Green Data Center Resolutions for 2011 - Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Dec 20 2010)

1. 

   From some perspectives, a lot has happened to green data centers in 2010. The financial and regulatory pressure has continued and in response we’ve seen big steps in organisations supporting more efficient sites … and even in the sites themselves.

    

   Firstly, the energy crisis has come into focus in a big way. In the UK we face a deep and long-term shortage of energy, unless we change the way we generate and use electricity - and the government has come up with proposals  that aim to boost low-carbon generation, and cut electricity waste. They are based on raising the “floor price” for carbon.

    

   They’ve been described as a “a once-in-a-generation [ouch!] attempt to reshape the way we power our economy” and observers are rightly predicting a major battle over how they are implemented, with interest groups trying to block or boost them.

    

   The shake-up comes just when there’s no money to pay for things, so that made things interesting. The UK’s first actual scheme to reward or penalise non-utility companies for their emissions achievements, the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, was changed overnight into a green tax, partly to fund the changes to the energy market.

    

   That’s got to increase the pressure for efficiency. Energy is after all the fastest rising expense in data centers, and now makes up around 12 percent of the cost.

    

   Meanwhile, regulations are also starting to bite. Data centers are buildings, and so any regulatory pressure they experience is usually through building codes, which use the BREEAM standards in Europe and the LEED standards in the US.

    

   Behind these, the US heating and cooling industry’s ASHRAE standards have put their weight behind the use of outside air for cooling, turning “economizers” from a very good idea in 2009 to a must-have item in 2011. The industry has responded, with a couple of systems that turn economisers into an off-the-peg cooling solution.

    

   Beyond the regulations, there are plenty of voluntary codes of practise, measurements and guidelines for data centers. During 2011, they multiplied. Frankly, I’m in danger of losing track. At the basic measurement level, the Green Grid has extended its PUE scheme with the CUE measure for carbon use by a data center, and is promising to deliver a similar measure, WUE, for water use.

    

   Components of data centers have come under scrutiny, with storage body SNIA coming up with Emerald, a benchmark for energy use by storage systems, designed to allow buyers to compare the energy efficiency of different products.

    

   In some ways, Emerald is a challenge to the EPA and other bodies, who have not really made as much progress as they should on energy labelling for servers and other IT hardware.

    

   For the data center as a whole, the BCS has delivered an accreditation scheme, the Certified Energy Efficiency Data Centre Award (CEEDA). This hasn’t come out of nowhere - it’s a regime that assesses implementations of the much-loved (or at least long-established) EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres. Despite being a useful aggregation of a lot of data center knowledge, the EU Code of Conduct has not had as much support as its creators hoped (and its site looks a bit dusty) - perhaps CEEDA will give it a boost.

    

   What about the data centers themselves? We’ve seen a couple of sites go carbon-neutral, and we’ve seen a rise in modular and containerised data centers. These both make it possible to get an efficient data center up and running much more quickly than would otherwise be the case. In the UK, again, we see government taking a lead on getting into these sites.

    

   It’s possible that there’s a downside. If it’s so easy to build the centers, will there be over-capacity and waste? I think that if people manage the replacement of older data centers well - and reuse and recycle the kit where possible - the net result will be positive.

    

   But on another level, how much has really changed? A year ago, I listed some green data resolutions for 2010. I’d say the list could pretty much stay the same for 2011:

    

   1. Keep your perspective and get buy-in from colleagues.

   2. Take stock of what you have.   

   3. Instrument, measure and monitor.  

   4. Consider  outsourcing or cloud. 

   5. Read research and use resources. (As we’ve seen, there is even more of this around this year)  

   6. Turn things off!

    

   Happy Christmas and New Year to you all!

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