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Building the Green Data Center
blackbearnh writes "O'Reilly News talked to Bill Coleman, former founder of BEA and current founder and CEO of Cassett Corporation, about the challenges involved in building more energy-efficient data centers. Coleman's company is trying to change the way resources in the data center are used, by more efficiently leveraging virtualization to utilize servers to a higher degree. In the interview, Coleman touches on this topic, but spends most of his time discussing how modern data centers grossly overcool and overdeploy hardware, leading to abysmal levels of efficiency."
This is why I purchase Sun server for my organization, half the power of a Dell and equivalent performance.
Software has an impact, too. Messy, heavy code takes longer to run, takes more CPUs, etc. Imagine how much energy could be saved if there wasn't so much code bloat!
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In all seriousness I've often wondered why they don't just slap server farms and data centres in the australian desert, well any for that matter. Solar power galore (almost no cloud cover in central Oz), and if the miners get paid to go live out there and work for $$$, surely if you cut out alot of your overheads IT guys would take big bucks to do it. Offer the work to Residency applicants even to cut the wage. Also there are enough big mining outfits out that way, so they would probably relish being able to out-source their IT needs. y
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He talks about turning off unused capacity like it's some future panacea, HP and VMWare have been doing it for a couple years already. He also dismisses turning servers off as not being a big deal but anyone who's run a datacenter knows that servers that have been running for years often fail when they are shut off. There are numerous physical reason for this from inrush current to bearing wear. A modern boot from SAN server is probably much less likely to fail at boot then older ones with DAS, but the chance is very much non-zero. Of course with a good dynamic provisioning system a single host failure doesn't matter because that new VM will just get spun up on a different host that's woken up.
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by more efficiently leveraging virtualization to utilize servers to a higher degree
I should have printed a fresh stack of these.
Switch the machines off at the the socket. You can do it using SNMP.
Monitor the average load on your machines, if too low, migrate everything off it and switch a machine off. If too high, switch one on.
Course it assumes you know how to create highly available load balanced clusters. Automatic installations, network booting and all that. Not so difficult.
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I think this guy confuses heat and temperature. In datacenters, cooling costs are mostly proportional to the heat produced, and have little to do with the temperature you maintain in the steady state.
1. Get a data center
2. Paint it green
3. ???
4. Cthulhu
We do something like this, but from scratch rather than using LTSP. It's really not difficult, just a slightly different way of looking at how an operating system and server application should work. Think botnet. It's a fundamental shift in the mathematics of computing infrastructure, from linear or worse to logarithmic.
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applications? Seems that there have been several Linux clusters built up to do jobs that modern video cards could do orders of magnitude faster... Like looking for intelligent signals from beyond, Gravity waves, Machine vision, etc... I know that these are niche apps, but these are usually the type of apps where clusters are applied.. no?
small the rento por90y this handsharek.
How can you be a former founder of something? Someone else can't come along later and found it again can they?
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
He's no longer the founder of BEA? Who is then?
Good point, however, since this is just thermodynamics - why do we actively cool systems? Managed properly the heat should be able to be utilised in ways far more effective than air conditioning. I think people often forget that air conditioning isn't actually a cooling solution if you take the whole picture. You are providing more energy and therefore more heat to make a small area temporarily cooler.
Overcooled? Has he calculated how much energy goes into replacing hardware? Does he know that the rule is 10 degrees celcius cooler doubles the time the hardware will run(in certain models)? We don't just love cool because it means you can overclock, it very well could decrease energy use and carbon emissions related to running your business.
I've used Dell's Greenprint Calculator to determine usage in my racks pretty often.
It's got a nice interface and gives you all the energy information you need on their equipment, plus allows you to insert your own equipment's energy profile to calculate total usage.
It's very handy
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This is a huge topic, since so many different strategies are being brought to bear. For data center operators, energy efficiency is a business imperative since the power bills are soaring. Here are some sources offering ongoing reading about Green Data Centers:
The Green Data Center Blog
Data Center Knowledge
Groves Green IT
The Big List of Green Technology Blogs
Yea, but the downside is that you've got to run OSX
Don't get me wrong. OSX is a great operating system for a user. It's probably the best laptop OS in existence. I'm writing this comment on a Powerbook G4 right now, actually. But in the server room, OSX sucks if it has to interact with any non-OSX services.
The very fact that they took things in Unix that had worked for 20 years and broke them for no good reason except they didn't fit their idea of how something should work is asinine.
Granted, the recent releases have gotten better, but I was so burned by 10.2-10.3 that I literally have a pile of Mac Servers that I'm going to be selling on Ebay / Craigslist.
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What I've always wondered is why we don't build more datacenters in colder climates here in north america. Why put huge commercial datacenters in places like Dallas or San Diego (there are plenty in each) when you could place them in Canada or Alaska? In a cold enough climate, you could just about heatsink the racks to the outside ambient temperature and have little left to do for cooling. I suppose the downside is 20ms of extra latency to some places, and perhaps having to put more fiber and power infrastructure in a remote place. But surely in the long run the cooling savings would win no?
11*43+456^2
Some companies make it a total no-brainer to control the number of servers running -- according to the current computing demand. Alpiron makes a product that integrates seamlessly with Citrix and Terminal Server, so that the users are at no point affected. Additionally, it takes 20 minutes to set up, and you get alarms, power-saving reports etc. for free.
The headline on /. is "News: Building the Green Data Center". Every IT publication for the past year has put "building the green data center" on its cover. It's not news anymore!
"We're a Windows shop." You only hint at your real concerns -- that license tracking and organizational inertia prevents it in your case. That's too bad for you.
The technology is obviously available and immensely powerful. Some will use it, some will shun it. In the corporate world which do you suppose is going to out-compete the other?
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This guy is insane for wanting to turn servers off !! We never do except to apply some patch or install some new hardware. No telling what will actually happen when the machine boots up again. And to do this on a regular basis. With N-tiered applications ? Crazy talk.
Speaking strictly to the cooling generation side of things, the biggest thing that saves energy is implementing freecooling, that is bringing in outside air directly when it is cold and using it to cool the building (contamination is a easy known problem to deal with - filtering is not hard). If you're in a dry climate, use a cooling tower to make cold water and use that in coils. Blindingly simple, but datacenters just don't do it, even though their 24/7 load that is independent of outdoor air temperature is a great match for it. Part of the reason is it doesn't save peak load, and peak kW is where it's really at. Many datacenters I've seen have maxed out their utility feed, and paying for new infrastructure on the MW scale is not cheap.
Get the self contained Toshiba 5MW reactor, build data center around it.
For desalination plant design, see above.
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Hey... It's been working for Microsoft.
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not sure how high humidity it's safe to run a datacenter at though
60% seems to be the common recommendation among datacenter humidifier vendors, even those who could sell more gear by changing that number. Static sucks.
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