| « GigaCentre: Where we are going | BC: An Environmental Nexus – Carbon Tax vs. Cap and Trade » |
February 28th, 2008 [by Doug Alder]
In the last post (Gigacentre: Where we are going) I talked a bit about . The fact is everybody is talking “” but very few are actually being proactive about it. The importance of can not be overstated, and not just for the obvious . As more and more companies begin to report their as part of their focus will be drawn to the large role their plays in that reporting. Offloading corporate IT infrastructure to green, zero carbon data centers will be suddenly be very attractive to corporate Accounting, PR departments and CTOs (far less physical infrastructure to manage.)In a February 21, 2008 interview with a major finance magazine (not yet published), Tim Dufour, ‘s company president, said:
the old ways of IT, especially for the mid-market enterprise (less than 1000 employees), are changing. In the mid-market you often see multiple branch offices with small numbers of inefficient servers operating in back-room closets with inadequate cooling and obsolete UPS electrical systems. By contrast, today you see more and more mid-market companies and many are outsourcing to larger more efficient data centers, which might be the best way to make their IT green. The customer needs to be savvy though, as we see most data center infrastructure providers claiming to be green, even when they are using as their power source, their data centers are 10 to 20 years old with inefficient cooling/UPS and simply are not designed for today’s server density.
Here’s the reality check for you the datacenter customer. If your current data center is operating like the ones Tim just described then they really aren’t green. What they are doing is using some form of carbon offset trading to claim green status but as I explained in the last post that is not the same thing as zero carbon. To be green a data center really needs to be , not carbon neutral 1.
If it were then no matter how much efficiency we achieve in lowering power usage per server, the resulting cost savings, when passed on to the consumer, will result in even more servers being used and thus more GHG being produced.
For datacenters zero carbon is greener because it causes an overall reduction in GHG through the centralization, virtualization and concentration of server usage and resources in one place, rather than in multiple inefficient data centers, thereby allowing those inefficient datacenters to be closed or scaled down.Enter Gigacentre, the future of green datacenters; designed from the ground up with the latest in green technologies:
The single biggest factor in costs for a data center is the and the greatest use of that power is in cooling the tremendous amount of heat the servers produce. Cost for powering the servers and HVAC is nearing, or exceeding, the cost of the servers and hardware themselves.
IDC estimates for every $1.00 spent on new data center hardware, an additional $0.50 is spent on power and cooling, more than double the amount of five years ago. According to Gartner, 70 percent of CIO’s are reporting that power and/or cooling issues are now their single largest problem in the data center. Gartner estimates that 50 percent of data centers in 2008 will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet demand with 48 percent of the data center budget being spent on energy, up from 8 percent a few years ago.(More at blade.org)
Here’s how that power gets used in a traditional datacenter. As you can see the majority is not spent on actually running the actual servers but on cooling them and providing back up power and power conditioning. That 45% (, , ) spent on cooling is where the biggest opportunity exists to save electricity.
from: – Guidelines for Energy Efficient-Datacenters (.pdf)
Let’s take a closer look at some of the technologies I mentioned earlier and see how they can assist in lowering power usage, both at the rack and at the HVAC level.
| Green Data Center Technologies | ||
|---|---|---|
| One problem that confronts datacenters is what do you do with all the open space, the room you have left to grow into? It presents heating/cooling/airflow problems for the parts of the room you are currently using. | ||
Efficiency takes on many forms in a data center, from automatically turning overhead lights off when no one is present to running cabling through proper channels to ensure air flow is not interrupted.While we all understand the importance of a quality infrastructure to support and carry data traffic, there are other areas in the data center where cabling may be hurting your environment. In particular, your cooling capabilities and the degradation of connections over time. The first is rapidly becoming a cost drain. Older cooling units and even the latest and greatest cooling units will suffer if they can not move air into the desired locations. The effect of abandoned cable under a data center floor is an air damn [sic]. Efficiency is a function of proper design of the physical plant which in turn influences work flow and work habits. Gigacentre is being designed with all of this firmly in mind. |
||
| “” | While cooling is never free there are ways to dramatically lower, the cost of it by upwards of 50%, and additionally reduce significant amounts of usage. This is accomplished by using IBM’s revolutionary Stored Cooling SystemThis stored cooling solution is designed to optimize the efficiency of equipment that is often overprovisioned and running at low utilization and efficiency. It provides a turnkey solution that is designed to be maintenance-free, requiring only an “oil change” to replace the phase change material once every 25 years. By shifting energy consumption for cooling to off-peak hours when utility rates are lower, it helps reduce energy cost. During the night, when power rates are down, the system refrigerates a large mass of a cooling gel which is used during the day, when power rates are high, to provide the cold air for the chillers, in essence it is a massive cold battery. This allows data centers to maximize the efficiency of their existing chillers thereby reducing the need to overbuild chiller capacity to meet intermittent peak usage times, which is not only a saving in infrastructure investment but also an additional lowering of potential electrical usage and thus an environmental benefit as it lowers the load on the power grid. |
|
The bigger the physical footprint the bigger the carbon footprint. Datacenters striving for zero carbon need to use every tool at their disposal for reducing that physical footprint. One such tool is blade servers. For example, from an April 7, 2007 press release by IBMMicroprocessors can account for a sizable portion of the power used by a server. The new systems introduced by IBM today are based on low-voltage industry standard processors that provide the same application performance as their higher wattage cousins, but in some cases consume less power.To put this in perspective, consider that for every kilowatt of electricity consumed, on average over a pound of CO2 is released into the environment. For example, with the new low-voltage, quad-core Intel-based blades introduced today, businesses can save up to 60 watts of energy per two-socket blade server and in an enterprise environment with 1000 blade servers can prevent the release of nearly 20,000 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere over a year. That is the equivalent of the amount of CO2 produced by an air-traveler flying in a passenger jet round-trip from New York to London seven times. Gigacentre will be using IBM X series blade servers.Blades take up much less room than traditional servers. In a standard 42u server rack you can get up to a 45 percent density improvement when compared to standard rack mounted and non rack mounted stand alone servers. |
||
| Virtualization is the big one. Everything else helps but this technology, especially with the advent of Hyper-V, really reduces the need for space and hardware. By unifying multiple servers through virtualization infrastructure is maximized. The use of multiple virtual environments on the same hardware node allows for easier mounting, operation and maintenance of multiple OS as each environment is separately bootable. because each physical server can now do the work of several servers the need for hardware and the use of electricity is lowered. As you can see, virtualization combined with blade servers leads to a substantial positive impact on the environment. | ||
| Chilled Water to the Rack | Pre-cooling with chilled water is more effective than with air. Water is a much better conductor of heat than air is. The resulting hot water can be cycled through or used to heat parts of the building that do not contain server racks. See IBM’s IBM Rear Door Heat eXchanger which can remove 55% of the heat (55,000BTU/15,000Watts) coming off the rack. That’s heat that won’t require additional A/C chillers to cool down. Removing heat at the source is far more effective than letting it escape then trying to remove it from a much larger mass of air via . | |
| Crucial to the efficiency, and thus the cost and , of a datacenter’s HVAC systems is the layout of its floor space. The use of hot and cold aisles allows an operator to separate the hot air and cold air flows for greater HVAC efficiency and, as mentioned earlier, by running your cabling through proper cable channels, only under (and/or above) the hot aisles you decrease cold air flow interruptions and thus improve cooling efficiency even further. There is an excellent article on this here. | ||
These are just some of the technologies that will go into making Gigacentre one of the greenest datacenters in the world. Stay tuned for more newsAdd the RackForce blog to your favorite news aggregator today – click here 
1 one of the major problems with is that there is no way to accurately show that it really is being offset. There has been a lot of fraud going on with where the money etc does not go into real renewable energy projects but instead into false front operations that appear to be doing projects. Other problems arise when companies claim carbon credits for carbon taxes they pay. The whole carbon trading scheme is so full of holes that it can not be relied upon. See
for more details
