It's great server weather here in New Mexico today. The current temp is 74f , the high will be ~82f ,the low was 57f ,and the humidity will be ~30% all day. These are all "in range" of the air needed for a densely packed server to breath. Depending on how many servers are packed into a rack, they can heat this 74f degree air by as much as 50f degrees. Removing that heat from the server exhaust air consumes energy and expensive equipment. A key system trade off in data center design is that density reduces the unit cost of deploying and operating servers for most inputs but increases the cost of dealing with high density heat. If we can find ways to address this heat with less energy and cost then we can be more economical, and in today's words, more green.

It was on a day like today, a while back, where Tom Greenbaum, a fellow Intel engineer, and I were brainstorming how to get outside air directly to the servers. Because of Tom's experience in custom air handlers, we were focusing on economizers that are normally used for buildings. Economizers are commonly designed into office buildings, homes and in a simple fashion, most cars, but they are rarely are thought of for data centers. The key concept is that you have access to two air supplies: the outside air and the exhaust air. To be most economical, you want to continually decide "what is the best air to use next?". This takes measuring, deciding and switching. In your car, you are both the measurement device and decider as you press the re-circ button or the flow-through button on the dash. In a highend building air conditioner this is an outside weather monitor, an inside weather monitor, a simple controller and some extra duct work.

In our experiment we used an vane controller in a looped air duct that could blend outside air with the exhaust air to get us the best air for the servers to inhale at the lowest cost. The accuracy and controllability of our monitors and controllers were not as capable as we wished, but they did the job. The perfect controller would have measurements of outside air and exhaust air for: temperature, enthalpy and dew point. It would have policies that you could modify for best economy based on the requirements of your equipment. For example, it should be able to blend exhaust heat into the outside air to hold the minimum temperature at say 55f and no more in winter and it should be able to start incremental cooling loads as the temperature of the coolest of the two supplies rises above the maximum allowed by your equipment, in summer. It would decide to use some exhaust air when the dew point was higher than the outside temperature to control air humidity. You get the point, it would condition the air using all available inputs. Our PoC used DX cooling based units that usually are considered not as economical as water based cooling. But, in this mode of operation, they worked well and reduced complexity. In addition they used no water which is a plus in many desert locations. You can imagine evaporative systems in similar designs that could replace the DX units or work with the DX units for even more "economi-zation".

In the video you will see dust on the back of the servers. We had filtration on the air intakes and a control system that can indicate when the filter needs replacing, but we had a door system that let in dust near the inputs during really windy days. It was a design flaw in our temporary room. Once it got into the system we decided to let it run to see where it went. It collected in the exhaust areas but then created very little risk becasue most of the time we exhausted the air. Something that would not have been true in a closed loop system.

Don Atwood was able to negotiate for and create the production capable configuration for a sufficient number of production servers that were dense enough to run a proof of concept (PoC). These servers run high volume batch computing and are nearly always running above 90% utilized, perfect heaters for the job. It is important to note that this PoC was dependent on the concept of a "Compute Center". A Compute Center is the idea that high density servers can be isolated in their own air space a very short distance from the storage. The storage is left in the classical, and perhaps now more aptly named data center. Where this concept is able to be used, it can help free up traditional close loop environmental control for storage systems. If anyone knows of a great economizer controller, please lets us know. An Atom based design would be a plus

The temporary "compute center" we established and operated would not have be successful without the help of several great engineers contributing insight and innovation. Tom Greenbaum, Marvin Bailey, Steven Bornfield, Natasha Bothe, Greg Botts, Demetruis Ferguson, Ryan Henderson, Dan Links, Don Wright all contributed to learning what is possible during our PoC.

Well, it's 79f outside now and still great server weather, there are hot air balloons in the sky this morning, as we get ready for the Balloon Fiesta here in early October. Hot air balloons, like racks of servers, love this air becasue they can inhale cool air and then heat it to create work that moves people. Finally hot air balloons spend very little energy exhausting the resulting heat out the top. Its a simple model really, it just takes a smart controller.

Video: http://video.intel.com/?fr_story=2d6e0fbbef76b72c6119cc7fe7889bba20cb5192&rf=bm

Paper : http://www.intel.com/it/pdf/Reducing_Data_Center_Cost_with_an_Air_Economizer.pdf

The current uptake in high performance computing means mostly good things, but it also comes with a few built-in challenges. The paradox of this particular progress is this: when you scale hardware, you oftentimes scale power consumption, right along with it. My colleague, Shesha Krishnapura, a senior principal engineer from Intel IT Core Systems Engineering group, has some good news to share, in this podcast speaking with

 The Register’s ]]>

Tim Phillips. Shesha says that “In the past, that power relationship has existed. But with Intel’s core microarchitecture based platform, the power envelop has remained constant while performance has climbed significantly.”

Check out Shesha’s podcast below.

I'd like to introduce myself--my name is Ilene Aginsky and I'm the new site community manager for the IT@Intel zone on Open Port, Intel's online IT community site. I started out in IT about two years ago and got very interested in the green aspect of IT.

We have had quite a few discussions out here in the community on green versus efficient Greening Data Centers or Make 'em Efficient? and I'm not as concerned by what it is called but rather what we must do to ensure we don't damage the environment.

The issues are not simple and require a balancing act. It is important to look at the picture holistically, from cradle to grave. For example, Intel IT will be refreshing approximately 20,000 servers this year with new servers that will consume less energy and reduce our carbon footprint. This begs the question: what happens to the old equipment and what are we doing to prevent it from ending up in a landfill?

I asked my colleague Robert who is the Secure Data Control Program Manager for IT and he told me that all end-of-life (EOL) servers at Intel follow the same process. We make sure that we secure all the data by removing and sanitizing the hard drives.

Once the data has been sanitized there are three possible paths:

Resale - we prioritize re-sale

Donations - some organizations need servers, even without disks

Scrap - anything deemed worthless to resale or donations is sent to scrap vendors for material reuse and recycling

What does your organization do with old equipment?

The relative positioning of 2 and 4-socket servers for server virtualization has been an open question for a long time - a question that has stumped the most astute of IT professionals time and again. In fact it might not be an exaggeration to say that this open question is almost in the same class as the famous Riemann's hypothesis that has remained unsolved for over a century! (If you accept that premise, then there's some real estate on the moon that I'd like to bring to your attention as well). Although advocates for either class of servers have been emphatic in their respective positions, compelling data-points supporting their positions have been few and far between.

To remedy this sorry state of affairs, an Intel IT team conducted in-depth tests and analysis using current quad-core processor based 2 and 4-socket servers in a virtualized environment. This effort culminated in a comprehensive framework for comparing server platforms for virtualization. This comparative framework encompasses the majority of common deployment scenarios and usage models and answers - once and for all - the long unanswered question "which server is more appropriate for my virtualization project?"

The whitepaper detailing the findings can be found here Comparing Two- and Four-Socket Platforms for Server Virtualization. If time is short, click on the icon below for a short video overview.

Doug Garday continues his podcast series with part II, which continues the discussion around a heat recovery system to reduce the total cost of ownership. In this podcast, Doug plugs in numbers that show potential energy cost savings.

To listen to Part I go to What if you invested a dollar and it returned 10?. View the full brief at Data Center Heat Recovery Helps Intel Create Green Facility.

Most data centers have a very long history with the enterprises they provide services for. Data centers grew up around the users they provide services to and are generally located within a close proximity to the user base. As LAN capabilities improved, performance of local applications became less of an issue for enterprises but new capabilities were generally landed in existing facilities. As the enterprise grew through mergers and acquisitions, additional data center capacity was generally co-located with the new users.

When availability was the key metric for measuring performance of applications, it became customary for each new application that the enterprise was rolling out (whether developed or purchased) to have its own dedicated hardware, to protect the integrity of the application and improve stability. Over time this has led to data centers around the world that are full of hardware that operates at a fraction of what it's capable of! Application owners were loathe to consider the idea of ‘stacking' applications on the same server, looking to avoid potential conflicts that arise in a shared resource environment.

We now have multiple vectors for driving efficiency into our data centers: energy efficiency, sustainability and cost are some that are moving organizations toward initiatives that will transform the way we provide services from the data center and how we support those services going forward. Driving efficiency is a painful but necessary step in the overall transformation.

Transformation can mean many things to the enterprise but part of a data center transformation generally involves consolidation of data center facilities and compute resources that provide services to the enterprise. This can cause some amount of nervousness on the part of the end users, application developers and administrators who have grown accustomed to unfettered access to resources over time.

Why is this abstraction of resources from users, developers and administrators necessary? A primary driver is to standardize facilities, network, compute and storage resources so the operations staff is sustaining a small number of standard offerings, which provides them with a very predictable environment that they can become expert is sustaining. By centralizing to fewer facilities and driving toward higher utilization of existing resources (i.e. network, servers and storage) the enterprise can obtain more work out of their data centers for less energy and therefore less cost.

Removing the users, developers and administrators from the data center is a process and mindset change that will take resolve and ultimately executive support. So many IT pros feel they need to ‘touch' their environment but this leads to custom configurations, unknown/undocumented changes and instability in an environment that we're trying to standardize. Building the competency within the operations group will facilitate a change in the way excursions and outages are dealt with and will form the basis of a much more predictable environment that the operations team will feel proud to own. This is one piece of the transformation that cannot be overlooked when considering the evolution of the enterprise data center.

I've posted to this blog a few times in the past, but my "day job" (Data Center Efficiency) has kept me away from blogging for longer than I'd like. My colleague Brently and I were recently in Folsom for meetings, and took some time out to talk about some of the key elements of our data center strategy: working horizontally rather than tailoring solutions for a particular business unit, giving transparent access to a global pool of resources, and improving data quality.

I'll plan to increase my posting frequency, using this blog as a forum to share some of the things that have worked for us (or that haven't worked) as we reduce our data center footprint. I'd like for this to become a conversation rather than a broadcast, so please let me know if you have any questions or would like more details on any specific part of this initiative.