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

Few?

[oodaloop]

So 54 data centers responded out of "over 100"? That seems pretty good to me. How many of the rest just didn't know how much energy they used, or couldn't be bothered to look it up?

Re:Few?

[Amouth]

saddly i know the power useage of one data center that would not be reporting in.. lets put it this way.. based on the farm usage they turn off power to other floors in the building.. not to conserve power but because the main line coming into the building is their bottle neck

Re:Few?

[Thornburg]

Are reasoning and math lost skills, even on a site tagged "news for nerds"?

They are seeking "at least 100 data centers" to participate.

It DOES NOT SAY that they asked 100. They have put out a general request for datacenters of 1000 square feet or more.

So, out of all the data centers in the US that are over 1000 square feet, only 54 have agreed to participate. That is NOT 54/100 or 54%, it is a drop in the bucket, and it does seem to indicate a reluctance to participate. Although it could just as easily be apathy.

Re:Few?

[sabatorg]

As someone who has worked around and at several very large data centers including those who hosted servers for ebay, google, accenture, ford, honda, etc, I would suggest that it is very likely that the "rest" have a very good understanding of how much power they consume. Floor space is only a small fraction of the processes of determining server capacity. Power and cooling are the real limiting factor in any large floor space data center.

Re:Few?

[oodaloop]

I think you're referring to reading comprehension skills, not math and reasoning as such. Flying in the face of /. norms, I read TFA again. There is no mention of how many data centers were queried, though their goal of 100 responses could be used to guesstimate. Also, it says the plan is 1 year old and the data centers need to compile 12 consecutive months of energy usage and submit it before June 1. How the 54 other companies compiled 12 consecutive months of data in 11 months is conveniently left out, but perhaps there will be more companies complying with the request closer to the deadline.

Re:Few?

[Thornburg]

I concede you are correct that it really is reading comprehension, not math or reasoning skills at fault here.

However, even RTFA-ing twice didn't give you a complete grasp. The article never mentions querying any data centers, just that they want them. They may have called/emailed/mailed to some, or they may have just put it up on the web and hoped.

Additionally, it says that the participants will begin collecting 12 consecutive months of data at the start of the program, "and submit the data by June 1, 2009." That's next year.

Transportation energy use is the key

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

We should stop conflating energy consumed at fixed locations from the energy consumed by the transportation sector. We have enough energy in the form of coal, nuclear power, tar sands, wind, solar, cow dung and what not. Sure, there are problems and pollution and different costs and benefits for each of these sources. But the one big advantage they have is that, they don't make us dependent on fickle foreign powers in unstable regions. We are 100% self sufficient in the fixed-point-energy consumption sector.

But it is a completely different story when it comes to the energy consumed in transportation. There is no viable alternative to gasoline for cars, diesel for trucks and kerosene for the airplanes in the near future. Nothing. And all the crude oil we import goes to transportation.

The politicians are clueless dumb idiots who go through the motions of doing something, on the crazy logic, "we must do something, it is something so we are doing it".

Re:Transportation energy use is the key

[afidel]

Uh, coal and tar sands are kind of a real problem as there are huge impacts on the environment both from mining them and from using them. Probably 90+% of the new capacity brought online in the last 30 years has been coal, and much of that growth has been to power electronics. Datacenters and corporate computers are a non-insignificant chunk of that. I know my datacenter for a midsized company probably draws as much power as the homes of all of the IT staff combined. Transportation is only 28% of the US energy puzzle, and as long as we keep relying on dead plants we are going to have a problem, coal that isn't used to needlessly power datacenters today can be turned into synthetic oil in the future. Hopefully not for transportation but for plastics and pharmaceuticals, where it is used as a feedstock rather than for energy production.

Re:Transportation energy use is the key

[jafiwam]

Well, you're right for now. While we're starting to develop alternative fuels...let's try to get past the ECO-freaks out there, that won't let us drill for our own oil, in our country!! China is drilling in cuban waters just off the coast of FL...why the fuck aren't we drilling in the lucrative oil fields offshore of FL, NJ, CA...?? I believe, it is because when the rest of the world is tapped out, there will still be quite a bit in "environmentally protected" areas that will be used to retain world superpower status long after everybody else goes back to riding behind horses.

It's a long term strategy.

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

[maxume]

They probably still have some power bills sitting around.

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.

In other news

[Normal Dan]

Over 50 data centers have given into government demands for private data. There is wide speculation on why so many data centers have willfully fallen under the sway of the government. There are rumors about bribes involving lowering energy costs. How many more data centers will cave? Is your data safe?!

Ignored like a credit card application

[EnOne]

There are probably at least Two reasons that this was ignored 1) The form letter from the Government was ignored like unsolicited credit card application. 2) The data center in question needs their people to work on projects instead of collecting information for said Government.

Yeah, that would be nice

[PIPBoy3000]

Our data center had a catastrophic failure last year when the generator test failed and the operators didn't notice they had no power until the UPS died 15 minutes later. Absolutely everything lost power, and we spent the day recovering systems from various messy states. The exception was our Tandem, used for our clinical system, which was kept alive by a series of D batteries powering the CPU. We used to make fun of those D battieries, but never again.

In any case, our data center is part of a larger facility and while it's easy to report on overall power use for the facility, it's mixed in with so much else that it's hard to get a good estimate for power use by the data center alone. As we found out the hard way, the UPS wasn't adequate for downtimes longer than 15 minutes. We've since made a big push to improve the UPS and reduce the number of physical servers in the data center (switching to virtual whenever possible).

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.