Energy Efficiency in the Data Center

Action packed webcast from Cisco’s TechwiseTV crew on the web at 1pm EST / 10am PST/ 18:00 GMT today: ”Energy Efficiency in the Data Center” (Data Centre for us UK peoples ). I last came across Robb and Jimmy of TechWiseTV when I was over at the VoiceCon show - pic above.

Update, post webcast: Once you’ve recovered from the rock music fueled introduction, there’s an hour of good content. Somebody needs to take that pen off Robb Boyd to stop him waving it - watch the video to see!

A 1U server, running 24×7, produces more emmisions than a Toyota Camry driving 15,000 miles per year.

According to Cisco calculations. Regardless of the maths, most of the industry is getting pretty hot on the environmental issues with IT. Vendors and customers alike have been impacted by regulations like RoHS and WEE, which deal with the cradle and the grave impacts of kit, now the spotlight is on the power that gets used in between.

Gartner put IT on a par with the airline industry for CO2 emmisions (”Green IT: Why it matters” on ZDNet last year), and the epicenter of IT power munching is the Data Center. Environmental issues are being driven by Corporate Social Responsibility and getting people to think long and hard about that power consumption - well, at least hard about it.

Valerie St. John Hosting introduced a range of people who touch on many of the key issues. Let me attempt to redact the highlights. Going green here isn’t just an altruistic thing. Using less energy saves money, and with tightening budgets that makes a lot of sense.

Given recent price hikes, energy is a top cost item for data centers. One of the challenges is that cooling uses as much, or more, power as servers themselves, creating a double whammy every time you add something to the rack. You can shuffle your cold isles and hot isles all you want, but all that energy has to come back out somehow.

Virtualization is getting a new lease of life with a lick of green paint, one which it can wear with pride, since removing a bunch of servers at 5% CPU load and focussing on higher loads on fewer machines saves money in all directions. Rob Smoot, from VMWare, talked though server virtualisation, but also the benefits of virtualization for the desktop: Using thin clients reduces power use, compared to power hungry PCs, and extends the desktop lifecycle, reducing waste from the destruction of old PCs.

Some of the power consumptions per rack mentioned in the show were enough to make a data center designer cry. The challenge is that buildings work on long design cycles - it wasn’t long ago that 4.5KW per rack was considered high. Meanwhile servers have raced ahead, with APC talking about a 17Kw cooling system and about 30Kw per rack . The challenge is that many of the buildings becoming available just weren’t built for those sorts of power specs - I wonder how on earth you get that much power to a rack, let alone to the building?

Robb Boyd quotes Doug Gourlay on the history of constraints: first we were space constrained, then cooling constrained and now we are power constrained. One recent discussion I had involved choosing a site location based on the nearest power stations. I kid you not! Data centers are big ticket items, costing hundreds of millions. Right now, increasing power consumption is threatening the longevity of many designs.

Rob Aldrich - Cisco’s Mr Green - joined and made some interesting points. He maintained that ‘green’ is a political term, while efficiency and sustainability are technical terms - more clearly defined and more meaningful. Nice point… I’ll spare you my usual carbon offsetting rant. In a similar line to server virtualization, for people who have ended up with rack upon rack of SANs, Cisco is collapsing SANs islands and moving a fair bit of functionality into the network. The argument is that service modules in a Catalyst 6500 family switch consume less power than stand alone solutions.

The show mentioned some double conversion, single phase power units. I’m not sure what the efficiency of going from AC to DC back to AC is, or how that helps from an efficiency power of view? I must have been having a senior moment there.