Posted by Mark Harris on Mon, Jun 14, 2010 @ 01:32 PM
The IT industry has focused a tremendous amount of attention to the concept of 'GREEN' over the past 5 years. Many of the players, both IT vendors and consumers of IT gear alike have created GREEN Officers or Sustainability Czars, and even whole organizations that focus on 'greening' a company or a product strategy. Green is timely and exciting and viewed as a good corporate citizen thing to do. However, the realities of COSTS are now beginning to materialize.
While it is very exciting to standup in front of your shareholders and articulate all of the GREEN initiatives in progress, there have been a number of recent 'green' projects conceived a few years ago that have been put 'on hold' pending funding. The reality of GREEN is that it COSTS money! It may cost money short term, or it may be long term. Green is not cheap. In some cases an ROI can be calculated to show savings over longer periods of time, in somes cases new technologies must be invented to make any difference in costs.
Consider the grocery store analogy. An organic pear may be 40% higher in cost than a 'generic' pear. Yes, everybody knows that organic is healthier, but how many people are willing to spend 20%-40% MORE for the Organic versions of their groceries? Oh sure, at first you tried a few, but the likelihood is that many of us switched back to regular foods and continue to buy non-Organic groceries due to cost.
Another gem... I priced a 5kW solar system for my house a year or two ago, and with a total cost of over $50K, I calculated the break-even point (after rebates!) to be 9 years! Hummm, so I would have to write a check for $50K, and then over the next 9 years would get my $50K back, and THEN I might start saving money...
In the world of IT, we have the same thing happening today. Many of the biggest companies that jumped into 'GREEN' early because they thought it was a good corporate citizen move while at the same time believing it would somehow save them money, are now finding that 'going green' COSTS money. REAL money! It may be an upfront cost with a 3-5 year payback, or it could be permanent ongoing costs. The fact is TODAY that a kW of power generated by Wind or Solar has a cost of 5-10 TIMES that of fossil fuel generate power. (See the URL: http://greenecon.net/understanding-the-cost-of-solar-energy/energy_economics.html).
Our best bet today is to use advanced monitoring to determine WHERE energy is being used, and how exactly how much by each application. This will set the stage for future investments in green technologies to be deployed. And remember, "Going Green" does NOT mean your energy efficiency is going to be better. You could running your entire data center on renewable power, but do so with a horrible PUE due to process and architecture problems. Wasting a watt is wasting a watt, regardless of where the watt came from.
We have the opportunity to push each other towards data center innovation, the creation of new power and cooling technologies, various regulatory reforms to spur investment even furthar and above all, demand accountability across the board.
Posted by Mark Harris on Tue, Jun 08, 2010 @ 04:52 PM
With all of the efforts to get energy under control, it is not surprising that there are a number of new energy bills making their way through congress. One of the most 'spectacular' in-process bills with wide-ranging energy inferences is the Waxman-Markey Bill, or "HR2454". Officially it is called the "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" and it has three basic parts. This summary is provided by the Congressional research Service as follows:
"American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 - Sets forth provisions concerning clean energy, energy efficiency, reducing global warming pollution, transitioning to a clean energy economy, and providing for agriculture and forestry related offsets. Includes provisions: (1) creating a combined energy efficiency and renewable electricity standard and requiring retail electricity suppliers to meet 20% of their demand through renewable electricity and electricity savings by 2020; (2) setting a goal of, and requiring a strategic plan for, improving overall U.S. energy productivity by at least 2.5% per year by 2012 and maintaining that improvement rate through 2030; and (3) establishing a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and setting goals for reducing such emissions from covered sources by 83% of 2005 levels by 2050."
So what does this mean for us? Well, the first point is a good one: Energy Suppliers will have to create at least 20% of their power from renewable sources over the next 10 years. Like Solar and Wind power. Sounds good huh? Green as it gets. The only drawback to you and me is cost. Green is expensive. Using today's technologies, Green power will increase the price per kW for residential, commercial and industrial users. Greening is good for the environment, but will increase the rate at which power bills go UP. Nothing in life is FREE.
The second point is where we can all get more actively involved. Personally. For the next 20 years, we are all expected to help the nation become 2.5% (year over year) more efficient in our use of power at home and at work. Every year, 2.5% more effective, compounded. To do so, we'll all be buying CFLs and LED lights, using more microwave ovens, and during the summer at work we'll all enjoy the same 76-degree office temperatures that our datacenters will be driven to. Energy Efficiency is the name of the game! The car makers will also step up and happily sell us hybrid and BEV vehicles to help do their part. (Have you seen the new CODA Automotive BEV cars? Cool.)
Lastly, the bill states that we (the country) need to reduce total Carbon emissions by more than 80% of the level that we saw in 2005... but we have 40 years to do so. Hummm... Imagine the amount of change required in these 40 years to reduce carbon emssions by 80%, but then again, consider what life was like 40 years ago in 1970; The commercial cell phone didn't yet exist, nor did iPods and x86 computers, we hadn't seen Disco or StarWars yet, color TVs were just coming out and all the cars had V-8 engines!
Actually, I am a huge proponent of this and similiar bills. It significantly raises the awareness that we ALL need to do something, NOW! Every light left on, every old server left spinning, every little piece counts. If we can all just get in the normal mode of saving energy because it's the right thing to do, then we all relish in the long-term rewards from doing so...
Posted by Mark Harris on Mon, Jun 07, 2010 @ 03:56 PM
OK we have heard about the 'Greening' world around us, the price of power, the costs of cooling, the need for energy efficiency and ultimately The Green Grid's "PUE" KPI for a few years now. What originally sounded like a great way to definitively calculate the energy efficiency of getting IT work done, still seems like a great way to do so, but also seems like just the START of the journey...
Remembering that alot of work went in to the creation of PUE, it is considered by many to be a great place to start TODAY towards the goal of optimizing energy usage. Remember, you can't optimize that which you don't understand. That said, PUE may not be viewed down the road as the single best metric, but for now, it is MUCH better than what we had just a few years ago. Nothing. PUE is a metric that is well understood and can be determined for ANY END-USER that chooses to calculate it. It can be calculated in real-time using a fairly small investment in time and resources.
Today the EPA took the next step to allow end-users to compare their energy conservation and efficiency efforts to those of their peers. Basically, any company the wishes to can audit their PUE, document their findings, hire a PROFESSIONAL (recognized audit partner) to verify their claims, and then submit to the EPA. Those data centers that rank in the top 25% of their peer group will be considered as having an 'Energy Star' compliant data center. (And the bragging rights that go with the star).
So what does this mean to the industry? Well, I think we'll hear alot of companies that applaud the move by the EPA for Energy Star data center recognition. Many companies have worked hard to eliminate energy inefficiencies and love telling the world about their successes. The new Energy Star rating will allow this message to be even louder, since it will provide some apples-to-apples comparison. It supports the ROI measurements for these efforts. Peers will get a sense of what is POSSIBLE by people doing like environments. Some CIOs and CFOs will stand up and say, "Why is my closest competitor X% more energy efficient making the same type of widget?"
We will also see a bunch of complaining about the use of 'PUE' as the main KPI used in the determination for Energy Star. The more vocal opponents will argue that PUE as a KPI is err'd from the start or meaningless and can be manipulated or contrivedby the unscrupulous. In turn, we'll see a resurgence of pushes for "DCeP" (or one of the 10 proposed proxies) as a better KPI from these nay-sayers. I say it's good to see more energy on KPIs like DCeP, but we need some forcing function, NOW! Rememeber, the goal is to get companies to ACT NOW... mid course corrections welcome!
I think PUE was a great first step. I think Energy Star for Servers and then Energy Star for Data Centers is a great SECOND step(s), but why would we be nieve to think all of this would stop there?
Energy Star for Data Centers is circa 2010. Perhaps the folks at EPA will have a Energy-Star-PLUS recognition in 2012 (they could call it "Energy Star for Data Centers 2012" or similiar nomenclature) based upon any potentially agreed upon proxy for DCeP. Or perhaps they would use a different metric/KPI? Not sure. But what I am sure is, that we need to force ENERGY EFFICIENCY PROGRESS NOW. For companies to stand up, articulate their best practices and be tested and challenged by their constituents. We all need to LISTEN and LEARN from each other.
Status quo will no longer work. As an industry we need to push the design and re-architectures of existing space to be highly efficient. Too much waste in the past and nobody really understood it. We need to do the hard work, build containment aisles or modify air flow on on inlet-temp or overall pressure, we need to install sensors and monitoring, install spot cooling, refresh older hardware servers, etc. etc etc.
The energy efficiency work has just started, and it's a very long road ahead. Let's stay on track and work towards a common goal. Doing more with less, making every KiloWatt count, reducing the cost of doing business. Remember, we are all on the same planet, using the same resources.
The EPA's "Energy Star for Data Centers" 2010 is a GOOD thing...
Posted by Mark Harris on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 @ 01:34 PM
I was flipping through the 2007 report to congress issued by Jonathan Koomey ("Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency Public Law 109-431") and on Page 10 came across a very easy to read, but impactful diagram which provides some great insight into the future of the IT industry, and can be discussed in terms of end-users as well.
I suspect that this chart could be applied more or less to ANY individual company in their quest for energy efficiency. If there is some level of 'greening' at play in a corporation, then this chart can be a crystal ball into your 5 possible futures.
You can see from the diagram varying impacts on energy consumption, (starting at the top) going from taking NO NEW ACTION, all the way through DOING EVERYTHING POSSIBLE. I would suggest today that most companies are somewhere approaching the "Improved Operations Scenerio". If you look above, you'll see this green curve essentially takes the overhead out of operations, but does very little to have any significant long term effect on the SLOPE of the curve.
In the chart, the "State of the Art Scenerio" is a good depiction of what is POSSIBLE (expected) if all business processes are tuned and all equipment is refreshed with the latest. This would create a real-time infrastructure ("RTI" as defined by Gartner) that self-tunes itself based upon demand. Most importantly... It would also lower the most basic cost per transaction. A CPU cycle would actually cost less!
These are very exciting times ahead...
Posted by Mark Harris on Mon, May 03, 2010 @ 07:05 AM
Imagine a computer processing chip that could run at any speed, without any cooling. Imagine that this processor could be mass produced using existing technologies, and using off-the-shelf substrate materials. Well, this is not fantasy and I was reminded the other day about the work NASA has been doing for a few years...
It is true! Nasa has been demonstrating a set of chip technologies that have been able to operate at over 1000-degrees F for extended periods of time. While this is remarkable for NASA, now adjust your focal point to the usage of this technology for standard IT purposes. Cooling as we know it today would be a thing of the past. We might have cooling just for the human occupied areas, and perhaps some filtering still required, but here we'd see data centers running happily at over 100 degrees F.
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/09/nasa-designs-new-ultra-high-temperature-chips.ars
Finally PUE of 1.00! Curious reading to be sure...
Posted by Mark Harris on Thu, Apr 29, 2010 @ 07:09 AM
Understanding the power consumption of any given discrete device in the data center may be accomplished in a number of ways including measurement and modeling technologies. While many approaches have been tried over the years, today there are four main ways to determine the power being consumed.
- Faceplate Values. Each manufacturer places a service value ‘plate’ which identifies things like model and serial numbers, manufacturer’s contact information, safety certifications and power requirements. The power requirements are usually listed as the voltage range acceptable for the included power supplies, as well as the maximum current to be drawn by any configuration and working condition of the device. For a complex device, this faceplate power consumption value is listed as the maximum possible and may be 4 or 5 times the actual power being drawn in normal operating conditions. Since this is printed information required on every device, it essentially has no additive administrative no-cost.
- iPDU Monitoring per outlet. Newer environments have begun to deploy measured or metered power distribution devices within each rack. These iPDU have enough intelligence to allow network inquiries to be made of the iPDU itself, with the most granular of these devices offering discrete values for the power being consumed PER-OUTLET. These PER-OUTLET iPDUs make ideal sources of raw power consumption values, although they tend to be costly to do so.
- Monitoring via operating system service. Most modern hardware telco, server and switch designs and their associated operating systems include what is known as ‘System Services’ or ‘Daemons’ which are intended to allow access to granular operating information. In most modern cases, device drivers are included in the standard software builds which enable power consumption metrics to be read from the actual power supply unit, assuming that the power supply was instrumented in hardware when the device was manufactured. In cases where this hardware instrumentation exists, there are no additive costs to gaining access to the power consumption for these devices across an IT infrastructure.
- Modeling the device. It could be argued that a tremendous portion of the installed IT equipment that was purchased more than 3 years ago has little or no instrumentation capability in hardware. In these cases it is impossible to programmatically read power consumption metrics. Instead one approach has been to model the power consumed based upon a model of the hardware configuration of the device. Mostly for servers, it could be argued that a good approximation for a device can be calculated by knowing an inventory of components inside each device, and then the power consumption of each of those components. Coupled with some workload information and a fair assessment of consumption can be derived.
It should be noted that each and every Enterprise will likely find themselves dealing with MULTIPLE approaches (from the above list) in determining power consumption. Some devices and configurations will lend themselves to highly granular network inquiry, while other older devices may need to be modeled to determine power. It is these sources of power consumption that will need to be gathered, normalized and then ultimately fed into some form of higher value asset or resource management suite.
Posted by Mark Harris on Thu, Apr 29, 2010 @ 07:00 AM
It is funny how many times I have recently visited larger data centers considering 'Green IT' or other Efficiency initiatives and find high priority funded projects for wireless temperature sensors. True wireless environment technology is some of the coolest 'tangible' stuff I have seen in a long time. It is a high-tech version of the kind of technologies that we all grew up with, things we all just inherently 'get'. Temperature and Humidity Sensors. What could be simplier?
Here it is in 2010, and is important to realize that finally there are a number of great choices for wireless sensor solutions out there either using Active RFID or 802.15.4 (zigbee) technologies. A customer today really can deploy a fairly granular 'mesh' of sensors in data centers and related facilities areas without much difficulty. The sensors are simple, small, have long battery lives (> 3 years each) and low-cost. All of the solutions have easy to install packaging with double-sided tape or velcro. How easy is that?
Well, I would argue that the REAL VALUE for wireless temperature and humidity environmental sensors are NOT the sensors themselves, nor the data derived from each individual sensor but the aggregation of all of the data from all of the devices, rolled together with the metric data from the co-located IT gear and the facilities deployed HVAC gear, all normalized and easily accessible using ordinary tools. EXCEL anyone? (Or for the web-bies in the crowd, "Xcelsius Anyone?"). Imagine being able to plot the PUE of your data center as a function of outside temperature, or the total power consumption as a function of actual CPU processing (IT load). Remember, sensors can be found everywhere in your data center as discrete wired and wireless boxes, as well as embedded in every IT device purchased in the past 3 years, such as your servers, routers, firewalls and storage directors as well as in every PDU or iPDU (power strip). Sensors are everywhere just waiting to be queried for their metrics!
Customers should think BIGGER. Push the envelope and think PAST the wireless sensors (which ARE very cool), think PAST the pretty pictures that any one of the wireless vendors can draw, and focus on how to transform ALL of the data that you can get your hands on into actionable, cost saving information that can be directly applied in the BIGGER picture of running the IT structure at the lowest cost possible, supporting SLAs, etc.
Posted by Mark Harris on Sat, Jan 16, 2010 @ 09:00 AM
In 2007, the “Energy Independence and Security Act” was passed by congress and is sometimes referred to as “HR6” (see below). In this energy efficiency Act, Section 453 is a section dedicated to the application of this Act to the datacenter and the timeframes specified for doing so.
In general, the Act identifies a national goal by the year 2011 for all corporations to fully understand their energy consumption with some level of granularity. Now what is important here is that the Act appears to have raised some significant awareness across all ranks and corporate executives (“CxO”) that energy consumption is not only the largest (and rapidly growing) component of IT spending, but the details of this usage almost entirely an unknown. Assuming the likely scenario that the relevant government agencies continue to push for energy efficiency and independence, the HR6 Act will be applied to ALL companies within the US, public or private, and will become a hot topical discussion item in all of the coming stake-holder and shareholder meetings alike. This will affect us all in 2011!
As a background, the Act considers any facility or portion of a facility that “primarily contains electronic equipment used to process, store, and transmit digital information” and which “uses environmental control equipment to maintain the proper conditions” to be a datacenter, dedicated or not. So, essentially any company with IT of any nature will be well advised to consider “HR6-453” very strategically and make plans towards its goals now.
The good news is that the Act as written today, is focused on “Eco-Reporting” of all IT and facility assets alone, rather than the control and active reductions of energy consumption to any prescriptive level. (Those recommendations and opportunities will come next). It articulates that baselines should be drawn up that reflect “datacenter efficiency holistically, reflecting the total energy consumption” for IT equipment and the facilities around which they are housed. It recommends that these baselines be documented, auditable and available for analysis or governmental submission (if requested) over the next year.
Towards this end, monitoring systems should be evaluated with specific projects identified and put in place THIS YEAR (2010) that have the ability to measure and view energy consumption for all IT related consumption, equipment, cooling, facilities, etc. These systems will have a unique opportunity today to be initially deployed for compliance with HR6 in 2011, and yet at the same time become the framework and basis for the next expected phase of (likely) mandated behavior which will deal with actually increasing the efficiency for the IT function across all companies in the US.
Additionally and in support of this and subsequent Acts, the EPA is busy developing metrics in their Energy-Star programs which will set efficiency KPIs associated with IT equipment. In short order, guidelines (and later mandates) will exist that require the active monitoring and reporting, usage of increasingly efficient equipment, cooling and facilities infrastructure equipment, and the continuous optimization of the entire IT ‘system’ for increased energy efficiency much like ITIL has been suggesting for years. Given the roadmap ahead, now is the time to start planning for the inevitable.
Mark Harris
Vice President, Product Management
Mark.Harris[at]Modius.com
Posted by Jay Hartley on Fri, Dec 18, 2009 @ 09:00 AM
One of the key power usage metrics that I often find our customers requesting is Available Redundant Capacity (ARC). This metric can mean different things to different people, but in simple terms, we at Modius like to define it as the amount of IT load that can be added to a data center system as a whole without sacrificing redundancy.
When viewed from the rack, row, room, or building level (or even across a network of data centers at the enterprise level), ARC provides a simple way to answer the question: “Where can I safely add new IT equipment without overloading and potentially bringing down my facility?”
Typically, most data centers don’t calculate ARC. Instead, operators set a simple alarm threshold on the Actual Loadof each device. For example, if the power load reaches 50% on a device (or more often 40% when de-rating), then the device or the monitoring system will throw an alarm.
However, this simple approach to thresholding based on device power usage doesn’t effectively capture all the conditions of the broader power distribution system. There can be hidden capacity that allows for safe failover, even though simple device-level thresholding suggests otherwise.
The goal of system ARC is to identify where you can handle additional load without sacrificing system redundancy. To calculate ARC for power of a device in a dual-feed situation, the calculation is simply:
ARC = {Device Capacity}/2 – {Actual Load}
In most cases, the Device Capacity will be de-rated to allow for some margin. In the case of power capacity, it is common to de-rate apparent power (kVA) capacity by 80%. ARC can also be expressed in real power (kW) if you know or can estimate the power factor of the load. It is even more important to de-rate the capacity in the case kW measurements to allow for potential load problems that could degrade power factor.
Below is an ARC-based dashboard in action:
Here, the top panel shows how ARC has been calculated for 6 different data centers, along with a measure of cooling overhead. The lower panel shows the drill down for one of the sites.
When calculating the overall ARC for devices in parallel, you can add the ARCs of the individual units. For instance:
UPS A has 10 kVA ARC
UPS B has 8 kVA ARC
Together, they have 18 kVA ARC
Interestingly, it is possible to have a safely redundant system even though one of the individual devices has a negative ARC. For example:
UPS A has 3 kVA ARC
UPS B has −2 kVA ARC
The net ARC of the system is a small but safely positive 1 kVA
In this case, even though one UPS is nominally overloaded according to the simple one-device threshold, either UPS can fail without dropping any load.
Calculating system ARC from the individual device ARCs in this way assumes that the capacities of both parallel components are the same. This is most often the case, but in the rare instance that it is not, then you have to total the actual load across the devices, and compare it to the (de-rated) capacity of the smaller device. This ensures that the most-limited device can handle the entire load.
Some questions may arise when the load is imbalanced, as in the examples above. Such imbalances may arise because some of the load is not configured redundantly. Some loads also do not balance themselves between the two power paths. The ARC calculation doesn’t depend on knowing such details. Of course, any non-redundant load will be dropped if it loses its power source; however, as long as the system ARC is positive you know that any redundant load will be protected regardless of which power source is lost.
In summary, the goal of system ARC is to identify where you can handle additional load without sacrificing system redundancy. With parallel equipment, you can total the ARC of all components if they have the same capacity rating. When looking at ARC along the power chain, the correct system value will be the minimum ARC of any one set of components.
Kind regards,
Jay H. Hartley, PhD
Director of Professional Services
Jay.Hartley@Modius.com