Possible truce For Greenpeace and data centers - by Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jul 5 2011)

1. 

   The argument between Greenpeace and data centers has seemed pretty intractable - so when the environmental campaign met with the industry on a platform in London, I made sure I was in the audience.

   On the one hand, data center owners have been beavering away, making their facilities ever more efficient and working on ways to measure that efficiency. It’s an economic thing. The aim is to compute more for less money and, since energy costs money, that means more processing for less energy. And less energy means less carbon, right?

   Well no, actually, says Greenpeace. If the energy you use is generated from coal, then it makes greenhouse emissions; so sites should be moving to renewable energy, regardless of efficiency (and apparently regardless of cost!).

   The campaigner also complains about the wasteful processing going on in the cloud and on social networks.... and its been ironically burning plenty of cycles campaigning against it on Facebook.

   The main targets of Greenpeace’s campaign have been Apple, and Facebook - which in fact runs a very efficient data center - and has shared its expertise in the OpenCompute project.

   Last week, Tom Dowdall, Greenpeace’s energy campaigner took to the stage at The 451 Group’s Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit, to face Dr Ian Bitterlin of Ark Continuity - which runs an efficient data centre in a stonemine in Wiltshire, and Dr David Snelling of Fujitsu Labs, who is also vice chair for the technical workgroup of the Green Grid in Europe, along with analyst Andy Lawrence of The 451 Group.

   The encounter started with Bitterlin saying he was “aggravated” by Greenpeace’s stance - and Dowdall responding: “We are not against data centers – we want them to lead the way to a green energy revolution.” He also agreed that IT is a key part of moves to make the rest of our lives more efficient.

   The panel gave two basic reasons why big data centers and the cloud are more efficient than random servers dotted around in cabinets and small sites.

   Firstly, it takes a certain amount of energy to make a server and get it to where it will be used - the “embedded energy”. That energy is better spent on a server which will be used 24x7, and with as little idle time as possible. So it should be in a big data center, with virtualisation, running cloud services, said Snelling.

   Secondly, by replacing scattered servers with centralised ones, we are retiring servers that run at a poor efficiency (PUEs of three to eight, said Bitterlin) and using instead servers that have a PUE of 1.4 or less. Bitterlin reckons that outsourcing IT to the cloud could save 60 percent of the energy demand of IT servers in the UK.

   Dowdall didn’t argue with that, but repeated Greenpeace’s view that using better energy is more important than using less energy, because that actually cuts greenhouse emissions, and stops perpetuating a bad system.

   Facebook may have saved itself millions by siting its data center in Oregon. The overall savings may be $25 million, according to Lawrence, since the state of Oregon has high enemployment and will give good grants and tax breaks to industry coming there.

   But the money it has spent with its utility, PacificCorp, is being used to fund an aggressive campaign against clean air legislation. The power provider is lobbying government intensively for minimal controls on its emissions. In effect, Dowdall is saying, if Facebook doesn’t buy into renewable energy, it will be funding an active campaign for business as usual, and the expansion of dirty energy.

   All this led to an interesting discussion at the end of the panel. If getting your data into low-carbon centers is so important, what is Greenpeace doing in this regard?

   It’s been widely reported that the environmental group has admitted having servers in a colocation center in Virginia that gets its power from coal and nuclear. Why is that?

   Dowdall’s answer sounded slightly evasive. When Greenpeace grew above the size where it could run all its own servers - and have direct knowledge of where its power came from - it found that the energy sources of providers were often a “mystery”.

   It’s been asking questions of its providers, and finding all too often that they refuse to answer because their power usage is a “commercial secret”. This lack of information provided by hosting companies was in fact, the main (if slighlty dull) result from Greenpeace’s most recent “DirtyData” report (check the number of figures that Greenpeace has had to estimate).

   In this, Dowdall found he was in agreement with others on the panel. The Green Grid, said Snelling, has been struggling to get providers to share information. The PUE measure emerged, he said, as a way to turn the raw “commercially sensitive” figures into an “efficiency” score which providers were prepared to share.

   Dowdall, is simply incredulous that a company’s power bill is that crucial. “What are we going to work out from that?” he asked.

   Indeed, I would expect governments to make cmopany’s publish their energy usage figures as a way to bring the debate into the open - and Greenpeace might find itself on the same team as data centre efficiency players at last. 

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