Data Center : Greening the Power Monsters

They have been called the power monsters, energy guzzlers and the biggest
concern of CIOs the world over. Yes, we are talking about data centers that for
the past decade have witnessed maximum innovation to cater to growing storage
and processing needs of enterprises. While innovation in this space has created
complex high-end computing devices, it has also raised huge concerns over the
power utilization, the rising costs of energy, real estate and the overall
efficiency of the data center. Hence, going green has become more of a cost
saving measure apart from being an environmental or social responsibility for
any enterprise.

Data Center Slice-n-Dice

To understand the efficiency of a data center, it is essential to look into
the power consumption patterns within the data center.

Almost 50% of power is consumed for non-productive purposes, and this is
where vendors have to focus on increasingly, says Pallab Talukdar, head, server
business group, Dell.

Component and IT vendors such as Dell, HCL, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and the
like have been a step ahead in producing energy efficient equipment with every
new generation product being 8-10% more power-efficient that the previous one.
Hence, there is an automatic focus on bringing down cooling costs which still
takes up a large chunk of the pie. However, cooling can not be blamed in
isolation. With the increasing uptake of blade servers, higher compute
capability is being compacted into a smaller footprint. While this reduces the
real estate space, it increases the heat dissipation requiring more cooling.

Calculating Efficiency

Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) and DCIE (Data Center Infrastructure
Efficiency) are the only parameters that have been used so far to measure the
efficiency of a data centers. However, these metrics talk only about the passive
infrastructure and compute side in isolation. Therefore, vendors such as AMD,
APC, Cisco, Dell, Emerson, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft
and Sun and end users such as ADP, Allstate, BT, Enterprise, Facebook and Fed Ex
Services have come together to form the Green Grid Alliance that is defining
meaningful, user-centric models and metrics; developing standards, measurement
methods, processes and new technologies to improve data center performance
against the defined metrics.

As a key step toward creating a more accurate measurement standard, Emerson
is coming out with a new metric called CUPSPW (Compute Unit Per Second Per Watt)
and is already working with EPA and Energy Star in the US to introduce CUPSPW as
a new metric. Apart from this Emerson is also working with the CII and BEE
(Bureau of Energy Efficiency) to come up with ECBC Part IIa standard that will
define design parameters and best practices for green data centers. Another key
vendor HCL, which is not a part of the Green Grid, has been working with the US
Green Building Council (USGBC) to build green data center and infrastructure and
provide facility assessments under its unique data center Green Quotient
service.

According to IDC for every dollar spent on new server spend, 50 cents are
spent on energy to power and cool it. Therefore, on the cooling side, a lot of
new initiatives have been taken at the design stage itself. Today, concepts such
as raised flooring, perforated flooring, hot and cold aisle cooling have been
taken into consideration while designing a data center. According to Ashrae
standards, by increasing the data center temperature between 20-25 degrees and
introducing concentrated cooling enterprises can achieve about 12% cost savings.
The concept of EC (Electronically Commutated) fans is also gaining a lot of
momentum in the cooling space as they can change their speeds based on the heat
that is drawn within the rack and save on power. While higher compute capability
is being packed into smaller form factors, the heat density in a rack has
ballooned out of proportion over a period of time requiring innovations at the
rack level. Chube, Pratik observes, Heat density was about 1.5-2 Kw/hours per
rack a few years ago and now it has spiralled to 15-20 Kw/hours. To tackle these
issues we are focusing on the most important part of a rack, it is the
perforation in the front door. Industry standards is at 65% perforation but
Kanur, a company recently acquired by Emerson, has a perforation ratio of 83%
which allows better heat dissipation and better exchange of cold air from the
raised floor design.

Tech Assistance

Over capacities built on the storage and server front has been an issue that
all major enterprises have been plagued with. According to most storage vendors,
capacity utilization on the storage front has been very poor among enterprises
at just about 15-20% and according to IDC estimates data is growing at a (CAGR)
of 52%. Disparate storage is inefficient because assets are typically
underutilized, wasting capital investment in storage infrastructure, and
unnecessarily consuming power, cooling, and space resources. In addition to
lowering the total cost of ownership and improving productivity, properly
implemented storage consolidation can reduce management complexity by lowering
the number of storage devices, centralizing administration and policies, and
enhancing security and control, says Vivekanand Venugopal, Products and
Solutions Director, APAC, Hitachi Data Systems. Therefore, concepts such as thin
provisioning, virtual provisioning, deduplication, using efficient storage
mediums like tape libraries and high-performance Network Attached Storage (NAS)
systems are becoming popular that allows users to buy less storage capacity and
intelligently allocate space for different functions.

Virtualization is increasingly gaining traction and has helped in improving
the efficiency of a data center to 70-80% from just 30% previously. Players such
as VMWare, Microsoft and IBM have been focusing on virtualization in a data
center from an end-to-end perspective. Besides the effect on the companys
bottom line, virtualization is positively impacting the environment. Gartner
estimates that 1.2 mn workloads run in VMware virtual machines, which represents
an aggregate power savings of about 8.5 bn kWh-more electricity than is consumed
annually in some small countries globally for heating, ventilation and cooling,
says Ganesh Mahabala, regional director, VmWare India and SAARC. IBM on the
other hand has been concentrating on reducing server sprawl and through
consolidation and virtualization has taken utilization levels to an all time
high. While standard servers run at 25%, IBM server utilizations levels are as
high as 90%, says Jyoti Satyanathan, VP-Platform Business, STG IBM. Besides
this, IBM has also been focusing on bringing a certain level of standardization
on the application front and has invested heavily on Linux for this. According
to Satyanathan, this helps in bringing all the applications onto a single layer
and consolidation becomes easier bringing down server floor space by about
50-60%. Apart from this, it also brings down staffing and training costs by
reducing the need for multiple skill sets. Giving his views on virtualization
Swapan Johri, Sr VP Transformation Services, HCLT ISD says, In addition to
lower manpower costs virtualization and consolidation also provides high level
of security, enhanced disaster recovery and enhanced regulatory compliance.

Though virtualization brings in complexities such as how data should be
managed and back-up should be created, solutions such as The system centre
virtual machine manager by Microsoft allows users to manage virtual as well as
physical servers from the same console with exactly the same attributes. So,
this brings down complexities and makes the IT managers job easier. A growing
number of large enterprises such as Mahindra & Mahindra, Crest Animation Studios
and Sony TV (check Case Study section) have used virtualization as a cost
advantage.

All vendors agree on the fact that cloud computing is the next big wave in
which application will be delivered through a data center. According to Pallavi
Khaturia, Director-Server Business Group, Microsoft, The uptake for SaaS and
PaaS has been boosting the demand for cloud computing and the demand for robust
data centers. Microsoft already delivers a lot of its applications through
clouds on a pay-by-use model and we believe cloud computing contributes a lot to
greening data centers. IBM, a pioneer in cloud computing services and has
recently set up a cloud computing center in Bangalore to build standards for the
cloud computing needs. Cloud computing will drive virtualization and the
greater uptake of desktop virtualization and thin clients. Enterprises can reach
higher energy effectiveness using clouds, but the concept is still in the
nascent stage, says Satyanathan.

While there has been a lot of debate on hosted data centres and its role in
the green strategy of enterprises, PK Saji, Sify clarifies the point, The
hosted concept is not being adopted as a green initiative but to primarily
tackle manageability issues, create better DR measures, reduce total cost of
ownership while adhering to SLAs and standards.

Green Consensus

It is good to see a consensus on the need for greener data centers among the
user community and vendors. While, concepts such as virtualization and
consolidation took time to gain traction, now that enterprises have realized the
benefits it is definitely here to stay. Green is no longer being looked upon as
gimmick and its cost advantages have proved to be an eye opener for enterprises
who have felt the pinch of the present market downturn. However, there is
certainly scope for improvements and the formation of the Green Grid Alliance
and LEED certifications for data center architecture will go a long way towards
achieving them.

Priya Kekre

priyak@cybermedia.co.in