Government Technology - May 2008 - (Page 28)

7. Take advantage of metrics and models developed by industry initiatives such as The Green Grid to improve the energy efficiency of existing data centers and plan more effectively for new facilities. 8. Adapt performance dashboards to reflect sustainability measures, including metrics such as energy efficiency, emission and waste reduction, and supply chain and staff management. 9. Remember the classically simple (but often overlooked) answer: When not in use, turn it off. Clearly data center optimization is a much larger undertaking than even the most refined list can capture. Enter The Green Grid, a not-for-profit industry consortium focused on “advancing energy efficiency in data centers and computing ecosystems.” It has completed the key elements of its technology road map, and the first priority is developing metrics for benchmarking, measuring and optimizing data center power consumption. The consortium was welcomed as an aggregation point as the industry and data center operators struggled to come to terms with green IT. Even at that, some analysts worried that the consortium’s ties to industry might hold it back from the kind of innovation needed to re-imagine the data center as part of a sustainable ecosystem. It is worth noting that The Green Grid aspires not only to help tune up existing data centers, but also to help planners make smarter decisions when and if they are able to rethink data centers and build them from scratch. Energy Best Practices A Contrarian Consensus The greenest data center is the one that you don’t build; the greenest server or storage device is the one that you don’t buy; and the greenest watt of electricity is the one that you don’t use. Planning the Work, Working the Plan Fewer than half of organizations monitor the energy consumption of their data centers, according to a 2007 study by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The co-location of data centers in dual-use buildings often makes it difﬁcult to meter IT energy consumption separately. As a ﬁrst step, uninterrupted power supply systems can act as a surrogate in monitoring power consumption by mission-critical gear. What is a data center operator to do? Draw on Best Practices • Assess and plan. • Consolidate and ladder refreshes with energy-efﬁcient replacement servers. Get Dense • If you must own, share. • If you must operate your own, then consolidate, modularize, virtualize and rethink ﬂoor space. • If you go after your own servers, go after storage too. Data centers were the original shared service where multiple public entities could avoid duplicate investments in raised ﬂoor space, uninterrupted power supply and environmental costs. Looking ahead, systems will consume available power supplies much faster than ﬂoor space, and the cost of power is more volatile than real estate. In one manufacturer’s assessment of what it characterizes as a typical data center, 15 percent of power is consumed by storage, 26 percent by computing servers and fully 59 percent is consumed by cooling. Consolidation and virtualization matters because low server utilization rates waste energy and virtualization increases utilization. Finally modular design lets systems run at load — where energy performance is at its peak — or alternatively, to turn off when not at capacity. Cool Running, not Cold Data centers should not be mitten- or sweater-cold, yet data center employees often sport the layered look to be comfortable at work. There is sometimes historic or cultural resistance to the idea of raising temperatures in the data center out of concern for the operating temperatures of mission-critical machines. Yet the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers may expand its recommended speciﬁcations for server temperature by as much as 80 percent and humidity ranges by 60 percent, suggesting there might be operating tolerances to be exploited. To those ends: • Aggregate high-demand systems and use rack- or row-based cooling systems to do what room-based air conditioning cannot. • Make sure heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems are working for you, not against you. Lukewarm isn’t a solution. Separate the hot aisle from the cold aisle. • Run chillers at off-peak hours and use stored energy during peak loads. • The installation of blanking panels — pieces of metal that prevent air recirculation — can reduce energy loss through unused vertical space in open-frame racks and rack enclosures, which creates unrestricted hot air recycling and causes equipment to heat up unnecessarily. • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests that data centers can tap cooler seasonal weather to economize by using air-side economizers, which typically sense and ﬁlter outside air and allow it to enter the data center when conditions, such as temperature and humidity, are within acceptable engineering parameters. Lean and Green Chopra looks to the private sector for the needed innovation to fundamentally reform data centers. “We need to encourage our vendor community to build green-friendly data centers and server farms,” he said, “so we can be proper stewards of our resources.” One example of industry-led innovation is found at the intersection of modularization and sustainability. In late 2007, a computer manufacturer unveiled a full data center in a box — and delivered it on a truck. The big digital prefab is “a pre-configured, fully contained data center in a shipping container.” MAY_08 28 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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