Yesterday I went to an Aperture-sponsored event in downtown Chicago that Andrew Fanara from the federal Environmental Protection Agency spoke at. Much of it was information that he has spoken about before and that we’ve reported, all of it around the data center energy efficiency issue that the EPA has gotten more involved with in the past couple years.

A major focus of the event was measurement. Leaders in the industry say that data centers must learn to measure how much power they’re consuming in order to reduce it. Then they can have before-and-after accounts of their Power Usage Effectiveness number, which is an efficiency metric dividing your total facility load by the IT load.

Your PUE number is like golf — the closer to 1, the better. At least that has always been the common wisdom. The goal, says experts, is to reduce your PUE. But sometimes an IT energy efficiency project can play games with that number.

Steve Yellen from Aperture said a virtualization project can temporarily hurt your PUE number. Take this example: You have 10 megawatts coming into a facility, and 5 of them are taken up by the IT load. You virtualize and consolidate servers, thereby reducing your server footprint, and thereby reducing your IT load. So now your IT load is only 4 megawatts even though your facility load is still 10 megawatts. So your PUE would go from 2 to 2.5.

Presumably there would be an adjustment. You would see that the IT load had decreased, and so you would adjust your facility load accordingly. According to Yellen, everything would be hunky dory again, right? Wrong. Your PUE would still take a hit. Let’s take the same example:

• Your facility load is 10 megawatts and your IT load is 5 megawatts, so your PUE is 2.
• You virtualize and consolidate so that your IT load becomes 4 megawatts, a one-megawatt reduction. Your PUE is now 2.5. Uh-oh.
• So you adjust, reducing your facility load by one megawatt to match with the IT load reduction. So now your facility load is 9 megawatts while your IT load is 4 megawatts. Your PUE is now 2.25, which is still worse than the PUE of 2 you had before you virtualized and consolidated. Still uh-oh.

In fact, the more energy you save with your virtualization/consolidation project, the worse it could be for your PUE. Say your project reduced your IT load by two megawatts instead of one. So you reduce your facility load by two megawatts as well. That means the facility load is 8 megawatts and the IT load is 3 megawatts, yielding a PUE of 2.67. Uh-oh.

Taking it a step further, any project that improves your IT load alone will yield a worse PUE. If you buy those new super-duper efficient servers, that could make your PUE worse. If you install blanking panels and move perf tiles around the right way, that will improve your PUE.

Let’s not panic here, because there is a good side to this. If I consolidate servers, I have fewer servers to cool. That presumably means that I’ll be able to reduce my facility load further because I might be able to shut down one of the cooling units. And maybe fewer servers means I can get rid of one of my uninterruptible power systems (UPS) units. In the end, it might all even out, but it may just leave you with a zero-sum game instead of an improved PUE number, which is what you think it would do.

In the end, what’s most important is reducing your overall power load, and if you can document how it all happened, all the better.

Since yesterday was Earth Day, I’m sure all you data center managers were out hugging trees, riding your bicycles to work and watching An Inconvenient Truth. But that was yesterday. Today, reality in the data center hits again. And the reality is that many of you aren’t that concerned with data center energy efficiency. I know, it’s a downer. But there are some hints of a silver lining if you can hold on a bit.

First, the reality: 37% are not in the middle of a data center energy efficiency project and have no plans for one. Perhaps some don’t realize that a server consolidation and virtualization project is an energy efficiency project, so that could be skewing the numbers somewhat. Pretty much everyone nowadays is doing virtualization and consolidation.

Second, almost half are getting their information about data center energy efficiency from vendors, either on the IT or infrastructure side. These vendors have one primary goal — to sell their equipment. If making their server or UPS 1/10% more efficient can help sell it, they’ll do it. Meanwhile, data center managers might be able to fill up cable cutouts and put in blanking panels for pennies on the dollar compared to what these vendors are selling, and save more energy.

“I’m not sure that’s surprising, but it’s telling,” Jay Fry, the VP of marketing for Cassatt, said. “They’re getting their data from interested parties, well-entrenched vendors who have a stake in incremental change, but not in a more innovative and potentially market-disruptive way.”

Cassatt, which provided these numbers from its own survey of users, is a server power management software company. And yes, Fry is a marketing guy. They’re a vendor just like the others, and Fry’s job is to sell, just like the other vendors’ marketing guys. So what is Cassatt pushing? Their software allows data center managers to power up and power down servers according to scheduled demand, thereby saving companies power costs they don’t need to spend when their servers aren’t being used. But not everything in Cassatt’s own survey is so rosy for them either.

In the survey, more than 41% said they cannot justify turning their servers off. Period, end of story. Sorry Cassatt, you’re not welcome here. Ouch.

But Fry said that was actually a lot lower than he thought; he was expecting that number to be about 90%. That’s what it has been in past years, he has found, so at least some people are thinking about changing.

“There’s still a lot of work to do,” he said, “but it does seem like people are thinking about ways to do things.”

There are some good things from this survey. About 40% said that either their primary or secondary reason for doing an energy efficiency project is “environmental responsibility.” See, so there are some tree-huggers out there. Also, in a response that seems to contradict the one about shutting off servers, almost half of respondents said they would be comfortable with an automated solution that “power-controlled” at least some of their production servers. Most likely they think that “power-controlled” means something less than shutting them off.

Finally, in a response that reflects results from a recent Uptime Institute survey, it seems that the IT-facilities gap is shrinking. About 54% said there is no gap or a small one. This result probably doesn’t have a direct effect on Mother Earth, but overall if communication between facilities and IT is better, power in the data center can be better monitored, thereby keeping power in check, thereby reducing strain on coal-fired power plants, thereby reducing their output, thereby making the shrinking gap an environmental concept. It took a while to connect those dots, but yes, we did it.

Sydney, Australia based-Ideas International Inc. has launched an open source-style website to compare and rate the functional capabilities of blade servers on Monday, April 7.

The IT research and analysis company’s new site for Collaborative Product Evaluation looks at medium-sized blade servers and will include enterprise-level blade server data by mid-summer, said Jim Burton, the vice president and senior analyst for entry-level servers and blades at Ideas International.

The site lets users compare various components of the servers that fall under the umbrellas of platform functionality, environmental footprint, virtualization functions, reliability, serviceability and manageability, and deployment considerations.

The information is based on the hardware specifications, interviews with end users, and performance data, Burton said.

“We establish the appropriate ratings, but it is an open source-style website, so users can affect these ratings too,” Burton said. Of course, Ideas International give the user feedback a credibility rating, so only statements supported by concrete data can actually bring a rating up or down, he said.

The site is pretty handy if you are on the market for blade servers, especially because the site allows you to make comparisons based on your priorities. If you need power efficiency, you can compare boxes based on that alone. Same goes for factors like “green-ness,” cost, networking and so forth, said Burton.

Ideas International also has evaluation sites for x86 virtual machine platforms and plans to create evaluation sites for Unix-based systems and Linux in the near future, so keep an eye out for those.

Northern California utility Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has made headlines by finding novel ways to offer rebates for energy efficiency in the data center. Last week PG&E hosted utility companies from all over the country to brainstorm ideas for new rebate programs and other methods to curtail IT energy consumption.

According to the PG&E Website, the Utility IT Energy Efficiency Coalition comprises over 24 utilities from across the US and Canada that are primed to address the high tech, data center, and IT infrastructure markets. California utilities are well represented, with Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas and Electric, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, City of Palo Alto, and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power attending the meeting. Utilities from the Pacific Northwest, Texas, New York, and Canada also participated.

We talked to PG&E’s Mark Bramfitt, supervisor of the customer energy efficiency program for the high tech market about the programs that they’ve had in place so far. Surprisingly, the server virtualization program hasn’t been quite as sucessful as I would have imagined. “The uptake on the virtualization program is a little slower than we wanted,” Bramiftt said. “We’ve received 60 applications in so far.” PG&E has had a number of calls from customers that say “we just did it”. But unfortunately, customers need to come to PG&E before a virtualization project to get the funding. Bramfitt is working on offering a rebate to customers so they can get incentives after the fact.

On the upside, PG&E is seeing a lot of success with its new construction incentives. The Bay Area is currently experiencing a data center construction boom. And Bramfitt is convincing many of them to install air-side and water-side economizers. For more on economizers, check out our case study on United Parcel Service.

“We’re about to pay a customer a $1.4 million incentive [for economizers],” Bramfitt said. “It’s going to be one of the biggest checks we’ve ever written for a new construction.”

Organizations ranging from corporate entities to the federal government are simultaneously, furiously working to fill the gaping void in the green data center certifications and awards space, striving to replace LEED as the de-facto standard for green data centers.

The proposed accolades run the gamut from professional development/personal achievement awards due to be announced by The Uptime Institute this month, to official stamps of approval from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Ben Stewart, senior vice president of facilities at the hosting firm Terremark, has been watching the development closely. According to Stewart, once a credible certification is available, hosting companies will have to pursue them to be competitive.

“We’re already doing things toward that end,” Stewart said. “We’re monitoring what’s going on through the Green grid, The Uptime Institute, and the EPA… so when the programs do become available, we’re able to put our signature on the bottom and submit the paperwork.”

On the other hand, Stewart doesn’t expect the rest of the data center community to be quite as aggressive, simply because they won’t have the same benefit. “For companies like us and [hosting company] 365 Main — being green, comparing ourselves to the rest of the industry and making ourselves better is good for business,” Stewart said.

But colocation hosting data centers are a small percentage of the data center market, and Stewart said, unless the utilities offer more incentives, the majority of data center operators aren’t going to jump through hoops unless there is something in it for them.

“We’re trying to attract customers to our facility, to show we’re leading edge,” Stewart said. “With a company like Citibank, people don’t equate them with their data center.”

Stewart isn’t your typical facilities guy — he’s definitely leading edge, and he’s about to take that ethic to the next level. “We’re building a new data center in Amsterdam at Schipol Airport and we’re looking at using the waste heat to de-ice the runways,” he said. “Europe is so far ahead of us on this stuff — they’ve given us five ways to put our waste heat to use rather than exhaust it. We’re learning an awful lot.”

Green IT = Smarter air conditioning
Data center efficiency isn’t real sexy when it comes down to it — unless you think Plexiglas, bristled grommets and caulk are sexy, in which case, this is definitely the Web site for you.

Primarily, the organizations pushing for greener computing are focusing on the infrastructure efficiencies in the data center — whittling away at the amount of cooling needed per unit of computing power. And that’s about as sophisticated as it gets.

There are definitely bigger fish to fry (like reducing the amount of servers needed for a certain job, thereby reducing the amount of overall power consumption), but infrastructure is one of the only places in IT where people seem to have any agreement.

The holy grail of green IT is determining what amounts to “useful work”. It’s pretty simple to determine how much power Server X uses, and how much power it takes to keep it cool. But how do you measure the usefulness of the work Server X produces?

How much do you lose to bloatware (inefficient code)? How “useful” is the server that runs an application twice a month? And what determines “useful” anyway, revenue dollars, per CPU cycle, per watt?

You can bet these questions will be debated for years to come.

A new report from IT research and advisory firm Computer Economics presents something of a dilemma for many data centers bent on reducing energy costs. While IT managers may feel pressure to cut their utilities expenses in their data centers, many of them don’t have a financial incentive to change things: 44% of the 128 IT managers surveyed in the report Holding IT Accountable for Energy Costs, don’t actually pay for their utilities. No wonder cutting back on energy can be a challenge: It’s hard to get motivated to cut costs when you’re not footing the bill.

John Longwell, research director at Computer Economics and author of the report thinks it’s in the best interest of IT managers to have utilities charged back to their departments. By including energy costs within their own budgets, “IT managers can make allies with the facilities managers who are focused on energy costs,” Longwell said. Such relationships can translate into support for IT purchasing decisions. “Facilities managers can be allies for upgrading your infrastructure to include more energy-efficient processors and power supplies.”

Of course, IT managers that don’t pay their utility bills may not see the wisdom of greener IT. But if IT managers are feeling the squeeze to cut costs, they should consider taking on energy costs within their budgets. After all, when the money is coming out of your own pocket, the motivation to get thrifty can be undeniable.

I spent three days this week in Washington D.C. lobbying on behalf of the National Wildlife Federation on climate change legislation, specifically promoting the bipartisan Warner-Lieberman Climate Security Act of 2007 (S 2191) which is currently in Senate Committee.

This bill would impose a cap and trade system for carbon emissions on utilities. Under this bill (or another cap and trade system like it) your electricity provider would be given a fixed number of pollution allowances. Every allowance equals one ton of carbon dioxide pollution a company is allowed to emit.

The number of available allowances goes down every year. If you’re a polluter, you’re required to go to the market and buy allowances from an auction (operated by the Environmental Protection Agency) or buy allowances from other utilities. Companies will have to determine whether it is cheaper to put engineers to work on reducing CO2 emissions, or to buy more allowances, rewarding cleaner energy and driving utilities to innovate.

So how does carbon cap and trade relate to the data center?

First and foremost — it’s going to drive energy costs up an estimated 20% across the board. Data center operators already constricted by huge power bills are in for even more sticker shock at the meter in the future.

Second, this means the issue of data center site selection will become even more important, as regions with large hydropower and nuclear energy options become increasingly attractive as these non carbon-emitting energy sources benefit under a cap and trade system and keep prices lower by comparison.

Third, under the proposed Senate Bill, the EPA will begin regulating the carbon offset market. That means for those of you who work for companies pursuing a green, social responsibility, zero-carbon, initiative a regulated and viable carbon credit offset system will be available.

With carbon offsets today, a corporation pledges to pay a third-party company to invest in renewable energy or plant trees that will sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. You see this in Silicon Valley today with companies like Google, Sun Microsystems, HP and others trying to offset their carbon footprint.

But carbon-offset companies are unregulated and often unaffiliated with official environmental agencies or standards. Under this bill, the EPA will launch a Climate Change Credit Corporation and will be responsible for due diligence on the legitimacy of carbon credits.

Carbon cap and trade FAQs:
Who pays for this and where does the money go? Um, essentially we all pay for this through higher energy prices. The carbon allowance auctions will raise billions of dollars that will be spent on:

Wasn’t cap and trade a big debacle in Europe? Yes, it was. Under the cap and trade system in Europe, agencies gave 97% of the pollution allowances away for free to industry. The companies cashed them in for money, charged consumers for them, and didn’t actually do anything to reduce emissions. The U.S. plan is different in that we would only be giving 35% of the allowances away for free and that percentage would drop off over time as the industry adjusted to the new economics.

How likely is the Warner-Lieberman bill pass? Not too likely. While some folks are optimistic to get this through the current legislative session, insiders say it may come to a vote in the Senate, but it will not be signed into law under the current administration.

That said, carbon cap and trade systems are in our near future as every remaining major presidential candidate in the 2008 election has recognized global warming as a threat to our environment, economy and survival on this planet as we know it.

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.

The Green Grid, a consortium of mostly vendors looking to push the IT industry toward being more energy efficient, is holding a technical forum in the Bay Area early this week. On Friday they held a Webcast with reporters to talk about some of the progress the group has made in the past year or so.

The technical forum looks like it’s going to be interesting — SearchDataCenter.com’s own Matt Stansberry will be there digging up the good stories — but the Webcast didn’t offer that much. But there was one good nugget: the group announced that it has written a peer report of a recent study on using DC power in the data center.

Back in 2006, The Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory (LBNL) ran a demonstration project comparing the use of AC power vs. DC power in the data center. The study claimed that data centers could save 10-20% on their energy costs by using DC power.

Here’s the skinny on the logic of using DC power vs. AC power. When the utility sends electricity to a customer, it’s in AC. That then goes through multiple conversions back-and-forth between AC and DC power before ending up in each server in the form of DC power. In a DC-powered system, there is only one conversion at the beginning. Since energy can be lost with each conversion, DC power proponents claimed savings.

There are drawbacks, however. DC-powered IT equipment can be harder to come by. Transferring AC power over long distances is easier because doing so with DC requires much larger wires. And there aren’t as many electricians out there who are experts in DC power.

Now there are questions being raised about the LBNL study. Though the Green Grid wouldn’t say what’s in its peer review report — which is scheduled to be released this week — there have been rumblings about whether the study compared old AC-powered equipment with newer DC-powered equipment. If that’s the case, it likely wouldn’t be considered a fair study, and the benefits of using DC power might be less than LBNL originally claimed.

It will be interesting to see what exactly the peer review study says. We’ll be keeping an eye on the issue and let you know about it.

The Uptime Institute has been one of the organizations at the forefront of the green IT movement, along with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the Green Grid, vendors and other groups. One key challenge Uptime has been dealing with is how data centers can justify energy efficiency to the higher-ups, the executives, what Uptime and founder Ken Brill like to call the “C-suite” — that is, CEOs, CFOs, even CIOs.

At its conference last year, Uptime first tossed out the idea of giving awards to those companies that went green with their data centers. That idea is now the Green Enterprise IT Awards, which aims to applaud companies that have made their data centers energy efficient.

Brill said it’s a way to get more companies, in particular executives, to realize that this matters.

“The awards allow us to give them recognition from the bottom-up approach,” he said. “Then it challenges the rest of industry to ask, ‘Why aren’t we doing the same thing?’”

The deadline for applying for an award is March 15, and there are multiple categories: systems architecture, hardware asset utilization, energy-efficient hardware deployment, facilities site physical infrastructure overhead, and green IT beyond the data center. The awards will be announced at the group’s symposium this year, which is scheduled for the end of April in Orlando.