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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."
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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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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No one in the server farm business is going to try and break into the solar-power business. It's not their area of expertise. It's an entirely different sort of business altogether. If there were a ton of solar power stations littering the outback, or if someone enterprising were ready to put some up in the hopes of attracting power-hungry industries with cheap electricity, that'd be another thing. But I would imagine it's still a rather risky proposition, as far as things go.
Besides, the bandwidth and latency to Australia from the rest of the world... not the greatest.
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And I think you don't understand thermodynamics either. Cooling to say 18 Celsius when you can happily get away with 25 Celsius will have a big impact on your cooling bill even through you are getting rid of the same amount of heat.
1. Get a data center
2. Paint it green
3. ???
4. Cthulhu
How can you be a former founder of something? Someone else can't come along later and found it again can they?
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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.
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
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?
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