Data center designers share secrets for going green
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Tips include: conduct a thermal study and why UPS devices contribute to the problem.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard's HP Labs research center has developed a new approach to cooling datacenters by adjusting air conditioning systems to changing server loads more precisely than what's available now. HP says its Dynamic Smart Cooling (DSC) technology, which the company claims can deliver 20 percent to 45 percent savings in cooling energy costs, depending on the size of the datacenter, will be available in mid-2007. DSC involves placing several heat sensors on racks of servers throughout the datacenter, which send information on changes in temperature to a central monitoring system. As the sensors detect an increase in a server's temperature, a signal is sent to the nearest of several air conditioning units to throttle up to cool that server. When the server cools down because it's not doing as much computing, the air conditioner throttles down. HP, which firstÂ introduced the concept of Dynamic Smart CoolingÂ in 2003, revealed a number of additional program details Tuesday. It announced creation of a Data Center Solution Builder program with design partners that will work with HP to implement a DSC solution, which can be retrofitted into an existing datacenter. HP has already started trials of the technology is going to implement DSC in new datacenters for its own operations at six U.S. locations. Also, Pacific Gas & Electric, the power utility serving Northern California, will make rebates available to datacenters that deploy DSC, said Mark Bramfitt, of PG&E. DSC is a way of addressing an energy consumption problem datacenters didn't have just five years ago, said Chandrakant Patel, an HP Fellow and one of the system designers. "Five years ago, no one got fired for wasting energy but they did get fired if the server went down," Patel said. But today, energy consumption is an issue and Dynamic Smart Cooling technology addresses datacenter management concerns about the operating expense of powering and cooling, said Paul Perez, vice president of HP's Technology Solutions Group. At a demonstration of the technology for media Tuesday at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, journalists could see that the datacenter in a nearby room was using 117 kilowatts of electricity to stay cool. But when the DSC system kicked in, consumption dropped to 72 kilowatts. Power consumption is, on average, 40 percent of the operating expense of running a datacenter, Perez said, citing industry research. And 60 percent to 70 percent of that energy expense goes to cooling the servers, he said. Other technology companies areÂ working on ways to keep datacenters cool, said Jonathan Eunice, founder and principal advisor at Illuminata, an IT research firm. Chip makers like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are developingÂ processors that run coolerÂ than they have in the past, Eunice said. HP's chief competitor, IBM, is trying toÂ address thermal issuesÂ on a system level. "IBM does have its services arm with the ability to send out heating experts to map the datacenter hot spots and advise about efficiencies," said Eunice. IBM also offers a product called Power Executive that measures and modulates power consumption on a wide basis. Â ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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No longer a hot box nation US politicians have joined the great call for energy-friendly data centers, as the Senate this week approved a bill that promotes low-power server technology.â¦
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InfoWorld - IBM researchers are counting on a 40-year-old technology to keep modern, state-of-the-art datacenters running cool and allow companies to squeeze more computing power from the electricity they consume.
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Scientist Jonathan Koomey and AMD exec Mario Rivas say the amount of energy required to run data centers has gotten out of hand.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM researchers are counting on a 40-year-old technology to keep modern, state-of-the-art datacenters running cool and allow companies to squeeze more computing power from the electricity they consume. These considerations are more important than ever. The power consumed by a rack of servers has risen from around 5 kilowatts (kW) of power per server rack five years ago to as much as 30 kW today, thanks to the introduction of more powerful processors and denser blade servers. And the power-consumption levels will continue rising in the years ahead. "People want more compute power and we can give it to them because we can package this into a smaller footprint, basically," said Roger Schmidt, chief thermal architect and distinguished engineer at IBM's Server and Workstation Division. The challenge that Schmidt and his colleagues face is how to dissipate the increasing levels of heat these systems generate. "We're working on this all the way from the chip to the datacenter," he said. At the datacenter level, Schmidt sees an expanded role for water cooling as a means to bring heat levels down. Water cooling, which uses small pipes filled with distilled or deionized water to dissipate heat, was first used by IBM to cool mainframe computers during the 1960s. The technology, which was used in more than 90 percent of mainframes by the mid-1980s, was given a second lease on life in 2005, when IBM introduced its line of Cool Blue water-cooling products. One such product is IBM's $4,299 Rear Door Heat eXchanger, which attaches to the rear of a server rack. Four inches thick and weighing about 32 kilograms (70 pounds) when filled with water, the Rear Door Heat eXchanger, can absorb more than half of the heat coming from a server rack, according to IBM. IBM's water-cooling systems, as well asÂ competing products from companies like Hewlett-Packard, offer several benefits for datacenters. Most importantly, water can absorb more heat than air, and the pumps required to circulate water in a cooling system consume less power than air-conditioning systems. And IBM plans to expand its line of water-cooling products in the months ahead. "We've got other enhancements coming out shortly," Schmidt said, declining to elaborate on specific details. One potential enhancement is to extend water cooling from the rear of the server rack to specific components, such as processors -- as was done with some IBM mainframes. "Once you bring water to the rack, you've got a lot of options," Schmidt said. Convincing datacenter operators to pipe water through racks filled with expensive servers and invaluable data is not always easy. The easiest to convince are those IT managers with experience from the days when water-cooled mainframes were the backbone of large corporations, Schmidt said. But many remain nervous at the thought of water-filled pipes coursing through rooms filled with expensive servers and invaluable data -- even though water is already a key component of all datacenters. "Water cooling in datacenters is already there," Schmidt said. "The chilled water that's brought to the air conditioning units? That's water and it's in the pipes right above the server racks. We're just plugging into that to apply that at the rack level."
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A coalition of technology companies and environmental groups led by Google Inc. and Intel Corp. launched an initiative Tuesday to conserve electricity and curb global warming emissions by making the world's computers and servers more energy-efficient.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S Department of Energy (DOE) is stressing incentives over regulations to improve the energy efficiency of datacenters. The DOE's office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) gathered the top technology companies in Silicon Valley Wednesday to promote collaboration on strategies to improve overall energy efficiency.Â Datacenter energy issuesÂ are a growing concern for businesses and users as computers get more powerful, and the cost of running them and keeping them cool continues to increase. Technology vendors represented at the forum, including rival chip makers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel, along with server vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, andÂ Sun Microsystems, have each been developing more energy-efficient products. But they and the DOE representatives acknowledged that datacenter energy usage needs to be addressed holistically. The DOE can be a resource to the industry, not a regulator requiring datacenters to meet energy efficiency goals, said Andy Karsner, head of the EERE program. "I donât know that right now thereâs a dramatic need for a regulatory move, particularly when you have the leaders of the industryâ¦coming here with a sense of purpose,â said Karsner. Industry representatives said they work independently on improving the energy efficiency of individual products but that the federal government could provide tax credits, other financial incentives, or other resources to enhance overall energy efficiency. "AMD and Intel keep doing their best to improve the performance [of processors], but the CPU is only half the story.â said Kris Singh, director of strategic platform technology programs at AMD, which hosted the daylong energy conference at its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. Because this was the first meeting of what the DOE called a "tech industry working group," no specific recommendations were made and the schedule for future work remained open. The DOE can fund research that individual product makers can't fund to look at how different components could work better together, said David Rodgers, acting deputy assistant secretary of EERE. "A hardware company might improve theÂ energy efficiency of a blade serverÂ and another company might improve the energy efficiency of a transformer to convert AC to DC. Right now very few people are doing research on how to integrate those two together," said Rodgers. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sponsors theÂ Energy Star programÂ rating the energy efficiency of home appliances such as refrigerators and air conditioners and some commercial equipment. But some participants in the working group are skeptical that a comparable program could be applied to datacenters. âIâm not sure about that," said Roger Schmidt, chief thermal architect at IBM. Because datacenters are much more complex with components from different manufacturers, it'd be hard to develop one Energy Star rating everyone would agree upon. "What if [the rating] is bad, what do you do? Who are you going to point the finger to?â Schmidt asked.
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Think disk made out of trees Technology Forum HP is going greener than a green thing from a green land with its latest storage boxesâ¦
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At a meeting in London next week, the European Commission will discuss the technology available for reducing data center energy use and what a code of conduct -- if one is to be adopted -- should include.
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Your data center gets the job done today, but how will it handle increasing demands of the future, especially fundamentals such as power and cooling?
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Green tech financiers share tips for spotting sustainable startups.
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By Mullins, Robert  HP Labs' research center has developed a new approach to cooling data centers that the company says can deliver 20% to 45% savings in cooling energy costs, depending on the size of the building.
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A proposal to use 'green data centers' to provide Internet and other services for consumers and small businesses in the U.K. is decidedly content-free, Techworld's Chris Mellor writes.
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IT vendors can play a major role in reducing the world&#39;s energy consumption, but information about the benefits of technology has been lacking in an ongoing environmental debate in Washington, D.C., three tech CEOs said Wednesday.While IT consumption of energy in the U.S. has grown in the last decade, technology also displaces more than its share of energy-consuming activities in other sectors, members of the Technology CEO Council said. The advocacy group highlighted a report, released Wednesday, saying that every kilowatt hour of energy used by IT replaces 10 kilowatt hours of energy that would have been used elsewhere.IT currently uses about 6 percent of U.S. electricity, up from 2 percent to 3 percent in 2000, said John &quot;Skip&quot; Laitner, co-author of the report and director of economic policy analysis at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). But through a wide variety of IT products, including tech that enables video conferencing, telecommuting, and e-mail, technology results in a net decrease in energy consumption, he said.Instead of flying to a conference in Sweden recently, Laitner attended by video conference, he said. And in preparing the ACEEE&#39;s report, Laitner received thousands of pages of documents by e-mail or downloads, instead of having them delivered.Few studies have explored the energy efficiencies created by IT, he added. &quot;We have to look at what that&#39;s displacing,&quot; he said.Users of computers and other tech products should expect more energy savings in the future, said Dell CEO Michael Dell. He joined Mike Splinter, president and CEO of Applied Materials, and Joe Tucci, chairman, president and CEO of EMC, at a press briefing focused on green technologies.&quot;As an industry, we have begun to take up the [environmental] issue in a serious way,&quot; Dell said. &quot;It&#39;s an issue that customers care about.&quot;The IT industry has come under some criticism for its energy use, particularly at large data centers. In January 2007, U.S. Senator Wayne Allard, a Colorado Republican, introduced a bill that would require the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to analyze and report to Congress about the growth and energy consumption of computer datacenters by the federal government and private companies.Congress needs to &quot;more fully understand the impact that the growing number of computers in use throughout the country has on energy consumption,&quot; Allard said then.The Technology CEO Council isn&#39;t concerned about congressional mandates because the IT industry is already taking steps to reduce its energy consumption, said Bruce Mehlman, the group&#39;s executive director.But the U.S. government has a huge impact on energy consumption by adopting more green technologies, said Applied Materials&#39; Splinter. &quot;The government is the largest user of energy in our country,&quot; he said.In addition to the ACEEE report, the Technology CEO Council released its own report, called &quot;A Smarter Shade of Green.&quot; The report lays out the group&#39;s environmental policy principles, including:*&#160;The president should select a federal agency as a center for energy efficiency excellence, a model for other agencies going green.*&#160;The government should invest more in green research.*&#160;Governments across the world should reduce tariffs on green technologies.*&#160;The U.S. government should explore tax incentives for deploying energy-saving technologies.*&#160;Companies shouldn&#39;t wait for government mandates or incentives but should adopt energy-efficient strategies on their own.
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By Dubie, Denise  Getting rid of obsolete computer gear isn't as simple as it used to be. The threat of data loss, coupled with increasingly stringent environmental regulations, has IT pros rethinking their disposal methods.
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(InfoWorld) - The IT industry's thirst for energy is growing exponentially, far outpacing the supply of reliable, clean power. Now a group of leading IT firms has banded together to try to head off an impending energy crisis in the datacenter. Eleven enterprise heavyweights including Microsoft, IBM, Sun, HP, Intel, AMD, Rackable Systems, and VMWare announced Monday that they have formed a non-profit group called The Green Grid to drive new metrics, technology standards, and best practices for curbing power consumption. Robust growth in the IT sector and in companies' use of technology is leading to an acute power shortage, according to analyst firm Gartner. Half the worldâs datacenters will run out of power by the end of 2008, Gartner estimates. That means companies face swelling utility bills as they struggle to keep their servers cool and humming. Many of the companies participating in The Green Grid are individually developing energy-efficient technologies. However, joining forces to tackle the power-consumption problem holistically is a must, according to Green Grid board member Bruce Shaw, director of worldwide commercial and enterprise marketing at AMD. "No one player owns the kingdom. It's not just a processor problem. It's not just a server problem. It's not just a memory problem. Everyone in the ecosystem needs to be involved." By working together, Green Grid companies can develop ways for their respective greener technologies to "hook into one another," thus increasing their overall effectiveness, Shaw said. The consortium started work last April, with representatives for AMD, Sun, IBM, and HP getting the ball rolling. Not surprisingly, there have been challenges from the out start, including concerns about intellectual property and developing a standard way to measure power consumption   "Do you measure by performance per watt? Per dollar? Per thread? Something different?" said Green Grid boar member Colette LaForce, vice president of marketing at Rackable Systems.Â