Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

They have been called the power monsters, energy guzzlers and the biggest concern of CIOs the world over. Yes, we are talking about data centers that for the past decade have witnessed maximum innovation to cater to growing storage and processing needs of enterprises. While innovation in this space has created complex high-end computing devices, it has also raised huge concerns over the power utilization, the rising costs of energy, real estate and the overall efficiency of the data center. Hence, going green has become more of a cost saving measure apart from being an environmental or social responsibility for any enterprise.

Data Center Slice-n-Dice
To understand the efficiency of a data center, it is essential to look into the power consumption patterns within the data center.

Almost 50% of power is consumed for non-productive purposes, and this is where vendors have to focus on increasingly, says Pallab Talukdar, head, server business group, Dell.

Component and IT vendors such as Dell, HCL, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and the like have been a step ahead in producing energy efficient equipment with every new generation product being 8-10% more power-efficient that the previous one. Hence, there is an automatic focus on bringing down cooling costs which still takes up a large chunk of the pie. However, cooling can not be blamed in isolation. With the increasing uptake of blade servers, higher compute capability is being compacted into a smaller footprint. While this reduces the real estate space, it increases the heat dissipation requiring more cooling.

Calculating Efficiency
Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) and DCIE (Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency) are the only parameters that have been used so far to measure the efficiency of a data centers. However, these metrics talk only about the passive infrastructure and compute side in isolation. Therefore, vendors such as AMD, APC, Cisco, Dell, Emerson, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun and end users such as ADP, Allstate, BT, Enterprise, Facebook and Fed Ex Services have come together to form the Green Grid Alliance that is defining meaningful, user-centric models and metrics; developing standards, measurement methods, processes and new technologies to improve data center performance against the defined metrics.

As a key step toward creating a more accurate measurement standard, Emerson is coming out with a new metric called CUPSPW (Compute Unit Per Second Per Watt) and is already working with EPA and Energy Star in the US to introduce CUPSPW as a new metric. Apart from this Emerson is also working with the CII and BEE (Bureau of Energy Efficiency) to come up with ECBC Part IIa standard that will define design parameters and best practices for green data centers. Another key vendor HCL, which is not a part of the Green Grid, has been working with the US Green Building Council (USGBC) to build green data center and infrastructure and provide facility assessments under its unique data center Green Quotient service.

According to IDC for every dollar spent on new server spend, 50 cents are spent on energy to power and cool it. Therefore, on the cooling side, a lot of new initiatives have been taken at the design stage itself. Today, concepts such as raised flooring, perforated flooring, hot and cold aisle cooling have been taken into consideration while designing a data center. According to Ashrae standards, by increasing the data center temperature between 20-25 degrees and introducing concentrated cooling enterprises can achieve about 12% cost savings. The concept of EC (Electronically Commutated) fans is also gaining a lot of momentum in the cooling space as they can change their speeds based on the heat that is drawn within the rack and save on power. While higher compute capability is being packed into smaller form factors, the heat density in a rack has ballooned out of proportion over a period of time requiring innovations at the rack level. Chube, Pratik observes, Heat density was about 1.5-2 Kw/hours per rack a few years ago and now it has spiralled to 15-20 Kw/hours. To tackle these issues we are focusing on the most important part of a rack, it is the perforation in the front door. Industry standards is at 65% perforation but Kanur, a company recently acquired by Emerson, has a perforation ratio of 83% which allows better heat dissipation and better exchange of cold air from the raised floor design.

Tech Assistance
Over capacities built on the storage and server front has been an issue that all major enterprises have been plagued with. According to most storage vendors, capacity utilization on the storage front has been very poor among enterprises at just about 15-20% and according to IDC estimates data is growing at a (CAGR) of 52%. Disparate storage is inefficient because assets are typically underutilized, wasting capital investment in storage infrastructure, and unnecessarily consuming power, cooling, and space resources. In addition to lowering the total cost of ownership and improving productivity, properly implemented storage consolidation can reduce management complexity by lowering the number of storage devices, centralizing administration and policies, and enhancing security and control, says Vivekanand Venugopal, Products and Solutions Director, APAC, Hitachi Data Systems. Therefore, concepts such as thin provisioning, virtual provisioning, deduplication, using efficient storage mediums like tape libraries and high-performance Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems are becoming popular that allows users to buy less storage capacity and intelligently allocate space for different functions.

Virtualization is increasingly gaining traction and has helped in improving the efficiency of a data center to 70-80% from just 30% previously. Players such as VMWare, Microsoft and IBM have been focusing on virtualization in a data center from an end-to-end perspective. Besides the effect on the companys bottom line, virtualization is positively impacting the environment. Gartner estimates that 1.2 mn workloads run in VMware virtual machines, which represents an aggregate power savings of about 8.5 bn kWh-more electricity than is consumed annually in some small countries globally for heating, ventilation and cooling, says Ganesh Mahabala, regional director, VmWare India and SAARC. IBM on the other hand has been concentrating on reducing server sprawl and through consolidation and virtualization has taken utilization levels to an all time high. While standard servers run at 25%, IBM server utilizations levels are as high as 90%, says Jyoti Satyanathan, VP-Platform Business, STG IBM. Besides this, IBM has also been focusing on bringing a certain level of standardization on the application front and has invested heavily on Linux for this. According to Satyanathan, this helps in bringing all the applications onto a single layer and consolidation becomes easier bringing down server floor space by about 50-60%. Apart from this, it also brings down staffing and training costs by reducing the need for multiple skill sets. Giving his views on virtualization Swapan Johri, Sr VP Transformation Services, HCLT ISD says, In addition to lower manpower costs virtualization and consolidation also provides high level of security, enhanced disaster recovery and enhanced regulatory compliance.

Though virtualization brings in complexities such as how data should be managed and back-up should be created, solutions such as The system centre virtual machine manager by Microsoft allows users to manage virtual as well as physical servers from the same console with exactly the same attributes. So, this brings down complexities and makes the IT managers job easier. A growing number of large enterprises such as Mahindra & Mahindra, Crest Animation Studios and Sony TV (check Case Study section) have used virtualization as a cost advantage.

All vendors agree on the fact that cloud computing is the next big wave in which application will be delivered through a data center. According to Pallavi Khaturia, Director-Server Business Group, Microsoft, The uptake for SaaS and PaaS has been boosting the demand for cloud computing and the demand for robust data centers. Microsoft already delivers a lot of its applications through clouds on a pay-by-use model and we believe cloud computing contributes a lot to greening data centers. IBM, a pioneer in cloud computing services and has recently set up a cloud computing center in Bangalore to build standards for the cloud computing needs. Cloud computing will drive virtualization and the greater uptake of desktop virtualization and thin clients. Enterprises can reach higher energy effectiveness using clouds, but the concept is still in the nascent stage, says Satyanathan.

While there has been a lot of debate on hosted data centres and its role in the green strategy of enterprises, PK Saji, Sify clarifies the point, The hosted concept is not being adopted as a green initiative but to primarily tackle manageability issues, create better DR measures, reduce total cost of ownership while adhering to SLAs and standards.

Green Consensus
It is good to see a consensus on the need for greener data centers among the user community and vendors. While, concepts such as virtualization and consolidation took time to gain traction, now that enterprises have realized the benefits it is definitely here to stay. Green is no longer being looked upon as gimmick and its cost advantages have proved to be an eye opener for enterprises who have felt the pinch of the present market downturn. However, there is certainly scope for improvements and the formation of the Green Grid Alliance and LEED certifications for data center architecture will go a long way towards achieving them.

Priya Kekre
priyak@cybermedia.co.in

Page(s)   1