Going Green in the Data centre (28-Sep-07)
From Lauraibm
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Full story: Going Green in the Data centre (28-Sep-07)
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Practical Steps For Your SME To Become More Environmentally Friendly
For the past four decades, the data center has been all about extreme power. Vendors designed servers, storage networks, and the entire computing environment for optimal performance. Today, a highly tuned server can operate extremely fast for application delivery, email, data backups, and just about any other task. However, in the past year or so, as the topics of global warming, ozone deficiencies, renewable resources, and the data center’s carbon footprint have made headlines, the concept of extreme power at any expense has come into question.
Instead, many large companies have started a green data center initiative, both in terms of purchasing more efficient servers and in meeting regulatory compliance for recycling existing equipment. Google, IBM (www.ibm.com), Sun Microsystems, Intel (www.intel.com), and many others have announced programs to deal with green computing.
For IT managers in small to midsized enterprises, the concept of a green data center is partly environmental, partly financial. Certainly, there’s a cumulative effect when more and more SMEs join the crusade for environmental computing, and that’s the ultimate motivation. At the same time, realizing lower operational costs from more efficient systems is another prime incentive. The main question for IT managers is: How can you take steps toward a green data center today? It can seem like an insurmountable goal, but admins can address it with some practical changes, especially in which products they buy.
“Most if not all of the server and storage vendors are focused on being more power- and cooling-efficient,” says Mark Peters, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. “Therefore, implementing products that are designed to be more power- and cooling-efficient is certainly a start.”
Steps To Take Now
Even before choosing new products and planning purchases for the next few months, admins can take several steps now. According to Sun, turning up the thermostat in the data center just one degree can save 4 to 5% in room energy costs. Raising the set point from 68 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit could save as much as 20% on cooling costs. ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers), an international technical society for data center cooling, recommends setting room temps to 78 F. Sun also recommends checking to see if your cooling tower supports evaporative cooling, which is especially effective in humid areas. Also, plug any and all leaks in the cold air plenum to increase cooling efficiency.
Another critical step involves virtualization, which helps admins consolidate applications onto fewer servers and makes them more efficient. Of course, this kind of consolidation is a longer process but one that begins with an analysis of which servers are being underutilized. Rakesh Kumar, a Gartner vice president, says most servers in use today are only running at 30% efficiency. Sun recommends a simple, immediate step: For any servers that are at 0% utilization—either because no users are accessing those applications or because of an infrastructure problem—admins should just power them down.
Speaking of analysis, another practical step to take toward the green data center is measuring the overall efficiency of power and cooling. Kumar mentions Aperture VISTA and Rackwise for analyzing data center power and cooling efficiency. Used primarily for the aerospace industry, two additional tools can help you analyze airflow in the data center and fine-tune systems for better environmental control. Both Future Facilities and Flowmetrics provide computational fluid dynamics features to help admins determine cooling deficiencies and correct them for measurable cost savings. “These energy management tools will give you a good picture of your servers from an energy point of view and will give you good trend analysis for the future,” says Kumar.
Product Choices For Green Computing
Once you know where the inefficiencies exist in the data center, it’s time to start evaluating products. Sun recommends eliminating any servers and computers that are more than five or six years old because newer systems are much more efficient. The next phase should be in evaluating servers with an eye toward using more efficient multicore systems, then updating and consolidating storage systems, then installing more efficient UPS and PDU products, and finally updating cooling and heating products, looking at new Clean Heat and Power products that benefit from local generation capacity.
Some product suggestions include the Eaton Powerware BladeUPS, which has a 93 to 95% power efficiency; the Sun Fire T1000 Server, which uses new Cool-Threads technology to manage CPU cycles; and SoftLayer, a hosted services company that optimizes server efficiency.
“Evaluate all green technologies for economic benefit first, then ecological,” says Mark Monroe, the director of sustainable computing at Sun. “That is, a potential solution must make sense from a total cost of ownership (TCO) standpoint, such as paying a small premium for a product upfront for greatly reduced operating costs in the future. Green products make better use of resources, whether we are talking about chip multithreading (CMT) computers, flywheel UPSes, or advanced cooling systems, so the payoff is in lower operating costs and less waste.”
Of course, another option for making your data center greener is in optimizing and virtualizing your systems internally and then hosting less-efficient systems externally. SoftLayer specializes in this process, offering services for, say, customer management through an API that puts the burden for optimization on a hosting vendor. SoftLayer can fine-tune servers and application performance for all the companies that use the hosting.
“A properly sized, high-efficiency power supply on a server can easily save up to 25 to 30 watts in a server,” says Sam Fleitman, COO at SoftLayer. “A properly sized or energy-efficient hard drive can save another five to 10 watts. And a low-voltage processor can save anywhere from 20 to 50 watts per processor. Taken independently, these savings might not seem like much. However, someone that is involved in the entire process—such as the data center manager should be—will see savings like that add up quickly in the overall data center environment.”
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