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The biggest challenge for a datacenter today is to go green. And this is not
because we have suddenly become very nature friendly but its because at the end
of the day when we save nature by cutting down our power, cooling, space, heat
emissions, etc we directly or indirectly save costs. The reasons for this are
simple. IT is a must for every business, and as the business grows, an
organization needs to invest more on the IT infrastructure. With the rising
energy costs, more IT equipment translates to higher costs of power consumption,
and also more space, which anyways comes at a premium. So, if products continue
consuming the power they have been consuming, then it could have serious
implications. Last year, Gartner estimated that ICT accounts for 2% of global
CO2 emissions, which is the same as the aviation industry. Thats a high figure
by any means, and unsustainable as suggested by Gartner.
To understand this need of going green, lets take an example. Well! this is
not an example but is a real life case. Its about an office in Gurgaon. The
office has around 400 computers and a small data center with somewhere around 30
servers and 5 blades which eat up around 150 to 200 KW of power in a day. The
consumption includes the power consumed by the cooling and lighting equipments
running in the data center as well as in the building.
In Gurgaon power is a major problem and to address it, the company has a 320
KV diesel generator which eats Rs 1,000 worth of diesel every hour and also
throws out a lot of pollutants. But, surprisingly, when in the night the city
undergoes major power cuts for hours and the office is closed, except the data
center which is a 24x7 operation. So, the data center should not require more
than a 20 KV generator, the same 320KV generator is used and a lot of fuel is
burnt without any reason and a lot of money goes for a toss. Such a situation is
nothing but wrong planning and is very common in our neighbourhood. However,
with a bit of planning, a lot of money and environment can be saved. Below we
talk about some of the key technologies that should be used in a data center to
make it greener.
Virtualization
This is a trend that has really picked up momentum across the IT industry,
and is a key technique being touted for going green. Every organization today is
combating the evils of server proliferation in the datacenter. Theres a server
for just about every application: mail, web, proxy, business apps, security,
content management, file sharing and so on. The sad part is that their average
utilization hovers around 30-40%, if not less. And yet they continue to run 24x7
and consume energy even when theyre idle. So, in effect, youre paying the
energy cost of servers, which are idle almost 70% of the time. Thats not a very
pleasant thought indeed, which is why the whole concept of server virtualization
has become so popular. It helps combat this problem.
Virtualization allows you to abstract the hardware from the software. So a
server, which traditionally runs a single OS and application in the data center,
is able to run multiple OSes and apps simultaneously. This would allow you to
load a single server with more applications and increase its utilization. This
reduces the number of servers in the data center, and also helps you defer your
server purchase. With new servers more and more processing capabilities are
coming to the market and so adopting virtualization has become more easy and
efficient. In the second week of September this year, Intel has released its
7400 series Xeon processors which has 6 cores per processor. Such innovations
are driving the industry to go greener with more widespread use of
virtualization.
| How to Make Money
from Carbon Credits? |
Under the Kyoto Protocol, the
developed countries have voluntarily decided that they will bring down the
level of carbon they are emitting to the level of early 1990s. These
countries have set different norms for their companies and factories to
bring the level of carbon emission and other green house gases.
Carbon Credits are a part of international emission trading norms. Credits
are awarded to companies that reduce green house gases below their emission
quota. The total annual emissions are capped and the market assigns a
monetary value to any shortfall through trading. Business can exchange, buy
or sell carbon credits in international markets at prevailing rates. These
credits can be used to finance carbon reduction schemes between trading
partners and rest of the world. Companies in developed nations have two ways
to reduce emissions. One is reducing green house gases by adopting new
technologies. Secondly, these companies can tie up with developing nations
and help them setup new technology thats eco-friendly; thereby helping
those companies earn Carbon Credits. These credits are bought over by
companies of developed countries to show their contribution in reducing the
carbon emissions in the environment. India and China have emerged as biggest
sellers of Carbon Credits, while European countries are the biggest buyers,
and the US hasnt signed the Kyoto Protocol. |
Cloud Computing
If you extend the concept of virtualization from a single server to a
complete grid, and make its access available over the Internet, its called a
Cloud. Just imagine, if virtualizing a single server can save you 50 to 70% of
resources then how much savings will happen in case your complete data center
acts as a single grid and is then virtualized.
Power and Backup
Its always good to use renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind.
But it might not be feasible for all data centers to go for such deployments as
the costs are huge and the RoI is slow. But there are certain things which can
be easily done, such as using UPSes instead of generators.
Yes, even though UPSes are not great for the environment (especially if old
batteries are not disposed properly) then it can cause a lot of harm to nature.
But they have their share of goodies as well. First, they dont eat up oil and
second, they save a lot of smoke and money given the sky-rocketing prices of
petroleum products.
| Clouds! Wherever you
Look |
| Cloud computing has emerged as a
big enabler for green computing. Its still in its early days and the
adaptation is yet to become widespread, but we can foresee a future where
Cloud computing would become a mainstream computing platform to save
deployment and environmental hazards. But before we go further and discuss
how Cloud computing could be a great enabler for green computing, lets
first understand what is Cloud computing.
If you understand what is a Grid and what is
Grid Computing, then understanding Cloud becomes pretty easy. But if you
dont, then here is a recap of Grid. Grid is essentially a Cluster of
computers which are loosely coupled with each other, by loosely coupled we
mean whose interconnect is either not 100% available or the latency of the
interconnect is high if you compare it against an HPC. But the prime job of
a grid is to share a distributed job load and process it aggregately.
Now, as we have gone through a Now lets
understand what a Cloud is. The simplest example: deploy any virtualization
architecture on top of your grid and you get a Cloud. But in this case the
grid nodes are not so loosely coupled, and managed inside a data center.
Whats the benefit? The main benefit is that as you have aggregated and
consolidated all your computing resources under one single grid platform and
you have deployed a virtualization platform on top of it, it becomes very
easy to cut a slice of the grid into a desired configuration and provide it
to the user as and when required.
The Green Cloud
Now the question is where and how the concept of Green fits into Cloud?
To understand that, first of all you have to understand how virtualization
helps in consolidation and as a result saves power, space and resources.
Once you understand that you can easily see the benefits of Cloud. You could
achieve x amount efficacy in terms of our resource utilization if you use
virtualization on a single server, just imagine how many times of x you
would be able to achieve if you virtualize our complete cluster. Technically
you would be able to utilize 100% of you resource all the time and hence
would be able to achieve a much higher degree of consolidation. And as a
result we would save more space, more power and more money. Even if you use
Cloud computing as a client and dont want to deploy your own Cloud for
consolidation. Then also you are saving nature as you are reutilizing
pre-existing resources on some huge data centers instead of deploying your
own data center for the same task. |
Moreover, they preserve power. So, going back to the Gurgaon data center
example, we can easily replace the generator with a UPS, and so when the
utilization of power is less at nights, the UPS will only supply the desired
amount of power and will increase the backup by preserving the unutilized power.
So if the UPS can give a 2 hour long backup in the day when the office is fully
active, it can give you a 6 hour backup in the night when only 10 or 20%
equipment are working.
Blade Servers
Blades are a great way of saving energy and e-waste. They let you increase
the density of your data center to multiple levels. A single 7U blade chassis
can take up to 14 blades which saves your real estate space and in turn reduce
the ambient cooling requirements (as you can host your data center in a smaller
space). Blade servers are generally built with specialized processors which eat
less amounts of electricity. In Intels dictionary these processors are called
LV (low voltage) processors and their performance per Watt is higher than
others, but are not the highest performing processors in the lot.
The other benefit which you get with blades is that most of the blade vendors
today provide chassis which are both backward and forward compatible, which
means you can easily replace the existing servers with new ones as and when they
are available, and can do more virtualization to consolidate instead of buying
new servers. The vendors also provide buyback schemes for old blades against new
ones pretty often, so it also solves your e-waste problems as you dont have to
throw away those blades. You might as well save some money by giving them back
to the vendors. Its not just servers and blades that need to go green and
consume less power, many components today come with a greener version. These
versions are essentially products with slightly reduced performance (in some
cases) and better power efficiency along with less harmful elements in the body
of the device (paint, metal, wires, etc). A lot of such products are available
out there, ranging from a simple network switch to hard disks and even
processors; all of them today have greener versions. And yes, all these
components are a part of your datacenter, so if while building or upgrading a
datacenter, you should look forward to such equipment.
First printed in PC Quest
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in
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