Google has had an impressive record in renewable energy. They invested over $850m dollars in renewable energy projects to do with geothermal, solar and wind energy. They entered into 20 year power purchase agreements with wind farm producers guaranteeing to buy their energy at an agreed price for twenty years giving the wind farms an income stream with which to approach investors about further investment and giving Google certainty about the price of their energy for the next twenty years – a definite win-win.

Google also set up RE < C – an ambitious research project looking at ways to make renewable energy cheaper than coal (unfortunately this project was shelved recently).

And Google set up a company called Google Energy to trade energy on the wholesale market. Google Energy buys renewable energy from renewable producers and when it has an excess over Google’s requirements, it sells this energy and gets Renewable Energy Certificates for it.

All hugely innovative stuff and all instituted under the stewardship of Google’s Green Energy Czar, Bill Weihl (on the right in the photo above).

However Bill, who left Google in November, is now set to start working for Facebook this coming January.

Facebook’s commitment to renewable energy has not been particularly inspiring to-date. They drew criticism for the placement of their Prineville data center because, although it is highly energy efficient, it sources its electricity from PacificCorp, a utility which mines 9.6 million tons of coal every year! Greenpeace mounted a highly visible campaign calling on Facebook to unfriend coal using Facebook’s own platform.

The campaign appears to have been quite successful – Facebook’s latest data center announcement has been about the opening of their latest facility in Lulea, Sweden. The data center, when it opens in 2012, will source most of its energy from renewable sources and the northerly latitudes in Lulea means it will have significant free cooling at its disposal.

Then in December of this year (2011) Facebook and Greenpeace issued a joint statement [PDF] where they say:

Facebook is committed to supporting the development of clean and renewable sources of energy, and our goal is to power all of our operations with clean and renewable energy.

In the statement Facebook commits to adopting a data center siting policy which states a preference for clean and renewable energy and crucially, they also commit to

Engaging in a dialogue with our utility providers about increasing the supply of clean energy that power Facebook data centers

So, not alone will Facebook decide where their future data centers will be located, based on the availability of renewable energy, but Facebook will encourage its existing utility providers to increase the amount of renewables in their mix. This is a seriously big deal as it increases the demand for renewable energy from utilities. As more and more people and companies demand renewable energy, utilities will need to source more renewable generation to meet this demand.

And all of this is before Google’s former Green Energy Czar officially joins Facebook this coming January.

If Bill Weihl can bring the amount of innovation and enthusiasm to Facebook that he engendered in Google, we could see some fascinating energy announcements coming from Facebook in the coming year.

Photo credit Jaymi Heimbuch

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I attended the 2011 DataCenterDynamics Converged conference in London recently and at it I chatted to a number of people in the data center industry about where the industry is going.

One of these was Active Power‘s Graham Evans. Active Power make flywheel UPS’s so we talked about the technology behind these and how they are now becoming a more mainstream option for data centers.

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone, welcome to GreenMonk TV, we are at the DCD Converge Conference in London and with me I have Graham Evans from Active Power. Graham you guys, you make the spinning UPSs.

Graham Evans: That’s right yes the flywheel UPSs, kinetic energy. So behind us here we have our powerhouse. So what we found with the flywheel UPS is because of its high density environment, the fact it doesn’t need cooling the fact that it is really suited to a containerized environment we’ve put it in a powerhouse to show the guys in DCD to show the benefits that we can provide from a systems perspective.

Tom Raftery: So what the flywheel UPS does is it takes in electricity, while the electricity is running, spins wheels really, really fast and then if there is a break it uses that kinetic energy to keep the system up.

Graham Evans: Not quite, so the flywheel itself is spinning all the time as an energy storage device. The UPS system is primarily conditioning the power. So as the power comes through it’s a parallel online system, all of the kilowatts flow through to the load and our converters regulate that power to make sure you get UPS grade output through to your critical load. At the same time the flywheel is spinning it’s sat there as a kinetic energy store ready to bridge the gap when its required to do so.

An Active Power flywheel UPS

So voltage or mains fails on the input, the flywheel itself changes state instantaneously from a motor to a generator and we extrapolate that kinetic energy through some converters to support the load, start our diesel engine, and that then becomes the primary power source through to the system.

Tom Raftery: And you got the diesel engine in fact built into the system here, it’s on the right hand side as we are looking at here. So there is a reason that you have your own diesel engine kind of fitted into in there.

Graham Evans: Yes, so we are not holding into one particular diesel engine manufacturer so what we do as a complete system is designed as a critical power solution. So the thought really is from a client point of view we can be flexible in terms of their requirements. We can size the engine to support the UPS load only or maybe we can pick up some mechanical loads as well. We make some enhancements to the diesel so we have our own diesel controller to start the diesel quickly. We have our own product we call GenSTART,which allows us to have a UPS backed starter mechanism to the system so we can use that UPS power to start it.

Tom Raftery: And that’s important because the flywheel don’t stay up as long as say a battery bank.

Graham Evans: Its important because this type of loads that we are supporting need that quick power restorations, so from a UPS point of view we need to restore or keep power instantaneously that’s the job of a UPS, no break power supply, but we also find with mechanical loads certainly in high density datacenter environments we need to restore the short break mechanical loads very quickly. So the system you see here is able to do that. We continuously support the UPS load and we can bring on the cooling load ten seconds afterwards. So very fast starting, very robust system.

Tom Raftery: And the whole flywheel UPS idea is relatively new comer to the datacenter environment?

Graham Evans: Not especially I think it feels like that sometimes but we have been around for 15 years as a business, we have 3000 plus installations worldwide, but certainly we are not as common place as some other technologies but we are probably one of the fastest growing companies globally. So, yeah not brand new 15 years in business, but yeah the concept’s really taken off and it’s been really successful for us.

Tom Raftery: Cool. Graham that’s been fantastic, thanks for coming to the show.

Graham Evans: No problem, thank you, cheers.

I attended the 2011 DataCenterDynamics Converged conference in London recently and at it I chatted to a number of people in the data center industry about where the industry is going.

The first of these was Paul-François Cattier of Schneider Electric who talked about the need for standardisation of infrastructure in the data centers to speed up the time to build.

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone, welcome to GreenMonk TV. We’re at DCD London Converge and with me I have Paul-François Cattier, who is VP Data Center Solutions for Schneider Electric. Paul welcome to the show.

Paul-François Cattier: Thank you Tom.

Tom Raftery: So Paul you guys made a bit of an announcement at the show here, can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Paul-François Cattier: Yes we announced what we call the way to bring the standardization and modular IT into data center to bring energy efficiency in the data center. So basically what we think is today’s data center industry is still very immature in its infancy and we need to bring this with stage of maturity to be better efficient.

Tom Raftery: So tell me why do you think a modular infrastructure is better for data centers?

Paul-François Cattier: It’s not really the modular infrastructure that is better for energy efficiency in data center, it is really the standardization that allow this modular IT. In fact what we need to bring into the data center, I think to bring it to maturity is the standardization and to be able to standardize the data center, you need to find a point of granularity of modularity, where you bring the standardization and after a lot of these different data centers have been serving the different business peoples but this level of standardization will allow a lot of CapEx and OpEx efficiency in your data center and you know that most of the OpEx of the data center are in the energy.

Tom Raftery: So talk to me about standardization. What exactly are you talking about when you say standardization, standardization of… ?

Paul-François Cattier: Most of the data center today are designed as unique design. So each time it’s very long process to design data center because it’s a unique design so you have 24 months, 20 months before you decide to do a data center when you are coming to the completion of the data center. So with the standardization you are using subsystems that are completely standardized, manufacture build, manufacture interested, respectable performance and you are using these bricks or these blocks or these Lego if you want of subsystems, standardized subsystems to build your data center.

Schneider Electric Power and Cooling modules

If doing this, you can really build your data center in three to four months with optimized performance and ensure due to this standardization that the management that is needed to really tie the data center physical infrastructure and it’s energy consumption to the effective IT of your data center to be enabled in the data center because as the data center is very much in standardized module, it’s very easy to require this type of management system. So like if you want — if you would like to develop yourself, your GPS in your car, it will — you will spend maybe 20 years before being able to use your own GPS designed by you.

What you do is you share the R&D to have an excellent GPS system that is sold to many, many customer to spread out the cost. So this is what standardization and modularity will bring into the data center world.

Tom Raftery: How far away do you reckon we are from that becoming the norm? I mean you talk about the data center industry currently being quite immature. When do you reckon we will be that much further along that this will be the norm?

Paul-François Cattier: Well we have a long way to go. Today 80% of the new built data center are still built in a very traditional way, that is totally inefficient in terms of CapEx use, in terms of OpEx use and in terms of energy efficiency, and you know that we are working in all the market, we are in Schneider Electric to bring energy efficiency into this market. And really we believe that the standardization in the modularity enables the management aspect of the challenge to be enabled, and — enabled to be enabled of course and allow this energy efficiency and when you save 1 kilowatt at the plug, you save most of the time 3 kilowatt as a generation plant.

Tom Raftery: Great. Well François that’s been fantastic, thanks for coming on the show.

Paul-François Cattier: Thank you very much Tom.

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is a widely used metric which is supposed to measure how efficient data centers are. It is the unit of data center efficiency regularly quoted by all the industry players (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc.).
However, despite it’s widespread usage, it is a very poor measure of data center energy efficiency or of a data center’s Green credentials.

Consider the example above (which I first saw espoused here) – in the first row, a typical data center has a total draw of 2MW of electricity for the entire facility. Of which 1MW goes to the IT equipment (servers, storage and networking equipment). This results in a PUE of 2.0.

If the data center owner then goes on an efficiency drive and reduces the IT equipment energy draw by 0.25MW (by turning off old servers, virtualising, etc.), then the total draw drops to 1.75MW (ignoring any reduced requirement for cooling from the lower IT draw). This causes the PUE to increase to 2.33.

When lower PUE’s are considered better (1.0 is the theoretical max), this is a ludicrous situation.

Then, consider that not alone is PUE a poor indicator of an data center’s energy efficiency, it is also a terrible indicator of how Green a data center is as Romonet’s Liam Newcombe points out.

Consider the example above – in the first row, a typical data center with a PUE of 1.5 uses an average energy supplier with a carbon intensity of 0.5kg CO2/kWh resulting in carbon emissions of 0.75kg CO2/kWh for the IT equipment.

Now look at the situation with a data center with a low PUE of 1.2 but sourcing energy from a supplier who burns a lot of coal, for example. Their carbon intensity of supply is 0.8kg CO2/kWh resulting in an IT equipment carbon intensity of 0.96kg CO2/kWh.

On the other hand look at the situation with a data center with a poor PUE of 3.0. If their energy supplier uses a lot of renewables (and/or nuclear) in their generation mix they could easily have a carbon intensity of 0.2kg CO2/kWh or lower. With 0.2 the IT equipment’s carbon emissions are 0.6kg CO2/kWh.

So, the data center with the lowest PUE by a long shot has the highest carbon footprint. While the data center with the ridiculously high PUE of 3.0 has by far the lowest carbon footprint. And that takes no consideration of the water footprint of the data center (nuclear power has an enormous water footprint) or its energy supplier.

The Green Grid is doing its best to address these deficiencies coming up with other useful metrics such as, Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE).

Now, how to make these the standard measures for all data centers?

The images above are from the slides I used in the recent talk I gave on Cloud Computing’s Green Potential at a Green IT conference in Athens.

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I attended Google’s European Data Center Summit earlier this week and it was a superb event. The quality of the speakers was tremendous and the flow of useful information was non-stop.

The main take home from the event is that there is a considerable amount of energy being wasted still by data centers – and that this is often easy to fix.

Some of the talks showed exotic ways to cool your data center. DeepGreen, for example, chose to situate itself beside a deep lake, so that it could use the lake’s cold water for much cheaper cooling. Others used river water and Google mentioned their new facility in Finland where they are using seawater for cooling. Microsoft mentioned their Dublin facility where they are using air-side economisation (i.e. it just brings in air from outside the building) and so is completely chiller-less. This is a 300,00sq ft facility.

IBM’s Dr Bruno Michel did remind us that it takes ten times more energy to move a compressible medium like air, than it does to move an non-compressible one like water but then, not all data centers have the luxury of a deep lake nearby!

Both Google and UBS, the global financial services co., gave what were hugely practical talks about simple steps to reducing your data center’s energy footprint.

Google’s Director of Operations, Joe Kava (pic on right) talked about a retrofit project where Google dropped the PUE of five of its existing data centers from 2.4 down to 1.5. They did this with an investment of $25k per data center and the project yielded annual savings of $67k each!

What kind of steps did they take? They were all simple steps which didn’t incur any downtime.

The first step was to do lots of modelling of their airflow and temperatures in their facilities. With this as a baseline, they then went ahead and optimised the perforated tile layout! The next step was to get the server owners to buy into the new expanded ASHRAE limits – this allowed Google to nudge the setpoint for the CRACs up from its existing 22C to 27C – with significant savings accruing from the lack of cooling required from this step alone.

Further steps were to roll out cold aisle containment and movement sensitive lighting. The cold aisles were ‘sealed’ at the ends using Strip Doors (aka meat locker sheets). This was all quite low-tech, done with no downtime and again yielded impressive savings.

Google achieved further efficiencies by simply adding some intelligent rules to their CRACs so that they turned off when not needed and came on only if/when needed.

UBS’ Mark Eichenberger echoed a lot of this in his own presentation. UBS has a fleet of data centers globally whose average age is 10 years old and some are as old as 30. Again, simple, non-intrusive steps like cold-aisle containment and movement sensitive lighting is saving UBS 2m Swiss Francs annually.

Google’s Chris Malone had other tips. If you are at the design phase, try to minimise the number of conversion steps from AC<->DC for the electricity and look for energy efficient UPS’.

Finally, for the larger data center owners, eBay’s Dean Nelson made a very interesting point. When he looked at all of eBay’s apps, he saw they were all in Tier 4 data centers. He realised that 80% of them could reside in Tier 2 data centers and by moving them to Tier 2 data centers, he cut eBay’s opex and capex by 50%

Having been a co-founder of the Cork Internet eXchange data center, it was great to hear that the decisions we made back then around cold aisle containment and highly energy efficient UPS’ being vindicated.

Even better though was that so much of what was talked about at the summit was around relatively easy, but highly effective retrofits that can be done to existing data centers to make them far more energy efficient.

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Photo credit Tom Raftery

Sentilla are a client company of ours. They have asked me to start a discussion here around what are the day-to-day issues data center practitioners are coming up against.

This is a very hands-off project from their point of view.

The way I see it happening is that I’ll interview some DC practitioners either via Skype video, or over the phone, we’ll have a chat about DC stuff (war stories, day-to-day issues, that kind of thing), I’ll record the conversations and publish them here along with transcriptions. They’ll be short discussions – simply because people rarely listen to/watch rich media longer than 10 minutes.

There will be no ads for Sentilla during the discussions, and no mention of them by me – apart from an intro and outro simply saying the recording was sponsored by Sentilla. Interviewees are free to mention any solution providers and there are no restrictions whatsoever on what we talk about.

If you are a data center practitioner and you’d like to be part of this blog series, or simply want to know more, feel free to leave a comment here, or drop me an email to tom@redmonk.com

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Photo credit clayirving

Out of curiosity, I decided to see if I could make a list of the top 10 data center focussed blogs. I did a bit of searching around, found around thirty blogs related to data centers (who knew they were so popular!). I went through the thirty blogs and eliminated them based on arbitrary things I made up on the spot like post frequency, off-topic posts, etc. until I came up with a list I felt was the best. Then I counted them and lo! I had exactly 10 – phew, no need to eliminate any of the good ones!

So without further ado – and in no particular order, I present you with my Top 10 Data Center blogs:

• Green (low carbon) Data Center blog – Dave Ohara’s famous blog on Monitoring, Modeling, and Meditating the Green Data Center
• Data Center Knowledge – one of the best known data center blogs
• The Server Room – a high volume blog of Intel staffers
• Data Center Design – from the consultants and engineers at PTS Data Center Solutions
• The Uptime Institute blog – as the name suggests, this is the blog of the Uptime Institute!
• N Plus One – another Uptime Institute blog, but this time more practical, less corporate
• Efficient Data Centers.com – despite the name, this is not at EfficientDataCenters.com – it is the blog of Jack Pouchet at Emerson
• Mark Thiele’s blog – Mark is the Founder & President of the industry practitioners group Data Center Pulse
• MS Datacenters – Microsoft’s data center blog
• Data Center Links – John Rath’s data center industry blog

What great data center blogs have I missed?

The chances are there are superb data center blogs out there which my extensive 15 seconds of research on the topic failed to uncover. If you know of any, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Image credit Tom Raftery

Back in 2006 I was the co-founder of a Data Centre in Cork called Cork Internet eXchange. We decided, when building it out, that we would design and build it as a hyper energy-efficient data centre. At the time, I was also heavily involved in social media, so I had the crazy idea, well, if we are building out this data centre to be extremely energy-efficient, why not open source it? So we did.

We used blogs, flickr and video to show everything from the arrival of the builders on-site to dig out the foundations, right through to the installation of customer kit and beyond. This was a first. As far as I know, no-one had done this before and to be honest, as far as I know, no-one since has replicated it. Until today.

Today, Facebook is lifting the lid on its new custom-built data centre in Prineville, Oregon.

Not only are they announcing the bringing online of their new data centre, but they are open sourcing its design, specifications and even telling people who their suppliers were, so anyone (with enough capital) can approach the same suppliers and replicate the data centre.

Facebook are calling this the OpenCompute project and they have released a fact sheet [PDF] with details on their new data center and server design.

I received a pre-briefing from Facebook yesterday where they explained the innovations which went into making their data centre so efficient and boy, have they gone to town on it.

Data centre infrastructure
On the data centre infrastructure side of things, building the facility in Prineville, Oregon (a high desert area of Oregon, 3,200 ft above sea level with mild temperatures) will mean they will be able to take advantage of a lot of free cooling. Where they can’t use free cooling, they will utilise evaporative cooling, to cool the air circulating in the data centre room. This means they won’t have any chillers on-site, which will be a significant saving in capital costs, in maintenance and in energy consumption. And in the winter, they plan to take the return warm air from the servers and use it to heat their offices!

By moving from centralised UPS plants to 48V localised UPS’s serving 6 racks (around 180 Facebook servers), Facebook were able to re-design the electricity supply system, doing away with some of the conversion processes and creating a unique 480V distribution system which provides 277V directly to each server, resulting in more efficient power usage. This system reduces power losses going in the utility to server chain, from an industry average 11-17% down to Prineville’s 2%.

Finally, Facebook have significantly increased the operating temperature of the data center to 80.6F (27C) – which is the upper limit of the ASHRAE standards. They also confided that in their next data centre, currently being constructed in North Carolina, they expect to run it at 85F – this will save enormously on the costs of cooling. And they claim that the reduction in the number of parts in the data center means they go from 99.999% uptime, to 99.9999% uptime.

New Server design
Facebook also designed custom servers for their data centres. The servers contain no paint, logos, stickers bezels or front panel. They are designed to be bare bones (using 22% fewer materials than a typical 1U server) and for ease of serviceability (snap-together parts instead of screws).

The servers are 1.5U tall to allow for larger heat sinks and larger (slower turning and consequently more efficient) 60mm fans. These fans only take 2-4% of the energy of the server, compared to 10-20% for typical servers. The heat sinks are all spread at the back of the mother board so none of them will be receiving pre-heated air from another heat sink, reducing the work required of the fans.

The server power supply accepts both 277V AC power from the electrical distribution system and 44V DC from the UPS in the event of a utility power failure. These power supplies have a peak efficiency of 94.5% (compared to a more typical 90% for standard PSU’s) and they connect directly to the motherboard, simplifying the design and reducing airflow impedance.

Open Compute
Facebook relied heavily on open source in creating their site. Now, they say, they want to make sure the next generation of innovators don’t have to go through the same pain as Facebook in building out efficient data centre infrastructure. Consequently, Facebook is releasing all of the specification documentation which it gave to its suppliers for this project.

Some of the schematics and board layouts for the servers belong to the suppliers so they are not currently being published, though Facebook did say they are working with their suppliers to see if they will release them (or portions of them) but they haven’t reached agreement with the suppliers on this just yet.

Asked directly about their motivations for launching Open Compute Facebook’s Jay Park came up with this classic reply

… it would almost seem silly to do all this work and just keep it closed

Asking Facebook to unfriend coal
Greenpeace started a campaign to pressure Facebook into using more renewable energy resources due to the fact that Pacific Power, the energy supplier Facebook will be using for its Prineville data center produces almost 60% of its electricity from burning coal.

Greenpeace being Greenpeace, created a very viral campaign, using the Facebook site itself, and the usual cadre of humurous videos etc., to apply pressure on Facebook to thinking of sourcing its electricity from more renewable sources.

When we asked Facebook about this in our briefing, they did say that their data centre efforts are built around many more considerations than just the source of energy that comes into the data centre. They then went on to maintain that they are impressed by Pacific Power’s commitment to moving towards renewable sources of energy (they are targeting having 2,000MW of power from renewables by 2013). And they concluded by contending that the efficiencies they have achieved in Prineville more than offsets the use of coal which powers the site.

Conclusion
Facebook tell us this new custom data centre at Prineville has a PUE of 1.07, which is very impressive.

They have gone all out on innovating their data centre and the servers powering their hugely popular site. More than that though, they are launching the Open Compute Project giving away all the specs and vendor lists required to reproduce an equally efficient site. That is massively laudable.

It is unfortunate that their local utility has such a high gen-mix of coal in its supply to besmirch an otherwise great energy and sustainability win for Facebook. The good thing though is that as the utility adds to its portfolio of renewables, Facebook’s site will only get greener.

For more on this check out the discussions on Techmeme

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Photo credit FaceBook’s Chuck Goolsbee

Continuing my series of chats with companies in the data center energy management space, I spoke recently to Philip Petersen, CEO of UK-based ad infinitum.

Their product, called InSite, like that of most of the others in this space I have spoken to, is a server based product, front-ended by a browser.

InSite pulls the data directly from devices (like power strips, distribution board meters, temperature and humidity sensors) and stores them in a PostgreSQL database. Having an SQL database makes it that much easier to integrate with other systems for pulling in data, and also for sharing information. This is handy when InSite is connected to a Building Management System (BMS), it allows organisations to see what proportion of a building’s power is going to the keep the Data Center running, for example. And because InSite can poll servers directly, it can be used to calculate the cost of running server-based applications (such as Exchange, Notes, SQL Server, SAP, etc.).

I asked Philip about automation and he said that while InSite has an inbuilt Automation Engine, it hasn’t been deployed because “no client that we have spoken to has wanted to do that yet”. Demand for automation will come, he said but right now companies are looking for more basic stuff – they often just want to see what’s actually going on, so that they can decide on the best way to respond.

InSIte’s target customers are your typical medium too large organisations (ones likely to have significant IT infrastructures) as well as co-lo operators. Unlike some of the other companies in this space though, Ad infinitum were able to share some significant customer wins – Tiscali’s UK Business Services, Equinix and Cisco’s UK Engineering labs.

In fact, Cisco have published a Case Study on the Cisco.com website referencing this solution [PDF] and how Cisco were able to achieve a 30% reduction in IT equipment power consumption and a 50% drop in their cooling costs!

It’s hard to argue with a significant customer win like that!

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Photo credit JohnSeb

Speaking of data centers, I was delighted to read this morning of a partnership between IBM and Indian bank Kotak.

According to the release, IBM is helping the bank consolidate its server rooms into one data center and Kotak will save:

over US$1.2 million in operational efficiency and reduced energy costs over the next five years

I’d like to see some of the calcs behind those data – $1.2m over five years sounds low to me unless it is a modest data center.

Intriguingly, the release refers to:

a chilled water-based cooling and an automatic floor pressurization system

If that is water cooled servers (as opposed to water cooled air handling units) then this is nice. I’d love to know what an ” automatic floor pressurization system” system is. Anyone know? My guess is that it is something for maintaining underfloor airflow integrity but if it is that, then it sounds like traditional air cooled servers, not water cooled

Hello? Anyone from IBM have any more info on this?