Green Grid tech forum leaves users hungry for something meatier
The Green Grid technical forum in San Francisco this week was conclusive proof that the green fluff cycle is full blown. Despite trotting out three eco-aware end users, the vendor consortium blew its chance to prove that it’s more than vendor hype to data center managers seeking meaty advice.
The presentation started with a slick video parade of talking heads from the various member companies, talking about getting down to business and working together to come up with solutions!
It was an apt metaphor for the organization’s fundamental problem:
The public face of The Green Grid is a PR dog-and-pony show and all of the information sharing goes on behind a membership wall. And the real dirty work goes on behind an even more exclusive members-only barrier.
John Tuccillo, director of the Green Grid (and representative of American Power Conversion Corp.) kicked the event off by congratulating the organization for having accomplished so much in its first year. Um, wait a minute. I seem to remember Bruce Shaw from AMD hopping up on the podium at the Uptime Institute Symposium in April 2006 to announce the launch… but I digress.
The point is, compared to user driven conferences I’ve attended, this was a pale imitator. Not to take anything away from people like Bill Tschudi from LBNL (a highlight of the day), who made great presentations and talked about new things; but primarily the speakers were preaching to the choir.
I recognized 90% of the people in the room. We don’t need to go over the fact that we have a problem. We all know about the virtues of hot-aisle/cold-aisle and server virtualization. Let’s break new ground here!
The tedium was maddening. You could see it on the attendees’ weary faces. How long have we been talking about LEED data centers? I’ve been watching it since 2005. How much has changed since then? Nothing. There has been no movement on this issue.
What’s happened with the Power Usage Effectivenes PUE metric? Have we refined it? Publicized how to accurately measure it? No. We renamed it and flipped the ratio to be represented as a percentage — another debate raging since early 2006 that has pretty much gone nowhere.
We could be past this stuff already! But with so many organizations and companies fighting over who owns “Green IT”, it has prevented widespread adoption, and has stalled new ideas. There have been at least four different names for the equation that represents data center building power divided by IT equipment power. There are five alternatives to LEED in the data center under development by different groups.
These efforts are stalled because entrenched vendors and organizations are fighting over their fiefdoms and there is no transparency, no public comment.
I spoke to Mark Monroe, Director of Sustainable Computing from Sun Microsystems, at the event about my concerns and he brought up some good points. He explained that the Green Grid needs to grow its membership to be effective, and it needs to hold some information back to gain new members. But there is an imbalance between superficiality and new thinking. The end user community should have a role in deciding how these standards are built, to understand the arguments different vendors are making and to have an input on what is adopted.
So if the Green Grid is a bunch of hype, then why does this even matter? Because these vendors have the biggest microphone and they have a chance to make a difference. Almost every company is building a new data center this year, and significant numbers of them are going green. It’s time to give people some direction — it is a captive and receptive audience.
Miles Kelly, vice president of strategy at the San Francisco-based hosting giant 365 Main (a Green Grid end user member) spoke for the masses of data center pros when he took the microphone at the end one of the sessions and asked the panel for some guidance. “Give me something I can take back to my operations team. What is your prescription for a company like ours?” he asked.
The panel looked at each other in silence before essentially giving a non-answer as Kelly walked back to his seat.
What is your experience with The Green Grid? Leave your comments below.
Posted: February 6th, 2008 under Data center user group news and info, Green data center.
[…] Green Grid, Microsoft. Tags: AFCOM, GreenGrid, GreenM3, Manos, Microsoft, Serverspecs, Uptime trackback More than a few of the blogs including Serverspecs are all reporting the need for more meat at theGreen Grid Technical forum. I think that the entire industry needs more meat. The companies represented at this event should equate to the best of the best. Whats unclear from the articles is whether or not they are referring to the first day (public info) or the panels and breakouts. I would be really interested in getting some information into some of those workgroup sessions. In my past experience with this event, the first day was all marketing garbage, but the actual discussions were interesting. […]
Pingback by Where’s the beef? - A Green Grid Data Center tale « The Digital Cave — February 6, 2008 @ 9:40 pm
I too was astonished that after all this time we are still arguing about how to calculate and use something as simple and useful as PUE. There is too much concern over trying to get something perfect when in fact almost no one has the metering equipment in place to even start!
A useful discussion I was hoping to see (but didn’t) was a detailed review for the masses where and how to meter. Once the data is actually being collected, there are plenty of smart Data Center operators who will quickly put it to good use without an agreed standard.
Comment by Wally Phelps — February 7, 2008 @ 3:05 am
Wally, I totally agree. Almost no one has instrumentation in place.
Even fewer understand the implications of where to measure and when to get consistent and accurate data — not necessarily standardized, but at least accurate.
On the standards front, ASHRAE and The Uptime Institute have done some research in this area. I believe ASHRAE is actually publishing an entire book on how to conduct this benchmarking consistently.
PS: I wish we’d have had a chance to meet up.
Comment by Matt Stansberry — February 7, 2008 @ 4:52 pm
Wait - let’s not be too harsh. Yes, the org is off to somewhat of a slow-start as-compared with others. But (as a member) it’s a rapidly-growing org, and they have to level-set via metrics first. Recall that this is not a standards body per se — they exist to promote other efforts (such as US DOE, US EPA and SVLG) which they’re currently doing.
However, I *do* believe there’s a greater opportunity here: with all of these vendors in one arena, I’d like to see the organization pursue *innovation* in the space. Rather than focus on metrics (yeah, important) the opportunity is to create radically new approaches to efficient technologies and operational techniques. I hope the membership challenges itself to do so. (I could care less about improving power supply efficiencies by 8%; I want to see operational techniques that improve data center energy efficiency by 80%). Thoughts in detail at http://fountnhead.blogspot.com
Comment by KennyO — February 9, 2008 @ 6:05 pm
The reported lack of substance at the GreenGrid Technical Forum does’n't suprise me. This is a classic repeat of the 1970’s energy crisis where if you applied the savings that every vendor claimed, you would be running your electric meters in reverse.
The bottomline is that there are a lot of good vendor ideas and energy saving applications out there but they don’t all work for everyone and the User community has little incentive to implement them.
Lets face it Energy Management is not in the IS job description and even if it was, they do not have the data or tools to manage the power.If people want to be successful in reducing their energy then they have to grab the bull by the horns and make it happen.
Before getting into IS and Mission Critical Systems I was the first energy manager for a department store chain (1976-82) and no one thought I could attain the 5% savings goal much less the 25% savings actually accomplished.
This was not accomplished by just cycling air-handlers every 15 minutes. It was accomplished by developing a program of installing IBM Series 1 computers that provided automatic overrides of the motor cycling when customers were too hot, a daily energy profile of each facility’s power and then analysis of that data to understand how the energy was used. Everyone knew that lighting was the energy hog but no one could qualify it. Once qualified we were able to sit down with the Visual Merchandisers (my End User) and discussed what was driving them to higher wattage lamps. Once we understood their goals we jointly redesigned the entire lighting methodology by lowering the ambient light which inturn allowed for greater impact of the display lighting. It was that simple but it would have never have happened without data collection that documented how the energy was consummed plus taking the time to understand the unique End Users needs and developing a plan that actually improved their sales.
It is no different today. We have an energy crisis, we have an energy hog End User and we need to work with them. We need to work in their world, understand their goals and implement an energy plan that complements their activities.
Every data center is different and if anyone thinks that they have a metric that will be the guide for data center energy savings it is time to think again. The only metric that counts is the bottomline. How much is the next electric bill going to be?
If you need to drive the point home then ask this question:
How many IT employees can be added to staff for every 1% savings on power? In this time of resession talk they will quickly get the point.
Comment by Dennis Cronin — February 10, 2008 @ 9:32 pm