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IBM can help you go green too.
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The concept of the "green" data center is in vogue today, and not just because of the soaring costs of power and cooling. More than an economic pain point or a social responsibility, bringing sound environmental principles to bear in operating a data center can become a competitive advantage and source of operational stability.
The same concepts behind virtualization that have enabled companies to create new efficiencies in their data centers can be applied to make data centers energy-sippers instead of energy-gulpers. The same intellectual property that enables data centers to achieve greater levels of server utilization, a reduction in server numbers and maintenance, and a shrinkage in data centers' space demands can monitor energy consumption for maximum efficiency, creating, in effect, a virtual power grid. A study by American Power Conversion Corporation found that 70% of data centers' energy-related costs are attributable to infrastructure systems.
Assessing Your Efficiency
Any plan to take a data center green starts with IBM's energy efficiency assessment, a six- to eight-week comprehensive, fact-based analysis that prioritizes tactical plans across the data center to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy-related costs. Called "Project Big Green", IBM is targeting its assistance on corporate data centers where energy constraints and costs can limit growth and is relying on a new global "green team" of more than 850 energy efficiency architects from across IBM.
The savings can be substantial — more than 40% for an average 25,000 square foot data center. Based on the energy usage profile of the US, this savings equates to more than 7,400 tons of carbon emissions saved per year.
The assessment measures existing energy usage of cooling, electrical, and building systems, compares your profile to an industry standard, and pinpoints opportunities for improvement. These assessments address the obvious as well as complex solutions. For instance, in an estimated 70% of data centers, the raised floors, which were originally designed to promote cool air flow, are being used instead for storage, defeating their original purpose. At the other extreme, the thermodynamic lay-out of the data center plays a huge role in power consumption as well as computing reliability.
“The same concepts behind virtualization that have enabled companies to create new efficiencies in their data centers can be applied to make data centers energy-sippers instead of energy-gulpers.”
Identified Needs and Elegant Management
Once the action items have been identified, IBM goes further to create a business-based financial justification to help prioritize improvements for energy savings and to make the case for the improvements to non-IT executives.
In another coming phase of the creation of a green data center, IBM Virtualization dynamically manages the power and cooling needs of data centers by shifting workloads in logical partitions among machines to optimize performance of servers and storage devices. For instance, workloads can be shifted away from servers in data center hotspots and those servers can be powered down.
In addition, power attributes can be folded in virtualization tools. For instance, if the data center is exceeding service level agreements, the clock speed on the server's processor automatically can be slowed so that service agreements are met at lower levels of power consumption. Another source of reduced power consumption: the ability to automatically put servers into "sleep" mode and reactivate them according to demand fluctuations can dramatically lower the power consumption of the servers going into "sleep" mode.
IBM Tivoli workload tools can schedule shifts of workloads between data centers to take advantage of off-peak electricity rates. The Tivoli Accounting Manager even gives the operator a view of the resources required to process a given workload, thereby creating an opportunity to apportion power costs to data center customers.
IBM Is Committed to Energy Efficiency
Not surprisingly, IBM is practicing what it is preaching. IBM has committed itself to spending $1 billion a year to make its business more energy efficient. The company's plan includes new products and services for IBM and its clients to sharply reduce energy consumed by data centers.
IBM, which runs the world's largest commercial technology infrastructure, expects to double the computing capacity of its data centers within the next three years without increasing power consumption. Compared to building out new space and doubling the size of its data centers — now comprising more than 8 million square feet on six continents — IBM expects this will help save more than 5 billion kilowatt hours of energy per year.
The green data center concept is paying dividends for IBM customers, too. Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) undertook a collaborative effort to optimize energy efficiency opportunities in PG&E's California IT operations through a server consolidation program and by jointly developing a new way to measure and reduce heat in data centers. A world leader in energy efficiency, PG&E teamed with IBM to deploy a server consolidation and virtualization initiative with the explicit goal of reducing energy consumption in its own data center facilities spanning over 40,000 square feet of raised floor in San Francisco, Fairfield, and Diablo Canyon, California.
PG&E consolidated nearly 300 Unix servers onto six IBM System p servers, helping to reduce 80% of its energy and facilities consumption, and is using IBM virtualization technologies to boost utilization of the systems from 10% capacity to over 80%. In addition, PG&E is deploying IBM Rear Door Heat eXchanger water cooling technology on the System p servers to reduce heat in the data center by up to 60%.
Before embarking on its server consolidation efforts, PG&E teamed with IBM Research to develop a tool to uniquely measure the three-dimensional temperature distributions in its data centers. With IBM's new Mobile Measurement Technology (MMT), IBM and PG&E were able to survey the relevant physical parameters of PG&E's data centers to visualize — via 3-D images — hot spots, air leakage, and other inefficiencies. The data was then used to build customized thermal and energy models to help mitigate hot spots and rectify imbalances within the data center.
IBM's Mobile Measurement Technology utilizes a unique advanced measurement technique, coupled with statistical and optimization methods designed to help provide scientific strategies for improving space and energy efficiency of existing data centers. The new mobile measurement machine includes a position monitoring system with a network of up to 100 sensors used to gather thermal data at a granular level, with unprecedented speed and accuracy as it travels through the data center. A 10,000 square foot data center can be completely surveyed within a few hours by the MMT, compared to taking several weeks for several people to survey the data center by hand. Wireless thermal sensor technologies can also be deployed to measure long-term, transient temperature effects in the data center.
IBM isn't alone in thinking that energy efficiency will be one of the major forces shaping society as well as technology in the years ahead. For all the attention that is being focused on the energy efficient data center, IBM just might come to be known as Big Green instead of Big Blue.
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