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  • tjcanning 8:38 am on August 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: CFO, CIO, Data Center, ,   

    Who Cares About Data Center Efficiency? 

    pollThis the question I ask and it shall be the community that helps answer this question! I thought it might be interesting to see what views the folks in twitter universe have on this topic. Seems like there is a lot of talk these days around data center energy savings – but talk is cheap. Who really cares and who can take action? Let’s go to the people and find out!

    I’m using Twtpoll for this exercise. It’s a cool little on-line twitter poll application that shows up branded (just like my twitter profile). You can cast your vote and also view results at http://twtpoll.com/jr3ddd

    It’s going to run for a week and then we’ll see what new insights we have on this topic. Feel free to re-tweet …enjoy!

     

  • tjcanning 1:03 pm on July 29, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Data Center, ,   

    ASHRAE_Extended_Environmental_Envelope_Final_Aug_1_2008-1-1

    ASHRAE. Enjoy Summer.

    If you thought your data center was just as cold as San Francisco in the summer, that might just be about to change. ASHRAE, which stands for “The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers” has some new recommendations for all you cost conscious data center folks!

    “It’s ok to run a little warmer! I say, it’s ok to run a little warmer!!”

    Every data center I have ever been in has been cold, noisy, and pretty much a place to get software installed, hardware plugged in, and then get the heck out of there and have the rest of the meeting where it is warm and quiet. ASHRAE is a game changer and causing lots of interesting articles to pop up all over the place.

    So what do you need to know about ASHRAE?

    The inlet air temp range has been updated to reflect modern times. From ASHRAE’s 2008 Extended Environment Envelope document Page 1. Here’s the deal:

    These recommended conditions as well as the allowable conditions refer to the inlet air entering the datacom equipment. Specifically it lists for data centers in the ASHRAE classes 1 and 2, a recommended environment range of 20 to 25 degrees C and a relative humidity (RH) range of 40-55%

    Basically – you don’t need to freeze the data center like an ice cube anymore and you can start to evaluate a higher operating environment. It does not mean you go change all the set points over night and start cooking everything like a Weatherford fired BBQ. Naw.. you need ot be able to understand what effect these neds ranges will have and be able to plan accordingly if you plan to adopt these new recommendations. Things to consider:

    • What is my current baseline?
    • How can I measure it if I don’t?
    • How can I visualize the effects of increased temperature?
    • How do I ensure I don’t create hot spots
    • How can I adjust/refine set points to optimize?
    • Can I associate changes to OpEx expenses and show an ROI?

    It’s like a new opportunity is present with ASHRAE to determine and define a new operating environment that your data center can safely operate in, and but reducing the draws on cooling – be able to save money in the process. Makes sense to me. Of course, raising inlet temp, and based on delta T, the idea is not to be cooking the hot aisle beyond control or containment. You still need to be able to have humans survive a trip or perform work  in the data center. ASHRAE does not apply to humans.

    Are you a fan of ASHRAE’s new recommendations? Have you taken any action to realize an ROI based on these new ranges?

    Tom
    Fan of ASHRAE

     

    • vburke 8:26 pm on August 16, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Spot on on the human factor of the hot aisle, especially if you’ve got great hot aisle containment.

      Vern

  • tjcanning 7:50 am on July 27, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Data Center, , Green Grid,   

    pueGot PUE?

    You would think this is easy to figure out right?

    But, how come I only see major enterprises promoting their PUE? I mean we always see PUE (and it’s inverse cousin DCiE) being compared to MPG in green presentations – and every car manufacturer and individual seems to have an appreciation and understanding of MPG – so where are all the enterprise when it comes to understanding their PUE?

    Check Grid Grid for the definition and we’ve got the cool chart on the left and it looks pretty simple. Just get your numbers and do the math!!! I mean the math is simple right?

    Oh… Now I see where the problem lies… getting the numbers?

    From the Metrics and Measurements page you can get a quick definition or rather purpose of PUE:

    The Green Grid proposed the use of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and its reciprocal, Data Center Efficiency (DCE) metrics, which enable data center operators to quickly estimate the energy efficiency of their data centers, compare the results against other data centers, and determine if any energy efficiency improvements need to be made.

    If I dust off my old Electrical Engineering books:

    Power = Voltage x Current

    Wow – this simple right? Nope. For a lot of data centers – there still remains a lot of mystery surrounding power visibility and consumption. How do you measure and how do you aggregate across all the different data center assets (and across different vendors, console, meters etc) so you can get a picture of what the heck is going on. Don’t get me wrong – if you have a state of the art, one vendor solution – you might some luxuries that most enterprise data centers don’t – but for the average data center environment – it’s probably a big challenge. What’s happening at the rack or circuit level still remains a buried treasure. If you’re reading this and you agree – drop me a comment. Validation is a good thing!

    Confession. I use Twitter. How shocking in this day of social media! My user name is PUE_DCiE. You can check me out at http://twitter.com/PUE_DCiE. I though it would be good to share just what that user name was geared towards. Thanks Green Grid for creating this definition! Now I have a cool user name.

     

  • tjcanning 5:23 am on July 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Data Center, , , ,   

    090618-forrester-big

    Green IT 1.0 – Adopt Today!

    So, I did not invent the chart of the left – I have to thank the smart folks at Forrester Research who obviously spent a lot of time thinking about this. When I first saw it posted on Greener Computing, I thought I was looking at a traditional Gartner Group Hype Cycle and was in shock -

    “OMG! Has hype already hit Green IT?”

    Thankfully – this chart is an “Ecosystem Phase” chart (although is it really that much different than a hype cycle I ask?).

    It shows the evolution of IT technologies (which I will refer to as “Services”) from the phases of “creation > survival > growth > equilibrium > decline”. According to the post, Green 1.0 Technologies refers to IT infrastructure – so the list pretty much makes sense and should ring a bell with all of us.

    Green IT 1.0 Services

    • 10 GbE (10 gigabit per second Ethernet)
    • Clean energy to power data centers
    • Client virtualization
    • Cloud computing services
    • Data center outsourcing and colocation services
    • IT asset disposal and recycling services
    • IT energy measurement
    • Localized cooling
    • Managed printing services
    • PC power management software
    • Server power management software
    • Server virtualization
    • Solid-state disk (SSD)
    • Storage capacity optimization
    • Thin clients

    Wow! So, if you’re a top notch, on-the-ball IT person – you’ve now got a lot of things to be thinking and worried about! Life is not so simple any more – if you decide to actually engage in helping understand and optimize these services within your IT infrastructure. The question I ask is,

    “Where the heck do you start?”

    Any time I have seen a new technology or evolution (or sometimes revolution!) occur within an organization, it is by some smart and ambitious early adopter who decides to champion a cause that they believe will help the organization. Most times – he/she does this on their own time and by pure passion. With so many Green IT 1.0 Services – does this theory still hold water? Or does senior management need to stand behind IT and be supportive of the time it takes to investigate these proposed services?

    With so much focus on Corporate Sustainability, Green IT,  Green *.*, PUE and other flag waving initiatives – I really hope that IT folks are given the  extra cycles and rewards to spend the time it takes to explore and evaluate Green 1.0 Services.

    After all, Green IT 2.0 is just around the corner…

    The full report, “TechRadar For I&O Professionals: Green IT 1.0 Technologies, Q2 2009″ is available for purchase from Forrester Research.

    Add Comment
     

  • tjcanning 11:29 am on July 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Data Center, , ,   

    37454602Green IT. It Starts With Research.

    Time to go back to school and get up to speed on the current state of Green IT. I’m very curious about the current state of mind of  “Green Data Center Professionals”. After Goggling around a bit, I came across John Lamb’s book titled “The Greening of IT” and though this would be a good topic for my second blog post. Just so you know – this blog is NOT going to be a book review site – but this book does serves well as a soft introduction to helping both myself and IT folks get started.

    Why do I like this book? I haven’t even read it yet – but I liked the quick on-line description. If you read “Greening Your IT, for newbies and Experts” it provides a nice intro to the book and it was this walk through that got me thinking. Thanks to Matthew Wheeland for that post. I have picked up the book and it is currently queued for my reading.

    Getting started on anything is always easier if you have a plan or map right? Greening the data center shouldn’t be any different. But it’s new, maybe not everyone is on board and the first few steps might take someone who we refer to as ‘an early adopter” to get things rolling. Reminds me of the early software infrastructure days. I lived through those times  as IT moved to J2EE app servers, service oriented architects promoted the value of re-usable web services and those early adopters became the early transformers (sorry, nothing to do with the movie!) of the organizations. They took small departmental steps to help realize the value of their efforts which would scale and have an overall corporate impact. Sounds like the same could apply to realizing data center efficiencies as we test out a single cold aisle containment, or a fine grained measurement of a single rack for power and thermal usage. Those single tests and benefits could scale out and have a tremendous corporate impact on the bottom line. Ask anyone looking to sign off on any project today – and it has to impact the bottom line!

    Simple steps are key today in any complex process. SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) proved that real quickly. Maybe we can learn from that process as we investigate Green IT.

    As mentioned by John Lamb in the above post – the process of “Greening IT” should be broken up into some simple and measurable steps:

    • Get educated – Goggle “Green IT”
    • Communicate internally – Get executive sponsorship
    • Baseline – Know where you are today
    • Plan – Map out server consolidation/chiller analysis/temp increase tasks

    I get this plan. It is simple. You can measure it and gain support for it internally. But how many folks are actively doing this today?

    This is the magic question I hope to answer over time!

     

  • tjcanning 12:52 am on June 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Data Center, , , ,   

    community-globeCSR. Getting started…

    Welcome to my first blog post. CSR is a key topic topic these days. According to wikipedia – CSR is defined as

    Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), also known as corporate responsibility, corporate citizenship, responsible business, sustainable responsible business (SRB), or corporate social performance,[1] is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model. Ideally, CSR policy would function as a built-in, self-regulating mechanism whereby business would monitor and ensure their adherence to law, ethical standards, and international norms. Business would embrace responsibility for the impact of their activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere. Furthermore, business would proactively promote the public interest by encouraging community growth and development, and voluntarily eliminating practices that harm the public sphere, regardless of legality. Essentially, CSR is the deliberate inclusion of public interest into corporate decision-making, and the honoring of a triple bottom line: People, Planet, Profit.

    CSR applies to the data center as helping green the data center definitely affects the bottom line. Power and HVAC requirements for any enterprise data center need to be visualized and analyzed as part of the overall corp sustainability initiatives. More to follow shortly…

     

    • euandus3 9:43 pm on October 25, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Interesting post. I wonder whether companies don’t use CSR as window-dressing…when it is convenient for them. Hence I think the movement should not be a substitute for government regulation. I write about this at: thhttp://euandus3.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/corporate-social-responsibility/

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