With the upcoming holiday sure to brighten the skies across the U.S. with colorful flashes of light, I thought it would be a good time to share some of the advancements in Flash-memory based storage devices. Solid-state drives (SSD) can help bridge the server and storage performance gap and decrease data center power requirements. A few weeks ago, at Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Technology Forum, a relatively new entrant into the field, Fusion io announced that is adapting Fusion-io’s ioMemory architecture to HP’s enterprise-class servers, including the HP BladeSystem c-Class system.

“Adapting this technology specifically for HP servers offers radical increases in associated performance for a broad range of applications and workloads and can dramatically improve the effectiveness of data center architectures,” said Fusion-io CEO Don Basile. “With our ioMemory architecture, we’re getting more than 200,000 IOPS [I/O operations per second] within HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades today.”

When I met with Basile for a mere 30 minutes, he shared an intense amount of information, including a variety of statistics that illustrate the power of the technology. The ioMemory technology is still costly enough that it’s not ideal for long-term archival storage, but the speed that it provides makes it valuable in the active data requirement area. Basile explained that the technology is capable of 3.2 GB/s of sustained bandwidth, with extremely low latency (50 microseconds). In terms of I/O, a traditional enterprise application server that is I/O-intensive may cost $15 to $20 per I/O versus $0.15 per I/O using the Fusion-io system.

In addition, Basile explained that all this speed is possible with less energy expenditure and less heat than a typical storage area network (SAN). Heat and power are reduced because of the lack of mechanical heat that would otherwise be generated by spinning disks. In addition to using less than 1% of the power required by a typical SAN, the footprint is minimal: 16 ioMemory cards can fit into 10U without any oversubscription. Basile noted that consumer electronics such as the iPhone have helped lower the cost of silicone chips.

HP is not alone in integrating SSD technology. Earlier this year EMC announced that it had added SSD in its enterprise Symmetrix system, and more recently rumors have circulated that the company will add it to the Clariion storage array. Sun has also announced that it will release a new version of the Solaris operating system designed to integrate flash and traditional disk-drive storage. And Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz says that it’s not just a flash in the pan. Sun’s Adam Leventhal has also produced an informative technical article outlining the technology and its optimized uses.

In the age of increasing energy costs, efficiencies in data centers are welcome, and the Flash technology is likely to play a key role in the data center of the future. If you’re interested in the topic, check out the Flash Memory Summit in August.

When it comes to data center metrics the one most often talked about is square footage. Nobody ever announces that they’ve built a facility with Y-tons of cooling, or Z-Megawatts. The first metric quoted is X-square feet. Talk to any data center manager however and they’ll tell you that floor space is completely irrelevant these days. It only matters to the real estate people. All that matters to the rest of us is power and cooling - Watts per square foot. How much space you have available is nowhere near as important as what you can actually do with it.

If you look at your data center with a fresh eye, where is the waste really happening?

Since liquid-cooled servers are at the far right-hand side of the bell curve, achieving electrical density for the majority of us is usually a matter of effectively moving air. So what is REALLY preventing the air from moving in your data center? I won’t rehash the raised floor vs. solid floor debate (since we all know that solid floors are better) but even I know that the perforated tiles, or the overhead duct work is not the REAL constraint. A lot of folks have focused a lot of energy on containment; hot aisle containment systems, cold aisle containment systems, and even in-row supplemental cooling systems.

In reality however, all of these solutions are addressing the environment around the servers, not the servers themselves which are after all, the source of all the heat. Why attack symptoms? Let’s go after the problem directly: The server.

First of all, the whole concept of a “rack unit” needs to be discarded. I’ve ranted before on the absurdity of 1U servers, and how they actually decrease data center density when deployed as they are currently built. I’d like to take this a step further and just get rid of the whole idea of a server case. Wrapping a computer in a steel and plastic box, a constrained space, a bottleneck for efficient airflow is a patently absurd thing. It was a good idea in the day of 66 Mhz CPUs and hard drives that were bigger than your head, but in today’s reality of multi-core power hogs burning like magnesium flares it is just asking for trouble. Trouble is what we’ve got right now. Trouble in the form of hot little boxes, be they 1U or blade servers. They are just too much heat in too constrained spaces.

Virtualization won’t solve this problem. If anything it will just make it worse by increasing the efficiency of the individual CPUs making them run hotter more of the time. Virtualization might lower the power bills of the users inside the server, but it won’t really change anything for the facility that surrounds the servers in question. The watts per square foot impact won’t be as big as we hoped and we’ll still be faced with cooling a hot box within a constrained space.

So here is my challenge to the server manufactures: Think outside of the case.

This isn’t a new idea really, nor is it mine. We’ve all seen how Google has abandoned cases for their servers. Conventional wisdom says that only a monolithic deployment such as a Google data center can really make use of this innovation. Baloney. How often does anyone deploy single servers anymore? Hardly ever. If server manufacturers would think outside of the case, they could design and sell servers in 10 or 20 rack unit scale enclosures. They could even sell entire racks. By shedding cases altogether, both server cases and blade chassis, they could create dense, electrically simple, easy to maintain, and most importantly easy to cool servers. The front could be made of I/O ports, fans, and drives. Big fans for quiet efficiency. The backs could be left open, with electrical down one side and network connections down the other. Minimize the case itself to as little as possible… think of Colin Chapman’s famous directive about building a better race car: “Just add lightness.” The case of a server should serve one purpose only: To anchor it to the rack. Everything else is a superfluous obstruction of airflow. No need for steel, as plenty of lighter weight materials exist that can do the job with less mass.

Go look in your data center with this new eye and envision all those server cases and chassis removed. No more artificial restriction of airflow. Your racks also weigh less than half of what they do today. You could pack twice the computing horsepower into the same amount of space and cool it more effectively than what you have installed.

Ten years from now we’ll look back at servers of this era and ask ourselves “what were we thinking??” The case as we know it will vanish from the data center, much like the horse and buggy a century before. We’ll be so much better without them.

There are a number of new products emerging on the data center marketplace to address IT energy efficiency and greening the data center. Here are two videos recorded at the recent Uptime Institute Symposium, introducing CSRware and DegreeC.

In this first video, CSRware founder Karen Alonardo expounds on the need for tools to monitor a data center’s evironmental footprint.

In this second video, DegreeC engineer Wally Phelps discusses software used to optimize data center airflow with variable fan drives.

IBM announced that it has built a data center that will be twice as energy efficient as the industry average, according to officials with the company.

If that is true, it means the facility will have a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.25, as the industry average is 2.5 according to The Uptime Institute. That means for every 125 watts of power that enters the facility, 100 of it is being used to power IT equipment.

The Boulder, Colo. facility is the latest in a string of data centers IBM has at a campus there. This newest one is about 115,000 square feet, with about 70,000 square feet of raised floor. Including the new site, IBM’s Boulder campus includes 300,000 square feet of raised floor space, which makes it the company’s largest data center worldwide.

The facility will be used to host customer’s IT equipment. Joseph Dzaluk, the VP of infrastructure and resource management, said they already have 16 customers lined up. Some features of the new facility include:

• Construction started June 2007
• Submitted for LEED certification (first IBM data center to receive certification, if accepted)
• Free cooling for 75% of the year using a water-side economizer
• Will use about 1 million kilowatt hours per year of wind power purchased from Xcel Energy
• Variable-speed pumps and motors in the cooling systems
• Low-sulfur diesel in the backup generators to help reduce emissions
• Backup generators online in under 30 seconds
• Batteries provide 15 minutes of continuous power at full load (in case those backup generators don’t go online in under 30 seconds, I guess)

Data center power and cooling services companyAPC is offering a number of free online tools, called APC TradeOff Tools, that give IT pros a way to view how infrastructure changes effect costs and performance in the data center.

“The tools answer questions like, ‘what will the ROI be if I increase the water chiller temperatures?’ or ‘what do I need to do to hit my energy efficiency or carbon footprint target’?,” said Neil Rasmussen, senior vice president of innovation for APC.

The West Kingston, RI-based company’s new tools include the power efficiency calculator that allows IT managers to generate “what if” scenarios regarding virtualization, power sizing, efficiency, power density, and cooling decisions.

Another new tool is the Data Center Carbon Calculator, which allows users to input data about their infrastructure and see the impact any changes would have on data center efficiency, energy costs and carbon footprint.

“If a company makes a carbon efficiency pledge, they can use this tool to drill down into different ways to achieve that goal,” Rasmussen said.

The Data Center Capital Cost Calculator details the impact of physical infrastructure design changes on capital costs; the Virtualization Energy Cost Calculator shows the impact of server virtualization and data center design choices on energy and space savings; and the Data Center Power Sizing Calculator gives details about the impact of server and storage configurations on IT load capacity and required utility input power.

There is also the Data Center AC vs. DC Calculator, which compares the efficiency of each, and the Data Center InRow Containment Selector, which recommends cooling options based on the data center infrastructure.

All of the tools can be accessed here on APC’s website.

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.