Blog Posts From The Data Stack Tagged With green_it

Data Center Power: Zooming in Where it Matters

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 04 May 2013 15:00:08 GMT

This post originally appeared in Information Management on December 26, 2012

Politics aside, the subject of energy is of great concern in every large data center. Why, then, is power consumption still an afterthought for most server deployments? Because IT and facilities teams typically work independently and neither team can control consumption or predict requirements when data center energy costs are buried in the overall utility bill.

Let’s face it: Energy costs are spiking, server sprawl is pushing against site capacity limits, and the Internet and smart device adoption rates are calling for aggressive increases in data center compute densities. Industry analyst firms agree that power and associated cooling requirements account for the fastest increasing components of operational costs. To protect the bottom line, and to comply with the latest EPA Energy Star standards, data centers need to change the way they monitor and manage energy consumption for power-hungry assets, like servers. New power and cooling management approaches are available that offer greater energy efficiency and reduced costs.

Traditional approaches to managing power and cooling have failed to control costs, in large part because they typically force over-budgeting to ensure priority needs are met. Ironically, even with overestimating and over provisioning cooling, data center hotspots continue to crop up, thereby impacting server availability, reducing data center cooling efficiency and driving up operational costs. These factors and their impact demand that facilities and IT professionals find a better way to achieve their common objectives.

Zooming in on the Right Measurement Points

One of the most fundamental barriers to achieving greater power efficiency and curbing runaway energy spend rates has been the inability to obtain accurate readings of actual server energy consumption levels. Various models have been developed that translate temperature and power consumption into overall data center energy requirements for servers and their associated cooling systems. However, even the best of these models lack the real-time visibility required to accurately understand and predict energy trends. Actual usage can vary significantly (up to 40 percent) from modeled predictions, and the models do not provide the immediate feedback required to pinpoint hot spots before they impact services or identify areas of waste where conservation can lead to savings.

Energy models are limited in terms of day-to-day management of power consumption. For example, we know from in-field measurements that an average of 15 percent of data center servers are “ghost” or “zombie” servers (servers that are not producing useful work, drawing energy just to stand idle). When we do the math, assuming that a server draws approximately 400 watts of power, which currently costs about $800 per year, companies are spending on average more than $24 billion per year for these “ghost” servers in their data centers.

Aggregating Server Thermal and Power Data

A second problem has been the technical challenges of aggregating data from varied and disparate systems within the data center. Facilities managers have been forced to cobble together, manually or with crude homegrown systems, vital data such as power supply of the server, inlet and outlet temperatures, asset information contained in RFID tags as well as temperature and humidity readings of the air conditioning units. This prevents the achievement of a “big picture” perspective of facilities’ server inlet temperatures and power consumption data from rack servers, blade servers, and the power-distribution units and uninterrupted power supplies related to those servers. The crippling effects of this piecemeal view are analogous to a long-distance truck driver suffering from tunnel vision.

By shifting attention from the cooling systems to the servers which account for the majority of the power consumed in the data center, managers can introduce a holistic energy optimization solution. Accurate monitoring of power consumption and thermal patterns creates a foundation for enterprise-wide decision-making with the ability to:

Monitor and analyze power data by server, rack, row or room;
Track usage for logical groups of resources that correlate to the organization or data center services;
Automate condition alerts and triggered power controls, based on consumption or thermal conditions and limits; and
Provide aggregated and fine-grained data to Web-accessible consoles and dashboards for intuitive views of energy use that are integrated with other data center and facilities management views.

Identifying temperatures at the server, versus at the room or even rack levels, can also help data center managers more accurately understand what the real ambient temperature should be for individual servers to have optimal life spans. This assessment of real temperatures has enabled data centers to increase the overall room temperature by one to two degrees, which can create significant savings in the air-conditioning expense.

Disseminating the power and cooling data, without impacting ongoing processing in the data center, is another challenge. Invasive monitoring approaches have the potential for adversely affecting the performance of existing systems. Agentless monitoring capabilities should have little impact on the overall system performance, and therefore are virtually undetectable to the end users’ experiences.

Where should all of this energy monitoring and aggregation functionality be placed within the data center? Ideally, all of this would take place transparently and non-invasively, to avoid impacting the servers and end users. Agentless approaches, without the need for any software on the managed nodes, are available. Data center managers should also look for solutions that are easily integrated, such as those based on Web Services Description Language APIs, and able to coexist with other applications on the designated host server or virtual machine.

Where Power is Going

Today, the goal is improved efficiency and reduced costs, but energy management will become even more critical in the future, as compute models continue to tax power infrastructures. Whatever the goal, the monitoring and aggregation of server energy metrics set the stage for much more comprehensive energy management and a far deeper and richer set of usage models for IT assets. Besides enabling accurate power planning and forecasting, logging and trending power data provides knowledge for data center “right-sizing” and accurate equipment scheduling to meet workload demands.

The thermal data can also be used for more efficient designs of integrated facilities systems, such as cooling and air-flow solutions. Optimized resource balancing in the data center will always be closely tied to power; the expanded insight offered by intelligent energy management approaches will contribute to cost-saving decisions for years to come.

Jeff Klaus is the director of Intel Data Center manager (DCM). Jeff leads a global team that designs, builds, sells, and supports Intel® DCM.

Reflecting on Carbon: Why Invest now in Efficiency

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 03 May 2013 14:25:38 GMT

I’ll admit it. I read some dismay the stories about the collapsing market for European carbon dioxide emissions allowances, as covered in the New York Times.

Without going into great detail, I feel the most economically efficient way to reduce the deferred costs of carbon emissions is to simply set a price for them today. Does buying roses grown in Africa produce more or less carbon than those grown in the Holland? I’d say a carbon analysis of that supply chain borders on too complex. But if carbon impacts were fairly encumbered at each point of use with a cost, an efficient market would prefer the lower impact source to the extent that carbon futures affect the price of the commodity.

Sadly it appears we have taken a step away not only from that efficiency, but also from addressing the carbon problem.

So are the carbon credits DOA? After some digging, I think not. Here's why - carbon futures are traded on a market like any other commodity and are affected by the same supply and demand economics that affect the price of everything else. So let’s look at both.

The first data I looked at was to compare the fluctuating price of carbon with economic data in this case the changes in combined GDP of four major European economies (Germany, France, UK, and Italy). This shows an important correlation in the demand side. The amount of money available to chase EUA credits is limited.

Another correlation is with electricity generation, which is a reasonable proxy for the demand to use credits. Here I just looked at France and Germany together. Although Europe uses multiple sources for electricity, the majority source is from fossil fuels.

Again, the trend (at least of available data) shows a pretty good correlation. This is yet another way to look at the demand side of the equation. With lower economic output driving lower demand for electricity in turn diving lower demand for carbon allocations, the drop in price seems natural.

On the supply side, of course, the decision by the commission to not limit the number of allocations guaranteed an abundant supply of credits.

So do I think the carbon market idea is dead? No, I don’t. The data “behind the curtain” support the idea that the falling price of carbon allocations is just a simple matter of supply and demand.

Will demand rise and EUA prices rise in the future? Of course they will. Hence, while there may not be any short term imperative to oinvenst in low carbon and efficient technolgies, smart industries should be, I believe, investing now, in the down turn, to gain advantages from efficiency in the longer term.

Data centers: What does it take to heat things up?

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:00:25 GMT

This post originally appeared in GreenBiz on December 26, 2012

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Keeping things cool has long been a mantra for data center operators, but new research suggests it may not be essential for everyone.

Data centers have historically operated at temperatures ranging between 64° and 68° Fahrenheit (or 17° to 20° Celsius), prompting them to spend approximately 44 percent of their total power budgets on cooling.

Originally, the varied mix of equipment and associated warranties dictated these relativelycool temperatures, and service level agreements (SLAs) often included explicit language about how much deviation was acceptable.

But while it's true temperature control can affect equipment reliability and appropriatemanagement and monitoring is needed for business continuity, new research supports the idea that higher temperatures are beneficial for most data centers.

So, how do you know when to raise the temperature, and by how much? Are there any changes recommended to reduce business risks?

Should every data center cut back on cooling?

When we ask, many data center managers can’t tell us why they set the thermostat at a particular temperature. It’s just the way it has been done for years.

But when well-known companies -- including Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Korea Telecom andothers -- publicize their high temperature ambient (HTA) successes at 80°F and above, we all pay attention. And when research and on-the-ground examples support the efficacy of HTA data centers, suddenly we are all tempted to reduce our cooling costs by just pushing up the thermostat.

Before arbitrarily cutting back on cooling and letting the ambient temperature rise, however, as a data center manager, you’ll want to review your equipment warranties, SLAs and compliance requirements. For those responsible for data centers supporting legacy systems that require lower operating temperatures, or for those whose organizations are subject to extremely stringent compliance requirements, you’ll want to continue to take a very conservative approach.

HTA Best Practices

That said, today’s major vendors of data center equipment generally design and warrant systems and products for reliable operation at 40°C or 100°F. It makes economical sense to take advantage of the latest product specifications and warranties. This means considering simple as well as more involved changes:

Thermostat-only changes. Data centers potentially reduce cooling costs by 4 percent for every 1°C increase in operating temperature. (Cooling accounts for up to 44 percent of the power consumed in an un-optimized data center, which is the typical design being implemented in emerging economies.)
Retrofitting the data center. Besides raising ambient temperature, hot and cold air aisle separation drives up the savings, and replacing chillers with economizers (heat exchangers) can yield dramatic savings. In one of Intel’s data centers (with 900 production servers), retrofitting and raising the temperature to 33°C or 91.4°F has translated to a 67 percent annual power savings ($2.87 million in a 10MW data center).
Optimized data centers. Hot aisle containment, energy-efficient servers and a node-level power management solution capable of dynamic resource management (e.g., power capping servers, racks and rows; adjusting server performance and fan speeds) have been shown to dramatically drive up energy efficiency and support operation at the highest temperatures without increasing risk to the business. Real-world results show power utilization efficiencies can be increased so that IT power utilization improves from 50 percent to 81 percent of the total.

All things -- and temperatures -- in moderation

Your data center can take some steps to reap the cost benefits of HTA operation. Start with a plan to phase out, relocate or outsource any legacy system that is keeping your data center at the lower, more expensive operating temperatures. As soon as possible, bump up the temperature by one degree or two, to get on a path toward HTA.

However far along you are, an energy management solution may improve your visibility into energy use and thermal patterns within your data center. Among the foundations necessary for achieving power efficiency through HTA practices are real-time visibility and the abilities to log power and temperature data, and to analyze usage trends based on the logged data.

These same capabilities can also enable other energy management practices such as lowering carbon emissions, thus allowing you to expand a data center without exceeding power limits, and efficiently balancing services and workloads to avoid power spikes.

The cost and power savings achievable by adopting HTA as a model may well represent the new norm. The timing is perfect: Data centers currently consume 1.5 percent of all of the world’s power. Annual server energy costs exceed $27 billion. By 2014, these numbers are expected to double. Bumping up your data center’s ambient temperature directly reduces cooling costs and power consumption, and simultaneously reduces CO₂ emissions.

HTA makes business sense, and it makes sense for our planet. Get ready for the data center world to heat up!

Jeff Klaus is the director of Intel Data Center manager (DCM). Jeff leads a global team that designs, builds, sells, and supports Intel® DCM.

The Growing Energy Demands Of Living Your Life In The Cloud

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:00:06 GMT

This post originally appeared in Forbes on October 22nd, 2012

Follow @jsklaus on Twitter for more

You recycle, drive a hybrid, and run your major appliances during off-peak hours. You are doing all you can to help reduce your energy consumption, right? Maybe not.

Have you considered how your lifestyle is driving up power use in the cloud? Personal energy use is no longer reflected solely in utility bills. A rapidly growing fraction of the average person’s day now involves an online component, and what we’ve come to think of as personally essential apps and services are driving up the power requirements for a global network of Web portals and online information hosting and delivery services.

Think about how different our at-home lives were before the digital revolution. An alarm clock – not a smart phone – buzzed us awake. We read newspapers and watched over-the-air broadcast television. We went to the shopping mall, and called the airlines to book travel. Our calendars hung on the wall next to the phone, and Post-It notes, time-manager notebooks, and PDAs were our essential life tools.

Click on the present day. Dad turns on the television to play back a pre-recorded game. He checks his fantasy football stats on his smart phone while Mom uses her iPad to Facebook a relative on the other side of the country. The kids are Googling to research homework assignments, and dinner is courtesy of the family’s favorite recipe app. After dinner, e-mail is checked, and IMs go out to coworkers about tomorrow’s meeting agenda. One teenager is in a virtual multiplayer online game world with a few schoolmates, and another is streaming a favorite show from an entertainment site.

The point is that we are living in a connected world, and we are tapping into cloud-based services more than ever before. And unless you are a technology holdout, you now live in an Internet-centric world where you use multiple smart devices and enjoy instant access to information. And besides the obvious accesses to online resources, there are a growing number of cloud accesses that might surprise you. When you talk to Siri on your iPhone, for example, you are using the extensive data centers behind the voice recognition system. Similarly, your navigation and location-based services are tied to cloud services hosted on servers around the globe.

Connectivity and online services are much more than just conveniences or entertainment sources. Besides serving up music, movies and information about our favorite sports or entertainment stars, the online world has improved the delivery of services that are vital to our everyday lives. Community police departments send out automated alerts from their central data centers. Patient health information is managed within online health services to help hospitals and treatment centers improve medical outcomes. And emergency response teams and relief agencies post essential information on their web sites, to update residents hit by natural disasters like hurricane Sandy.

So, we not only enjoy convenient access to information and services, we have become dependent on it. Digital experiences are improving the quality of our lives. And that brings us back to the question of energy. What price are we all going to pay for these conveniences and safety services if cloud applications keep escalating energy consumption?

Each online activity has an energy price tag in the cloud. Behind every online experience are global networks and data centers. It is currently estimated that data centers account for consumption of at least 1.5 percent of all of the world’s available energy . This statistic should raise our concern, and in fact, this power draw has doubled in the last five years and continues to grow about 20 percent annually in part because of the growing popularity and variety of online apps and services.

Just how popular are online services? How fast is the cloud driving up energy consumption? The most popular sites and services are publicizing amazing growth in their user bases and site activity. Amazon reports that it now sells more e-books than hard copies. Tablet sales expanded 98 percent last year; there are now more than 1 million online apps. A growing number of subscribers are cancelling traditional TV services, as online video streaming increases. And the user bases for music and video streaming should reach the one billion mark within the next three to five years along with total mobile devices projected to reach eight billion by 2016 .

The digital world is here to stay, and somehow the data centers are going to have to keep up. Fortunately, the power challenge is not new to technology providers who have experienced the result of higher consumption and grid utilization. High demand and aging delivery grids have forced some utility companies to restrict the amount of power delivered to a data center. Other data center operators are seeing energy prices increase and/or spike as demand grows, which strains operational budgets. Recognizing that these trends are here to stay, IT equipment manufacturers are innovating a new generation of data center, software tools, and networking products that are more energy-efficient than predecessors.

A data center full of energy-efficient servers can still waste power, however, if these servers are always powered up, but under-utilized. Power efficiency and optimization calls for an intelligent combination of the automated monitoring of power conditions and the ability to adjust power, temperatures, computer performance and workloads on the fly.

The trends and industry needs mentioned above are driving the evolution of holistic data center power management solutions. The approaches and implementations vary, but industry leaders that are emerging, and documented user results are helping to advance the most promising methodologies and products for data center energy efficiencies.

With the potential for rapid returns on investments, the world’s largest data centers are leading a wave of energy management best practices adoption. They are curbing run-away energy with a combination of micro-level controls (for individual servers, power distribution units, air-flow controllers, and cooling units) as well as macro-level controls and policies (for racks of servers, rows of racks, and entire data centers).

While you might say that technology got us into this situation, it is equally true that technology is helping us to mitigate this energy challenge. As long as energy is a precious resource, data center managers will continue looking for ways to improve conservation. The business case encourages them to do the right thing.

So go ahead and immerse yourself in the digital world. Guilt free. Thanks to data center managers who are seeking improved energy efficiency on your behalf, your power usage in the cloud is being managed responsibly.

Jeff Klaus is the director of Intel Data Center manager (DCM). Jeff leads a global team that designs, builds, sells, and supports Intel® DCM.

Computacenter Consults the Future

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 01:10:06 GMT

Download Now

Computacenter is Europe’s leading provider of IT infrastructure services. It advises organizations on their IT strategies, implements the most appropriate technology from a wide range of vendors, and, if required, manages its customers' technology infrastructures.

Computacenter introduced its SAP Procedural and Service Model* to help customers identify the best SAP HANA* appliance, based on the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family, to suit their SAP platform strategies, together with a roadmap for installation. Several features of the Intel Xeon processor E7 family make it the ideal platform for performance, reliability, availability, and energy efficiency. Within the first month of launching its SAP HANA Procedural and Service Model, Computacenter had signed up three customers.

“Ultimately, we will be able to generate new revenue streams and develop much closer relationships with our customers,” explained Rene Stolte, solution manager for Computacenter.

To learn more, download our new Computacenter business success story. You can find more like this one on Intel.com and iTunes. And to keep up to date on the latest business success stories, be sure to follow ReferenceRoom on Twitter.

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

Podcasts in December for the Data Stack

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:05:14 GMT

Happy holidays to all of our listeners and we hope you’re having an easier time than we are settling back into work! This month, all three podcasts delivered episodes on energy efficiency and performance per watt. Chip Chat finished off a run of episodes from the NAB conference earlier in the year and delivered a fascinating episode on the Intel® AtomTM processor S1200 launch, which delivers server class performance at only 6W. Conversations in the Cloud tackled scale out storage – storing a terabyte of data at only 12 W. And Digital Nibbles had Intel’s eco-technology guru, Lorie Wigle, stop by to talk about sustainability in technology. As always, you can listen to the episodes via the links below, and comment on this blog post with any podcast topics you’d like to hear about.

Intel Chip Chat

Media Solutions for Dell Hardware – Intel® Chip Chat episode 224: Allyson was at the NAB conference earlier in the year and stopped by to talk with Franklin Flint from Dell about the solutions at the show and what customers can do to take their products to market on Dell hardware – removing the need to build to do their own build and managing their own supply chain. For more information, visit www.dell.com/oem.
Large Object Storage for Media – Intel® Chip Chat episode 225: Paul Speciale, VP of products for Amplidata, chats about large object storage – storing very large unstructured data at petabyte scale. Allyson caught up to him at the NAB conference, where he talked about the AmpliStor system, and what it means for storing media. For more information, visit www.amplidata.com.
The World's First 6-Watt, 64-bit Server-class SoC for Microservers – Intel® Chip Chat episode 226: Frequent Chip Chat guest Raejeanne Skillern, director of marketing for cloud computing at Intel, stops by to talk about the Intel® Atom processor S1200 launch – the industry’s first server-class SoC featuring 64-bit support, error code correction and Intel virtualization technologies, aimed at microservers, storage and networking systems. For more information, visit www.intel.com/atom.

Intel Conversations in the Cloud

Energy Efficient Scale-Out-Storage with Quanta – Intel® CitC episode 54: Ben Wu, director of sales and marketing for Quanta, stops by to talk about a reference architecture/demo from Quanta and Amplidata showing scale-out-storage. In scale-out-storage, data is stored across the chassis, allowing Quanta to show a 1U rack with 12 hard drives and close to 1 petabyte of storage, while only consuming five watts of power per terabyte. For more information, visit www.quantatw.com/Quanta/english/Default.aspx or www.intelcloudbuilders.com.

Digital Nibbles Podcast

Do Well by Doing Good – DNP episode 24: A couple of fascinating interviews this week on Digital Nibbles. First up is Lorie Wigle (@lwigle), general manager in the Eco-Technology Program Office at Intel. She focuses on the intersection of sustainability and technology – looking at both the direct footprint of computing (how can we make everything from cell phones to datacenters more efficient) as well how technologies can be applied to address challenges (like food safety or energy data). Then Rick Turoczy (@piepdx), general manager of the Portland Incubator Experiment stops by to talk about funding starts ups in Portland, OR and how to make better entrepreneurs and start ups.

Atom for the Data Center: Matching the Right Solution for Workload Requirements

webadmin@intel.com — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 17:13:50 GMT

When Intel Announced the first 6W, 64 bit processor for servers a couple weeks ago with the introduction of its first Atom SoC for the data center, many folks were interested to hear about how Atom fits into Intel’s broader data center strategy. To get the inside scoop, I decided to chat with Raejeanne Skillern, Intel’s director of cloud marketing and frequent guest on my Chip Chat program.

Raejeanne and I chatted about why Intel decided to drive Atom to the data center, what specific customer requirements were driving this development, and who was expected to deploy Atom platforms…and for what purpose. The short story: as it has many times in the past, Intel is utilizing Atom to address a pretty specific need in the data center for low compute intensive workloads where extreme density is required. And the good news is that our webscale data center customers who are expected to deploy these platforms will benefit from the common instruction set architecture with our existing Xeon platforms today, meaning that the software running these workloads on Xeon today can easily migrate to Atom tomorrow.

The 12 Days of Christmas in the Data Center

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 15:00:46 GMT

This post originally appeared in Data Center Knowledge on December 21st, 2012.

Jeffrey S. Klaus is the Director of Data Center Solutions at Intel Corporation, where he has managed various groups for more than 12 years. Klaus’s team is pioneering data center power and thermal management solutions, which are sold through an ecosystem of data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software and hardware companies around the world.

Another year’s end, and we’re in the midst of another holiday season. Besides anticipating time off, family celebrations, and gift giving, every IT professional should be anticipating—and planning for—the challenges relating to data center energy management in 2013.

On the First Day of Data Center Christmas: IT Transformation

The data center has moved from a support business to a mission-critical resource. Next year, I could argue that the data center will become the most-critical resource. The elevation of the data center is being driven by demands for transaction speed and exploding numbers of devices and applications used for sales, service, operations, HR, and practically every functional area. Business users will continue to expect more from the data center. They want to improve their productivity with increasingly self-service capabilities, customization, on-demand services, and, above all, reliability that translates to highly available data center services.

Second Day: Organizational Disconnects

Historically, the various IT and facilities teams worked separately. Rarely did hardware, software, networking, and facilities teams come together, and if they did, they rarely understood each other. The 2013 outlook, with escalating energy costs and a continued sluggish global economy, calls for increasing focus on power optimization, and that means providing tools that not only work for all of the various teams, but encourage cooperation among the teams.

Third Day: Affordability of Servers and Storage Drives Up Demand

Dramatic server/storage price reductions over the last decade have led to mass migrations of tasks to online and automated platforms, thus driving up energy consumption in the data center. Power and cooling have become significant portions of the budget; some argue power has become the single biggest expense.

Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Days: Virtualization, Clouds, and Mobility Change Energy Profiles

Rapid change is nothing new in the data center, but 2013 will see several major technology trends gaining wide-scale acceptance. Virtualization is expanding from servers into desktop infrastructure, and users are demanding the flexibility and rapid provisioning that is only possible within a private or public cloud environment. Mobility adds another layer of complexity, as employees bring their own smart devices to work, thus driving up network traffic and server workloads with apps and anytime, anywhere access to data center resources. The data center is being bombarded with service requests, and large companies are already hitting the power restrictions of their facilities as well as the limits of some local utility companies to meet their needs.

Seventh Day: Natural Disaster Preparedness

The 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and this year’s hurricane season that included Sandy’s devastation of New York and surrounding states are vivid reminders that every data center should be continually refining its disaster plans. The 2013 challenge will be to ensure that disaster plans include prolonging operation with backup power supplies. Disaster recovery should be elevated to a data center best practice, supported by a management solution that offers on-the-fly server adjustments to minimize power draw.

Eighth Day: Battling Methodologies and Tools

Natural disasters are one of the driving forces fueling growth of co-location (colo) facilities. Since many colo companies position their services as insurance for any power outage situation, some are among the early adopters of intelligent energy management solutions. Others have developed their own power management tools, and these will increasingly impact off-the-shelf DCIM solutions.

Ninth Day: The Search for Holistic DCIM Solutions

The ongoing debates about energy management approaches are driving the demand for and evolution of holistic DCIM platforms. Data center teams should look for solutions based on real-time data collection versus less-accurate predictive models. With fine-grained thermal and power monitoring, a DCIM solution should enable a data collection that feeds into holistic analysis and ultimately control of energy behaviors.

Tenth Day: Budget-Restricted Technology Roll-Outs

Of course, even the best solution doesn’t automatically override the budget restrictions stemming from global economic uncertainty. Therefore, data center managers will likely aim for smaller-scale trials and proofs of concepts than originally planned. A phased-in deployment should still be designed to achieve the same results over the long term, with each phase essentially self-funding the next phase with the proven gains in energy efficiency.

Eleventh Day: Vendor Consolidation

DCIM will continue to mature and, along with economic pressures, the rapid rate of change may likely lead to vendor consolidation. This will include large vendors buying up smaller tool vendors, to accelerate the development of their platforms. Maturation ultimately benefits the customer, however, and so the challenge here will be to avoid investments in solutions that may get swallowed up by competitors.

Twelfth Day: Inability to Predict the Future

As the year comes to a close, we are left with many unknowns about the DCIM market and how energy management in the data center will look a year from now. How will the market size compare to the 2013-2014 predictions? What will it take to move the technology to the next level?

We will all be watching and analyzing market movements, but ultimately data center demand will drive the technology. And this demand is growing at a healthy pace. Slow economy or not, energy costs are not going to suddenly plummet. More likely, energy demand will drive up prices, and governments will continue to increase energy taxes. DCIM solutions that build in proactive, fine-grained energy management capabilities are the best—and perhaps only—way to keep the data center sufficiently supplied without breaking the budget.

Follow Intel DCM: https://twitter.com/IntelDCM

Addressing New Challenges in the Evolving Data Center: The Atom S1200 Processor Family

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 19:03:37 GMT

Intel has long blazed a trail of innovation for data center computing, leading the transition from mainframes to x86 towers to rack-mount blade servers, and beyond.

Today, Intel again takes the lead with the introduction of the Intel® Atom™ S1200 processor family, the industry’s first sub-10 watt server system on-chip (SoC) that builds in enterprise-ready features such as 64-bit support, virtualization technologies, and error- code correction (ECC) support for higher reliability. The industrial-strength Intel Atom S1200 microprocessor is designed to power high-density microservers as well as a new generation of storage and communication equipment.

So why does the world need a SoC microserver?

It turns out that one size of server does not fit all needs in the enterprise data center. As the server industry continues to segment, Intel recognized the need for high-density, hyper-scale servers based on low-power processors that can deliver extremely energy-efficient performance within a highly dense-compute footprint. These characteristics are increasingly important for many data center workloads, but address the immediate compute needs of companies that offer dedicated hosting and private clouds, Big Data workloads, content delivery, and front-end servers for hosting web pages; yet still need to harness the horsepower of 64-bit computing.

Servers based Intel Atom S1200 processors also give data center managers a new tool for workflow management, allowing them to flex and scale hardware configurations to meet the needs of changing workloads. Because the new server is compatible with the most commonly used server OSs, applications and data center hardware, implementing the new server is straightforward, with no need for porting or tuning new software stacks. You can break up large and complex workloads, such as Hadoop algorithms, and run many small but highly parallel "chunks" of code for optimal efficiency and performance across a range of server nodes. And there’s no need to rewrite code for the new high-density server, because all the code that’s already running in your x86 datacenter will also operate on the Intel Atom S1200 processor-based platforms.

With more than twenty low-power server, networking and storage systems based on Intel Atom S1200 now in production, the processors provide a new milestone for optimizing performance with low-power, high density computing. Download today’s press release announcing the Intel Atom S1200 and learn more about Intel’s roadmap for power efficient, high-density computing.

Data Center Energy: Past, Present and Future (Part One)

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 15:00:01 GMT

An Audit of Data Center Power Efficiency—or Inefficiency

This article is part one of a three-part series on energy management in the data center. (See parts two and three.)

Today IT organizations face extreme pressures to cut costs and drive efficiency at every level. Approximately $24.7 billion is wasted each year on server management, power and cooling for unused systems in data centers. This figure is significant and represents on average 15 percent of a data center server population that is completely idle but consumes power and cooling.

On average, annual energy costs are $800 or more for a 400W server. Do the math, and you can’t ignore that data center energy inefficiency is staggering, especially since idle servers represent only one vector of the efficiency problem.

Crude Assessments

Before you can optimize energy efficiency, you have to understand your nominal power and thermal conditions under the range of workloads supported by your data center resources.

In the past, most data center managers had only minimal energy-monitoring capabilities. They often assessed power consumption and cooling efficiencies by solely relying on returning air temperature at the air conditioning units. When that didn’t provide much insight, they would manually collect additional power data on a per-rack basis. Also, to estimate future growth, predictive models were developed and used to translate these static measurements into assessments of future energy consumption. The models deviate from reality by as much as 40 percent, however.

Clearly a more accurate method is required to assess and predict energy and ultimately avoid the need to overprovision power and cooling. The large margin of error also makes modeling ineffective for predicting power spikes or other problematic events that lead to equipment failures and service disruptions.

Calculating Power vs. Measuring Power

Although expedient, this approach has deficits that fall short of most efficiency goals. The problem with the method is the conservative nature of the vendor data. Manufacturers notoriously lean toward worst-case estimates, and overprovisioning is understandably the result when planning is based on this data alone. Opinions also vary widely about how to de-rate the vendor data, with data center managers citing 20 to 50 percent reductions as common practice.

Some skeptical data center managers get out the power meters to verify the specifications and adjust data to their specific configurations and workloads, and intelligent power distribution units (PDUs) are deployed by those who can afford another layer of hardware. The PDUs can supply a steady stream of power data, but this data then must be collected and analyzed. Even then, the data is completely focused on power and does not address airflow or temperature patterns throughout the data center.

An Expanded Continuous Data Set

In the quest for a more accurate energy map, many data center teams acknowledge the need to continuously aggregate more data points and take advantage of automation to minimize the time required for assessments. In response to these customer demands and energy trends, data center equipment vendors began integrating capabilities to provide power and thermal data without the need to employ meters or absorb the cost of intelligent PDUs. Today, data center managers can collect readings for server inlet temperatures and power consumption levels for rack servers, blade servers, and any deployed power-distribution units (PDUs), as well as the uninterrupted power supplies (UPSs) related to those servers.

Energy-monitoring solutions are now available to aggregate this data and can give data center managers a detailed view of the conditions at the individual server or rack level. The data can drive a picture of the entire data center and also support drilling down to understand the energy requirements and usage patterns for groups of users or physical resources.

By continuously collecting data in real time, it is possible to generate thermal maps of the data center and uncover hot spots and airflow inefficiencies before they lead to failures. Data logs can also be analyzed to identify trends and fine-tune power and cooling systems accordingly. The primary benefit of a fine-grained, real-time data collection and aggregation solution is the ability to avoid designing data centers on the basis of worst-case situations.

Solid Solutions for Holistic Data Center Energy Management

Armed with the ability to automatically collect and aggregate power and thermal measurements, data center managers and facility teams quickly recognized the value of emerging middleware solutions and tools that go further than passive monitoring. Energy-management solutions have evolved to enable the following:

Proactive threshold detection to identify and correct problems and adjust conditions, extending the life of data center assets
Introduction of controls that enforce policies and allocations designed for optimized service and energy efficiency
Dynamic adjustment of server configurations during times of outages
Billing for services using a model that takes into account total energy consumption
Integration of energy management with systems- and facilities-management consoles and methodologies

Conclusions

Data center teams face energy challenges in every direction. Users want 100 percent uptime. Management wants lower costs and sustainable practices. Facilities teams need to divert power to other site needs. And utilities companies are saying they can’t meet the service levels required for expanding data centers, even if companies can pay the escalating prices for energy.

The days of overprovisioning are over, and holistic energy-management solutions have arrived on the market. Today’s challenge is to accurately define the main requirements for an energy management solution and to choose a solution that puts a data center on the lowest-risk path, considering the current trends and energy outlooks.

This post originally appeared in The Data Center Journal on September 12, 2012.

About the Author

Jeffrey S. Klaus is the director of Data Center Manager (DCM) at Intel Corporation.

In part two of this series, Jeff overviews the trends and industry changes that are affecting today’s data centers and accelerating the need for energy efficiencies. The series will conclude with part three, which outlines the best practices that employ the latest approaches, along with examples of the benefits being gained by enterprises that are pioneering next-generation energy management.

Leading article photo courtesy of bandarji

Follow Intel DCM: https://twitter.com/IntelDCM

Energy-Efficient Performance Makes for Cost-Effective Data Centers at The Ergomic Group, Hyundai-Kia, and Teamsum

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 01:12:56 GMT

Three new business success stories explain how companies have replaced their power-hungry servers with more efficient solutions:

The Ergonomic Group’s Virtualized Platform Helps Hosting Services Provider Cut Costs, Improve Performance: HP BladeSystem* platform based on Intel® Xeon® processors provides room to grow for The Ergonomic Group.
Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group Finds the Optimal Solution for FTA Country-of-Origin Verification: The Hyundai-Kia atomotive group and its suppliers chose Ecocloud's FTA Insight* System equipped with Intel Xeon processors and Intel® Solid State Drives for easier data integration and storage of reference materials for country-of-origin verification.
At Teamsun, Virtual Computing in the Cloud Gets a Boost with Energy-Efficient Technology: Teamsun’s IVCS* elevates cloud computing with Intel® Virtualization Technology, improving server efficiency and power savings.

Find more business success stories like these on Intel.com and iTunes. And to keep up to date on the latest business success stories, be sure to follow ReferenceRoom on Twitter.

CIOs Reduce Data Center Costs Through Power and Cooling Efficiency

webadmin@intel.com — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 15:03:22 GMT

Energy costs are the fastest-rising cost element in the data center. Based on recent trends, the EPA estimates that energy consumed by data centers will continue to grow by 12 percent per year. As the director of Intel’s Data Center Manager (DCM) group, I and my team have observed how the data center is now a source for CIOs and their technical teams to add to the bottom line through increased power and cooling efficiency.

In fact, we’ve found three value drivers for power and cooling efficiency: measuring energy use; increasing energy efficiency; and power capacity planning.

In an article I wrote earlier this year for Information Technology (IT) Business Edge, I examine how each of these three drivers can help CIOs to optimize efficiencies and begin to control their rapidly escalating data center costs, to turn this cost center into an opportunity to contribute to the bottom line. To read the blog in its entirety, please check it out on IT Business Edge.

Provided by QuinStreet, Inc; Intel DCM Director Jeff Klaus published the Guest Opinion, “CIOs Reduce Data Center Costs Through Power and Cooling Efficiency” on ITBusinessEdge on Feb. 1, 2012.

Data Center Power Consumption: Breaking the Rules

tim.allen@intel.com — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 19:15:21 GMT

When you need to scope data center power consumption, do you typically make your best estimate and then add “padding,” say 50%? You’re not alone. In fact, that margin has become a rule of thumb. Data center design is a complex task with a variety of requirements, and many IT managers don’t have the time or the tools to accurately predict power consumption.

The problem with this “estimate and add 50%” approach is that an addition of data center capacity could bring with it an expensive new investment in power supply. And when workloads are light, all that expensive power is “stranded” in your data center. In cloud deployments, power usage and workload requirements are always in flux. Intel is tackling this problem with its Intel^® Xeon^® processors and their power capping abilities.

Intel^® Node Manager allows you to set a cap on power consumption to a rack, and then manages the details of keeping those servers in the rack collectively under the cap. During peak workload times, Intel^® Data Center Manager monitors the Intel Node Manager instances under its control and spins up additional resources on other servers if need be, in order to prevent performance limitations. We call it Penalty-Free Power Capping. This video animation explains how it all works.

Intel Xeon processors also work in concert with complementary technologies from VMware, JouleX, and Dell to enable proactive power management in your data center. This video walks through configuration of these technologies so you can seize more control over your data center’s power needs.

The bottom line: you have more control over how power requirements grow within your data center, so you can delay expensive investments in power supplies until you know they are absolutely necessary. Eliminate the guesswork of “estimate and add 50%,” and rely on policy, not estimates, when you design your cloud data center's power infrastructure!

Cloud Efficiency: Industry Focus and Responsibility

webadmin@intel.com — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:05:45 GMT

There has been sporadic concern about the energy use of “cloud” data centers, even as recently as last week’s New York Times. From the outside the concern is understandable; cloud data centers consume an enormous amount of energy, they are large visible entities, and their number is growing.

Looking at the surface of a problem is not the same thing as understanding it deeply. Since about 2006, when the first studies of data center energy use raised alarm bells, the industry response has been unified, focused, and socially responsible.

The Green Grid, the premier Industry group focused on resource efficient IT, was launched in 2006 to address systematic improvements in efficiency. The wide adoption of their PUE metric has brought focus and results. While data center infrastructure once consumed half of the data center power, infrastructure now consumes less than 10% for state-of-the-art data centers.

In this same time period there have been huge breakthroughs in server efficiency. Through work at Intel on energy proportional computing the energy used to perform typical computations has been reducing by about 60% per year since 2006.

This rate of improvement is far outside our normal experience and may be hard to fathom. Improving the fuel efficiency of a car at 6% per year would have increased mileage from 20 mpg to 28 mpg – Not too bad. A 60% improvement rate would increase that mileage to 300 mpg. Imagine filling your tank once every six months!

Finally, innovation in the cloud has helped to consolidate workloads and bring them from less efficiently used isolated “server rooms” to highly efficient shared cloud services. This sharing enhances the usage of all compute resources and leads to even greater efficiency.

While direct comparison is difficult, these gains can roll up into one “number” for the overall data center efficiency, figuring in the infrastructure effectiveness, computing efficiency, and how effectively all those resources are used. Taking accepted industry values, the cloud is at least a factor of six times more efficient than the “conventional” case.

Does the data center industry need to do more to improve technology adoption and efficiency? Absolutely. For example, many of the technologies adopted in the efficient cloud have been slow to penetrate inefficient legacy data centers. Has the industry been focused and responsible in its technical innovation? The answer is an unequivocal, “yes.” That work continues.

And I think above all the broader use of computing at an always-improving efficiency will continue to enhance our lives.

Feel free to comment here or find me on Twitter @WinstonOnEnergy.

How to curb runaway power in the data center

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 15:06:38 GMT

Please note: This blog originally appeared on GreenBiz.com

Data centers represent a skyrocketing component of any enterprise's energy budget, and therefore a major share of operational costs. Best energy management practices can help contain these costs, and simultaneously put IT and facilities teams on an environmentally responsible path that aligns the corporate data centers with EPA energy standards.

The Scope of the Problem -- and the Opportunity

Surveys of all sizes and types of data centers identify many categories of wasted energy. For example, approximately 10 to 15 percent of all data center servers are idle (i.e., not processing useful work). An average server draws about 400 watts of power, for an annual cost of $800 or more. This adds up to billions of dollars of wasted energy, cooling, and management costs every year in the U.S. alone.

Traditional power management approaches have failed to curb this or other instances of wasted energy. As a result, data center managers have routinely over-budgeted power and cooling to accommodate spikes in demand and high-priority needs, and to avoid "hot spots" that would otherwise negatively impact server performance.

Finding Where the Energy is Going

The potential for savings and the high cost of energy have driven demand for new tools relating to energy management. Most of the resulting power management tools let IT managers examine the returned-air temperature at the air-conditioning units, and perhaps the power consumption for each rack in the data center. However, most lack visibility at the individual server level, and base their calculations on modeled or estimated data that can deviate from actual consumption by as much as 40 percent.

In contrast, a new class of holistic energy and cooling management solutions has emerged that offer fine-grained levels of monitoring. The latest innovations in this area focus on server inlet temperatures, and provide aggregation across a row or room, to create real-time thermal maps of server assets (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Thermal patterns in the data center help identify "hot spots," as the first step in optimizing power distribution and cooling system efficiency. Courtesy of Intel Corp. and iTRACS.

Similarly, real-time power consumption by servers and storage devices can also be monitored and logged, leading to highly optimized rack provisioning and capacity planning within the data center. For example, to provision a rack of ten servers, each with a 650 Watts power supply rating, a data center manager might test a fully-loaded server and arrive at a requirement of 400 Watts per server, or 4 KW per rack of ten servers.

Alternatively, with a real-time monitoring tool, the data center manager can accurately determine the typical maximum power draw in a production environment. Field studies have shown that this approach can help boost rack densities by as much as 60 percent (or up to 16 servers per rack, in this particular example), and can support the accurate capping of power per rack to protect equipment in the unlikely event that demand spikes above the defined power level.

Perhaps even more important, advanced energy management is helping data center architects intelligently allocate power during emergencies. Equipped with accurate power characteristics, uninterrupted power supplies (UPSs) can be configured to deliver longer operation times to high-priority servers during power outages.

Thermal and hardware power consumption data can also be logged and used for trending analysis. Temperature data can benefit in-depth airflow studies for improving cooling and airflow, and lead to more energy-efficient designs of integrated facilities systems.

Bottom line, the granularity and accuracy of the emerging energy management solutions make it possible to fine-tune power distribution and cooling. Instead of designing data centers based on demand spikes and worst-case scenarios, the expanded understanding offered by advanced energy management solutions can promote energy-efficient data center designs and policies.

Setting Practical Limits

Armed with power and temperature data for servers, racks, rows, and entire data centers, IT managers can encourage end-user behaviors that promote energy conservation. The same energy management solutions that monitor the data center can introduce controls that enforce green policies. For example, energy management solutions can automatically generate alerts and trigger power adjustments whenever pre-defined power limits have been exceeded.

Simply capping the power consumption of individual servers or groups of servers is not enough, however, because server performance and level of service are directly tied to power levels. Therefore, advanced energy management solutions dynamically balance power and performance by adjusting the processor operating frequencies. This requires a tightly integrated solution that can interact with the server operating system or hypervisor, based on defined thresholds.

Field tests of state-of-the-art energy management solutions have proven the efficacy of an intelligent approach for lowering server power consumption by as much as 20 percent without impacting performance.

Other Benefits

Besides helping to fine-tune energy-efficient data center designs, the ability to identify "hot spots" minimizes the risks of power overloads and related server failures. Proactive energy management solutions provide insights into the power patterns leading up to problematic events, and offer remedial controls that avoid wasted power, equipment failures, and service disruptions.

Companies can also use the new energy management solutions for power-based metering and energy cost charge-backs. The ability to attach energy costs to data center services raises awareness about resource utilization, and provides further motivation for embracing environmentally, and economically, sustainable business practices.

Based on any one of the previously mentioned benefits, the case for energy management is compelling. And, as explained at the top of this article, there is incredible upside. The energy being wasted on idle data center servers alone yields an attractive ROI for energy management solution deployments, with businesses currently able to achieve 20- to 40-percent reductions of waste in this area.