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Data centers are global warming culprits. But technologies are available to make them Green. And the potential RoI can help save both your company and the Earth.
By S Raghotham
The Earth is heating up, and worldwide computing is accounting for a significant part of it. A study commissioned by chip maker AMD last year found that data center servers and related infrastructure worldwide doubled their energy consumption between 2000 and 2005. Data centers in the US alone consumed five billion watts of electricity, equivalent to the output of five 1000 MW power plants. 
This level of energy consumption by data centers makes them one of the most significant contributors to global carbon dioxide emissions and therefore to global warming. ‘‘About two percent of global carbon emissions are due to the direct effects of IT usage, especially data centers. And then, there are the indirect effects because technology is used in every other sector as well. Carbon emission due to computing is becoming big’’, says Rajesh Dhar, Country Manager, Industry Standard Servers, HP India.
Worse still, says Chandra Kopparapu, VP, Asia Pacific, Foundry Networks, ‘‘Under current efficiency trends, data center energy consumption could nearly double again by 2011’’. That is, if no action is taken to ‘green’ data centers by making them more energy efficient, their power consumption could increase from seven Gigawatts today to 12 Gigawatts globally.
It is time, therefore, for IT managers worldwide to seriously consider how to make their data centers ‘Green’ by making them more energy efficient.
Says Praveen Sahai, Director, Marketing and Corporate Affairs at EMC, ‘‘Energy costs represent the second largest line item associated with data center operations today, consuming more than ten percent of a typical enterprise’s IT budget – a number that many experts predict will rise quickly in just a few years’’.
And make no mistake again. These concerns are not just for those far away, energy-guzzling Americans. They hold good as much, if not more, for Indian data center managers too. Indeed, energy is said to cost 39 percent more in India than in China and even more if compared to costs in the US. What’s worse, as Symantec India CTO Basant Rajan points out, India is facing a 70,000 Megawatt power shortage.
As energy costs continue to rise and power grid capacity is pushed to the brink, energy provisioning and consumption are emerging as critical concerns for today's CIOs, IT administrators and facility managers. Experts say the problem needs immediate attention especially in the hot economies like China, India and Brazil.
What’s wrong with your Data Center
What’s taking up all that energy in your data center? Is the IT equipment, such as servers and storage, guzzling up all that power? Or, is there something fundamentally wrong with the average data center as a whole?
The answer, it seems, is that both these are factors. The IT-led economic boom of the 1990s and since has led to ever more data centers being built around the world, and ever more servers and storage being added into these data centers. With the power of these servers increasing, their energy consumption too has increased manifold.
EMC’s Sahai points out, ‘‘While a typical server 10 years ago consumed 100W of power, the average server today consumes four times as much. Moreover, servers use about 30 percent of their peak electricity consumption even while sitting idle, which is often more than 80 percent of the time.’’
As server power consumption has increased, so has heat dissipation in the data center, requiring increases in cooling capacity. This problem has been further worsened by two factors that didn’t get much attention until recently.
First, as Intel’s South Asia Sales Director R. Ravichandran says, ‘‘In the past, we focused on maximizing the useful life of servers. While this was well-intended, older machines run less efficiently’’.
Second, the lack of modular design in both the IT equipment and infrastructure design forced IT managers in rapidly growing companies to oversize data centers and overprovision compute power. They put in more servers than required, provided extra power supply to all those servers, and provided additional cooling capacity, which in turn required more power supply.
‘‘The traditional way is that you analyze the compute requirements and then you stack up on it at the initial stages of the data center set up. This means that your current requirement could be just half of what you have installed, but this was done because it was a tedious task to upgrade your system configurations to meet growing business requirements. This led to over-sizing and under utilization of the resources. Due to this a huge amount was spent on the power consumption’’, explains Subodh Tagare, Marketing Director, APC India.
Bad data center design has compounded the energy-guzzling problem created by the over-provisioning of compute power. ‘‘Data center architecture has not changed in decades. They have continued to be built on the designs that came into vogue in the era of mainframes, although the world has moved on to distributed computing’’, explains Tagare, adding that wrong cooling designs and solutions lead to hot spots in the data center. These hot spots create a vicious cycle of power consumption by the cooling equipment.
No wonder then that in a recent Ziff Davis poll of 1,200 IT professionals, 85 percent of respondents said power and cooling in their data center were significant issues. In addition, 21 percent of respondents said that rack space in their data centers was going unused because of power consumption or cooling issues.
‘‘Businesses are now facing the prospect of power costs matching, if not exceeding, hardware costs’’, says Vamsi Krishna, Senior Manager (Technology), AMD.
So, what do you need to do to go Green?
Going Green is easy if you are building a new data center. First, you make a calculation of your compute requirements for the foreseeable future. Next, you plan a data center for modularity in both its IT elements and its power and cooling. Then you use data center modeling and thermal assessment tools and software – available from vendors such as APC, IBM, HP and Sun – to design the data center. The next step is to procure Green from the beginning – which partly means, buy the latest equipment and technologies such as blade servers and virtualization.
Once you have the equipment, you integrate it all together into high density modular compute racks, virtualize servers and storage, put in consolidated power supply, pick from a range of modern cooling solutions and, finally, run, monitor and manage the data center dynamics using sensors that feed real-time compute, power and cooling data into modern single-view management softwares that dynamically allocate resources. All that a CIO has to do is to convince the management to bear a higher upfront cost in order to go Green and gain in TCO terms over a period of time. It is that simple!
Says Karthik Ramarao, Director-Technology Team, Systems Practice, Sun Microsystems, ‘‘The biggest stumbling block one comes up against in transitioning from the existing data center to Green data center is how to do it. Green was not an issue earlier when the data centers were built. Performance, storage, space were the issues. These products are still working well and they are ensuring productivity. So, how do we move to a Green data center? There are financial implications. Most importantly, how do I ensure there is no production downtime?’’
Sun Microsystems itself managed to do so by carefully planning its Green data center initiative, and it managed to reclaim more than half the real estate from its old Bangalore data center and cut down on power consumption by a fifth even as it achieved a 154 percent increase in compute power.
It seems then, after all, that there are some low-hanging fruits that you can pluck to go Green. On the power and cooling side, it is all about cutting down wastage due to faulty design. On the IT side, it is all about upping utilization of compute power and space.
According to APC’s Tagare, ‘‘Cooling is the biggest opportunity for reducing energy consumption’’. Simple steps like ensuring Hot Aisle-Cold Aisle arrangement and using blanking panels and brush strips to prevent hot air re-circulation will prevent mixing of hot and cold air. These steps will also raise the return air temperature, thus increasing cooling efficiency. Further, removing obstructions from Supply as well as Return paths of the air will reduce energy consumption in fans.
Also, monitoring key attributes of power/temperature at rack level will help ensure that you load each rack to the design capacity, before using the next available rack. Any un-used capacity power/cooling will reduce the efficiency of the system.
On the IT equipment side, servers are the low-hanging fruit. ‘‘Several servers found in data centers are old. The storage aspects are comparatively fairly recent ones, although they too consume much power. In any case, it is easier to change the servers. From a customer perspective, if his data center has more than 50 machines, it is a prime candidate to go Green’’, says Sun’s Ramarao.
Intel, too, recommends server refresh as a major Green step. ‘‘We plan major changes in our server strategy to increase efficiency, while reducing cost and energy consumption. These changes include accelerating server refresh, implementing consolidation and virtualization, and standardizing reference designs. Because these new servers are more powerful than the ones they replace, yet consume less energy, we are able to add compute capacity without investing in a new facility, which would be much more expensive’’, says Ravichandran.
Symantec’s Basant Rajan believes that there will be increasing adoption of virtualization, consolidation, automation, and standardization to sustain Greening. ‘‘Virtualization is one key to necessary cost savings, despite the complex data center environment. Companies with server or storage virtualization deployments face low data-center spending. Also, standardizing on a single layer of infrastructure software that supports all major storage and server hardware platforms, will protect information and applications, enhance data center service levels, improve storage and server utilization, and drive down operational cost’’.
HP’s Dhar evangelizes blade servers and virtualization for Greening. ‘‘Anyone with ten servers or more should move to blades. This is the quickest way to save money and energy. Blades help realize greater compute density so that as businesses grow, you can add capacity in the existing data center rather than having to build more data centers. Also, since blades in a rack run on a consolidated power supply, they consume 30-35 percent less power. In rupee terms, data centers save Rs. 8-12 lakh over three years on that kind of power savings’’.
‘‘You have to be very focused on maximizing utilization. Any server that is being utilized less than 50 percent of its capacity should be virtualized and consolidated. In fact, using servers at less than 70-75 percent utilization starts to introduce wastage. Virtualized blades help to realize 90 percent or more utilization’’, he adds.
But what’s the RoI on Green?
AMD’s Vamsi Krishna says there is no standard formula to calculate RoI for going green. ‘‘It depends from customer to customer and industry to industry. AMD however does provide some online tools to help calculate RoI in general (http://enterprise.amd.com/Flash/PlatformPower.html).
Agrees Foundry’s Kopparapu, ‘‘Calculating RoI can vary depending on the customer’s core business values and industry vertical. However, many customers tend to look at ROI over a three to five year period.” The variables that are often taken into consideration are the rack space used, power consumed (KWh), thermal output (BTU/hr), cooling requirements (tons), consolidation of network switches (chassis), capital expenditure and operation costs over a set period of time.
Sun’s Ramarao believes that the often talked-about high upfront costs of going Green is misunderstood. ‘‘Upfront costs are not an issue from a procurement perspective. You invest roughly the same ballpark figure in procuring Green. But overhauling and repurposing the data center may be a higher cost. But that must be measured against the fact that newer machines are more powerful yet reduce the cost of power, space and cooling, which result directly in operating cost benefits’’.
Dhar agrees, ‘‘There is no direct cost associated with Greening as such. But carbon trading hasn’t yet become relevant, but that’s where economic value lies. Currently, therefore, RoI is on energy efficiency. Green data centers are able to show savings on power, space, cooling, and people’’.
In India, currently, it is estimated that for every dollar spent on powering a server, two dollars are spent to cool it. Current figures suggest that in our data centers, every watt of server usage causes 2-2.5 watts of power and cooling usage. A good data center must be able to bring that ratio down to 1:1.2-1.4 watts. An efficient data center would be where the ratio is 1:1. “But if anyone can give 30-40 percent savings on current energy consumption, that’s a big RoI,’’ says Dhar.
According to APC’s Tagare, using a modular, scalable power and cooling architecture can reduce data center power consumption by 10–30 percent, virtualized servers can have an impact of 10–40 percent, an efficiently designed floor layout can save 5–12 percent and a more efficient air conditioner architecture can save 7-15 percent of power.
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