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Data Centers Push Back On US Efficiency Rules
alphadogg writes "Data center executives from Google and other large companies are pushing back against new efficiency requirements proposed by a prominent standards group, saying they are too 'prescriptive' and don't leave them room to innovate. 'This standard defines the energy efficiency for most types of buildings in America and is often incorporated into building codes across the country,' Urs Hoelzle, Google senior vice president for operations, wrote in a post on the Google blog. Data centers are among the fastest-growing users of energy, and setting efficiency standards for them is a welcome step, he said. But he called the requirements 'too prescriptive.' Instead of setting efficiency targets and letting engineers decide how they can best meet them, the amendments specify types of cooling systems that companies should use."
I made the argument a couple days ago that video codecs should not be directly supported in browsers. The market must be able to innovate, and by forcing specific technologies, the playing field is narrowed and users are ultimately hurt by such prescriptive actions.
I'm in full agreement with Mr. Hoelzle, and I think that anyone who truly believes in limited government would as well.
So they can pull out a law forcing data centers to use the latest iCooling device from brand XYZ.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
...too tell you how much of a product you can consume.
If they want to add taxes to cover the externalities, that's fair... but the only rule for energy use should be: only use what you can pay for.
On the one hand, this makes a lot of sense. It shouldn't matter much how they manage to accomplish this as long as they manage to do so. On the other hand, there are problems with that approach: 1) One might want to specifically not encourage certain approaches if they had other negative results (we'd certainly feel that way about a process that improves building insulation using the flesh of newborn babies). 2) It may be difficult to measure efficiency and other metrics directly. So having specific requirements helps remove that uncertainty. This is one reason why a lot of building codes are so specific. The way the electric wiring needs to go in residential homes is standardized. Sure, you might come up with a better way of doing it. But the probability is high that something will go drastically wrong.
Everyone has a PUE? It's a rating by which you determine your efficiency.
I was talking with one engineer who had designed some interesting storage units. He was like yeah, in theory, it has a PUE of 1. Uhhh... you mean no cooling costs? He said, "Precisely."
It actually uses a very novel method of cooling, but they never went into production to my knowledge.
This is precisely what they were referring to in terms of too prescriptive in requirements. Through some innovation in varying scales you can produce some systems which perform far superior to TODAY'S conventional technologies.
Also note, in some of the larger shops they engineer some of their own devices. This may or may not fall into the confines of what is described in a mandate. Gasp! I know, more strange innovation. However, this is an area where many individuals and corporations have been trying to be king of efficiency for years.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
I don't know about you, but I've become somewhat jaded when it comes to standards like these. Usually, there's one or more parties who stand to gain financially if the standards are implemented (naturally). But when those who benefit are those that impose the standards themselves, doesn't it become somewhat of a slippery slope?
Where I work, there was this company XXX who was touting some kind of solution to protect mobile phone users; if your phone is stolen, and you report it to the operator, there was some mechanism in place that would lock the phone when it was powered up. This could be done because each phone has a unique identifier, kind of like a MAC address. Problem was, the technical platform was supposedly half-baked and too pricey, so many of the operators rejected it. But then, they got the idea to approach the government - and lo and behold, the powers-that-be came up with some regulation and standards that all operators had to comply to. Best of all -- we had to use Company XXX's technology!
So the question is -- do the members (or more likely, ASHRAE's Technical Committee members) stand to gain financially by implementing this? I would think so, since ASHRAE's made up of persons in the HVAC and other related fields. Members will gain access to "many opportunities to participate in the development of that technology"
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- Legislation should be restrictive only about total efficiency, not how to achieve that efficiency.
- There should/could be industry standard recommendation for technologies how to achieve certain efficiency levels
- Legislation should never restrict using some yet unknown technology!
- In unknown technology feared to cause real problems, have it authorized by standard evaluation process
- If something is really unefficient or is otherwise unethical or dangerous, just blacklist it
Forcing to use just some tehcnology sound like heavy industry lobbing.
...Google just wants to continue using the chilled blood of babies to cool their data centers.
Being green is good except for whenever **I** have to do it!
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
The same thing was done in the past. Only 6 inch round headlamps was allowed in cars manufactured and sold in America. It was the best back then, but what happen in the following years is that it stop innovation all together in America and Europe started to make better headlamps. Years ago was the law was repealed and non 6 inch headlamps was allowed to be installed on autos. Took years for America to catch up.
Make 100% virtualization being mandatory (servers, storage, network).
The "dedicated server" approach has to die, for the sake of everybody.
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It is one thing for the gov to say that we need to get our efficiencies up, for national interest. I have ZERO issues with that. The problem is that generally some lobbyists has gotten in there and made it now point to THEIR solution. Sadly, just about every one of those 'solutions' in any gov. response, will cost more and hurt us in the long run.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
These economizers that are being referenced are not always usable. They effectively circulate outside air into the data center. When the outside air is too hot, they can't be used. Also, when the outside air has too many pollutants, they can't be used. The cost of having them makes little sense when their usability is low. Other systems could make better use of the investment.
This is definitely a case where goals, not methods, should be prescribed.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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In its response, ASHRAE says there are already alternatives to economizers. Google and the other signers remain concerned about how the amendment to standard 90.1 might be interpreted by local building officials. They say tthe emergence of fresh air cooling is itself an indication of the speed with which best practices can change. “Not so long ago, economizers were a taboo subject for data center operators,” said Google's Chris Malone.It wasn't really until this 2008 Intel study that economizers gained momentum in data center design.
Google has it easy Towns bend over backwards to get them to build and locate within their locality. With that being said the tax payers are often stiffed with the "perks" and "Abatement's" that are guaranteed to Google and one of them is usually always the huge cost of power utility and infrastructure that Google doesn't necessarily absorb. With that said, Google should be responsive to the local government and regulatory committees and not be so defensive to them. Its ok to say "bad idea", its okay to say "This can hurt our engineering" but remember Google, you're plugged into a utility grid that the "people" put there for you so if you want to be the biggest consumer thereof, you have to play within the "commission" of those people.
Yes google, I admire you, but I admire you for what you can do and have done. Becoming more of a "black box" that gets its own way isn't what I hope to see. If the regulation/law/policy is bad, speak to it directly, not in vague assertations. Show the world your engineering ability and how to do it right if you feel you have that technology.
I suspect these standards are prescriptive to avoid creating loopholes and to avoid complicating enforcement.
How do you specify an energy use target for a data center? Do you specify kWh per CPU, per HDD, or something else? How do the agencies that monitor and enforce codes know how many CPU's, HDDs, or whatever else are in the data center on a given day? They just take the operator's word for it? With a prescriptive standard an agent can inspect for compliance and issue citations for non-compliance. I suspect this is what Google opposes. Restricting "innovation" alright, just not the kind of innovation you're thinking of.
Congress-douche: I was an Art History major in college. When will the time travel machine be ready for us?
It is rules like those currently proposed that led us to exclusive use of asbestos in many applications such as all of our schools. Because instead of specifying the desired ourcome, they specified the materials to use. The rules should state the end objectives and not the details of how those objectives should be met.
The building codes are necessarily formulaic in that a high-school graduate building inspector in a small town needs to be able to evaluate if a given structure is being correctly constructed. So I am fine with examples of approaches that provide satisfactory results being included in the building codes. I just think it is a bad idea that the codes be written such that this is the only way that this can be acheived. If a company hires architects and experts or wants to apply a new technique developed at a university there should be room for this. Most municipalities or states simply take these codes and make them the law, so it can be next to impossible to work around short comings once they are made laws unless they are propperly written in the first place.
The issue raised by a number of posters is the specificity of standards that define not the objective but the implementation. Initially it may seem like a good idea, but because it gets embedded in building codes, it can be the standard for much longer than it is actually a useful approach. The example of headlights and a lot of the electrical code is telling. By defining energy efficiency standards in quantitative terms rather than in specific implementation approaches, the engineers are free to use the best of available technology -- as long as they meet or exceed the consumption standards. Now, the tricky bit is defining what the metrics should be... mw per square foot, watts per MIP, whatever. Builders of small data centers will probably look to existing codes as a how to guide, but someone building a big site can probably afford real engineers. After all, energy consumption is the real long term cost of the data center and it is in their very personal best interest to reduce it.
But he called the requirements 'too prescriptive.' Instead of setting efficiency targets and letting engineers decide how they can best meet them, the amendments specify types of cooling systems that companies should use."
This makes perfect sense if:
* the government is fucking stupid
* the government wants to control you
Because if the legislation merely specified the end state (X reduction in Y), then more and smarter people would be able to find granular and custom solutions, it would be in their best interest to do so. But instead, it's idiot diktat from above, with no consideration of X-order consequences, and you get that either by stupid hubristic ego or by a desire to extend power and control. I actually lean towards the former, as most pols are lawyers and the lawyers that had any brains get paid more than pols.
BTW, same thing with stupid CAFE mandates. If you want to reduce CO2/smog/imported oil/etc, just jack up the gasoline tax $5-6/gal. That allows folks the freedom to adapt in the way most amenable to their individual needs: less driving for families who need 8mpg monstrosities, higher mileage cars for those who can buy them, mass transit or trip rationalization for those who can't.
s/word/word
Is that a RegEx or something like that? Like
$foo = "driven";
$bar = RegEx("s/driven/tempered/");
Printf($bar);
Is my pseudocode gonna print "tempered"?
:P
Totally offtopic, but I'm curious cause I see it in IRC all the time and I asked once but I don't think anyone was listening
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Rule 13545 of efficiency standards for cooling systems:
"You will think what you want before opening fridge's door".
informative
If I recall correctly isn't Google using solar power for several of its data centers? If this is the case who cares how much power those data centers are using if they are self sustainable. There were several comments made by a few companies on this issue in the posted article all of which were interesting. I think I would much rather have Google or other companies like Google spend resources on finding a better more energy efficient way of doing things rather than be forced to just use what's mandated.
To cool with outside air, you'd have to move a lot more air than if you were just ensuring it is breathable.
I.e. you can spend a long time in a house or car with all windows closed and air flowing just through cracks and vents by itself.
If you wanted to cool the house with outside air, you'd replace its entire volume of air probably every hour. That in turn causes more of the outside pollution to come in and faster wear of the filters.