Data Centers Caught In Power Play
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With five computer data centers in Northern Virginia, DuPont Fabros Technologies is a major local player in a growing industry responsible for safeguarding vast repositories of information stored online.
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Avoiding crisis in the rain-forest Meat Cast Ah, data center efficiency. The big vendors have embraced this topic like an admin embraces a bag of Dorritos.â¦
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Power-hungry servers consumed 45 million kilowatt-hours power in 2005--double that of 2000.
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New technology could mean superfast data transfer inside the computer.
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Blog: Power failure in downtown San Francisco impacts popular data center, leaving several popular Web sites offline.
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By Brier Dudley, Seattle Times  Feb. 19--I saw some amazing data centers in Redmond last week.   They were reliable, powerful, resilient and fault-tolerant.
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On the Mark: Blade servers are getting a bad rap in the data center energy crisis, one vendor tells Mark Hall, claiming that networking hardware poses power consumption and cooling problems that are just as big.
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Datacenter design is undergoing a significant transformation. The fundamentals of the datacenter -- servers, cooling systems, UPSes -- remain the same, but their implementations are rapidly changing, thanks in large part to the one variable cost in the server room: energy.
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(InfoWorld) - The forecast for datacenters isn't good for the short term: they're going to get hotter and a lot more cramped, according to Gartner analysts. Increasing use of cheaper x86 chip-based servers has presented problems for datacenters, most of which haven't been redesigned since the last tech boom went bust six years ago, said Rakesh Kumar, a Gartner research vice president. He spoke Monday during a presentation at Gartner's Data Center Technology Summit in London. The number of server racks is increasing. Consequently, the amount of floor space in datacenters is decreasing, but their power and cooling requirements are rising. More attention is being focused on theÂ environmental impacts of running high-energy datacentersÂ and moves by governments toward new legislation. "It will come down to a balance between the power, the cooling and the floor space," Kumar said. "What that means is legacy datacenters are obsolete." Gartner predicts that within 12 to 18 months organizations will have to make major changes to accommodate the heating and cooling challenges that come with more processing power. Four years ago, a stand-alone server in a rack used 2 kilowatts of electricity. Today, a standard rack filled with between 50 percent to 80 percent of blade servers consume between 15 kilowatts and 30 kilowatts per rack, Kumar said. The cooling statistics complicate the power picture. It takes between 1.2 to 1.3 times the amount of energy a server consumes to cool it, Kumar said. IT managers frequently can't fill an entire rack because of the heat generated by the servers. Floor cooling, where cool air is circulated under server racks, and air conditioning -- aren't going to work anymore because the heat is too great, Kumar said. What's more, the cool space beneath the servers in legacy datacenters becomes clogged with cables and wires and occasionally, other odd things that interfere. "They're thinking 'Hey, there's space under here. I'll keep my beer in there,'" said Peter Hannaford, of American Power Conversion, which makes server cooling equipment. "We found this guy who had a Christmas tree under there." All of these obstacles contribute to higher energy costs. Gartner estimates that electricity costs could go from 10 percent or less of IT budgets to 20 percent to 30 percent if left unchecked, Kumar said. Electricity costs have risen over the last year and will likely continue to rise, although the peak is unknown. Fortunately, everyone from chip vendors to servers vendors and software makers have a stake in reducing energy and heat, Kumar said. The problem could ultimately limit the growth of IT. A huge amount of investment is being made in finding solutions, either through new products or through new datacenter designs. Governments also are paying increased attention to IT. It's possible high-energy users could see higher taxes, or that ill-fitting legislation could be implemented, spurred by public demand for greener IT, said Steve Prentice, vice president and chief of research for Gartner. "They [the government] will rush something in that apparently does the job but does not address all the issues," Prentice said. "We think it's better to self-regulate."
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(Source: MessageLabs)Administrators struggle with ever increasing complexity in the data center. Join Brian Babineau, Enterprise Strategy Group and Anne O'Neill, Symantec Corporation for an evaluation of these options and the discussion of Veritas Server Foundation from Symantec, a novel approach to Data Center Automation that embodies Symantec's vision for a solution to DCA that is both complete and simple. We invite you to register now for full access to this online broadcast.
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Several storage suppliers are adding to their arsenal of products and technologies aimed at IT managers dealing with the explosion of data storage at Storage Networking World in Orlando this week.
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Disk freeze EMC refuses to let server makers get all the low-power data center attention. The storage vendor this week rolled out a new set of services meant to help customers gauge and then lower their energy consumption.â¦
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'Data Center 3.0' initiative gets rolling Cisco is selling a new obscenely large switch, tapped as the lynchpin of its "Data Center 3.0" virtualization initiative the company has been gabbing about for monthsâ¦
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AMD Opteron servers prove more power-efficient than Xeon-powered servers in tests.
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Each skinny server houses eight processors. Plug a few together, and voila! A high-performance machine.
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Cisco Systems wants to turn the enterprise data network into an electricity meter.Using open standards, the company wants to get server and storage vendors to collect and share information about their equipment and send it to Cisco routers and switches. The data could include power consumption, operating temperature and more. It&#39;s becoming a critical job, and because the network touches all IT resources across the enterprise, data collection should happen there, according to Paul Marcoux, vice president of green engineering.Marcoux joined Cisco from American Power Conversion only about six weeks ago after Cisco created the position to overlook energy issues across all parts of the company. Networking gear itself makes up a much smaller portion of IT power consumption than do servers or storage, but Cisco plans to go beyond just making its own products more efficient.Power is a growing issue in datacenters as the cost of energy rises and concerns about global climate change increase. Being able to collect and analyze information about power usage is a big part of the battle and becoming more crucial in the age of virtualization, according to Marcoux. Distributing storage and processing cycles without regard for power issues is not just inefficient, it&#39;s dangerous, he said.If virtualization software looks at a process that requires more computing power or storage space, then enlists servers or storage devices that are near to overheating or running out of power, it could send a rack of servers over the edge and shut it down, Marcoux said. For that reason, the virtualization system needs to know the power status of all the resources it may call upon, he said.By the same token, consolidated datacenters typically serve many departments of an enterprise and consume a lot of power, but those groups generally don&#39;t have to pay for their part of the power. In fact, the electricity bill often bypasses even the IT department, going to building management instead, Marcoux said. Collecting data about the power consumed by each device, and eventually by individual transactions, would allow enterprises to bill each department for the power it uses, he said.Software on routers and switches would collect the information and then take actions or forward it on to separate building management, energy management or virtualization control systems, Marcoux said. Given the large amount of energy data to be processed, Cisco may introduce daughtercards for its platforms to provide extra computing power, he said. He hopes the technology will be in place and collecting information in enterprises within three years.Because datacenters contain gear from so many vendors, open standards are the only way to make such a system work, according to Cisco. Fortunately, there already are several available standards, Marcoux said. Having standards already in place will help speed up adoption, Marcoux said.&quot;We&#39;re not trying to reinvent the wheel, we&#39;re just trying now to utilize the wheel,&quot; Marcoux said.Cisco&#39;s proposal would represent a whole new role for networks beyond communications, said Burton Group analyst Dave Passmore. Server vendors might go along with the plan, but Cisco can&#39;t count on smooth sailing, he said. Centralized power regulation would play a role in overall management of the datacenter, an area where Cisco is attempting to make inroads with other initiatives as well.&quot;Who controls virtualization in the data center is going to be the new battleground,&quot; Passmore said.
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A roundtable about data-center efficiency held last week in Austin reinforced the need for metrics, assessments and other tools.