Interop's green streak - by Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (May 12 2011)

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   Las Vegas, Nevada – Once upon a time, Interop was all about interoperability between network devices, most specifically of the Ethernet kind.   While it still has that flavor with its network lab on the expo floor, it is as much IT/data center-ish with green bubbling up big of late. Vendors are hocking everything from simple tweaks to air flow to energy-efficient chips and power management software.

   Since the data center and the network are linked at the hip, ah, Ethernet, the move was inevitable, but it’s still a little disconcerting to see better cooling systems – typically a physical infrastructure thing – show up besides HP and Dell promoting the latest and greatest in servers.

   Speaking of cooling, Schneider Electric – a division of APC -- Is the company promoting EcoBreeze, a modular economizer to provide more energy efficient cooling to data centers. The “it’s not a HVAC system” hasn’t been officially announced, but there’s literature and a white paper all the same.  The system uses a modular design so it can be sized appropriately and uses three forms of cooling, leveraging the local and seasonal climate to save energy. When it’s cold outside, simple air-to-air heat exchange is used. When outside temperatures go up, indirect evaporative cooling kicks in.  For the hottest days and seasons, proportional refrigeration kicks in. 

   On the other end of the scale, Eaton was showing off a modified floor tile that allowed cables to be passed through a mesh of interwoven thin rubber-like triangles to inhibit air flow.  The triangles can be wrapped and secured around cables to provide a barrier against escaping air, unlike traditional hole-in-the-floor designs that have lots of empty space for hot and cold air to pass through for reduced efficiency.  It’s a relatively simple thing, but if you tweak up one cable pass-through times the number of them passing through the data center, you can improve air flow and cooling efficiencies.

   Tilera was promoting its heavily multi-core TILEPro64 processor as the next new thing in power efficiency, with a performance per watt roughly five times greater than “industry standard” (i.e., Intel) processors. Tilera gets better performance through the ability to put CPUs to a low-power sleep mode when idle and communication efficiencies between CPUs on chip.  Applications include high-end networking products and video processing.

   Finally, JouleX announced its Energy Manager (JEM). The software measures dynamic energy consumption and utilization of any device attached to the network without hardware probes or other parasitic devices, including physical and virtual servers, core routers and switches, storage, and power distribution units. During off-peak usage, it can slow down the clock speeds of servers to cut energy consumption.

   JouleX claims JEM can help reduce data center energy costs by as much as 50 percent between monitoring to identify under-utilized servers, slowing down the clock speed during off-peak hours, and providing “power capping” to minimizing the amount of energy supplied to a device when it is idle or operating than less than full capacity.    It’s a heady promise, but JouleX already has over 70 customers around the world using its software.

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