Clouds, Air Cooling...and King Canute - By Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Dec 13 2010)

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   It’s well known how Canute tried to turn back the tide, and I think of him when I hear people arguing about the value of trends in computing.

    

   A king of Denmark, England, Norway and Sweden, around 1000AD Canute (or Cnut)  was a grandson of Harald Bluetooth - whose name was adopted for short-range radio. He is much more famous for once having his throne placed on an English beach and commanding the tide to stop.

    

   He wasn’t stupid - according to the legend, when the inevitable happened and the tide soaked hime, he exclaimed “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings.” You don’t mess with the tide, in other words. 

    

   People like to argue about how we should be doing our computing, putting the case for or against different trends, but I think that these changes are usually like the tide.

    

   Take the issues of whether the cloud is green, and the more nitty-gritty decisions of how to build and cool the data centers where the cloud might operate. There’s debate at every level, but in the end I think things will happen with a certain inevitability.

    

   Firstly, Pike Research went through the arguments once again. on whether the cloud is green. Clouds use virtualised IT, and use it more efficiently, so it’s not a big stretch to conclude they should be greener - cutting energy costs by about 38 percent and emissions by a similar amount, according to Pike.

    

   Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOm isn’t so sure. Don’t forget the network costs, she says. They are small, but if you are downloading lots of data repeatedly from the cloud, a cloud app can actually use more energy than local apps.

    

   It’s a fact that all data and computation is being done using ever cheaper hardware, bigger memory and better networks. These really seem like tidal forces which will move apps and data around. The computation will settle where it work best, form the point of view of cost, performance and price-to-the-user.

    

   If energy prices go up, and if those prices are realistically - and visibly - factored into the prices people pay, the eventual balance will swing towards the most efficient solution. That sounds more laissez-faire than I want it to, because in fact, I think we have to do a lot to actually drive the system in the direction we want it to go.

    

   Anyway, while researchers are worrying away at the big picture, it seems like there’s plenty of work going on lower down the stack, on the practical tasks of using less energy to run servers.

    

   Outside air cooling, using “economizers” is currently increasing in popularity, and we’re seeing a few firms standardising free-air cooled products, like the EcoBreeze from APC.

    

   Now, while EcoBreeze is an economiser in a can - or at least in a shipping container - it’s designed to be placed up against a building and used to cool a conventional data center. Other people are aiming free-air cooling at the container data centers.

    

   Space is at a premium in containers, and till now, they have been built for density first, so it’s not obvious how to fit the air-cooling in, However, containers are increasing, and becoming a recognised way to build inside buildings.

    

   SGI has launching an air-cooled version of its Ice Cube, which combines the two in one unit. AST Modular - the company which supplies IBM’s container products - has gone for a double-decker concept, where there is a whole extra container on top of the one which holds the IT kit.

    

   This lets AST claim to deliver more efficient in the same “footprint” - ie the two containers take up the same floorspace as one. More importantly, it provides options. You can take a very densely-packed container, and add on the air-cooling later.

    

   And from the way it’s deployed in the Thor facility in Iceland, the double-decker idea seems to make sense in the “big shed” style of modular data center. Thor has got up and running very quickly indeed, and yet claims a high level of efficiency - as well as one high profile customer, Opera.  It’s been able to do this because it;s basically got just one container, and one “pod” or modular data center segment.

    

   This sort of work on the actual implementation of real data centers is going to flow through and have its effect higher up the stack. Cheaper, greener cycles will keep those tides flowing, and move the computations to the best place in the end. 

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