Check out our green data center scuttlebutt at NGDC conference video blog (above).

HP data center visionary jumps to Microsoft

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF.– Christian Belady, Hewlett-Packard distinguished technologist and data center expert is leaving HP for Microsoft this week. Belady presented at the Next Generation Data Center conference yesterday and said the official announcement would be forthcoming.

Belady is HP’s most articulate advocate for energy efficiency in the data center and serves on the ASHRAE data center technical committee as well as The Green Grid, an eco-friendly data center vendor organization. He has also worked with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data center committee to develop server energy usage metrics and data center effectiveness benchmarks.

Belady developed and championed a data center energy metric that compares total power into a data center with the power that gets to the IT equipment. Belady’s metric, called power usage effectiveness (PUE), has gained support from ASHRAE and The Green Grid.

Despite leaving HP, Belady will continue to work on The Green Grid committees.

Vendors snipe on green data center panel

Vendors lined up on a panel late in the day yesterday to argue over whose company is greenest. IBM trotted out its recent effort to swallow its own medicine — consolidating 3,900 Unix and x86 servers onto 30 mainframes. According to IBM VP for IT Optimization Rich Lechner, the move is going to save Big Green $25 million in energy costs alone over five years.

Moderator, Burton Group analyst Andrew Kutz was incredulous that IBM was seriously encouraging people to lock themselves into a proprietary hardware platform to save energy dollars. But Lechner responded that mainframes aren’t going away and claimed that the current EPA Energy Star effort for servers was inspired by IBM’s Linux on the mainframe initiative back in 2000.

Kutz then turned to Sun’s VP of Eco-Responsibility Dave Douglas. Sun’s latest UltraSparc servers are offering 32-available threads, but according to Kutz applications aren’t adapting to this hardware design. “How do we use this parallelism we suddenly have?” Kutz asked?

Douglas said virtualization was one solution — users can run multiple applications and keep them isolated in virtual machines. Another tack IT managers can take is to drive development of more multithreaded apps. “Thread and core counts are only going to go up,” Douglas said.
Douglas pointed out another trend that supports Sun’s multithreading-multicore strategy. Despite skyrocketing demand for data center growth, there is a big part of computing that is not growing fast: ERP and HR apps. According to Douglas, the fastest growth in application demand is at the Web layer. Scaling Web app infrastructure Douglas said is a step-and-repeat process, running many applications in the similar environments which do take advantage of multi-threaded scaling .

Kutz then turned to Sun’s Blackbox, “I think Sun Blackbox is very neat and if one appeared outside my home, I might write a favorable review of Sun,” Kutz said. “But Sun is marketing them as being green, and I don’t see it. You stuck a bunch of computers in a box.”

Douglas said that Sun just completed an analysis that shows Blackbox is 40% more efficient at cooling servers with its closed loop liquid cooling design than traditional data center cooling on a comparable number of servers.

Douglas also offered a sobering reality check. “None of this stuff is green today. We’re working to make it greener. This stuff consumes a ton of energy and takes a lot of energy to make it. We’re trying to take this tack in the marketing and we don’t pretend we’re anywhere near the destination,” Douglas said.