Appropriately called HP Flexible Data Center or Flex DC, as I have seen it referred to, it leverages a modular design of what HP refers to as a “Butterfly,” with a core building in the center and four quadrants of data center space. Scale is achieved by adding quadrants or creating multiple “Butterflies,” essentially creating a campus of data centers. HP claims significant cost savings and a turn time of less than a year. Not too bad when you consider these are real brick and mortar data centers and not containers or pods. Will be interesting to see if this is the approach HP will take with its ES (EDS) data center consolidation effort and how customers respond to this standardized approach. Would be great to hear from any customers that are going down this path.

Read Bob’s other blog entries at Data Center Continuum.

via SAS and SATA, solid-state storage lower data center power consumption.

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

• How many data centers do organizations operate today? How do these numbers vary by company size and industry?
• To what extent are organizations planning to reduce/consolidate their overall number of data centers?
• How many organizations currently have new data center construction projects underway?
• Where do data center consolidation and new data center construction initiatives rank on organizations’ current list of IT priorities?
• How do data center consolidation and construction plans vary by company size class and industry?
• How do the number of existing data centers and spending mode impact data center consolidation?
• What role will outsourcing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models play in data center consolidation plans?
• What is the impact of consolidation efforts and corporate risk tolerance on new data center construction?
• What are the greatest factors influencing new data center construction?

Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, retail, government, and business services.

For more information on the contents and findings of this 24-page report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report Data Center Consolidation and Construction Trends Executive Summary

Energy costs in Qatar are exceptionally low (less than 2c per KWh) and this can contribute to the perception that there is a weak ROI on green energy efficient investments. However, this perception fails to take into account the lost opportunity of re-selling valuable energy resources abroad rather than consuming them wastefully on the domestic market.

So we had enough of the whys, now how do we go green? The simple magic words are “energy efficiency” and “high utilization.” We could choose to have 1,000 servers operating at 5% average efficiency or 100 servers operating at 50% average efficiency. Many organizations choose to operate one application on one server, so 1,000 applications means 1,000 servers. By introducing virtualization we can run multiple applications on shared servers reducing costs, improving efficiency and being green all at the same time.

Virtualization can enable a perfect storm of efficiency; we reduce the number of servers, thereby reducing both the capital cost and operation costs of those servers. Virtualization enables reductions in both data center capital costs and the operational cost of supplying electricity and cooling. One often forgotten additional advantage is the reduction in software licensing and maintenance costs because we are managing a smaller IT estate.

Storage is an important issue to focus on to improve efficiency; one enterprise disk of storage consumes as much as 1MWh (megawatt-hour) over its useful life. CIOs and COOs often find it very difficult to delete data that is no longer useful. Studies show that the chances of needing a document or a spreadsheet reduce exponentially across time, so the chances of you needing that 7-year-old spreadsheet ever again are close to zero. Best practice establishes that we should set a data retention policy and ruthlessly delete data that goes beyond that time.

Data deduplication can be an additional useful tool toward reducing data storage costs and increasing storage efficiency. It is a specific form of compression where redundant data is eliminated, typically to improve storage utilization. Deduplication is able to reduce the required storage capacity since only the unique data is stored. This in turn can reduce the overall footprint inside the data center. Deduplication can help by squeezing out between 10 to 20 percent more storage space just by getting rid of duplicated data.

Another valuable solution is to upgrade the data center equipment into modern equipment that has larger capacity, e.g., multiple old servers can be replaced by one modern server combining the benefit of energy efficiency and smaller space requirements. Upgrading old data center equipment can roughly increase energy efficiency by 3-4 times.

Cooling problems are clearly a major growing concern for data center managers. As per Gartner Research , it is estimated that data centers typically waste more than 60% of their energy just in cooling their equipment. Traditional cooling techniques are inadequate both economically and operationally. The solutions stemming from newer technologies are district cooling and hot aisle containment.

MEEZA data centers at QSTP leverage the massive investment made by the Qatar Foundation in district cooling, offering extremely efficient large scale plants that could not be replicated elsewhere in the country. Expert MEEZA engineers routinely virtualize customer applications, reducing the need for large numbers of servers and dramatically reducing overall energy consumption. MEEZA leads the way in IT sustainability by demonstrating best practice in green IT.

Read more of Steve’s blog entries at The Hot Aisle.

I guess it is unsurprising that ASHRAE, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, writes standards that are about refrigeration–after all, turkeys don’t vote for Thanksgiving.

Here is the article in its entirety:

Setting efficiency goals for data centers

For the past decade, we have been working to make our data centers as efficient as possible; we now use less than half the energy to run our data centers than the industry average. In the open letter below, I am very happy to welcome a group of industry leaders who collectively represent most of the world’s most advanced data center operators. -Urs Hoelzle, SVP, Operations and Google Fellow

Recently, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) added data centers to their building efficiency standard, ASHRAE Standard 90.1. This standard defines the energy efficiency for most types of buildings in America and is often incorporated into building codes across the country.

Data centers are among the fastest-growing users of energy, according to an EPA report, and most data centers have historically been designed and operated without regard to energy efficiency (for details, see this 2009 EPA Energy Star survey). Thus, setting efficiency standards for data centers is important, and we welcome this step.

We believe that for data centers, where the energy used to perform a function (e.g., cooling) is easily measured, efficiency standards should be performance-based, not prescriptive. In other words, the standard should set the required efficiency without prescribing the specific technologies to accomplish that goal. That’s how many efficiency standards work; for example, fuel efficiency standards for cars specify how much gas a car can consume per mile of driving but not what engine to use. A performance-based standard for data centers can achieve the desired energy saving results while still enabling our industry to innovate and find new ways to improve our products.

Unfortunately, the proposed ASHRAE standard is far too prescriptive. Instead of setting a required level of efficiency for the cooling system as a whole, the standard dictates which types of cooling methods must be used. For example, the standard requires data centers to use economizers — systems that use ambient air for cooling. In many cases, economizers are a great way to cool a data center (in fact, many of our companies’ data centers use them extensively), but simply requiring their use doesn’t guarantee an efficient system, and they may not be the best choice. Future cooling methods may achieve the same or better results without the use of economizers altogether. An efficiency standard should not prohibit such innovation.

Thus, we believe that an overall data center-level cooling system efficiency standard needs to replace the proposed prescriptive approach to allow data center innovation to continue. The standard should set an aggressive target for the maximum amount of energy used by a data center for overhead functions like cooling. In fact, a similar approach is already being adopted in the industry. In a recent statement, data center industry leaders agreed that Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is the preferred metric for measuring data center efficiency. And the EPA Energy Star program already uses this method for data centers. As leaders in the data center industry, we are committed to aggressive energy efficiency improvements, but we need standards that let us continue to innovate while meeting (and, hopefully, exceeding) a baseline efficiency requirement set by the ASHRAE standard.

Chris Crosby, Senior Vice President, Digital Realty Trust
Hossein Fateh, President and Chief Executive Officer, Dupont Fabros Technology
James Hamilton, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer, Amazon
Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President, Operations and Google Fellow, Google
Mike Manos, Vice President, Service Operations, Nokia
Kevin Timmons, General Manager, Datacenter Services, Microsoft

Read more of Steve’s blog entries at The Hot Aisle.

A clunker starts off with a ceiling height that is too low for hot air to separate out and migrate towards the CRAC units without too much mixing. The plenum under the raised floor is shallow and clogged with cables and other detritus choking off airflow from the CRACs. The floor tiles are perforated and have low airflow characteristics. The cabinets are all lined up like a schoolroom: front to back to front to back. You could cook turkeys in the back row. The CRAC units are low capacity and that capacity is exhausted. Naturally, the boss wants you to install some 10KW racks in a hurry for a critical business project.

What can you do?  Say “no way?” Offer a co-location option in a commercial facility as an option? Start looking for a new job?

I bumped into a possible solution a few days back on Twitter when I connected with Mary Hecht-Kissell (@PR_Strategies) who looks after Coolcentric. The problem set, defined above, that makes a clunker data centre is all about getting enough cold into servers to remove the excess heat. Every element in the clunker conspires to make delivering more cold air virtually impossible. That’s where the Coolcentric solution makes a difference. It delivers cold water right up against the servers. It adds additional cooling capacity that enables that set of additional 10KW (or more) racks to be installed in a data centre that seemed like a lost cause. It’s a fairly simple piece of technology that has been well engineered to be retrofitted to most types of existing cabinets. It’s a water-cooled door.

The water-cooled door is fitted onto the back of the rack so that the hot air exhausting out of the cabinet gets chilled immediately and very efficiently. Liquids are about 4000 times more efficient at removing heat from a server than air, so these water-cooled doors can remove significantly more heat with very low pumping energy.

One smart way to think about it is that the water-cooled door acts like a mini, contained hot aisle for environments (like our clunker data centre) where cabinet alignment, roof height, and plenum problems make hot aisle containment impossible.

Sounds like a pretty decent alternate to semtex!

Read more of Steve’s blog entries at The Hot Aisle.

The advisory from John Kerry’s office (he chairs the subcommittee) says, amongst other things, that the meeting “will also address how firms in the information and communications sectors are driving change and how government as consumer and regulator can help drive incentives to innovate.” Whatever your politics, it would be churlish not to wish such efforts well. And I was intrigued, but not surprised, to see EMC involved. The company is trying hard, and making good strides, to become something of a model corporate citizen. It has instituted a host of sustainablility practices, but rather than repeat what Steve has already covered, I’m going to mention one that is a tad parochial – to both EMC and ESG – and entirely relevant to this topic.

EMC’s IT organization has for some time been working vigorously to ‘practice what it preaches;’ ESG’s Lab Practice VP, Brian Garrett, and I worked last year to investigate and document EMC’s overall internal IT efficiency efforts…which range from instituting far higher levels of server virtualization, to storage (and server!) tiering, deduplication and solid state usage, all the way to imaginative power and cooling consumption reductions, as well as using a cloud computing model where appropriate. It is an impressive – and ongoing – effort and EMC is sharing the best practices it has learned, developed and enjoyed. It is sustainability at work - good for the IT organization, the planet and helpful to EMC’s bottom line. That kind of win-win-win is what can be achieved and is hopefully what the government will learn from Kathrin and others, and then find ways to encourage. This internal IT example and its other extensive corporate efforts suggest that EMC can be a fine witness to the subcommittee’s work.

Read Mark’s other blog entries at The Business of Storage.

Join Steve O’Donnell for a live data centre summit on the 21st April 2010 at 13:00 GMT, 8:00 EST.

Read Steve’s other blog entries at The Hot Aisle.

• Introduction of Flash Memory components as Solid State Disks
• Serial ATA (SATA) disks becoming popular and growing in capacity (2TB soon)

There are lots of other disk technologies around like Fibre Channel and SAS but SSD and SATA are getting the big press and are taking market share.  You might ask why? Disks in a data centre use power day and night, 365 days a year. A typical disk (Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 147GB SCSI) uses about 18W. In a data centre that means that its lifetime (5 years) power consumption including cooling and power protection (PUE 1.6) is likely to be 1.26 MWh. At 10c per KWh that equates to $126 per disk. So for 1PB of storage the lifetime cost of power will be $860,000 not including capital plant.

So getting the power that disks use down to a reasonable level is important. The formula that engineers quote for power consumption is:

Power ∝ Diameter ^4.6 x RPM ^2.8

So if we use large physical disks like in the old days where 8″ and 14″ were common disk formats we get 7717 times more power needed to drive a 14″ disk than a smaller 2″ one.

So the world is moving to smaller and smaller disks to reduce power demand, reduce heat output and deliver increased densities.

Spin speed has a similar impact so low spin speed disks use a lot less power than their high speed equivalents.

Slow spin speed, small disks use less power than larger high spin speed disks.

As the price of SSD continues to drop, the high spin speed disks that we use for high IOPS solutions will increasingly become replaced with SSD, whilst capacity will be served by low spin speed SATA migrating the storage world to Flash and Trash.

Inevitable and proved by the maths.

Click here for the PowerPoint slide.

Click here for the full ESG Research Report: 2010 IT Spending Intentions Survey. ]]> http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/01/most-important-it-priorities-for-2010-by-industry/feed/ 0