Guest View: What's It Mean to Be Green?
By Stephen Garrison
June 15, 2008 — While the notion of being “green” has become a familiar marketing concept, it offers IT managers very little in the way of tools for reducing escalating power and consumption needs and costs. The key to reducing power consumption in the data center is through an eco-efficient approach that integrates environmental, social responsibility and economic impact analysis into the planning and design processes. Additionally, the industry needs to create a clearly defined set of metrics that will allow organizations to conduct an apples-to-apples comparison of systems and infrastructure equipment.
The concept of “green” is a bit misleading in regards to computing and networking equipment, considering it requires power, and as new features are added, such as PoE, or system density increases, even more power is needed. Unless it is powered by a truly renewable energy source, it is a fact of operating a data center that you will not be “green.” Instead, a data center can aspire to be eco-efficient—implementing best practices in design, systems and technologies to optimize power consumption.
Design is crucial to establishing a solid foundation to build an eco-efficient data center. Considerations include not only how to lay out the racks, but more fundamentally, where to locate them. Whereas IT managers previously looked at how close a data center was to a major metropolitan area, today they should look at how close a potential data center is to renewable energy that can either power or cool the data center.
At the system level, much work is being done by vendors to reduce power consumption, including using lower voltage components and passive copper backplanes. Advanced management features that allow customers to tune power needs are also providing a way for enterprises to control escalating power needs. At the computing level, servers are increasingly being packaged with self-cooling systems, eliminating a significant source of power consumption.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, technologies are crucial to ultimately optimizing the data center. Virtualization is at the top of that list for its ability to reduce, in a drastic and immediate way, the number of servers in a data center. While virtualization is in widespread adoption, it is not the only technology means through which data centers can control power consumption.
Network automation offers another set of tools. By automating the data center infrastructure, for instance, a load balancer could tell both an underutilized server and the port on the switch that is connected to that server to power down. When traffic increased, the load balancer would then tell all components to power up. It is this type of network planning that will allow IT managers to gain an immediate reduction in power consumption without a wholesale data center upgrade.
Despite all good intentions to build a data center that utilizes energy-efficient best practices, without a standardized metric or measuring stick it is virtually impossibly to plan for power consumption within the network, much less make an informed decision about which products will work within given business requirements.
While industry groups like the Green Grid are attempting to standardize metrics, networking vendors have instead engaged in a battle of funny math to demonstrate how their products are greener. This creates a high level of confusion at the customer level and prevents any real analysis of power consumption or eventual reduction.
Consider the following number: 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh). This represents the amount of energy consumed by the nation’s data centers in 2006, according to a recent report by the EPA. It’s the equivalent of 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2006—or US$4.5 billion spent on powering up and cooling. In addition to mounting costs, a vast majority of businesses have reported server and storage downtime, outages and, ultimately, loss of customer satisfaction and revenue as a result of power and cooling-related issues, according to a survey by industry analyst group IDC.
Power and cooling are serious issues for organizations today and will only get worse unless the industry moves away from muddying the waters with claims of being green, to a serious discussion focused on how to best help IT managers build more efficient data centers. Through eco-efficient optimization, a typical data center can reduce energy costs by as much as 50 percent—or $400,000, according to IDC.
Stephen Garrison is a vice president at Force10, a company that builds and secures high-performance networks.
Related Search Term(s): Cooling, data centers, green computing, power
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