Friday 31 August 2012

Green Options



Datacentres eat power like there's no tomorrow. They consume a widely accepted estimate of somewhere close to 2. 5 per cent of all the power produced in industrialised countries. But this figure needs to stabilise, at the very least. This is partly because datacentre running costs are under pressure from end users, and partly due to international carbon reduction commitments. Number-crunching financial services companies
tend, of course, to be the largest consumers of datacentre services: after staff, IT consumption is usually the biggest cost faced by the sedor. So outside of Silicon Valley, banks and insurance companies can make a huge contribution to creating' greener' and therefore more efficient datacentres.
According to the Uptime Institute, the datacentre research group, it costs $23,000 per kilowatt, on average, to build a datacentre. Half of that cost however, is not spent on processing or securing information - it goes on keeping servers cool. Some trailblazers have already taken great strides to reduce their cooling expenditure. In January of last year, Deutsche Bank opened an 'Eco Data Centre' in the New York City area that, among other things, takes advantage of outside air for free cooling. Closer to home, Next generation Data (NGD) Europe has built one of the world's largest and greenest facilities, available to large
corporations, which registers a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.2. The Uptime Institute recognises 1.8 as the average PUE figure. And just yards outside the City of London. lnterxion has built a new facility, LON2, which is powered exclusively by renewable energy and saves on power by only cooling parts of server stacks as and when needed with computer room air conditioners (CRAC). lt runs a PUE rating of 1.4. Outsourced cooling Despite these advances, concerns over an overburdene <1 and increasingly expensive energy supply in the UK have led some users to look at relocation options. Verne Global is one company that caters for those looking for cheaper building options and lessening the risk of being a victim of future power spikes. The firm operates a datacentre campus in Keflavik, Iceland. Housed in
a former NATO air base, and powered by geothermal and hydroelectric energy, it is the first large-scale datacentre that takes advantage of the country's unique environmental circumstances. "Iceland has some truly unique solutions, • says Verne Global's vice president, Issac Kato. "(lt) can offer something called free
cooling all year round, 24 hours a day, so we reduce all carbon emissions associated with datacentre power consumption. We also have very long-term stable priced power contracts that we can pass on to customers for up to 20 years (matched with annual inflation). So we offer a low energy risk to our customers.·
"We have created one of the most economically and environmentally friendly datacentres in the world and passed onto our customers a 50 per cent or more energy reduction and a massive reduction in carbon footprint," he adds. Apart from high frequency trading, most system applications can be handled in Iceland. Kato says that Verne has already had one investment bank tell it that 60-80 per cent of all the bank's
applications could be placed in Iceland. "That includes anything that is computer intensive like grid-computing, virtual desktops and just general email," he says. No place like home Despite the obvious appeal of such a low cost model, reservations persist as to whether relocation is a sensible or even viable option.
"The Ideology of server hugging still exists." says Graeme Creasey. director of operations at Interxion.  People like to be close to their servers. And with very recent advances 10 server temperature control. they can remain so, he argues. "We utilise Adiabatic cooling (an evaporative cooling process) on the chillers
a lot more now because the technology has Improved that much. We're seeing less people moving out to places like the Nordic regions." What's more, relocating abroad involves an initial expense and Liquid cooling Staying closer to home could become even easier in the future with the advent of improved liquid cooling. This new solution not only saves on energy, but also cuts out thermal shocking; a term that describes the increased server failure rates caused by blowing cold air on hot components. Richard Barrington, chief sustainability officer at Icetope, says the firm has researched the area for a while and has now adopted a new approach, which looks to maintain a constant temperature in a datacentre, rather than cooling its
components when needed. "We immerse the whole of the motherboard, in a liquid called Novec, made by 3M," he explains. "lt has some great properties: it's brilliant at putting out fires, it doesn't conduct electricity and it's far more efficient than air at capturing heat and moving it. You can retrofit a datacentre and get cooling as close to the processing as possible." Icetope doesn't just use Novec to keep as constant a
temperature as possible, however. It then harvests the heat and allows a datacentre to actually re-use the heat. to maintain a general building temperature, for example. "It's a completely closed environment where we're not making massive demand on energy and we can cut the energy consumption of a datacentre
by 50 per cent," says Barrington. Liquid cooling won't work for everyone, however. As 40's Barker points out, in a eo-location facility where there is a mixture of server manufacturers, server models ·and equipment, providers have to stay with the more traditional, air-based cooling, to ensure a datacentre is suitable for anything a client may wish to install. Saving energy needn't involve new technology or re-vamped datacentres, however, especially for those at the start of the process. Andy Hawkins, a product manager within the innovations team at 1 E, an IT effioency solution provider, says that the f1rm finds that on average, clients have 15 per cent of their servers not doing anything useful at all. "That's a significant area of waste before you start digging into anything deeper than that." he says. Reimng m non-productive servers is a big money saver. 1 E  has calculated that 11 .8 million tons of C 02 are wasted by dormant or unproductive servers each year; the same amount produced by 2.1 million cars. 1 E installs software for firms to see if each server is doing what it was installed to do, namely provide value for business through use of an   application. With the rise of virtualisation, and the an additional headache when it comes to monitoring a datacentre. pnvate cloud, the tendency for IT to sprawl out of control is "lt would be extremely difficult to relocate in order to take strong. "You can stamp on sprawl and allow people to better advantage of cooler climates, "says David Barker, technical reclaim resources which are decaying 1nto a state of un-use," says
director at 40 Data Centres. "Aside from the upfront costs of a Hawk ins. "You could argue that whatever your energy large-scale relocation, the majority of our clients visit the facility consumption is, if you can prove that it's doing useful work and to work on their equipment and are within a fairly local you're getting value from the power you're drawing, then geographical catchment area." that is good:"

http://www.fstech.co.uk/fst/index.php

Wednesday 15 August 2012

Move Over PUE – Here Comes FVER!

PUE is a good data centre efficiency measure, but Peter Hopton thinks FVER might go one better
 
Metrics, they are not always perfect, but are a useful tool for us to measure our performance and improvement. PUE is a commonly used metric in the data centre industry, but there is room for more – and one of the most promising is called FVER.

PUE (power usage effectiveness) measures the waste in supporting mechanical and engineering (M&E) equipment by assessing the ratio of overall power to IT equipment power. Despite a little marketing abuse and users moving some of their loads into the IT equipment, PUE has been a success for the industry, driving common M&E efficiencies from wasteful to rather efficient.

FVER joins the PUE queue


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Now, enter a new metric supported by the British Computer Society’s Data Centre Specialist Group (DCSG), Fixed to Variable Energy Ratio, or FVER for short. FVER is not to be ignored, it’s the brainchild of Liam Newcombe, the man who led the best practice element of the EU Code of Conduct for data centres.

FVER attempts to target waste in the whole system (software, hardware, M&E and all) like PUE targets waste in M&E. FVER assumes your data centre is made up of a sum of two loads, a fixed load that would exist if the data centre was inactive, and a variable load that would be maxed out when the data centre was full to capacity. You can use measurement of output work and power consumption to establish (and if necessary interpolate) what these loads are and FVER is then calculated:

FVER = 1 + Fixed Energy/Variable Energy

(where normally Total Energy = Variable Energy + Fixed Energy)

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Like PUE, the target score is 1, but that is unlikely to ever be achieved. Real data centres will have a higher value – and less efficient data centres will have a much higher value of FVER. The concept is described in detail in a white paper from BCS: Data Centre Fixed to Variable Energy Ratio metric (DC-FVER).
Will FVER work? I hope so – the theory behind it is sound, as normally a data centre environment’s power consumption can be modelled as approximately linear, (ax+b), the sum of a fixed load (b) and a variable load (ax) that is approximately directly proportional to utilisation. By targeting the ratio you start to think about reducing the fixed load, which means an underutilised data centre will become much more efficient.

Will FVER catch fire?

To put forward an example, if your data centre’s average server utilisation is ten percent and you are given two options, reduce the fixed load or reduce the peak power consumption whilst keeping the fixed load constant, which would you choose? The answer is that reducing the fixed load will be nine times more effective than reducing the peak power consumption.
 
Like all metrics, it’s not going to be perfect, systems like liquid cooling for example will have a worse FVER than an air cooled system despite being much more efficient – as fans are a strong (but wasteful) variable load. FVER will however cause people to think about the fans inside their servers, encouraging them to throttle down. FVER also targets software, encouraging users to reduce server power consumption when the software is underutilised.
 
In summary, FVER is a simple metric to address a complex problem, and combined with measuring other metrics like PUE and a little bit of sensible behaviour; FVER could have some big benefits for the whole industry.
 
Peter Hopton is founder and technical director of Iceotope.
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Techweek Europe
15  Aug 2012