The Server Room Blog

Utility rebates/incentives for energy efficient datacenters

RK_Hiremane — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:27:59 GMT

Many utility companies in North America are encouraging energy efficiency in datacenters in a big way. Some are offering incentives to non-residential customers for making energy efficient choices including servers, storage, and other datacenter equipments. Most of these utility companies require customers to make thier rebate/incentive application prior to starting the project and obtain thier approval. I compiled a short informative article regarding various rebates/incentives offered by the utility companies and it was recently published in the datacenterjournal. Read through......

http://datacenterjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1475&Itemid=41

RK Hiremane

Your current data center could (should) be your last

K_Lloyd — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 17:52:00 GMT

I read recently that 50% of data centers will exceed capacity by 2012 - capacity being some variable combination of physical space, available power or available cooling. I am skeptical. I agree that if you project the current growth rate and available capacity and such, you could come up with the 50% number, but, we are far from status quo in our data center opportunities. I would hesitate to break out the wrecking ball. Today I see three, sort of distinct, opportunities that every data center manager should be looking at very hard before they write the big check for new real estate.

The first is efficiency. There are numerous avenues available here including consolidation (through virtualization), server refresh with more powerful ( and more efficient ) servers, and new approaches to cooling. If we quit thinking of the data center as a room, and start thinking of it as mainframe in a really big box, our approach to cooling can become radically different. Why make a data center comfortable? Instead just keep it within the boundaries of warranties. Nobody wants to be in there anyway. Data center optimization should be your first initiative - learn more opportunities for effiency from Werner.

The second path to capacity containment is external hosting. Improvements in network speed and reliability have nearly negated the need for local data centers, and many businesses already rely on geo distributed data centers. The shift to letting someone else build and run the raised floor area just makes sense. I think of the shift from self run data centers to commercially hosted data centers much like the shift from private to commercial suppliers for power and communications. It is also a shift that can be executed incrementally, moving just some of the application hosting to a service provider. A variation on this theme is the *SAAS*( software as a service) model - for example salesforce.com*. Virtually everyone in the application business is offering, or planning to offer soon, down the wire applications. Can you really run an email system for your staff better than a commercial system? By applying data center optimization and taking advantage of targeted hosting and SAAS, a data center owner can squeeze at least a few more years out of the current raised floor real estate.

For some businesses, or at least for some of their applications, commercial hosting or SAAS is not seen as viable. The application is too important a value differentiator, or the data is too big, or the work to special, or, whatever. This is especially prevalent in engineering and finance where large amounts of "top secret" compute are executed. Well, there is a solution here as well. When you need to "own every line of code, and how it is run" you can still shift some of the work to machines outside your data center and defer capacity expansion. I am referring to "cloud computing". The most recognized example of this is in the compute service offered by Amazon* that uses spare cycles in their server structure. I think we will see a growing number of large scale internet and service companies offering up clouds. With cloud computing you push a "unit of work" to be executed in a service providers compute cloud. With appropriate encryption and obfuscation, the "unit of work" can remain as secret and secure as you wish. The application, database, and work results remain under local management and control.

If I were looking at a shrinking capacity window( any type of capacity) in my data center, I would pay attention to these opportunities, and their variations. I would be looking very hard at my next $25,000,000 data center expansion to understand if an alternate approach and architecture could shift those funds to better use.

_{*Other brands may be claimed as the property of others}

Shall I throw out my old servers and buy new ones? ... Now?

W_Schueler — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:23:00 GMT

In the second comment around the right time for datacenter refresh, I'd like to look at Costs. Power is covered in the comment from Chris and I covered some comments on Space already in the discussion forum. So what it really boils down to is cost of running your existing datacenter versus the costs of throwing the servers out and replacing them. It is clear also from the other comments, that it doesn't make sense to throw out servers which are utilized in average 15% and have them replaced by new servers, which are 5 times faster and utilize the servers 3%... Great achievement hu?... Server Refresh makes therefore most sense to do only when consolidating the environment. How do I consolidate the environment? By using virtualization. See Helmuts blog and the whole theme next week on that topic.

Therefore let's look at the real cost factors, when refreshing the servers:

Cost of new hardware: That is obviously a significant capital expenditure and starting at about 2000$ for a reasonable DP server. But the trick is also that a lot of server companies offer financing models which make this an operational expenditure. But key is also to understand, that by consolidating your servers at the same time the depreciation costs of the servers may actually decrease, as you have less hardware to depreciate!
Maintenance costs: Again, reducing the number of servers running given applications, and at the same time unifying the environment helps significantly to reduce the maintenance costs. This can be a significant step in unifying on a given OS or hardware platform.
Power consumption: Similar to utilization, it doesn't make sense to just look at the power consumption by server, but at the consumption by performance and therefore I can save about 38% in power bills, on a given workload vs. the previous generation hardware and about a 10^th^ of the power of hardware which is 2-3years old. Again, obviously only, if I do this in combination of consolidating the servers. Trick often is, that those costs are often not taken into consideration, as those are not billed to the IT department but to the facilities group. So it becomes an executive decision to ensure they are looked at!.
Switching costs. Obviously very hard to measure, as this depends on the environment of the customer. And I talked to the customer who said: "No I will never touch this AS400 system, as it just runs and runs and runs." On the other hand I had a customer who replaced just those AS400 systems and saw huge synergistic effects, because he put the application on a standard based architecture and was able to finally integrate it in the other production system and therefore have one reporting and analytics tool.

I try to make a long story short. This is not something you do very often, but you don't get married every year either. But most of the time it's worth going through the efforts. So thinking about replacing the servers which are older than 2-3years is definitely worth while and often an effort which pays off in the first year!