Tuesday 25 September 2012

Damned Statistics...



Do you know your PUE from your FVER? Energy metrics are now regarded as a key means of demonstrating your 'greenness'. But which system should you be considering?

Popular efficiency metrics such as PUE (power usage effectiveness) have undoubtedly been successful in getting the data centre industry to wise up to the problem of energy efficiency. However, while many organisations have followed its principles with rigour, its popularity has led some in the industry to 'juke' the stats, rendering hollow figures, rather than useful efficiency measurements.

This was one of Greenpeace's main concerns in its 'How green is your cloud report' (featured in Green IT), as businesses were able to provide low PUE figures, it stated, without actually being energy efficient or environmentally responsible.

 PUE is by no means the only efficiency metric within the data centre industry, of course, but no other has achieved the same level of adoption industry-wide. The new data centre energy efficiency metric FVER (Fixed to Variable Energy Ratio) aims to change all that. Rather than measuring IT in the same way you would utility services such as water and electricity, FVER targets waste. It might serve the industry well in the future to incorporate measures such as this as part of a wider efficiency strategy within data centres - and to use any metric as only one factor in efficiency measurement, rather than the be-all and end-all statistic. "It's on the basis of PUE's success that we can now evaluate the potential of new efficiency metric FVER to help improve current efficiency measures and instil necessary behavioural changes within the industry," asserts Peter Hopton, Iceotope CTO and founder.

"Given that FVER is measured as a determinate figure from one to infinity, like PUE the lower the number, the better. This makes it likely to be understood and embraced by C level executives, as well as data centre operators."

 The premise behind FVER is simple; it 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. This metric allows data centre operators to measure the difference between the two states and, as a result, evaluate the efficiency of their systems.

LARGER IMPACT
"In crude terms, the greater the difference between the fixed and variable energy figures, the lower the FVER figure," Hopton explains "But, crucially, the fixed energy figure has a significantly larger impact on the solution than the variable energy figure. As a result, this metric encourages data centre operators to target the fixed load, rather than the variable energy, and following this method could lead to data centres operating much more efficiently.

EASY CHOICE "
To put forward an example, if your data centre's average server utilisation is ten per cent and you are given two options - reduce the fixed load or reduce the peak power consumption, while keeping the fixed load constant - which would you choose? Reducing the fixed load will be nine times more effective than reducing the peak power consumption. FVER is reflective of this, and makes both energy waste and potential efficiency gains much more visible." With technology in general, functional value is largely consistent with energy/ resources used or financial expenditure. "For example, you'd expect your television to require more energy when transmitting video than when on standby, your car to use more fuel when in motion than when stationary and to be charged more by your mobile provider for your current model than the long forgotten handset locked away in a desk drawer," he points out. The data centre industry does not follow this system, as a rule. Energy used remains at a somewhat consistent level, regardless of the 'useful work' being conducted - this ensures costs also remain high when minimal work is actually being done. "As puzzling as this may sound, what really baffles is that these facilities may not even be considered inefficient," adds Hopton. "In fact, dependent on the metrics and measurements used, they may be seen as running highly efficiently." Like all metrics, FVER is not perfect. Systems such as liquid cooling will have a worse FVER rating 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 it to allow the server to reduce its power consumption when the software is underutilised."

PART OF THE WHOLE
Ultimately, FVER should be used as part of a larger sustainability structure, utilised alongside other measures and efficiency metrics like PUE and combined with straightforward common sense, Hopton advises. "Whether there could be an efficiency metric that covers all areas of energy efficiency, or indeed whether there should be, is a debate for another time," he suggests. "If FVER can somehow help users recognise where their systems are wasteful or inefficient, this could pave the way for substantial energy efficiency measures in the future, similar to those we first saw with the introduction of PUE."

NEXT PPRIORITY
BCS data centre specialist group secretary and Romonet CTO Liam Newcombe is another advocate for FVER. "A major part of the potential efficiency improvement in the data centre is now locked up in the fixed 'base-load' power draw. Correcting this issue should be the next priority for data centre operators and the wider industry," he argues. "In an ideal data centre, whatever the power draw, when the IT platforms are at peak load, it would be zero when the IT platforms are delivering no services. The DC FVER metric provides a way for operators to measure how well their IT and site energy consumption tracks the useful work delivered by their IT platforms." Peter Hopton, Iceotope CTO and founder.

Wednesday 19 September 2012

Iceotope wins Startup Product of the Year



Guests gathered at Dartmouth House, Mayfair, last week to celebrate their achievements and the participants represented the very best and most innovative cases within the IT industry today.

This award acknowledges Iceotope’s innovative liquid cooling system, launched earlier in the year, which can provide full-time free cooling for IT anywhere on the planet. Techworld’s Startup Product of the Year award is given to ‘the best and the brightest innovators’ and is intended to predict the products and services which will most impact the IT industry in the future and business practices in general.

Sheffield's Iceotope was recognised not only for its current application within the IT industry, but also its capability to address some of the most pressing issues expected to arise in the future – including IT’s rising energy usage, the spiralling costs of running a data centre and the need to find sustainable IT solutions.

Peter Hopton, CTO at Iceotope, says, “We are thrilled with this win for our cooling solution – years of research and development have been involved, and we have had fantastic support from organisations like 3M and the University of Leeds throughout. It’s great to see this hard work being rewarded and knowing that truly innovative and disrupting technology still gets the recognition it deserves."

http://www.blmforum.net/en/blm/IT/1069

Monday 17 September 2012

Iceotope Wins Techworld's Startup Product of the Year!


Iceotope’s liquid cooling system, capable of providing 24/7 free cooling anywhere on the planet, is recognised for its impact on the IT industry.


Iceotope is proud to announce that its liquid cooling solution has been named ‘Startup Product of the Year’ at this year’s Techworld Awards – an accolade determined by an esteemed panel of judges including key members the IT press, industry analysts and experts .

Rewarding all sectors within the IT industry, the Techworld Awards honoured companies, teams and projects across 11 separate categories at the awards ceremony last week. Guests gathered at Dartmouth House, Mayfair, London on Thursday 13th September to celebrate their achievements and the participants represented the very best and most innovative cases within the IT industry today.

This award acknowledges Iceotope’s innovative liquid cooling system, launched earlier in the year, which can provide full-time free cooling for IT anywhere on the planet. Techworld’s ‘Startup Product of the Year’ award is given to ‘the best and the brightest innovators’ and is intended to predict the products and services which will most impact the IT industry in the future and business practices in general.

Iceotope was recognised not only for its current application within the IT industry, but also its capability to address some of the most pressing issues expected to arise in the future – including IT’s rising energy usage, the spiralling costs of running a data centre and the need to find sustainable IT solutions.

 “We are thrilled with this win for our cooling solution – years of research and development have been involved, and we have had fantastic support from organisations like 3M and the University of Leeds throughout. It’s great to see this hard work being rewarded and knowing that truly innovative and disrupting technology still gets the recognition it deserves,” commented Peter Hopton, CTO at Iceotope.

Thursday 13 September 2012

Conference platform for city's technology...



GREEN technology from Sheffield that cuts down on waste heat is to go on show at a political party conference. City-based Iceotope will showcase its technology - designed to cut data centre energy bills by half and re-use the waste heat they generate - at next month's Conservative Party Conference.

lceotope is one of a dozen fina lists in a competition to reward innovative startups that was launched by Prime Minister David Cameron and is backed by Fujitsu, lrunarsat and the British Venture Capital Association.

Peter Hopton, from lceotope, the founder of eco-friendly PC company, VeryPC, said: "This is a great honour for lceotope as it gives us a fantastic opportunity to showcase our technology to scores of influential people. "We knew a diverse group of organisations would be se lected in order to highlight the very best of UK innovation. "We feel that Iceotope has the potential to revolutionise the data centre industry as we know it, which is why we wanted to be included." Simon Blagden, from Fujitsu said the finalists were all motivated and optimistic people with an innovative approach and a strong understanding of the marketplace they were targeting.

http://www.thestar.co.uk/

Wednesday 12 September 2012

Liquid cooling halves data centre power Designed in Sheffield




Steve Bush
Wednesday 12 September 2012 10:03

Sheffield-designed liquid cooling halves data centre power needsSheffield start-up Iceotope can dramatically cut, by over 90%, the cooling overhead of data centres, and increases the computational density of server racks, by moving to liquid cooling.

Conventional servers are cooled by air, with fans bowing over processor heatsinks.

Resulting hot air is cooled by a heat-exchanger in the back of the cabinet, or air conditioning units elsewhere in the server room.

On top of the power consumed by the server electronics "you have to add at least 20% because of the fans in the rack, and the air conditioning can bring this up to 120% of the electronic load", Iceotope CTO and system inventor Peter Hopton told Electronics Weekly. "Some back-cooled air-cooled racks can get down 50-90% of processor power, but they struggle to get 20kW-worth of electronics inside the rack."

Hopton's claims is that he can get 22kW worth of servers into a rack, and get that heat out to the environment, with only 4% extra energy.

Behind the Iceotope cooling technique are two main ideas: keep the heat in liquid, so that air never needs to be handled, and avoid refrigeration, with its power-hungry compressors.

To implement liquid cooling, almost everything in an Iceotope server rack is different, and made in the UK.

Sheffield-designed liquid cooling halves data centre power needsThe only thing that stays the same are off-the-shelf blade server motherboards, each of which is mounted inside its own sealed hot-swappable 'cartridge', which is flooded with primary coolant - a novel liquid from 3M called Novec.

Novec is both compatible with electronics and fireproof, but its most extreme characteristic is its capacity to remove heat through natural convection.

"Novec is very convective, said Hopton. "It has high thermal expansivity - 20x more than water - and low viscosity, which means it convects 20-40x better than water."

Its thermal capacity is lower than water, said Hopton, but the overall effect is 10-15x better heat removal than if the Novec was replaced with un-pumped water.

To take heat out of the Novec, there is a secondary circuit with water snaking through a channel inside one wall of the cartridge, supplied through two self-sealing fluid valve/connectors at the back.

One litre of water per minute gaining 5°C is enough to extract 400W of heat from the server motherboard, with only 20W escaping into surrounding air.

"The meander channel is large, so it has a low pressure drop, and the pressure drop of the valve is small too," said Hopton.

The rack's cooling water comes from a reservoir at the top of the rack (which Iceotope calls a plenum), flowing into a bottom reservoir through 60 parallel paths, one through each cartridge - 48 blades and 12 PSUs.

Overall pressure drop through each path is low enough, said Hopton, that gravity is sufficient to push the required litre per minute through the cartridges.

"The only need for a pump is to return 60 litres of water to the top plenum. One 40W pump would suffice. We have two pumps - 80W in total," said Hopton.

And this is the source of Iceotope's headline marketing claim that it can shift 22kW from a cabinet at the cost of only 80W.

Sheffield-designed liquid cooling halves data centre power needs


Two pumps mean dual redundancy to keep the servers working after one failure.

For the same reason, there are two heat exchangers at the bottom of the cabinet, one per pump, to transfer heat from secondary loop to a tertiary and final water loop which takes heat out of the building.

"Water in from the external circuit can be at up to 45°C, and water out will be at a maximum of 50°C," said Hopton.

As returning water only has to be cooled to 45°C, this can be done by simple outdoor radiators almost any where in the world, providing that they are in the shade. There is no need for refrigeration and its attendant energy cost from compressors, said Hopton.

As external cooling is passive, the total energy budget is 22kW of heat per rack from the electronics, 80W/rack from the rack pumps, plus the energy required to pump the tertiary circuit.

According to Hopton, modelling by a third-party data centre simulation firm predicts that cooling is always possible for a total of 4% over the power budget of the electronics - including pumping twin tertiary loops, and sprayed water evaporative cooling water to boost the outside radiators in extreme weather.

"Even in Houston Texas in mid-summer, we can still get 45°C water back to cabinet with some evaporative cooling," he said.


ElectronicWeekly

Thursday 6 September 2012

A sustainable cooling solution for servers


A unique cooling system using 3M™ Novec™ Engineered Fluids has been launched to provide a low cost, low energy solution to prevent servers from over-heating.
Designed, engineered and manufactured by Sheffield-based Iceotope Research and Development Ltd in conjunction with 3M and the University of Leeds, the integrated server platform reduces the energy used to cool IT equipment by 97 per cent as it doesn’t need chillers and air conditioning units.
Data centres currently account for around 5 per cent of the UK’s energy consumption and it costs just as much to cool servers using air conditioning systems as it does to run them.
“Researchers predict that the world’s data centres will consume 19 per cent more energy in the next 12 months than they have in the past year,” said Peter Hopton, founder and chief technical officer of Iceotope. “In order to try to combat this increase in power consumption, we need to start looking at technology that will help not only reduce the environmental footprint, but also help reduce the costs associated with power and cooling in data centres and other high-performing computing environments.
“Through our research with the University of Leeds and 3M, we’re excited about the impact our solution will have on data centre design and location.”
With Iceotope’s innovative liquid system, servers are encapsulated in a sealed unit with 3M™ Novec™ fluids acting as an inert coolant. This eliminates the need for air conditioning and harvests the heat from 20 kilowatts of IT equipment using just 80 watts of power. The harvested heat can then be reused or passively cooled.
As the system is silent and fully sealed with the electronics protected from the environment, the need to locate servers in a ‘clean building’ away from people is reduced. This creates the added benefit of providing more flexibility for the location of servers and has the potential to reduce the costs associated with purpose-built clean data rooms.
Said Keith Deakin, principal design engineer for Iceotope Research and Development: “The system has been designed to provide a sustainable end-to-end liquid cooling system for whole data centres. The motherboard is encapsulated in a sealed module containing a Novec fluid and this is used to harvest the heat from every component on the board. The heat is then transferred into a separate sealed water channel within the cabinet.

Tuesday 4 September 2012

UK data centre vendor Iceotope suspends server chips in liquid

Liquid cooled modules that offer better efficiency launched at CeBit
The first modules compatible with Iceotope's cooling system each contain two of Intel's new six-core Romley E5-2600 processors. A rack can hold 48 of them, the company said. The modules are loaded from the front and back of the rack, which does not need the hot aisle/cold aisle arrangement common in air-cooled data centres.
While some server manufacturers take a half-hearted approach to liquid cooling, pumping fluid through the heatsinks on top of key components such as processors, Iceotope goes all-in, immersing half-size SSI (Server System Infrastructure) motherboards in Novec, an inert cooling fluid developed by 3M, and sealing them inside special modules. The cooling fluid carries the heat away from the motherboard through convection before giving it up to a heat exchanger through which water is pumped at low pressure, according to Iceotope CTO Peter Hopton.
Iceotope can cool an entire 20kW rack with a pump consuming just 70W, whereas some air-cooled servers contain fans rated at 200W or more per shelf, Hopton said. The Iceotope system warms the water by just 5 degrees Celsius, and can operate with incoming water temperatures of up to 45C, which means year-round free-air cooling is possible almost anywhere on the planet, he said.
A cabinet will cost just under £20,000, including two heat exchangers, two water pumps, two power supply units and all the necessary chassis. The first processor modules, each containing two of Intel's new six-core Romley E5-2600 processors, 64Gbytes of RAM and SSD storage, start at £3,995.

 
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The boards in the first modules come from Supermicro, and Iceotope will sell the modules through some of Supermicro's channel partners, Hopton said.

Iceotope prices its modules at 20 percent above equivalent air-cooled equipment. "We like that number because it's known that lifetime power costs are greater than capital equipment costs, and we save 20 you percent of the cooling cost," he said.

While Iceotope's servers aren't the cheapest around, Vik Malyala of Supermicro sees a market for them among the cost-conscious. "This is for people trying to bring the overall cost of operating a data centre down," he said.

Hopton hinted that data centre cooling could even become a profit centre rather than a cost centre: The waste heat in the cooling water could be reclaimed, using a heat pump to concentrate it for use in district heating systems in offices or housing near the data centre.

 
ComputerWorld UK

Iceotope touts super liquid cooling for data centres

Using 3M’s Novec coolant, the company claims it can cut cooling costs to zero.
By Jennifer Scott
ServersIceotope today announced a new technique of cooling servers, which it claims can make fans redundant and cooling costs non-existent.
The launch happened at this year’s CeBIT conference in Hanover, Germany, with the company also saying the solution cuts 75 per cent of the mechanical costs associated with cooling servers.
Cost savings on the maintaining side might be plentiful, but the set-up price is no drop in the ocean

The product uses 3M’s Novec liquid as a coolant, which Peter Hopton, founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Iceotope, called the “environmentally friendly little brother” of Fluoroinert – 3M’s previous coolant incarnation.
A water jacket containing Novec wraps around components and travels through the servers in fast currents at a rate of centimetres per second. With its low surface tension, the coolant “gets into all the cracks” to absorb the heat from servers and take it away to heat exchanges, where the liquid can either be cooled or used to heat other buildings and water within the complex.

The technology can not be incorporated into existing servers, however, and businesses would have to buy new servers – or modules as Iceotope refers to them – to install the technology.

Cost savings on the maintaining side might be plentiful, but the set-up price is no drop in the ocean.

Customers can buy cabinets, featuring six server modules – which look like blades – as well as the pump and heat exchanges, for £19,995. However, the cabinets can house up to 48 modules, which start at £3,995 for fully configured servers containing two six core Xeon E5 processors, 64GB RAM, 40Gb Infiniband and SSD storage. Users are able to choose between AMD and Intel processors.

Hopton told IT Pro the technology could soon roll-out across the data centre, with products for switches, routers and GPUs in the pipeline. He defended the upfront prices though, saying the overall benefits would save a lot more money in the long term.

“No chiller equipment is needed so when you are kitting out a new data centre, you don’t need to buy it,” he said.

“It is not massively expensive and if you need new servers… it is cost effective when you start to look at the money saved on energy consumption.”

Although he couldn’t confirm any UK customers yet, Hopton did say it was being implemented within UK data centres and the test company would be revealed soon.

  ITPro (web)
6 Mar 2012

Green IT: something smells PUEy – who let marketing near the metrics?

Peter Hopton, green IT entrepreneur and Iceotope founder, says the popular data centre efficiency metric PUE is being abused by marketeers, rendering hollow figures rather than useful efficiency measurements.
Everyone in the data centre industry and a surprising number of people outside of the industry can now tell you that PUE is a measure of energy efficiency in a data centre and that lower is better.

PUE or Power Usage Effectiveness is an instantaneous measurement of the ratio between total power consumption and IT power consumption in a data centre. As a result, PUE can and does vary over the year.

So strictly speaking if you report your PUE publicly, you should take the average over the year, no? You might, however, find that reported PUE’s represent the system’s best performance or worse – its theoretical best performance. This 'design PUE' is common in new unpopulated data centres which will have a very high PUE due to the fixed load of the cooling outweighing the insignificant IT load, a new data centre in these conditions could have a PUE of 7, which will settle down to 1.6 after it becomes populated.

Justifying a low PUE rating
Prefixing PUE doesn’t just stop at design modelling, you may find people talking about pPUE, mPUE or some other prefix that isn’t defined in the standard. This is because they are attempting to define a particular set of conditions outside of the standard of the metric in order to justify a low PUE claim. Some experts in the industry have suggested that in the case of mPUE, the m simply stands for marketing!

You also might find low PUEs being claimed by organisations that look to ignore or subtract some loads from their 'total power consumption’ such as measuring power consumption on the low voltage side of the transformer – saving them 0.05 off their PUE. Other tricks include turning the lights off or switching the UPS into bypass or line interactive mode when taking the measurements, but then flicking it back into double conversion shortly after as they don’t trust it will kick in fast enough in a power event.
And then there are designs that don’t break the standard that is PUE, but find interesting engineering work-arounds in order to reduce it:

• Some organisations are reducing their data centre cooling energy, but specifying servers with larger fans – moving the cooling energy into the IT load. It is estimated that as much as 20 per cent of IT load is fans moving air through the device to cool it

• Facebook uses lighting run over POE (power over Ethernet), which means the lighting and energy transmission losses are included in the IT load. A 25W POE device requires about 40W of power at the POE switch’s input, the remaining 15W is lost as heat over the cable or in the switch PSU

With the Green Grid having no plans to certify or involve itself in disputes over the PUE metric manipulations are only going to increase, so the next time you see a PUE claim that looks too good to be true, it probably is.

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23rd August 2012