US Data Centers Wary of Sharing Energy Data With Feds

1sockchuck writes "The EPA has been seeking at least 100 data center operators willing to share data about their energy usage to help the government develop an Energy Star program for data centers. Thus far, only 54 data centers have signed up, which suggests that few data center operators are eager to tell the government exactly how much energy they are using. The EPA issued a report to Congress last year on data center power usage, and is already developing an Energy Star program to rate servers. Can a program designed to rank the energy efficiency of appliances and computer monitors be a useful tool in addressing the enormous energy consumption of data centers?"

Comments

Might not have anything to share

[0racle]

I'm not really surprised. I've seen decent sized data centers (100-500 machines) that did not track their power usage. They might not have any data to share with anyone anyway.

Re:Might not have anything to share

[penguinbrat]

This may be a dumb question - but what's wrong with reading the electric bill for the place? The DC's I've been in or a party too - EVERYTHING connected to the DC or in it, had a purpose solely devoted to keeping the servers up and powered, one way or the other.

Re:Might not have anything to share

[Enry]

I hope you're joking

Data centers have to know how much they're using as they have to have sufficient UPS backup to keep their systems running in the event of street power outage.

Groups that maintain these data centers also wind up paying the electric bills, so even if they don't know how much is actually in use at ant single point in time, it's pretty easy to look at a few bills and see what the usage over the past 30 days were.

I can see the headlines now..

[tjstork]

Computer data centers use too much energy. Next thing you know, Congressman will be up in arms, hauling data center leads in front of a good public beating, and then passing legislation to tax excess profits. What would happen next? Data centers leave the USA in droves, 1,000,000 jobs evaporate, and the USA loses yet another industry due to a government that is as malicious towards successful enterprise as it is incompetent.

Data Centers use a LOT of power!

[mlwmohawk]

I have done a number of projects for a number of companies focused on power saving in the data center.

One company was building a fan control system to reduce the power used by cooling fans in the racks. We just had a Slashdot article about being more selective about load distribution and shutting down systems not being utilized for the load.

Data centers use redundant power which is more expensive than line power because UPS system are never 100% efficient.

To top it off, servers put out a LOT of heat. That is two types of load: The power draw of the server and the power draw of the data center cooling system.

Data centers are a prime target for green work, and I bet with a little development work you could EASILY cut the power utilization by 30%. Upgrading and replacing four older machines with two newer machines will cut power usage.

Maybe software efficiency is important again as doing more with less power is greener.

Re:is this really necessary?

[Enry]

An HPC cluster can easily consume 20+KW per rack. Across 5-10 racks (or more) per cluster. And that's not counting the AC that's required to keep the air cool.

While setting monitors to sleep mode and powering things off do help, data centers have a lot of power use in a small space. It's clearly in everyone's interest to reduce that power since it results in a lot of savings across the board.

Users can put in more systems per square foot, data center managers can rely on fewer UPS systems and fewer tons of AC, and the resulting lower utility bills is just icing on the cake.

Wary, or Don't Care?

[scrib]

What's in it for the data center? Of course they're not "eager" for new tasks on their To-Do list!

"Hi, we'd like you to generously share some internal data and in return we'd like to give you responsibilities and guidelines about how we'll let you give your data to us! Sweet deal, right?"

Presumably they are paying their power bills and thus have some incentive to take "reasonable" steps toward conservation. The government will need to use a carrot or a stick to coax this information from a busy business. I'm surprised simply announcing an interest in the information has netted as many responses as they've gotten.

Also, it's not clear this is the biggest problem

[The Second Horseman]

Data centers themselves are actually (somewhat) easy to figure out - and to figure out how to conserve power, at least to some extent. Nobody's going to do unless they were planning to anyway, or have a financial motive. But at least it's a central location, you can identify where the power is going, etc. It's going to happen over time as the cost of energy goes up, more than likely. One major reason for inefficient data centers is actually a lack of money - you don't get the budget to rip and replace, so you have to keep tacking things on.

So the EPA likes it because it's tractable. But in many organizations, most IT-related energy use is actually at the edge - factoring in thousands of computers, monitors, printers, edge switches, wireless access points, VOIP phones or digital handsets (a simple analog phone on-hook uses almost no power), etc. Dozens of computers in an open office area adds a significant amount of heat that has to be removed. And as more and more equipment runs uses Ethernet and TCP/IP, you need more and more network switch ports, often delivering PoE. I think a lot of organizations are going to end up pointing fingers at their IT departments because they can identify the cost, and it's easier to blame one group in one location than to face the fact that everyone's incremental usage adds up to significant numbers.

Re:!evil, just no trust

[Doctor Faustus]

You know, read the labels on the devices and such?
To some degree, but some possible improvements would require a standardization mandate. For instance, I was reading here a few years ago that Google can make (or get made) hardware to their own specifications, and they save an awful lot of power by using strictly 12V DC to the motherboards, if not the whole boxes. They were advocating for the rest of the industry to do that, but if you run a data center and can't buy the hardware to do that, you're out of luck.