Data Centers: Where and how to build with energy in mind

...By consolidating data centers, relocating them strategically and investing in green technologies, companies can fight rising energy costs.

- Robert Offley, CEO of CentriLogic, says:

Lately, there’s been some renewed discussion on the Web concerning data center waste and costs. By some estimates, data centers are consuming around 2% of all electricity used nationwide. While data centers are still perceived as being inefficient, consuming billions of kilowatt hours every year, the issue is not about corporate waste. Most IT departments are doing everything possible to save money by leveraging various strategies and technologies such as IT outsourcing, virtualization and the cloud to reduce infrastructure spending and utility consumption. The “green data center” movement has introduced several new practices, such as free air cooling, to cut back – sometimes by more than 50% - on energy use.

Data centers are considered “energy hogs” because our digital world is exploding. The impact of the social web, cloud computing and the ever-growing move toward automating manual processes in even the smallest of companies means terabytes upon terabytes of data for servers to analyze and store. Every day, we rely on data centers to power the apps that we require for work, to manage our personal business and for consuming information and entertainment.

Fortunately, there’s at least a partial fix to the data explosion as relates to energy use. From a facilities standpoint, consolidation makes ample sense. Ideally, the IT industry needs to focus primarily on locating equipment within purpose-built data centers to achieve the greatest efficiencies in infrastructure and utilities usage. Across North America there are currently thousands of small, retrofitted data centers that are 10 or 20 years old or older; these facilities aren’t being used to full or even half capacity. By outsourcing equipment to purpose-built facilities through services like co-location, virtualization and cloud computing, and replacing hardware with newer, energy-efficient equipment, we’ve got a start toward a greener global computing infrastructure.

Data center operators work hard to reduce power usage effectiveness (PUE), the core measure of data center energy efficiency, in these aging centers. PUE measures the relationship between kilowatts of imported energy with the kilowatts emitted by the internal infrastructure. It’s not uncommon for a smaller or older data center to have a PUE of between 2.0 and 3.0, meaning that it is using two or three units of energy to produce one unit of power. The PUE target for new data centers is 1.2, indicating a roughly one-to-one relationship between power purchased and power produced. Data centers with reduced PUE ratios are able to extend associated cost savings to the end users.

New data centers are being designed from the ground up with energy efficiency in mind, and the first step is to find the cheapest source of reliable power. Semi-rural areas with low cost power such as in areas of North Carolina and in Quincy, Washington are drawing the likes of big tech companies including Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Our company has also strategically chosen to open two purpose-built data centers in Western New York; one in Buffalo and another in Rochester. Western New York is an ideal location for data centers because of its immediate proximity to adequate power and pre-existing copper and fiber network infrastructure. The area’s attractiveness as a location for data centers was further validated in 2010 when Yahoo! opened a 155,000 square-foot data center in Lockport, New York.

Fortunately, the focus on IT outsourcing and the increased adoption of hybrid hosting and cloud computing infrastructures has made it both acceptable and viable for companies to locate their data centers farther out from major metropolitan areas. While companies used to require that the data center be housed near downtown areas and company headquarters, Hurricane Sandy is just one example as to why that thinking is faulty. When you combine the risk of political and terrorist attack to natural disasters that can bring an urban area to its knees, there’s an even stronger case for relocating data centers away from large cities. Mitigating factors in location include what kind of savings the local utilities will provide, quality of the high-speed fiber connections and the talent pool in those areas.

Beyond efficient power and risk management, operators should also consider reliable access to renewable energies when designing facilities. Our company is looking into the US West Coast as a future site, because of the relatively plentiful access to geothermal and wind energy. If we can use renewables for the primary power source and The Grid as the backup power source, we know we will be able to cut 50% or more from our energy bills – savings that we can pass along to our customers.

Finally, a critical piece of the greener data center movement is making optimal use of new cooling practices and energy-efficient hardware. Free air cooling, an integrated system of heat exchange which uses outside air to cool the inside of the data center, means that a data center can obtain up to 90% of its cooling needs without using electricity. There is also the concept of hot aisle containment, which improves the airflow in a data center to isolate hot air and prevent it from recirculating throughout the room.

Modern data centers use purpose-built equipment, including servers, UPS systems, air handling and cooling units, and backup generators to maximize efficiencies throughout all areas of operations. Instead of retrofitting old hardware, companies have the opportunity to purchase and provision hardware that has been designed specifically for data centers – machines which are getting faster and “cleaner” every year. Of course, virtualization is now table stakes in enterprise IT; data centers are buying one-fifth or less the number of physical servers that they did five or 10 years ago.

Building the modern-day data center will require capital investment, of course. Yet considering that the average life of a data center is 20 years, the payback will be sooner than later. Let’s say that a traditional data center is spending $100,000 per month on its utility bill. If it could cut those costs by half through some of the strategies mentioned in this article, it will save $600,000 in just one year! Over time, those numbers add up to many positive benefits – and not just from a financial perspective.

Corporate America is not known for having a preponderance of tree huggers, but reducing energy use also means reducing pollution and preserving the beauty of open space and wilderness areas for this and succeeding generations. That’s a future that is worth investing in today – and modern data center strategies will help get us there.

Robert Offley is CEO of CentriLogic. 

Is Cloud Computing Always Greener?

- Pierre Delforge, Senior Engineer at Natural Resources Defense Council (www.nrdc.org)

As a growing number of businesses consider moving computer applications from on-premise server rooms to the “cloud,” a groundbreaking analysis released today by the Natural Resources Defense Council, in partnership with WSP Environment & Energy, reveals that not all of Internet-based computing platforms are created equal: some clouds are “greener” than others.

While mammoth “cloud” data centers are in the media spotlight for their huge energy appetites, smaller server rooms and closets are responsible for over half of U.S. server energy consumption – but 50% of that is wasted due to lack of knowledge or incentives to save, costing U.S. businesses up to $2 billion in unnecessary electricity bills. Small server rooms and closets can be found both in small- and medium-organizations (SMOs), such as services and manufacturing sector companies, hospitals, government agencies and educational institutions, as well as large enterprises where they are often spread throughout headquarters and regional branch locations.

NRDC found that as much as 30% of a typical small office-based organization’s electricity bill may be due to powering and cooling servers running around-the-clock even when performing little or no work.

Cloud computing is often touted as the most eco-friendly choice. Until today’s report, however, there had been no independent analysis validating whether these computing services delivered over the internet are the most sustainable option for SMOs seeking to improve the energy and carbon efficiency of their Information Technology operations.

NRDC and WSP’s analysis found that:

·         Cloud data centers using energy-efficiency best practices and powered by renewable energy or efficient natural gas power plants can have dramatically lower carbon footprints, by as much as 97%, than typical server rooms in small- and medium-sized organizations.

·         But “brown” clouds that do not optimize energy efficiency and use electricity from coal-fired power plants, can have a larger energy and carbon footprint, by up to a factor of two, than on-premise server rooms using effective methods to improve energy efficiency and sustainability.

The report, Is Cloud Computing Always Greener? Finding the Most Energy and Carbon Efficient Information Technology Solutions for Small- and Medium-Sized Organizations, demonstrates that the carbon footprint of business computing is highly dependent on a number of important variables, including the type of electricitypowering the data center, the amount of server processing capacity being effectively utilized, and the efficiency of the facility’s cooling.

We found that the factors with the biggest impact on the environmental footprint of server computing are, in order:

·           Server utilization factor: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates typical servers operate on average in a range of 5 percent to 15 percent capacity while drawing 60 percent to 90 percent of their maximum power. Running more than one application on a server through a process known as “virtualization,” or having more than one customer share a server as in the case of cloud computing, can increase server utilization to 50 percent or higher. Unfortunately, most servers run a single application.

·         Electricity carbon emissions factor: This is the carbon footprint of the type of electricity used to power the data center (i.e., generating electricity from renewable energy produces far lower greenhouse gas emissions than coal-fired power plants). 

·         Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE): This measures the efficiency of the facility housing the servers, including cooling, power distribution, and lighting.

·         Hardware efficiency: Upgrading to newer models can substantially reduce energy consumption by server, data storage and networking equipment. Computing efficiency of servers is doubling every one and a half years.

Business Options

Our study compared the above variables under five of the most common business computing scenarios: on-premise servers with no virtualization (servers running a single application); colocation (servers hosted in external facilities shared with other companies) with no virtualization; on-premise with virtualization; private cloud (servers consolidated and applications accessed across a company’s intranet); and public clouds. As illustrated below, a public cloud nearly always produces far less carbon emissions and on-premise server rooms with machines operating a single application produce the most.

Fortunately, as our analysis shows, small- and medium-sized organizations looking to improve the sustainability of their operations have multiple computing options and should review all the variables that contribute to the carbon impacts of these options. When considering the cloud, SMOs should request full disclosure of the carbon-efficiency of the services. If keeping their computing platform on-premise, businesses should make sure their servers – and the rooms housing them – work at optimum efficiency.

Thinking Ecologically: What About YOUR Carbon Footprint?

- Jessica Vreeswijk, Editor in Chief at GreenItTools (www.GreenITTools.com), says:


97% of IT professionals say reducing carbon footprint is important. Why is little action underway at this point?

1. Attention has been focused on Data Centres - hardware vendors and consultants have been primarily focused on providing products and services to large companies who have data centres where there is a supply crisis predicted in energy in the next couple years. There has been a lot of movement in the data centre area because there are big savings to be had from looking at different methods for heating and cooling as well as reducing the amount of heat-producing hardware required to provide the processing power and storage needs. The ROI is high and there is an imperative as many states in the US have made it clear that there is not an unlimited supply of electricity for fast-growing data centers.

2. Facilities departments are generally responsible for energy costs - as a result, IT managers are not responsible for making sure they are minimizing this cost centre. As with any initiative, cross-functional projects are much more difficult to get off the ground when the costs must be paid by one department while another will benefit. Some companies are now assigning IT managers the responsibility for the energy costs and this will certainly ensure that IT can make the business case for changes.

Many people believe that reducing your footprint in IT is about shutting down PCs and monitors at night. In fact there are many practices, a few of which are listed here:

• purchasing policies to ensure that what enters the door has been manufactured in an environmentally respectful way and can be recycled at the end of its life.
• asset management practices that ensure you get the longest life out of your equipment and use equipment as efficiently as possible to provide your employees with the functions they need.
• ensuring the employees are encouraged to shut off equipment at night including printers, monitors, desktops, laptops and all electronic devices.
• providing the organization with technology that will help reduce the overall footprint by increasing virtual collaboration and enforcing responsible printing habits.

Why are organizations becoming more sensitive to ecological considerations?

There are many possible answers to this question as well. Here are a few of the most compelling I have seen.

1. Increasing media/public relations opportunities - there has been a lot of attention in the media and in politics around ecological concerns. Beginning with the Inconvenient Truth movie, many people began to wake up to environmental concerns at home and are now waking up at work. In some sectors there is significant pressure from investors who are concerned about risk inherent the what appears to be a move towards regulation. Work such as the Carbon Disclosure Project and the G3 reporting framework have legitimized and made measurable the impacts of organizations.

2. Increasing regulatory risks - as mentioned above, states such as California and much of Europe have been adopting regulations that are forcing companies to internalized ecological costs they were previously able to externalize. With the development of carbon markets and a price on carbon emissions, there is now a tangible, tradable, marketable 'thing' that companies can view as a threat or an opportunity.

3. Attracting and retaining employees and customers - many studies have shown that employees want to work for a company that is, at a minimum, interested in understanding and reducing the environmental impact. Particularly the next generation appears to place a high value on working for organizations that match their personal values whether they be social justice, environmentalism or another area that would have traditionally been seen as external to the responsibility of businesses.

Thinking Ecologically: Is Carbon Footprint Important?

- Derek Kober, Program Director of the BPM Forum (www.bpinetwork.org), says:

It's a combination of a need for more education as to the tangible business benefits that can be achieved through more ecological practices in the datacenter and the requirement for more leadership both within companies and in the community at large. This is precisely why the Think Eco-Logical initiative is providing resources and information to educate companies and engaging with advisory board members on best practices and leadership techniques.

One of BPM's study shows that the top reasons that Internet and eCommerce companies are more sensitized to ecological considerations are recent press on the subject, consumer demands for green practices, and the rising costs of inefficient data centers. These factors are in line with the premise of Think Eco-Logical itself -- namely that both the environmental (eco) considerations and the business (logical) benefits are driving sustainability concerns.

Just as within large companies, SMBs should look at defining corporate sustainability policies and guidelines that start with the simple things. For instance, looking at duplex (two sided) printing, better office recycling, turning off computers at night or during long periods of downtime, having timed and low-energy lighting, using alternative means and incentives for commuting to work. Then the next level is to look at the technology infrastructure that supports your business. For example, are your servers and facilities being fully utilized, can you implement simple virtualization techniques, and are you using up-to-date, efficient processors and servers that are now available? It starts at a grass roots employee awareness and participation level and then builds to more systemic environmental improvements.

Data Center Metrics: Not So Confusing

- Tate Cantrell, chief technology officer of Verne Global (www.verneglobal.com), says:

The Green Grid (www.thegreengrid.org) has said in the past that the point for measurement of the IT Equipment Power is at the distribution point upstream of the computer equipment at the computer room power distribution units (PDU’s). For most companies, this means at the output circuit breaker at the upstream breaker panel. Google (http://www.google.com/corporate/green/datacenters/measuring.html) on the other hand has encouraged the industry to take the power measurement at the input to the server, excluding even the power cords of the computers in the IT Equipment Power measurements.

Google goes further to encourage data center managers to choose the utility side of their substation when calculating the Total Facility Power for the PUE calculation. This is a bit more specific and a little more challenging than the Green Grid definition of at or near the facility’s Utility power meter.

The well-run enterprise has a goal to increase top line revenue while keeping costs in check and preferably reducing costs over time. The purpose of the data center is to improve worker productivity within the enterprise. With proper direction, improved worker productivity should improve top line revenues. By improving on metrics, data center managers can impact the enterprise by improving worker productivity and thereby top line revenues, while honing efficiency and delivering the data center solutions with reduced cost impact to the organizations.

Without metrics, a manager cannot monitor the ongoing performance of the data center operation. And without a well designed set of metrics that are customized to the infrastructure at hand, a data center manager is unable to properly predict the trends of a data center and will be unable to effectively time projects for capacity increase.