Powering Down

Written by Peter A. Buxbaum

by Peter A. Buxbaum

In the last 10 years, however, the proliferation and increasing importance of electricity-intensive computer servers and data centers—driven by demands for new Internet services such as search, music downloads, video-on-demand, social networking and telephony— have really brought this issue to the forefront. At the same time, there is an increased awareness of the issues surrounding fossil fuel consumption, including global warming.

Research conducted by Jonathan Koomey, a project scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a consulting professor at Stanford University, indicates that electricity use for data centers doubled worldwide between 2000 and 2005. Three-quarters of this growth resulted from the increase in the number of the smallest and least expensive servers. Data center communications and storage equipment each contributed about 10 percent of this growth. Electricity used by IT equipment in data centers represented 0.5 percent of total world electricity consumption in 2005, according to Koomey’s research, and a full 1 percent when electricity for cooling and power distribution is added to the picture.

The costs, both financial and environmental, of greater energy consumption have led to a great deal of talk in recent years about cutting energy costs and consumptions in IT departments. But a recent report from CDW Corp. suggests that IT executives may care about energy efficiency, but that this not reflected in their priorities when it comes to purchasing IT equipment.

Among all government and industry IT executives surveyed for the CDW report, over 90 percent said their organizations are taking steps to manage IT energy consumption and energy costs, but only one-third said energy efficiency is a very important consideration when purchasing new equipment. In the federal sector, only 32 percent of IT executives said that energy efficiency is a very important consideration when purchasing new desktop and data center equipment.

The report’s findings suggest that thinking green has not yet penetrated the IT culture when it comes to purchasing, according to Vic Berger, a CDW technologist. “Purchasing managers should be looking at technologies available that consume less power,” he said.

DEPARTMENT FOOTPRINT

The CDW figures were not broken down for the Department of Defense, but anecdotally there appears to be a variety of existing initiatives designed to decrease the consumption of electricity at DoD and to reduce the department’s environmental footprint. The federal government has been mandated to achieve power management goals by executive order, and DoD and its components have responded with their own policies and new policies and practices, which range from the simple to the sophisticated. Technology providers have also responded by providing products that are less power hungry and with other innovative strategies.

“For us power savings is about saving money, first and foremost,” said Bill Vass, president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems Federal. “Designing product lines that reduce our carbon footprint as well as our landfill footprint and making sure all our equipment is recyclable is all derivative of that.”

Stephen Stokes, vice president for sustainability at AMR Research, agreed that good business practices drive the quest to reduce electricity consumption among technology vendors. “Many computer manufacturers are working hard to reduce the power consumption of their equipment,” he said. “Others are working to make data centers more intelligent and to cool equipment locally. Never before has this been at the same level of priority, and they are to be applauded for these efforts. But I see all of this as generic good business practice.”

The federal government has been mandated by Executive Order 13423, issued in January 2007, to achieve certain energy management and reduction goals. DoD responded to these mandates with its Electronic Stewardship Plan, released earlier this year, to address how DoD will implement those goals through the acquisitions, operations and maintenance, and end-of-life management processes.

The plan’s requirements include that 95 percent of equipment purchased be certified by the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool; 100 percent of computers and monitors be EnergyStar compliant; the life of computers be extended to four or more years; and discarded equipment be donated, sold, refurbished or recycled.

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) “intends to exceed the reduction goals for power consumption and greenhouse gas emissions,” said Kelly Bates, a facilities engineering manager at DISA Computing Services.

DISA has taken a number of steps in this direction in the last year. The agency has moved away from installing individual power circuits for each new server or switch deployed to a more standardized plug-andplay environment using standardized rack systems and three-phase power distribution.

Three-phase power distribution refers to DISA’s complex and redundant scheme to assure adequate power to the data center floor. “At the lowest rack level, we use modular power distribution units, [MPDUs, or advanced power strips] to deliver power from redundant commercial feeds, the uninterruptible power supply systems, through the main power distribution units to the IT equipment,” said Bates.

These steps decrease the amount of materials purchased, and therefore those manufactured and transported, in order to deliver power to IT equipment, according to Bates. “Although this is seen primarily as a cost savings to the data center operators,” she added, “there are real global efficiency gains obtained from not having to manufacture, package and transport as much material, such as copper conductors, conduits, plastic circuit-breakers and MPDUs.”

SERVER CONSOLIDATION

As part of the Department of the Navy’s response to DoD energy mandates, chief information officer Rob Carey recently released an internal communication to numerous commands and ships naming October 2008 as energy awareness month. “The message encourages all Navy and Marine Corps installations and personnel to continue to be good stewards of energy and water by reducing consumption and implementing energy and water cost saving measures,” Carey said.

Senior DON leadership is also in the process of developing a policy memo on electronic stewardship and energy savings.

Among the measures to be included in the memo will be to standardize double-sided printing as the default setting on all duplication equipment; acquiring energy efficient flat screen liquid crystal display monitors, which use one-third the energy of cathode ray tube monitors; giving preference to purchasing laptops as opposed to desktop computers, to cut those energy levels by 75 percent; and shutting down all legacy IT systems, whenever possible, in order to reduce energy use.

An important aspect of the reduction of energy associated with servers and data centers involves server virtualization, a key technology when it comes to reducing server footprint and energy consumption. “We are in the process of a dramatic reduction in server farms and data centers working to reduce our footprint by 90 percent over the next few years,” said Carey. “To date, the DON has consolidated more than 2,000 servers down to 300. When the virtualization project is complete, there will have been an eight to one consolidation of servers in the system.”

Virtualization of servers involves loading specialized software that allows running multiple applications and operating systems independently on a single server. “You can load multiple operating systems on a single piece of hardware,” explained Vass, “and the virtualization software fools the operating systems to think they are running on individual servers when they really are not.”

In the best of cases, the number of machines utilized in a data center can be reduced by over 90 percent, according to Vass. “This greatly reduces the electricity required to power the servers and to cool the data center,” he added. “At the same time, the user doesn’t see or feel the difference.”

The power reduction efforts at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are also focused on server virtualization. “We started a project two years ago,” related Anil Karmel, a Los Alamos solutions architect. “We took a look at our infrastructure after running into a brick wall in terms of power and cooling at the data center.”

At the time, the facility was running 300 servers. “We needed to develop an approach to reduce our footprint, and we turned to virtualization,” said Karmel. “Today we have 400 servers. But by decommissioning old servers, we were able to add additional new virtual servers which did not require any additional footprint.”

The results of this virtualization have been dramatic. The Los Alamos data center has reduced its energy usage by 870,000 kilowatts per year and avoided $1.4 million per year in costs as a result of this energy saving. Virtualization has also allowed Los Alamos’ IT organization to become more responsive to users. “In the past it took 30 days to commission a new server,” Karmel said. “The customer would have to request specific purchasing approval. Once approved, physical asset in the form of a rack had to be brought on site and deployed. Now, the same process takes 30 minutes.”

COOLING ISSUES

Technology providers are also doing their part to make their products less energy hungry. Sun’s new 64-thread chip can have the effect of consolidating six computers into one, according to Vass. “This saves space and reduces the power footprint,” he said. “It can also provide the same computing power with one-thousand watts that took older systems 36,000 watts to provide.”

The 64-thread chip generates 50 percent to 60 percent less heat than equivalent older server technologies. Cooling requirements are also reduced by arranging servers in a “pod architecture,” in which a cooling unit services its adjacent pod, instead of cooling the entire room centrally.

“That’s like trying to keep food cold by turning the thermostat down to 40 degrees, instead of putting the food in the refrigerator,” said Vass. “Now we refrigerate an individual rack or server and not the whole room. That reduces the heat load and the power consumption.”

DISA is also endeavoring to reduce the power it uses to cool data centers and is utilizing data center floor center management techniques to do so. One of the metrics DISA is attempting to capture and improve in its power reduction efforts is the site infrastructure energy efficiency ratio (SIEER, or the coefficient of efficiency). The SIEER is measured by dividing power into the data center measured at the utility meter by the power out used to run the IT equipment for computing.

“In order to increase this efficiency ratio, and therefore save energy and lower utility costs, DISA is aggressively moving toward a managed, standards-based plan on how to arrange and manage equipment on the data center floor,” said Bates.

One of the key items being implemented in this effort is to implement industry best-practices for hot-and-cold aisle arrangement. Most IT equipment sucks cold air in from the front and exhausts hot air out the back. “Rows and rows of racks of this type of this equipment are placed in predetermined row locations where cold rack fronts face other cold rack fronts, and exhausts face exhausts,” Bates explained. “This prevents the next row of servers from sucking in heated air, which dramatically reduces the life expectancy of the equipment and limits mixing of hot and cold air.”

DISA also uses software to model floor layouts, position rack rows and IT equipment, and to determine the optimal placements for computer room air conditioner (CRAC) units based on the geometries and heat sources in the room. “This can reduce the number of CRAC units needed by half or more,” said Bates.

DISA enhances power efficiency also by installing blanking panels, plastic covers that fill up open spaces in the rack not used by servers. This prevents recirculation of hot air through the rack. “Mesh doors have replaced older solid, glass and louvered rack front and rear doors, allowing cooling air to enter and exit the servers,” said Bates.

DISA’s three-phase power distribution also addresses cooling system efficiency. “Single-phase power distribution, with its large number of power circuits, causes blockages under the raised access floor where cooling air is distributed,” said Bates. “This requires additional CRAC units to be operated to obtain sufficient cooling and airflow. The lower gross volume of cabling pulled to each rack with three-phase power distribution can reduce the number of CRAC units running by 10 percent to 20 percent, saving the additional electricity needed to run those units, as well as the pumps, chillers and cooling towers that comprise the remainder of the heat rejection system in the data center.”

TURN THEM OFF

The use of a smaller number of highefficiency, metered MPDUs also means that less heat is generated by the total number of power strips throughout the data center, meaning less cooling is needed in the room. “Metering of the MPDUs allows the facility managers to balance installed equipment loads across the three electrical phases, which reduces heat generated by having unbalanced phases at the capacitors and transformers. This significantly reduces unnecessary heat generation and the need to transfer it out of the data center,” Bates said.

Another Sun innovation that reduces the power consumption of individual units involves supplying users with ultra-thin clients, which are akin to the dumb terminals that operate off of mainframe computers. Ultra-thin clients contain little or no computing capacity locally, instead reaching back to servers to provide applications and computing.

Sun replaced thousands of desktop personal computers with ultra-thin clients at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., reducing desktop power consumption to four watts, mitigating the periodic obsolescence of PCs, and reducing air conditioning bills during the intensely hot summer months in that desert location.

Microsoft is also introducing powersaving features into its desktop and server products, according to Francois Ajenstat, an SQL server product director and member of Microsoft’s environmental sustainability team.

“The Windows Vista operating system added 30 new features related to power management,” he said. “We made power management the default setting. “With Windows Vista, when the laptop or PC experiences a period of inactivity, the machine automatically goes to sleep,” Ajenstat added. “This reduces the energy footprint of the PC and people don’t have to worry about turning them off.”

Of course, there is also a simpler solution to the PC power consumption problem. “Get employees to use the on/ off switch,” said CDW’s Vic Berger. The notion that it is better to leave computers and peripheral equipment on all night is an “urban myth,” he added.

The Navy agrees, and has mandated that PCs operating on the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) be shut off at night. The NMCI has also enabled the Auto On BIOS feature, which allows users to power down their computers when they leave work, but then has the unit turned on automatically at 5:00 a.m. every workday, allowing software to be added and maintenance to be performed on NMCI machines before employees arrive in the morning.

Tools are also available to help in planning networks to be more energy efficient. The Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator, for example, provides network planners with a power consumption/cooling modeling capability, which helps predict the impact of current or planned network infrastructure deployments. The telecommunications and network engineering company’s tool enables network planners to plot “what if” scenarios using different equipment in real-world deployments, enabling then to determine exactly what the trade-offs are in terms of energy consumption. ♦