10 Tips to "Greening" Your Data Center

Author: John Vander Hill

June 2008

It is not news to IT professionals that the data center is on the cutting edge of the "greening" of America.  Called out in the EPA's 2007 report on data center efficiency, the IT industry has responded in force with a variety of studies, initiatives, and other programs designed to slow the exponential explosion of energy consumption in the data center.  To the data manager on the ground, used to being out of the IT spotlight, this can be daunting stuff, but making real progress in energy conservation and carbon footprint reduction need not be a daunting task.  What follows are 10 tips that can benefit all IT managers whether they're responsible for a data center of 1,000 or 100,000 square feet.

Tip #1: Understand the problem

The point of all the talk around "green" data centers is reducing the impact of the data center on the global consumption of carbon-based energy sources and their subsequent release of carbon into the atmosphere.  Since a data center's primary energy source is electricity and since most U.S. electricity is generated from carbon sources (coal for the most part), finding non-carbon sources for electricity or reducing the energy load of the data center will directly reduce the carbon released into the atmosphere.  The 2007 EPA report (http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/downloads/EPA_Report_Exec_Summary_Final.pdf) outlines the basic problems.

Tip #2: Inform yourself

Since "green" is hot, the industry media and web is full of articles and pitches of every energy conservation scheme and widgit under the sun.  Where's the good stuff?  The EPA's Energy Star web site and sites that it references (http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=prod_development.server_efficiency) is a starting point.  Two other websites with terrific information are the Uptime Institute (http://uptimeinstitute.org/) and the Green Grid (http://www.thegreengrid.org/home).  If you prefer more of a newsfeed format, there is the Green Data Center Blog (http://www.greenm3.com/).

Tip #3:  Know yourself (and your data center)

How much energy does your data center consume?  If your data center is separately metered by the utility, the answer is as easy as looking at energy bills.  However, if the data center is part of a larger office or manufacturing facility it will take some work to set up the necessary metering to isolate the data center's energy use.  Your local utility may offer to set up the necessary metering for a snapshot; however, making an investment in metering the necessary sub-circuits is necessary to understand how these loads fluctuate over the course of a day, week, and year.

Tip #4:  Change your source

On way to reduce carbon consumption in the data center is to change the source of electrical power.  Some regions of the country are blessed with non-carbon baseline source such as hydro-electric power in the Northwest or nuclear power.  Many coal-based regions are constructing wind farms and still other utilities are buying so-called "green" power for wholesalers.  Check with your utility to see that alternative sourcing programs are available.  Typically these programs will cost a few more cents per kilowatt hour, but can be purchased on a percentage of use in order to minimize impact to already tight budgets.

Tip #5:  Sweat the big stuff (before it sweats you)

Energy consumption in the data center can be divided between critical and non-critical sources.  The critical sources are devices like servers and routers and disks, that is, the equipment that does the work of IT.  The non-critical sources are all the devices that are needed to support the critical load such as cooling, lighting and other incidental consumption.  

The largest contributor to non-critical load is cooling.  There are a variety of "best practices" such as keeping plenum space clear of obstructions and orienting equipment into hot and cold aisles, and adjusting perforated floor tiles.  The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) (http://www.ashrae.org/) offers numerous data center related publications as part of their Datacom series.  Look for the publication "Best Practices for Datacom Facility Energy Efficiency" as a good starting point.

Tip #6:  Cut out the dead wood

How many "dead" servers do you have?  In many data center environments it is surprising how many pieces of equipment are left plugged in and booted up after migration to new systems takes place.  Then that equipment is forgotten.  Accurate change control and configuration management can help identify devices that are consuming power but doing no useful work.  Start with a basic inventory of equipment and ask simple questions of business stakeholders about the need for each device.  For small environments, do this at least annually.  For larger environments, look into more sophisticated process improvements such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) (http://www.itil-officialsite.com/home/home.asp).

Tip #7: Consolidate Workloads

This is a variation of cutting out the dead wood.  Back in the dark ages, an enterprise had ONE computer (the MAINFRAME) and all workloads ran on that computer.  Sometime in the 1980's, when IT figured out that real work can be done on "commodity-class" or "open-systems" hardware, a vertiable explosion of "a box for this and a box for that" kind of hardware buying took hold in IT.  That was fine until it became apparent that all these boxes needed energy and, even worse, each successive generation of box required more energy than the succeeding generation.  Existing data center energy designs would not support this kind of growth, so, in a way, we've returned to doing the hard work of figuring out how to manage multiple workloads on fewer devices.

One method of consolidating workloads that has gained a great deal of currently is the not so new idea of "server virtualization".  With hypervisor software like VMware (http://www.vmware.com/), many Windows or Linux operating system images can be run concurrently on one server.  While the performance and reliability limits of this approach are just beginning to be understood, hypervisor technology is a real and viable alternative to the "one box, one workload" style of deployment.

Tip #8: Micromanagement is good

A surprising feature of data center workloads is their constancy.  Utility companies call the constant day-in, day-out energy draw "baseline load", and it's the stuff of new power plant design.  IT has had power management at the desktop for a number of years, witness various power management strategies in the energy constrained milieu of the modern laptop.  Many of these power conservation features have made their way into server class hardware, yet their uptake has been slow.  Look into server power management features.  It may not be a good fit for every configuration, but there are probably some workloads in your shop that do not require round-the-clock maximum power.

Tip #9: Beam me up Scotty

Fiber optic LAN devices consume less power than copper LAN devices.  The main reason it that requires less energy to propagate a signal over fiber then over copper.  This phenomenon becomes more acute as bandwidth rises and as the port density of networking equipment increases.  As networking moves toward higher and higher bandwidth, consider replacing that copper network infrastructure with fiber.

Tip #10: We're all in this together

Check out AFCOM (www.afcom.com).  It is the only association dedicated to providing education and resources for data center managers. Today's problems in the data center are basic, fundamental and are not going to change.  Effective data center managers, challenged by limited budgets and ever increasing demands for data center resources, will solve these problems collaboratively.  Our best resource is one another.

For more information please contact CDW Berbee, John Uchaker at 513-677-4119.  CDW Berbee, drawing on strategic partnerships with Cisco, IBM and Microsoft and the far-reaching experience of its hundreds of engineers, has assisted clients with a full range of technology solutions.  For other information, please visit www.berbee.com.