- Green IT numbers don't lie
- Audio: Four industry experts discuss the green datacenter
- VMware Infrastructure 3.5 will power down unused servers
- Green tech doesn't reduce computational demands
- Update: Web-host company fully embraces solar
- Thinking green? Think thin
- Ignore the data-center power crisis? Don't press your luck
May 15, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Stark statistics shed light on the needs driving green computing
If a picture's worth a thousand words, how many are statistics worth, I wonder? I have some numbers this week that speak volumes as to why so many companies have green IT on the brain -- or why they should.
These figures come from management consultancy McKinsey and Company, part of a report titled "Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency," issued at the recent Uptime Institute's Green Computing Symposium. If someone at your company is pooh-poohing the notion of even investigating sustainable IT opportunities, some of these numbers might give them pause to reconsider.
$11.5 billion - The total estimated energy bill for datacenters come 2010, up from $8.6 billion in 2007. Driving that figure: The installed server base is expected to grow by 16 percent to as many as 43 million machines worldwide; energy consumption per server is increasing by 9 percent; and energy prices have risen by an average of 4 percent, according to McKinsey. That, of course, means that if you're feeling some pain now from high energy prices or insufficient power, it's going to get worse if you don't make some changes.
25 percent - The amount of the IT budget at a typical company that goes toward datacenter costs. Indeed, the datacenter is expensive to operate, with 17 percent of the costs going to hardware and storage and another 8 percent going toward the facilities that support those machines. Of course, the report notes that not all the facilities costs associated with maintaining your IT infrastructure appear in the IT budget, so it's conceivable no one at your company is really aware of how much it costs to run, say, a midtier server each year.
$1,870 - The annual operating expense for powering and cooling a single midtier ($2,500) server in a tier III datacenter. The number is $1,320 for a tier II datacenter, and it reaches $2,020 in a tier IV datacenter. According to the report, "servers are often housed in a higher tier datacenter than necessary, further driving facility costs." The point, of course, is that "cheap" servers really aren't cheap at all, so the "throwing hardware at the problem" approach isn't particularly sustainable.
30 months - The amount of time until 90 percent of companies with large datacenters will need to add more power and cooling. That's two and a half years. Not a lot of time, is it? And if you're already out of floor space or drawing all the power you can from your local utility, you're in trouble. There also may be opportunities to unplug systems that are grossly underutilized.
5 to 30 percent - That range represents the average utilization of the distributed systems in the datacenter today, which, according to the report, handle 80 percent of all computing demands. It's a fairly broad range -- but even if you're running all your servers at 30 percent utilization, you're still not getting as much work out of them as you might.
70 to 80 percent -- The utilization of mainframes that handled 80 percent of all computing demand from 1975 though 1985. It's an interesting statistic, certainly. Perhaps because these machines were so much pricier than "cheap" servers today, companies worked harder to get more bang for their buck. IBM will certainly make the case that mainframes today still offer higher energy efficiency than, say, multiple blades.
146 - Among a total of 458 servers at four production datacenters, McKinsey found that 32 percent (146 in all) were running at or below 3 percent peak and average utilizations. That means nearly one-third of these machines were plugged in, wasting energy to spin and to be cooled -- and doing virtually no work. Those machines need to be put to work or unplugged.
15 percent - The amount of cabinet space that can be reclaimed through techniques such as more efficient racking and the removal of servers that have been decommissioned yet still left in cabinets, turned on, according to McKinsey. Imagine being able to reclaim 15 percent of your floor space. That should buy you some time before having to move forward with a costly datacenter expansion.
65 percent - The reduction in physical server count you might expect through virtualization. Your mileage may vary, both for better and worse, but we've seen plenty of big wins through virtualization, leading to more floor space and lower energy costs.
55 percent - That's the average amount of UPS, cooling, and other facilities that are underutilized in a datacenter. It's not just the servers and other IT hardware draining the juice and the bottom line.
74 degrees - The temperature to which cold aisles can be set in datacenters. Most datacenters are overchilled, which is costly. Adjusting the temperature, along with some inexpensive basic best practices, can put a dent in those cooling bills.
Beyond the cost savings you stand to reap from bringing green practices to your datacenter, there are also environmental considerations. Whether or not you're concerned about your company's carbon footprint, legislators are becoming increasingly interested. Here are more figures to chew on:
0.3 percent - The percentage of CO2 emissions worldwide produced by datacenters today
0.6 percent - The percentage of carbon dioxide produced by the airline industry today
1.0 percent - The percent of carbon dioxide produced by the steel industry today
170 metric tons - The amount of CO2 that datacenters worldwide currently produce per year. (As an interesting point of comparison, that's more CO2 than the entire country of Argentina produces in a year, which totals 142 metric tons.)
670 metric tons - The amount of CO2 that datacenters worldwide are expected to emit annually by 2020
Costs, environmental impact, and government interest -- what other motivators do you need to realize the urgency of adopting greener IT strategies? Hopefully these numbers provide some perspective on where things stand and where they’re possibly headed. As to what to do about it, we at InfoWorld have several ideas here as well as in previous articles, including: employing PC power management software, harnessing datacenter heat, using thin clients, thin provisioning and other green storage strategies, and more.
You might also find inspiration and guidance from the sustainable IT projects we highlighted among the 2008 InfoWorld Green 15.
Finally, I recommend checking out the McKinsey and Company report I've discussed here, which is available for free through the Uptime Institute Web site. It contains plenty of useful guidance on dealing with these problems.
Ted Samson is a senior analyst at InfoWorld and author of the Sustainable IT blog. Subscribe to his free weekly Green Tech newsletter.
Posted by Ted Samson on May 15, 2008 03:00 AM
November 07, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Audio: Four industry experts discuss the green datacenter
At InfoWorld's Virtualization Executive Forum in New York last September, I had the pleasure of leading a panel discussion about the green datacenter with four industry experts. Although I lacked equipment to record the event, Microsoft's Lewis Curtis came prepared. He's graciously made the audio file available on his blog.
Be forewarned: It's 45 minutes long, but the participants dispensed plenty of keen observations and useful nuggets of information.
The participants included: Robert Aldrich, senior manager of datacenter solutions at Cisco; the aforementioned Curtis, Microsoft's strategic infrastructure architecture advisor and environmental evangelist; Kevin Leahy, director of IT optimization business and unit and virtualization offerings at IBM; and Jim Smith, vice president of engineering at Digital Realty Trust.
On a related note, InfoWorld's next Virtualization Executive Forum takes place on Feb. 4, 2008 in San Francisco. In addition to sessions covering various aspects of virtualization implementation, there will be a presentation on the green datacenter. Details to come.
Posted by Ted Samson on November 7, 2007 08:00 AM
October 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)
VMware Infrastructure 3.5 will power down unused servers
Virtualization, in and of itself, is quite the green technology: It lets companies use fewer servers to get the same amount of work done. But the forthcoming Version 3.5 of VMware Infrastructure, which will include the new VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5, will include a feature designed to further reduce power consumption.
As descibed by VMware, "VMware Distributed Power Management is an experimental feature that reduces power consumption in the data center through intelligent workload balancing. Working in conjunction with VMware DRS, Distributed Power Management is designed to automatically power off servers not currently needed in order to meet service levels, and automatically power on servers as demand for compute resources increases."
That's a pretty cool trick indeed, though the "experimental" descriptor gives me a little pause. Hopefully on of the Test Center analysts will get a chance to kick those tires.
But it's certainly a step in the right direction toward a dynamic server farm.
VMWare Infrastructure 3.5 is due out later this year.
Posted by Ted Samson on October 8, 2007 03:24 PM
September 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Green tech doesn't reduce computational demands
During a briefing about AMD's energy efficient quad-core processor, a curious question arose. A journalist asked if AMD was worried that it would be ultimately hurting its own sales with the release of Barcelona. The reasoning: If AMD is selling a processor capable of doing twice as much work as its previous CPU, wouldn't that mean that organizations will end buying fewer products from the company?
Similarly, an attendee today at the InfoWorld Virtualization Forum asked panelst Jim Smith of Digital Realty whether he was worried that his company would have fewer datacenters to build because, thanks to virtualizations, companies will find they need fewer servers.
The responses to these questions were essentially the same: most certainly not. The underlying mistaken assumption in the queries, intentional or not, is that companies have maxed or nearly maxed out their processing and storage demands and have no need to grow any further.
Imagine if, through virtualization, storage consolidation, and/or more efficient hardware, you've managed to halve the machine count in your datacenter. Are you going to dust off your hands, smile a satisifed smile, and declare, "Well, my work here's done. There's no way I'll ever be able to use all this space"?
More likely, you'll figure out plenty of ways to cram more machines into that space (power permitting) -- that is, assuming your company has plans for growth (and hopefully, it does).
So green technology investments will deliver more bang for your buck, as well as some breathing room as your company grows. But chipmakers, datacenter architects, hardwares vendors and the like needn't worry about putting themselves out of business selling more energy-efficient wares.
Posted by Ted Samson on September 25, 2007 08:25 AM
August 01, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Update: Web-host company fully embraces solar
Correction: In the original version of this article, I mistakenly suggested that Greenest Host was the owner of the solar-powered datacenter I discuss. The facility belongs to AISO; Greenest Host is leasing a portion of the datacenter for its Web-hosting operation.
Additionally, I reported that Greenest Host is running 600 servers. They say they've reserved enough space to run as many as 600, though at the time of writing, they are unable to provide a specific figure.
I apologize for any confusion I may have caused.
While large companies such as Microsoft and Google have gingerly plugged in to the sun's energy, a newly announced Web host called Greenest Host is fully basking in it, with much thanks to AISO (Affordable Internet Service Online).
Following the lead of other companies seeking to boast green credentials, San Diego, Calif.-based Greenest Host has set up its Web-host service in AISO's 100-percent solar-powered datacenter. The facility is located in the inland desert of Southern California where its solar panels can soak up the sun year 'round.
The appeal of being a fully solar-powered company was strong for the company's CEO Mike Corrales. "Personally, my core values tend to skew toward green application and green causes," he says. "We wanted to make it really easy for end consumers and small businesses to be able to build their own Web sites in a way that coincided with their own personal value system."
According to Phil Nail, founder of AISO, many organizations have been turning to his company's hosting services for similar reasons. "We've seen a lot of that," says Nail. "Even out of the U.K, they're really coming out of the woodwork. A lot of companies have decided to resell our service."
By day, AISO's servers feed directly off the panels. By night, they get their power from batteries that store the excess solar energy. But the company has a backup plan. "[AISO.net] has a backup generator that runs on propane, just in case there is a shortage, or for some reason, we went 30 days in a row without sun," says Corrales.
Inside the datacenter, AISO runs new AMD Opteron-powered servers, "which use 60 percent less energy and generate 50 percent less heat" than the previous generation, according to the company.
"[AISO] worked closely with AMD to make sure that we have the best possible solution for our green datacenter. Because of their willingness to literally work hand-in-hand through the entire design and development process of the datacenter infrastructure, [AISO] felt that AMD was and still is the only way to go," says Corrales.
And, of course, AISO employs virtualization (from VMWare, specifically) "to reduce cooling and electrical requirements with a 30:1 ratio of virtual servers to physical servers."
For cooling, AISO uses two Energy Star-compliant systems from Freus. The cooling systems monitor outside air temperature, according to the Greenest Host, and when it reaches 50 degrees or below, "they suck the outside air in, filter it, and direct it into the datacenter, thus saving electricity when it's cool outside."
Moreover, AISO employs redundant environmental monitors from APC. These act as smoke alarms, but they also monitor humidity and cooling levels. "In case of a cooling issue, our support staff is notified immediately. This ensures all servers are maintained in a cool environment, which will prolong the life of the servers," according to the company.
The datacenter itself is built from steel and multiple layers of environmentally friendly insulation, the company says. The design keeps the cool air in and the hot air out, thus reducing the amount of energy necessary to run the facility.
AISO is also in the process of adding a green roof, which it says will reduce cooling and heating requirements by up to 50 percent. (A green roof, essentially, is a layer of soil and vegetation atop a building.)
Moreover, the company has a to-do list of other innovative and eco-friendly projects, according to Nail. "We are adding an underground water-storage tank to recycle grey water. Next, we are installing a new solar-panel automated-washing device we created. This will automatically wash the solar panels each morning, and all excess water will be filtered back into the storage tank. We'll also be using the storage tank water to water our landscape," he tells me via e-mail.
Given the green wave that's swept the business world, Corrales anticipates organizations will be lured by the eco-friendly nature of the service. "We can have an ethically superior choice available for people, but they don't have to sacrifice higher performance," he says. "Our pricing is pretty in line with all the major standard Web-hosting options out there."
Greenest Host will open to the public on Aug. 1. For more information, go to greenesthost.com. For more information about AISO, go to aiso.net.
Posted by Ted Samson on August 1, 2007 01:31 PM
May 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Less power hungry than their PC peers, thin clients are garnering greater attention for their green advantages
Verizon CIO John Hinshaw confirmed a juicy green nugget of data in a recent interview: He said the wireless giant has reduced energy consumption by 30% since replacing PCs with Sun Ray thin clients in the company's call centers.
That will translate to a savings of $1 million per year for Verizon, once the company rolls out thin clients (or some "desktop-less" variants) in its remaining data centers.
"Power consumption is more of a hot topic in the U.S. than it has ever been," says Klaus Besier, president and CEO of thin-client vendor Neoware. "What we see with many more customers today is when they look at thin clients, they're taking more into account power consumption and [related] savings."
With their relatively lower energy requirements compared to PCs -- not to mention other eco-advantages like longer lifespan and smaller form factor with fewer parts -- thin clients are worthy of some serious consideration from companies.
Or perhaps I should say "reconsideration." Thin clients, after all, certainly aren't new, and advantages such as easier administration (fewer admin visits to users' desks) and improved security (data's stored remotely) are pretty well recognized. But thin clients continue to mature, as do the essential technologies that make them all the more viable. That includes virtualization (as InfoWorld Chief Technologist Tom Yager has noted), Wi-Fi, embedded OSes, and software as a service.
Thin, trim, and healthy
Combine all those technologies with the very real concerns over power shortages, high energy bills, and global climate change, and it's no surprise that IDC foresees steady 20%-plus year-over-year growth in the thin-client space, with shipments expected to reach 7.3 million in 2011.
"We're expecting positive growth for thin clients based on all the factors you've laid out [i.e. advances of virtualization and 10G, and growing concern about power consumption], as well as ongoing concerns about security and PC management costs," says Bob O'Donnell, program vice president for clients and displays at IDC.
Neoware asserts that companies can save as much as 90% on desktop-computing energy costs by swapping out PCs for thin clients -- depending on what models of hardware you're extracting or implementing, of course. But as an example, a desktop PC consumes as much as 280 watts of power in the amount of time that the high-end Neoware e140 burns up 48. So a company with 1,000 desktops would be spending about $62,000 yearly on power (based on the national KWH rate of $0.0849.), compared to around $10,500 for the clients, according to NeoWare. Savings: Around 50 grand a year per one thousand systems.
For the visually-oriented, here's a chart provided by thin-client vendor Wyse, comparing energy consumption of some of its thin-clients to various PC configurations:
Of course, when you install thin clients, you need servers in the server room to act as their brains. But those power savings are still significant, as noted in a recent report titled "Environmental comparison of PC and thin client equipment" by the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. "Consumption is at least twice as low, sometimes three or four times lower than the consumption of corresponding PC systems. This applies even with the proportionate offsetting of the energy required by the server and the cooling power required for this," the report says.
Lower energy consumption is one of the clear eco- and monetary benefits. Another green-oriented cost advantage: the life-expectancy of a thin client, compared to a PC. "Thin clients don't need to be upgraded frequently. With thin clients, an OS release does not cause an upgrade to the client, only to the server -- resulting in far less e-waste, since the client can continue to be used longer," says Subodh Bapat, vice president and distinguished engineer for Sun's System Level Energy Strategy, which offers a range of Sun Ray thin clients. "Upgrade cycles of eight to 10 years are common in the thin-client world, as opposed to three to fours years for PCs, with corresponding benefits to the environment in terms of less e-waste."
Speaking of e-waste, Neoware's Besier adds that "Without moving parts, such as a fan or disk drive ... thin clients help companies meet their sustainability targets by eliminating much of the overhead associated with computing."
According to the Fraunhofer study, thin clients also hold a form-factor advntage over PCs, making them less expensive to ship: "They are only 35-40% of the weight of a PC and only take up 19-30% of the volume."
Not just about the green
Green issues aren't the only drivers for thin-client adoption. Jeff McNaught, chief marketing office at Wyse, opines that the new and improved Terminal Services features forthcoming in Windows Server 2008 (i.e. the platform formerly known as Longorn) will be a boon a Windows shops running thin clients.
In a simiar vein, Travid Brown, product manager for thin client solutions at HP, credits Windows XP Embedded for more acceptance of thin clients. "Microsoft has come a long way in developing XP Embedded It's the same binary as XP Pro ... and the thin-client experience now looks very much like the desktop experience. It's a lot better than it was a couple of years ago."
Another boon for thin clients: the shift toward 64-bit computing, by companies like Microsoft and Citrix, will spur adoption by sweetening the TCO pot. "Instead 125 users, you can have 250, 300 users on that server, just by changing the software. That has changed the cost equation," says McNaught
Moreover, McNaught says that company's in 2006 had been waiting to gauge VMware's success on the desktop virtualization front, given it success in the realm of server consolidation, and the results look promising. "You take the existing PC, suck all the data off a hard drive and onto the back-end, pop that PC off the desktop, drop a thin client, and the user continues working."
(Test Center Analyst Randall C. Kennedy was fairly impressed by the beta version of VMware Workstation 6.0 -- especially compared to the competition.)
There's also the advancements thin clients have undergone since the late 1990s when they were overhyped, notes Wyse's McNaught. "In those days, thin clients didn't do multimedia. Screen-draw capability was good, but not amazing," he says. "Companies like Wyse have been working on technology that will dramatically improve the user experience with multimedia, with voice over IP, with USB peripherals. Users can work in a multiscreen environment."
But green fever and technological evolution alone won't necessarily reduce some company's resistance to thin clients. Thin client vendors acknowledge that there wares won't dethrone the PC anytime soon.
For one thing, the machines are well-suited for plenty of basic applications, such as call centers or other roles where users are continually using the same few apps (e.g. productivity and e-mail). But high-end apps are better left on the desktop. "You would not have a CAD/CAM application running through a thin client," says Besier. "It doesn't even make sense to try to solve that problem. The market is not large enough."
Another reason thin clients haven't seem greater adoption, many vendors say, is that companies are set in their ways insofar as purchasing that which is familiar -- in this case, PCs, despite the fact that most desktops generally run at around 3% utilization. "Today's barriers are more of a cultural nature rather than a technical nature," says Sun's Bapat.
But Bapat predicts that "with the lower energy use, lower administration costs, better security, and less frequent capital expenditure outlays for upgrades, we will see more and more organizations making the move to thin-client computing."
Posted by Ted Samson on May 24, 2007 03:00 AM
April 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Ignore the data-center power crisis? Don't press your luck
Even organizations that are ineligible for PG&E's Virtualization/Server Consolidation Projects Incentive Program (or other utilities' variants) should give virtualization, and other greener, more energy-efficient technologies, some serious consideration.
In a conversation last week, Bogomil Balkansky, director of product marketing.at VMware, outlined the "triple whammy" that's driving up power and cooling costs in the data center. To simply ignore the harsh reality of what some industry leaders have described as a power crisis would be to, well, press your luck.
Whammy No. 1: The average power consumption of an individual server has quadrupled in the past five years, from 100KwH (kilowatt hours) to 400.
Whammy No. 2: Companies have managed to double the number of servers they can cram into their data centers, thanks to decreasing form factors such as those of oh-so-sharp, cutting-edge blade.
And Whammy No. 3: Energy costs have been going nowhere but up. Balkansky said that on average, they've increased 20% since 1999.
"Under the weight of these three factors-- quadrupling power consumption, double the number of servers, and the increasing cost of electricity -- they've all compounded and lead to a situation where expenditures for power and cooling has become a significant force to reckon with," he said.
He also noted that some utilities are struggling to keep pace with companies' swelling thirst for energy, resulting in a datacenter migration from metropolitan regions like Silicon Valley and New York to destinations in Idaho and Washington State. Building a new data center is, of course, a monumental task that can take a couple of years and many millions of dollars.
During our conversation, Balkansky also noted that VMware is working on adding power management features to its product line, which strikes me as an invaluable addition. The way it would work is, it would dynamically transfer underutilized VMs to as few servers as possible during downtimes and power down the servers not in use.
That's certainly something to watch for down the road, though Balkansky couldn't say when we might see it.
Posted by Ted Samson on April 3, 2007 06:00 AM
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