bn per year at the issue of how to reduce energy consumption and costs as part of its Big Green Project. Sun has been designing more efficient processors and servers, as well as introducing environmental services of its own. Meanwhile, HP has been focusing on the data centre and how to cool it down - and yes, their servers are cool too...
What problem are these efforts trying to solve? The move to Windows, Linux, and scale-out computing has filled data centres with racks of small, heat-producing industry-standard servers. In the most densely filled data centres, customers are consuming as much energy to cool server racks as they are to power them. Energy costs are becoming a major expense for the biggest computer users and it's a cost they could do without.
Obviously, it's a problem that affects only the largest computer users and it's more of an issue in the US, where energy costs are rising faster and energy provision is under more pressure. But ironically, it's one that affects many service providers who have a lot of computer real estate, including those in Europe. Service providers could consequently become some of the biggest users of green data-centre services.
So what about HP's offer? HP claims that Thermal Zone Mapping combined with its Dynamic Smart Cooling (DSC)-a hardware and software solution that continuously adjusts data-centre air-conditioning settings to direct cooling where and when it's required-can result in energy-cost savings of up to 45 percent. And there's the rub: the assessment service (around $100,000 for the full assessment) is not a quick fix for existing problems. It's one of a number of steps customers need to take to improve the energy efficiency of their data centres. Customers should be talking to their hardware suppliers about the whole span of services on offer from assessment to redesign of data centres and re-architecting of systems. Addressing the power and cooling issues is only half the story - virtualization, system management, and automation are also part of the solution to inefficient use of energy.
Computergram's view (27-Jul-07)
HP Sells Heat Modeling Service to Cool Data Centers
Section: 02. Industry News
By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hewlett-Packard is to offer a service called Thermal Zone Mapping, which promises to help companies save energy in their data centers by optimizing their computer room air conditioning units (CRACs).
HP puts monitors in the raised floor and dropped ceilings of a data center as well as every two feet up a rack of servers to build a three-dimensional view of heat flows and cold flows in the data center as workloads are running on racks of servers.
According to Brian Brouillette, a vice president in the company's HP Services unit, which is selling the TZM product, HP Labs took a bunch of PhDs and some computational fluid dynamics software and created a system to analyze what is going on with the CRAC units as they fight heat in the data center.
The TZM software can capture data on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis and show companies exactly what is happening in the data center--it is a bit like modeling the weather inside the room, in fact. If you have ever been in a data center, there are hot and cold spots, and getting the right amount of cold to cancel out the heat islands where servers or storage are running is a tricky business. Which is why HP thinks it can charge for a service that helps companies who are trying to pack more gear into data centers without blowing fuses.
Brouillette says that a lot of HP's larger customers have run out of data center capacity because they can't deploy new servers and storage since they are out of power for both the units themselves and the CRAC units to cool the room where they sit. In some countries, like China and India, getting power is a problem in and of itself, so minimizing electricity use is a starting point in designing a new data center. And even in Western economies, power is becoming an issue. For instance, the city of Palo Alto told HP itself some time ago that it would have to put a cap on the electricity it uses, or else its growth would cause brownouts in the city.
This is one reason why HP is undergoing a massive data center consolidation effort over the next three years, moving to three redundant data centers from the current 85 data centers the company runs worldwide. The TZM service is one of the ways HP is able to do this consolidation, and so is a set of companion technologies called Dynamic Smart Cooling, which is comprised of a few different technologies.
DSC includes electronics in HP's server and storage products to throttle back the amount of energy they use and therefore the heat they generate; it also includes air-conditioning products from various HP partners, including Liebert and Shultz, to dynamically direct cooling to hot spots in the data center. HP is using TZM and DSC in its Palo Alto and Austin data centers (the other one is in Houston), and it projecting that it can cut energy usage in the data centers by 10 percent compared to not using them, and helps get HP on track to reduce its global energy usage by 20 percent by 2010.
While HP is expecting decent results in its own data centers, Brouillette says that customers should expect anywhere from 10 percent to 45 percent improvement after HP's experts and partners come in. The TZM service, which has a starting price of around $100,000, scales according to the square footage of floor space in the data center.
That may seem like a lot in a world where a pretty powerful server costs only $2,500, but an early customer experience shows how desperate some data centers are to add computers but not use more power and cooling--mainly because the average new data center costs somewhere around $10 million. One anonymous customer in London in the financial services business had 4,000 blade servers deployed, and it needed to add another 1,000 but could not. After HP came in with the TZM service, the CRACs were tuned and the gear moved around in such a way that another 1,000 blade servers could be added to the data center and still stay in the same power envelope. That same company is now looking at DSC technologies to see how many more servers can be squeezed in the data center.
