Government Technology - May 2008 - (Page 26)

California CIO Teri Takai is less confident about the prospects: “We are the main power consumers in the state and our costs are rising. Replacing our old equipment with energy-efficient equipment sounds great but is very hard to justify. Replacing old facilities is even harder. And while virtualization sounds great, we are still fighting to consolidate physical data centers. How are we going to consolidate across servers that we can’t get into the same room? I am a great believer that CIOs need to get the IT shop in order before they branch out to take over the world.” These are very real challenges, but government agencies can overcome them. There’s tremendous opportunity for energy reduction and increased performance. In a meeting with technology firms in Silicon Valley, Andrew Karsner, an assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy, characterized computer systems as “an absolute juggernaut” of energy consumption. He argued that industry and government share a moral obligation to ensure the country’s energy security. As energy consumption and related costs have increased for data center facilities, so too has the workload. In 2006, data centers around the world managed 161 exabytes, which equates to 161 billion GB. The information created, captured and replicated is on track to grow sixfold by 2010 to 988 exabytes. But there is apparently no correlation between workload and energy consumption. the emerging set of greener practices suggests organizations should build on longestablished data center disciplines. Here are nine steps to start: 1. Take a broad, holistic view of the organization and its operations in assessing energy use, and factor energy and cooling cost reduction into life cycle management. 2. Consider power efﬁciency as a key placement attribute in scheduling server workloads. 3. Balance energy consumption and utilization when picking platforms. CPU utilization averages 90 percent on a mainframe but only 5 percent to 15 percent on servers. At the processer level, activate “throttle down” features to reduce energy consumption and consider migration to multicore processors which provide better performance at lower clock speeds. In addition, the Robert Frances Group estimates that power and cooling costs for data centers consume as much as 40 percent of the operating costs of the buildings in which they are housed. Moreover, Gartner estimates that 60 percent of a data center’s energy consumption is wasted. 4. Compare blade servers and rack servers Always On vs. Turn It Off The chief performance attributes of data centers — availability, reliability and sheer horsepower (performance) — are at odds with the conservation-based assumptions “Given the spiraling cost of power, the CIO is obligated to implement strategies that will reduce consumption; responsible organization citizenship demands nothing less.” Mike Mittleman, deputy CIO, New York state “In a typical data center, the electricity usage hardly varies at all, but the IT load varies by a factor of three or more. That tells you that we’re not properly implementing power management,” said Amory Lovins, chief scientist of the sustainability-focused Rocky Mountain Institute, in Seven Steps to a Green Data Center, published in Computerworld UK last year. MAY_08 of sustainability. Through experimentation with available tools, and the promise of new functionality in subsequent “greener” releases, data center operators and their providers (as well as analysts and other observers) are working on a number of emerging practices that may result in an honorable compromise between performance and sustainability. In broad strokes, on the basis of computing capacity and power and cooling requirements — not on space. The calculations, not to mention operational considerations, are complex and deserve disciplined analyses. For example, blade and virtualization technologies result in denser data centers that require more power and more cooling, but server consolidation through virtualization can result in significant energy savings. 5. Measure and monitor the energy consumption of servers at least annually. Choose more efficient power supplies for servers and recognize that redundancy and load sharing strategies raise both uptime rates and energy use. Many rack servers ship with supplies that are 60 percent to 70 percent efficient — but the Energy Star 80 Plus requirement, which requires power supplies in computers and servers to be at least 80 percent energy efficient, can save an estimated 301 kilowatt-hours per server annually. 6. Use the operating system to ration the voltage going to the processor, particularly as new power management features in new operating system releases provide granular controls. 26 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - May 2008

Government Technology - May 2008 Contents Point of View The Last Mile Big Picture On the Scene Four Questions for … Turning Over a New Leaf Crash Diet Budget Blues? Failing Grade? Running the Numbers The 311 Report High-Tech Corrections How It Works Spectrum Two Cents Products Personal Computing Signal: Noise

Government Technology - May 2008

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