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

Move Over PUE – Here Comes FVER!

PUE is a good data centre efficiency measure, but Peter Hopton thinks FVER might go one better
 

On August 15, 2012 by Peter Hopton, Iceotope 0

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.

How much do you know about green tech? Try our quiz!

Techweek Europe
15  Aug 2012

Building a better data centre

 Richard Barrington, chief sustainability officer at Iceotope

 

Increasing demands of a growing population coupled with energy intensive lifestyles leads to major challenges for those who source, produce, distribute and consume energy.

 The UK is not immune to this challenge -indeed many projections suggest demand for energy will outstrip supply as early as 2015,with service interruptions affecting electricity supply soon after.

 This has major implications for the data centre industry, which within a developed nation such as the UK, accounts for more than ten percent of all energy consumed, and is equal to more than 6,000,000 households and growing. Given that in some data centres more than two thirds of the energy is used for cooling, and in almost all cases the heat generated by the ICT is treated as waste, fundamental changes need to be made.

 A number of industry initiatives have attempted to tackle this problem and develop best practice, for example the Green Grid or the EU Code of Conduct, but these guidelines are all predicated on the current paradigm of blowing chilled air on hot electronics, with some forays into using ‘outside air ’,sometimes known as ‘free air cooling ’ ((climate and ambient temperature permitting).This system still treats the heat as waste, rather than a potential resource, and still requires large amounts of supplementary equipment.

 However, there are alternatives available now which address these concerns. Relocating data centres to the Arctic Circle is becoming a popular choice for many businesses but may not be feasible for those with regulatory concerns or geographical restrictions. Next generation liquid cooling, on the other hand, negates the need for such a move and provides free cooling regardless of location.

 Liquids are known to be up to 4,000 times more efficient at capturing and transferring heat than air, using much less energy to do so. However, adoption of liquid cooling has been patchy at best, either seen as a high end solution in super computer environments or as a bolt on within existing facilities.

 The reality is that the current generation of liquid cooling has failed to gain mass market acceptance because it has not been designed with the current operational requirements of the data centre in mind, that is modular, scalable, highly available, fully redundant and safe -until now.

 

A new blueprint

Rather than tweaking or re-engineering existing systems, disruptive technologies are transforming the entire data centre industry with wholesale changes at even the most basic level.

 In the current design process, consideration must be made for a variety of supplementary systems as well as the core IT servers. For instance, traditional facilities require chiller equipment, heat removal (and disposal)systems and separate heating apparatus. Even where free air cooling is possible for a percentage of the time, a complex and expensive Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) infrastructure is still required.

 In contrast, next generation liquid cooling systems, like those established by Iceotope, completely remove the need for chiller equipment or CRAC -freeing up large amounts of space and reducing the energy required to cool ICT by 97%.This also improves data centre density and means that the equipment used runs silently, enabling systems to be positioned inside busy populated locations such as research facilities with no detrimental effects.

 The flexibility of such spaces is vastly increased and there is less requirement for large, custom built structures. This solution also means that the heat harvested from the system may be used in the heating of local buildings, not only reducing the environmental footprint of the IT facility itself, but also of other facilities able to make use of the heat.

 By making use of an environmentally sound inert coolant,3M Novec, Iceotope ’s system is not only capable of reducing cooling power costs, but allows data centres to run neutral in terms of heat. The Iceotope Platform operates with facilities input temperatures of up to 45 °C, conforming to The American Society of Heating Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers standards (ASHRAE)as ‘W4 ’,the optimum temperature for liquid cooling. This temperature is key to providing free cooling anywhere on the planet, as the capability of taking such high input temperatures, whilst still being able to keep electronics cool, makes this system capable of functioning in even the most severe  conditions. In countries that experience extreme temperatures or even in equatorial and desert regions, where heat is always a major concern for compute environments,next generation liquid cooling is able to resolve such problems and still provide 24/7 free cooling.

 The next generation liquid cooling described in this article is set to disrupt the economics of the data centre industry in a major way. Given the potential energy and cost savings, this technology is not just innovative, it could force the market to rethink data centres all together.

 

30 July 2012

Connecting Industry

Hardcore Becomes LiquidCool, Eyes Server Market

By Rich Miller

 Hardcore Computer is retooling its business to focus on licensing its liquid cooling technologies for servers and high performance computing. As part of that shift, the company is changing its name to LiquidCool Solutions and will discontinue manufacturing PCs, workstations and servers.

 Hardcore, best known in the data center sector for its Liquid Blade immersion cooling system, has adopted a contract manufacturing model, with research and development and prototype work still done in house. The company plans to license its technology and intellectual property to server makers,with an eye toward other markets down the road.

 'The name LiquidCool connects the company to our heritage of pioneering total liquid submersion cooling for electronics and calls attention to our continued advancements in cooling innovations,' said Rick Tufty, Vice President of Engineering, LiquidCool Solutions. 'With a powerful IP portfolio and a continued focus on breakthrough research and development in cooling technologies, LiquidCool is positioned to deliver market-leading performance for a variety of markets.'

 

More Players Eye Liquid Cooling Opportunity

The market for liquid cooling has traditionally been concentrated in supercomputers and high-performance computing. But interest in immersion cooling has picked up in recent years as high-density server deployments have pushed the boundaries of cooling systems at data centers that historically have used of air cooling. Green Revolution has deployed its immersion cooling to a core group of customers, while Iceotope and Asetek have also entered the market in recent months.

 Hardcore initially specialized in water-cooled PCs,offering additional cooling capability for users who seek to 'overclock' processor speeds for performance gains. In 2010,the company adapted its liquid-cooling technology for PCs to the server environment. Liquid Blade immerses the blades in Hardcore’s Core Coolant -a clear dielectric fluid that is odorless and biodegradable. The submerged servers eliminate the need for rack-level fans, and would require only enough room air conditioning to keep staff comfortable.

 Liquid cooling provides a more efficient heat transfer than air, and offers potential savings to companies that can commit to a liquid-cooled design. Liquid Blade ’s submerged servers eliminated the need for rack-level fans, and required only enough room air conditioning to keep staff comfortable. The system also required no specialized fire protection systems for the servers, since all the blade components are submerged.

24 July 2012

Data Center Knowledge

Budget 2012 - Iceotope States Environmental Sustainability and Fiscal Responsibility can be mutually

Yesterday’s budget announcement saw George Osborne highlight the UK’s commitment to renewable energy, and announce that the Government will consider replacing the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC). However, the Chancellor failed to demonstrate the ‘clear commitment’ to the green economy that many suggested he would.

Peter Hopton, CTO of Iceotope, has made the following comments on the budget announcement, and what this will mean for the future of green IT. “Yesterday’s budget needed to address the interests of both businesses and the green community, by stimulating economic growth, and encouraging a resource efficient economy. However, instead of this, the announcement confirmed the Government’s beliefs that the needs of businesses and the environment are incompatible, highlighting that support for future innovation in the green sector comes secondary to cost benefits. Osborne’s stated the Government intends to simplify the CRC, or indeed replace the scheme with an alternative environmental tax, but he failed to state what such a proposal would accomplish in a broader sense. We desperately need systems that are both fair to operators, and internationally competitive, but also those that encourage and incentivise energy and carbon efficiency.” “In the Chancellor’s speech, there was little on future incentives for businesses to adopt green policies, or focus on their environmental impacts at all. The Government needs to recognise that green initiatives and innovation can lead to financial savings, and helping to set standards to reduce energy consumption can not only help improve environmental credentials, but can also help significantly cut costs.” datacentre.me 23 March 2012

It's cooler to soak your servers

What's going on in networking, operating systems, servers, storage and data centres?
Soaking your servers to keep them cool is not a new concept. Cray was doing it way back in the 1980s with the Cray-2. Wikipedia tells us that its use of liquid cooling led to the Cray-2 being given the nickname Bubbles, and to gags including "No Fishing" signs, cardboard depictions of the Loch Ness Monster rising out of the heat exchanger tank, plastic fish inside the exchanger.

I suspect that Iceotope, which has spent eight years developing a new form of immersive liquid cooling for servers, won't give rise to such levity. We're much more serious about this stuff now. Ahem.

Iceotope's CTO and founder Peter Hopton recently took me through the system which he claimed can save half of your datacentre energy costs.

The company sells cabinets of modules containing Supermicro server motherboards and all the parts that constitute a server, apart from spinning hard disks. "In the module are hot-swap, leakless water connectors that go into water backplane," Hopton said. "You never see water."

Each module is a server is encased in a leak-proof box filled with 3M's Novec 7300. On heating, this inert liquid expands 10 times more than water and so generates convection currents that carry the heat away, aided by a chimney effect created by the internal shape of the box. It convects very fast – up to 6 cm/sec according to Hopton -- and is less viscous with a lower surface tension than water, which enables it to reach the parts that water might not.

The module has a large bore water channel within a second compartment which forms a heat transfer plate. It plugs into a backplane which connects it to a closed-loop water system that includes a pair of redundant heat exchangers. Hopton said that the heat transfer plate inside the module was designed using principles of CFD to maximise convection. Water passed through the heat exchangers’ building sides can then exhaust heat into the outside world.

The advantages of Iceotope's system are that liquid is obviously much more efficient at heat dispersal than air -- water is about 3,000 times better, for example -- and that needs only a 72W pump to drive the water, which eliminates all the chilling equipment normally found in a datacentre. Additionally, the system cools all the server's components, not just the CPU and chipset.

Of course the downside is getting over the idea of filling your datacentre with liquid, to which point Hopton said:

"If it leaks, all the water will sit at the bottom of the cabinet in a tray as there's not much of it. You already have water in the datacentre in the CRAC and the humidifiers, so all we have done is brought the water a bit closer to the servers."


For Hopton, this system changes the economics of the datacentre: "There's no dust or air filtration, no chillers, no special rooms, and it's noiseless, you could put it in a library. Since our servers are protected from the atmosphere they should be more reliable, with no thermal stresses. In future, server complexes could be dirty with a concrete floor, since they're all sealed units."

Iceotope's biggest hurdle is of course the incumbents. It would be a big bet to shift to a new server design from a single, unknown vendor, let alone redesign your datacentre so radically.

Hopton is conscious of this: "Our long term goal is to build a licensing model in which other people make server units and we work with them, but we have to stimulate the market first and demonstrate there is a market for them before IBM etc will take note.

"So that's what we're doing. We will start being a customer of a board maker and build servers but then we will want global cabinet and server makers selling them through their own channels. We want to encourage diversity."

Ultimately, the cash will speak. Hopton claims that datacentre energy running costs could be cut by 50 percent, and that Iceotope servers can be much more tightly packed, as they don't need fans or space for air to circulate.

And to prove that it works, he cites a Swiss bank which has installed Iceotope servers.

"In future, you will buy a server from someone else and we are talking to server makers," Hopton said. "Right now we want to get into the commodity server market, and we can do that at a reasonable price point."

ZDNet UK (Web)

16 March 2012

Iceotopes innovative solution tackles the energy costs and environmental footprint associated with data centre...

Iceotope, the producer of the first truly scalable data centre ready integrated cooling and compute solution, is launching at CeBIT. This innovative approach to tackling energy costs and environmental footprints, combines industry standard ICT with next generation liquid cooling to deliver 24/7 free cooling for ICT, anywhere on the planet. This results in saving 97% of the energy cost of cooling and more than 75% of the mechanical costs. With Iceotopes unique liquid cooling system, all electronics are encapsulated in a sealed unit containing 3Ms Novec as the inert coolant. This reduces the power consumed at a server level by eliminating the need for any fans. Novec rapidly convects the heat away from the electronics, and then transfers it to a sealed low pressure gravity fed sub system. The heat can then be passively cooled or repurposed to centrally heat or provide hot water to other buildings, facilities or office spaces. No chillers, no CRAC, no waste.

Commenting on Novecs suitability for use in Iceotope servers, Adrian Hyner, sales manager at 3M said, Novecs safe, sustainable chemistry provides an excellent balance between performance, safety and the environment. By using an inert chemical coolant as opposed to potentially flammable solutions as used in alternative liquid cooling platforms, data centre owners can improve safety while making a dramatic overall reduction in electricity costs.

Jon Summers, senior lecturer and researcher, institute of thermofluids, at Leeds University, has been instrumental in the research into Iceotopes new system. "It is time that efforts were focused on the efficiency of internal cooling of information systems in data centres, said Summers. Using air is an easy engineering option, but certainly not efficient. Therefore the use liquid encapsulation of the electronics in the Iceotope system offers an elegant engineering solution with a definite efficiency gain." Researchers predict that the worlds data centres will consume 19% more energy in the next 12 months than they have in the past year, said Peter Hopton, founder and CTO of Iceotope. In order to try to combat this increase in power consumption, we need to start looking to technology that will help to not only reduce environmental footprint, but also help reduce the costs associated with power and cooling in data centre and HPC environments. Through our research with Leeds University and 3M, were excited about the impact our solution will have on data centre design and location, and were looking forward to demonstrating the new product at this years CeBIT.

DataCentre Solutions (Web)

08 March 2012