Digital Realty Trust and PUE, two years on

In May 2008 Digital Realty Trust was one of the first corporations to go public with its data center Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) figures. At a conference in London in April Jim Smith, CTO of Digital Realty Trust, summarized two years’ experience measuring and managing PUE and DCiE (Data Center infrastructure Efficiency). You can see what Jim had to say in this video on the DatacenterDynamics TV site. A great example for all of us.

“One Schneider” has the data center in its sights

Sanef Telecoms is the first company in France to deploy a solution combining products from Schneider Electric and APC. For Etienne Mercier, project manager at Sanef, the latest power and cooling technologies deliver an improved environment and a measureable return on investment. To manage the migration of the data center to a dynamic infrastructure, monitor business activities and deliver new distributed on-demand services Mercier has deployed a new global solution from Schneider Electric baptized “One Schneider”. The objectives of One Schneider are denser, more efficient, more predictable, more secure data centers, delivering modularity, flexibility and ease of administration for the enterprise. Schneider Electric is seeking to develop an effective model covering the design, deployment and operation of the datacenter to deliver integrated, standardized responses for faster deployment and improved energy efficiency.

End-to-end data center optmization
The “One Schneider” offering brings together IT and non-IT skills from Schneider Electric itself and associated companies including APC by Schneider Electric, TAC, Infra plus and Pelco. Their complementary skills and knowledge cover clean rooms, controlled climate environments, power distribution, precision air conditioning, security, facilities management and information systems infrastructure. With the associated services offerings this represents a very comprehensive response to the key issues face by today’s CIOs as they look at how the data center needs to evolve to meet the challenges of the next few years. The innovative approach is more concerned with improving the information systems environment globally rather than seeking “point” improvements at the level of individual components. The key success measures? Reliability, high availability, and energy savings delivered by the overall deployment.

New click comparisons from Google

Back in February we reported on a minor controversy over the energy consumed by running a Google search. Urs Hölzle, Google’s Senior Vice President, Operations, has just posted new figures on the Google blog measuring the CO₂ impact of a range of everyday activities in terms of the equivalent number of Google search operations. The carbon footprint of the PDF version of a daily newspaper, we’re told, is equivalent to 850 Google searches; a glass of orange juice is 1050 searches, and for 10,000 searches you could take the average US car for a five mile drive. If you can manage 3,100,000 search operations, your CO₂ emissions will be comparable to the monthly electricity consumption of an average American household.

Insisting on Google’s green credentials, Hölzle argues that energy consumption in Google’s datacenters is less than half the industry average, and that it’s probable that your own PC will consume more energy in the time it takes to return a search request than that consumed by Google’s own systems in executing the search.

Google’s corporate Efficient Computing page takes up the subject, declaring “Sustainability is good for the environment, but it makes good business sense too”, with a five-step plan to continue improving the company’s environmental responsibility:

1. Minimize electricity used by servers
2. Reduce the energy used by the data center facilities themselves
3. Conserve precious fresh water by using recycled water instead
4. Reuse or recycle all electronic equipment that leaves our data centers
5. Engage with our peers to advance smarter energy practices

The final word from Google: “Being “green” is essential to keeping our business competitive. It is this economic advantage that makes our efforts truly sustainable.”

Energy efficiency: a question of control

On January 20th a new generation environmentally-friendly superstore opened its doors in Sens, France. Part of the Intermarché chain of food and household goods retail outlets, the Sens store is aiming to reduce energy consumption and overheads while improving customer comfort thanks to an energy management solution by Johnson Controls, baptised Econeo. “From the beginning we took the decision to use environmentally friendly technologies in building the hypermarket” says Didier Poirot, owner and managing director. “Our main objective was reduced energy consumption. The Johnson Controls solution maximizes our energy efficiency, and we expect to reduce overall energy consumption by 30%.”

The hypermarket uses cooling systems based on recycled CO₂ for a much reduced greenhouse gas impact compared with traditional cooling systems. Heat generated by the refrigeration systems is recovered and recycled to heat the store, in particular the “comfort corridors” separating the chilled/frozen food areas with higher-temperature zones for a more comfortable customer experience.

Sustainable development is part of the DNA at Johnson Controls. A range of technologies and services allowing enterprises to reduce their environmental impact covers redesign of heating and lighting installations, biomass heating solutions, integrated facilities management systems and specialized metering. Johnson Controls is now calling on European companies and the public sector to sign energy performance contracts, with the objective of increasing the energy efficiency of buildings. According to Tom Lowery, the company’s vice president for Europe and Africa, immediate action is required to cut the production of harmful greenhouse gases. “If we care about our planet, we need to act now.”

Grazing goats make Google greener

Wildfires are a recurring risk in the dry sunny climate of Silicon Valley. Businesses and householders are regularly reminded of their duty to trim back undergrowth on their property to limit the fire hazard. Google has taken an innovative, low-carbon approach to the problem at their Mountain View headquarters this year: 200 goats.

Dan Hoffman, Director Real Estate and Workplace Services at Google, explains on his blog “Instead of using noisy mowers that run on gasoline and pollute the air, we’ve rented some goats from California Grazing to do the job for us. A herder brings about 200 goats and they spend roughly a week with us at Google, eating the grass and fertilizing at the same time”.

The next step will be for Google to move into the goats’ milk cheese business. In beta, of course.

IT Greening helps save the environment and helps save money, says IBM

Newly published by IBM, The Greening of IT: How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment presents compelling reasons why businesses must establish more efficient technology practices: they will help save the environment, and they’ll help save money.

John Lamb, the book’s author, is a Senior Technical Staff Member and Certified IT Architect for IBM Global Business Services. In the book he emphasizes the importance of IT managers understanding how to create and maintain green data center facilities, in which the mechanical, lighting, electrical, and computer systems are designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimum environmental impact. He addresses both the benefits and the challenges of going Green, including organizational issues (Who Pays the Electricity Bill?), motivations that speak to executives, and logistical issues such as asset procurement and disposal and supply-chain issues.

Lamb devotes an entire chapter to virtualization, perhaps the most promising technology for green IT. He also discusses the need for standard IT energy-use metrics, adhering to the mantra “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” and includes information on new energy-efficient cooling technologies that support IT. Three key actions head a checklist of tasks applicable to all green IT projects, according to Lamb:

• Communicate Green IT plans and appoint an Energy Czar. Set up an organization to drive the effort. You may start by making one person responsible; give that person a title (like “Energy Czar”).
• Consolidate and Virtualize. Consolidating IT operations, and using virtualization to reduce server footprint and energy use, are the most well-recognized and most-often-implemented efficiency strategies of the past few years.
• Install Energy-Efficient Cooling Units. In most cases, traditional data center design called for bulky computer room air conditioners (CRAC) units that are placed on the perimeter of the floor to move large amounts of air around the data center. In-row or supplemental cooling units have been shown to save energy.

The book’s 350 pages, with 20 chapters, four appendices, a glossary and a bibliography give a thorough practical grounding in the greening of the corporate data center.

As for the book’s own Green credentials, Pearson, publisher of the book for IBM Press, has issued a Green Statement explaining that a 100% green production method was used for the print edition, certified by the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council). The book is also available in the even greener eBook format.

The environmental threat of SPAM

We’re all familiar with the number of unwanted emails clogging our inboxes, offering unlimited wealth, health, and/or happiness if we just click on this link… Well, according to research carried out by ICF International and spam expert Richi Jennings for McAfee, Spam is also a threat to the environment. In their report “The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam” the researchers estimate that at 33 TWh the energy consumed in transmitting and deleting spam is equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million U.S. homes, with greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 3.1 million passenger cars.

Filtering Spam reduces the carbon footprint

Most of the energy consumption — some 80% — is generated during user interaction with unwanted emails: opening and deleting spam, and checking for false positives. Automatic spam filters consume about 16% of the total — but are already saving as much as 135 TWh of electricity, the equivalent of 13 million fewer cars on the road! According to the report’s authors, if everybody’s home and business email inboxes were protected by effective anti-spam technology spam-related energy consumption could be reduced a further 75%, saving 25 TWh or the equivalent of taking 2.3 million cars off the road.

The future’s Green for AXA Tech

Since late 2006 Green is the colour for AXA Technology Services (AXA Tech). Every employee is expected to contribute to reduce electricity consumption and paper usage by 5% each through simple actions such as switching off monitors or printing less. But with information systems representing half the total energy budget at AXA Tech — 350GW, out of a total of 700GW — a more aggressive strategy was needed.

A dedicated Green Team
“We decided a clear strategy was needed. The first, essential, step was to set up a team in every country, with a manager whose responsibility was to define a program and get buy-in from every department to identify solutions which would make a real contribution” explains Fabrice Lock, Innovation Program Manager at AXA Tech. Lock was speaking at the Innovation Forum accompanied by Axa Tech’s Director of Sustainable Development, charged with cost reduction and optimisation of IT services, including servers, storage, cooling systems and other services. The task is more difficult than it sounds in an industry where innovation is key to success, and where continual change is the norm.

The first results were visible in 2007, with €6M in cost savings. An additional €3M in savings is expected for 2008. Amongst the initiatives, virtualising the datacenter infrastructure has avoided the need to build a new datacenter, with the associated capital and operational costs.

A breath of fresh air for the datacenter

Year-round cooling for the datacenter carries high costs, both financial and environmental. Is it really necessary? An experiment carried out in the New Mexico desert by Intel gives some interesting answers.

Intel engineers reasoned that with servers typically designed to support operational ambient temperatures of 37°C (98°F), the datacenter can still effectively be cooled by free air at temperatures as high as 33°C (90°F). The decision was made to install a test bed using 900 blade servers in a trailer facility in the New Mexico desert. The trailer was divided into two halves — one half cooled using an industry-standard approach to climate control, the other half cooled using free desert air.

The Intel engineers were also interested in challenging assumptions about the impact of humidity, dust, and large temperature swings on server reliability. No attempt was made to control humidity in the free-air datacenter, and a simple household dust filter prevented larger particles entering but didn’t block fine dust.

The results? After ten months in the desert, the 450 dust-covered servers in the air-cooled half of the datacenter returned an overall failure rate of just 4.46%, only marginally higher than Intel’s (climate controlled) corporate datacenter (3.83%) — for savings in power consumption alone which would amount to $2.87M for a 10MW datacenter. For new-build datacenters, eliminating capex on cooling systems would add to the overall savings for the corporate IT budget.

The full report (PDF) is available in a brief on Intel’s web site.

Avaya Launches Energy Saving Calculator

Green communications: flexibility and cost savings

Following Cisco’s lead, Avaya recently launched its own online energy saving calculator to help companies determine how much energy they can save by using flexible working practices.

Martyn Lambert, vice president, marketing, Europe Middle-East and Africa, Avaya, said, “We know that smarter working practices are good for the bottom line and good for the environment generally. The Avaya energy saving calculator helps companies quantify the impact their actions have both on their business and the planet.”

The Avaya energy saving calculator determines how many kilowatts of energy, tons of carbon and litres of petrol/diesel can be saved annually based on the number of home working days a company permits its staff. The results include the amount of energy saved by reductions in heating and lighting at office locations and by staff not traveling back and forth to work on a daily basis.

The calculator also suggests a range of Unified Communications solutions that can help companies achieve their flexible working and business productivity goals.