1. Tweaking the near term - by Doug Mohney

    Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jul 21 2010)

    1. Tweaking the near term - by Doug Mohney

      As much as environmentalist advocates want the data center industry to go carbon neutral overnight, all trend lines indicate a boom in data center growth over the next five years. Energy production is not going carbon-neutral  -- with a few key exceptions -- overnight. Optimizing existing data center power consumption as much as possible, outsource to the best green we can find, and build new green data centers only when we absolutely need should be the mantra everyone adopts.

      Tweaking existing data power consumption is the name of the short-term game because there's an immediate return on investment; i.e. saving money through a lower power bill.  Corporations and IT managers can't wholesale scrap hardware investments, but they can squeeze more out of existing resources; more precisely, squeeze more INTO existing resource, and shutting off surplus servers and data storage.

      Software and management will play a key role into squeeze more into existing resources. One example of this philosophy is Power Assure (www.powerassure.com), a company that announced second round of venture funding to the tune of $11.25 million this week. Power Assure runs a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to dynamically manage power solutions for data centers, including both capacity and performance management and is developing load-shedding and shifting services  -- basically, shutting servers down when not needed.

      A different form of optimization is taking place in the humble rack.  While companies embrace various bolt-on cooling schemes to increase server/compute density per square foot, Green Platform Corporation (www.greenplatformcorp.com) is looking at mitigating the more humble mechanical aspects of vibration as it affects disk drives.  It sounds overly simple, but too much vibration -- especially when caused by too many disk drives in close proximity thrashing about -- can force hard drives to work much harder due to re-reads and re-writes.  

      Harder working disk drives mean more power consumption -- up to triple the energy consumption with lots of vibration -- so Green Platform  has gone with a simple engineering solution: mitigating vibration. Green asserts that its carbon-fiber vibration-dampening racks deliver instant payback from reduced CapEx with fewer actual metal storage racks needed and energy efficiency improvements by 65 percent.  It sounds a little simplistic, but the company has independent test results to support its claims. The company claims a 12 month payback period on its racks, along with an acceleration of application run time for complex high-performance computing applications.

      Hopefully, someone will put a number of these different tweaks together under one roof and see if they can deliver the sort of dramatic results both environmentalists and CFOs can love.

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    Recent Comments


    "One good thing that is pushing companies to be more efficient is the fact that their data is growing exponentially in size, while their datacenters physically remain the same size... witht the same power infrastructure.

    This will certainly make companies think more intelligently about resource management, and push more aggressive archiving policies. This is also one of the reasons that virtualization has become so pupular. It allows companies to do more, with less. "

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