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Green Data Centers: Federal Government Insights Part 5

January 11th, 2010

previous post: Part 4 – Data Center Power and Cooling

Conclusion

Today’s data centers are not built with energy efficiency in mind. It is true that uptime is the main concern of any data center manager and owner but when energy bills become overwhelming, it is high time to think how to reduce them. Green technology is one of the proven ways to save on energy.

There are many steps you can take in order to make your data center green. Consolidation, virtualization, power management, energy efficient equipment (especially power supplies), and cooling are the top priority areas towards a greener data center. If you make improvements in any or all of them, you will see how this affects your energy consumption in a positive way and you will also make your contribution to save the environment.

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Green Data Centers: Federal Government Insights Part 4

January 11th, 2010

previous post: Part 3 – Consolidation and Virtualization

Power Management

Power management is a really powerful way to decrease energy consumption. Ironically, power management tools are widely available and most often even now you have them in your data center, but they are not put to use. In some cases the reason for that is very simple – there are no internal rules to tell administrators when to turn power management on and administrators don’t want to take the risk to do it without formal authorization.

Properly administered power management can decrease power consumption by 20-25% or even more. Though it varies from one data center to the next, generally the load is much lower at night and at weekends and it is safe to turn power management on.

Some of the power management solutions that are built-in the operating system are good and even if you don’t have the budget to purchase dedicated power management systems, these built-in solutions are more than nothing. There is no doubt that dedicated, smart power management solutions are better but as a quick fix even built-in power management solution do a great job.

In addition to the operating system, hardware also has power management abilities. These power management abilities vary from one model to the next but generally for processors, motherboards, and monitors the presence of power management technology has already become a standard feature.  If your hardware has such features, you should definitely turn them on because this alone can cut your energy bill by 20-30% or more.

Energy Efficient Equipment

Power management is done best with energy efficient equipment. Today there is hardly a server or other data center equipment, which doesn’t include energy efficient parts. Usually it is CPUs, motherboards, SSD drives, and RAM that are designed to be energy efficient.

Energy efficient equipment might be more expensive to purchase but the cost savings it will generate in the long run will pay off. This is why you should always opt for energy efficient equipment when you buy new machinery or upgrade the existing machines.

High Efficiency Power Supplies

Power supplies are a special case of energy efficient equipment. A power supply might look like a secondary component because unlike CPUs or RAM it does no computational task but energy inefficient power supplies can waste more energy than any other part in the data center.

Power supplies are vital because they can waste almost 50% of the power. This means that your equipment gets only half of the energy because the rest is wasted by the power supply! But this is not all – in addition to wasting energy, power supplies need approximately the same amount of energy in order to be cooled. This way it turns out that a substantial part of the energy used in your data center goes for powering power supplies and cooling them!

In addition to low efficiency power supply, which wastes a substantial part of the energy, many servers run with 600-watt power, while they actually need only 300 watts. This is an additional energy leak and it should be one of the first points you must focus on when trying to make your data center a green one.

High efficiency power supply might cost a bit more than their traditional counterparts but the savings a high efficient power supply can generate for a year could be times its price. There is no need to say that cheap is more expensive, so don’t buy cheap power supplies, which are real energy monsters.

Cooling

Powering the equipment is only half of all the costs for energy in a typical data center. Cooling is another major expense because all the equipment generates a lot of heat and this heat must be dealt with. Air conditioning and other cooling devices also consume electricity, thus contributing to your energy bill.

Cooling expenses can be decreased in many ways. For instance, if you choose your location in an area where there is natural cooling (i.e. a colder place), this can help to reduce the cooling expenses.

The hot aisle/cold aisle concept is also a step in the direction of a greener data center. This concept means that you arrange computers in such a way that the rears of one row of computers face the rears of the adjacent row. Heat is ventilated through the rear of computers and this is where you cool more. The front of computers doesn’t generate heat and as a result demands less cooling.

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Green Data Centers: Federal Government Insights Part 3

January 11th, 2010

previous post: Part 2 – How to Make Your Data Center Green

Consolidation

One of the first steps you need to take in order to make your data center greener is to consolidate. In a typical data center it is not an exception to see servers, which are running at 10% to 15% utilization. 100% utilization (if possible at all) is risky, especially in the long run and you can’t afford to utilize your machines that much but if you consolidate two, three, or more machines into one, this immediately translates into two, three or more times less energy to power and cool them.

In addition to heavily under-utilized servers, there are also idle servers. Idle servers don’t perform any useful job but they still consume energy.  Idle servers could constitute up to 30% of all servers and if there is no way to monitor them and turn them off when they are not in use, this drastically increases your energy bill.

If an idle server is a more recent one, chances are that it uses some sort of power management, which means that its energy consumption is lower but still even with the best power management solutions, an idle server can consume up to 30-35% of the energy it needs when fully utilized.

Consolidating idle and under-utilized servers might not look like a big deal. However, when you have in mind that each server costs at least $500-600 a year in terms of electricity, and you have hundreds of servers, the savings you can achieve by reducing the number of running servers is considerable. What is more, this consolidation will in no way impact your operations negatively, so the dilemma is not whether you pay to have the job done or save money but the dilemma is if you want to pay when no job is done or not.

Virtualization

Virtualization is one of the technologies, which can make the most for the success of your green efforts. Virtualization allows to consolidate multiple logical servers or storage devices into one physical unit and is by far the most efficient consolidation technique.

Virtualization requires special software, which as a rule is not free. VMWare is the leading provider of virtualization solutions for data centers and its products are designed with energy efficiency in mind. In addition to VMWare’s products, there are many other free and paid virtualization products and if your budget can’t provide for a paid virtualization solution, you could consider some of the free, open source ones.

Virtualization is becoming a de facto standard for a data centers and there are hardly many data centers where no virtualization solution is implemented. Of course, this doesn’t mean that virtualization is a panacea because it does introduce some problems (for instance there are applications, which require a dedicated machine and misbehave when virtualized) but generally virtualization is one of the major approaches to a greener data center.

Next: Part 4 – Power and Cooling

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Green Data Centers: Federal Government Insights Part 2

January 11th, 2010

How to Make Your Data Center Green

previous: part 1 – Introduction and Why Go Green

Achieving a greener data center is hardly a task you can do overnight but each step in the right direction counts.  Some of the steps towards a greener data center require investment (i.e. the purchase of new, energy efficient equipment, or virtualization licenses) and generally these steps require planning in advance and a substantial timeframe to implement them but most of the other steps are relatively easy to do and require no to little investment.

However, the most important is that going green starts with the commitment to it. If you and your employees are not conscious that green is better, no high-end equipment and no force on earth will make your data center greener. Going greener should be the result of a conscious effort, not the result of a forced decision or imitation (everybody else does it, so I must do it as well).

Some of the steps in the greener direction are one-time steps (i.e. purchasing of new energy-efficient equipment), while others are ongoing tasks (i.e. power management). In some cases it makes sense to modify internal data center rules and regulations and to include provisions for green operations. For instance, it makes sense to have formal rules as to why should power management be turned on/off, so that data center employees don’t have to make guesses.

next: Part 3 – Green Data Center Consolidation and Virtualization

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Green Data Centers: Federal Government Insights Part 1

January 11th, 2010

Going green is one of the most important trends in IT in recent years. The green trend affects technologies and equipment of all kinds but probably one of the areas where its impact is most tangible is data centers. Data centers are known for their lavish energy consumption. This lavish energy consumption presents endless opportunities to introduce new technologies and polices in order to make data centers greener.

President Obama recently signed Executive Order 13514 which outlines sustainability goals for the US government.  “In order to create a clean energy economy that will increase our nation’s prosperity, promote energy security, protect the interests of taxpayers, and safeguard the health of our environment, the federal government must lead by example,” Obama wrote in the order.

Jeff Stewart, the electronics stewardship coordinator for the Department of Energy said, “It’s going to make all of look at what we do with IT with a new eye.”  The order requires that 95% of new acquisitions be either Energy Star compliant or Federal Energy Management Program compliant.

The necessity to make data centers greener is indisputable and in some cases it is also a matter of regulatory compliance. The steps a data center can take in the green direction are numerous and while some of them are not cheap, many of the steps are easy to do and require no investment at all. This guide will give you a basic idea about why it is important to make your data center green, as well as some of the steps you need to take in order to achieve this goal.

Why You Need a Green Data Center

Greener data centers are not just the latest fashion trend. It is true that eco-friendliness matters for all kinds of products – from food, to clothes, to automobiles, to computers – but the drive towards greener data centers stems not only from the fact that data centers want to follow the latest trends, but it is mainly due to the fact that data centers are among the largest energy consumers.

A data center consists of hundreds and thousands of computers and other equipment. As a rule, this equipment is always on and it needs energy. Energy consumption is constantly on the rise and as computers become more and more powerful, this trend is expected to continue. It is not an exception for high-end equipment to demand more than 30 kilowatts per rack.

However, powering equipment is only part of the energy expenses at a data center. The other part, which could be as substantial as powering, is cooling. Powerful machines emit a lot of heat and if this heat is not taken away, it might easily burn the equipment. This is why cooling is vital.

There are various cooling systems but most of them use electricity, which further increases the energy bill for a data center. In some cases electricity costs are the single largest expense for a data center, outnumbering even capital expenditures and labor costs. Hardware costs are times less than energy costs, which certainly must ring a bell that data centers are becoming real energy monsters.

According to Aperture, “Currently, power and cooling costs represent up to 44 percent of a data center’s total cost of ownership”. This data might seem shocking but the reality is that energy eats the financial resources of data centers. Needless to say, this situation is impossible even in a booming economy and no manager will put up with it.

Going green is one of the possible solutions to the ever increasing energy expenses problem. Green technologies can help cut energy expenses by 20-30% or even more without any disruption to the normal work of a data center. Many of these green technologies are new and are specifically designed to meet the green demands of a data center from recent years but there are also many evergreen tips on how to use less energy and perform the same amount of work.

Greener data centers are gaining more and more popularity and this is for a reason. Green data centers are not only cheaper to maintain but they are also your ecological contribution. Since data centers are among the largest energy consumers in the industry, it is obvious that when data centers as a whole consume less energy, this leads to decreased energy production, which in turn has a positive environmental effect.

Saving the environment by using less energy is not only noble. In some cases it is mandatory. There are different regulations all over the world, which impose green requirements on data centers. Therefore, even if you personally don’t care about the environment, you still need to go green because otherwise you risk pretty severe penalties.

Going green is not that difficult. If you are building a new data center, chances are that most of the equipment you will be getting is green. If you are not building a new data center, the steps you need to take are not that complex and some of the most important ones are described next.

Coming up:
Part 2: How to Make Your Data Center Green

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Cloud Computing: The Next Wave of Federal Computing? – Part 3 of 3

December 22nd, 2009

Securing The Cloud

“The primary issue with security is perception. But the cloud is more secure [than traditional systems] because it was built with security in mind.” - (Eran Feigenbaum, director of security, Google Enterprise)

Federation and the Federated Cloud

Well, it’s pretty much here today.  Take for example Salesforce.com which interoperates with Google Apps, Twitter, Facebook, and several other cloud-based services.  Many of these services have open developer APIs to integrate into their services so this type of interchange will only grow with time.

How Ready is the Federal Government?

In this writer’s humble opinion the future efficiency of the federal government will depend on economic models similar to cloud based computing solutions.  From a technology perspective, it will not be an overnight process.  Most of the big cloud services providers have free sandboxes where CIOs can test migrations of some of the applications we mentioned in part 2 of this series.

This is clearly where our government technology infrastructure (or at least a part of it) is going.  Let’s get moving.

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