Sustainable Technology

GE’s Appliances & Lighting Division achieves LEED Platinum level at its new data center in Louisville, Ky.  The facility’s design, construction and operation are focused on reducing data center energy consumption and lowering the building’s environmental footprint.  …

• In addition to installing innovative, high-efficiency cooling systems, GE is installing high-density servers to pack more computing power per square foot, reducing the size of the data center floor by half compared to the data center it replaces. This means that less energy is needed to cool the space.
• GE is reducing water consumption inside the building by 42 percent compared to the industry baseline⁷ by installing ultra low-flow fixtures. Outside the building, GE is reducing water consumption by 100 percent.⁸
• GE has offset 35 percent of the data center’s predicted annual energy consumption through the purchase of off-site renewable energy.

The Green Grid has posted updated guidelines for applying its PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness, metric.  The update includes specific recommendations for how to measure and calculate PUE in mixed-use data center facilities and introduces a condenser water source energy weighting factor.

Enhanced principles are introduced into the measurement definitions:

…   “When calculating PUE, IT energy consumption should, at a minimum, be measured at the output of the uninterruptible power supply (UPS). However, the industry will continue to improve measurement capabilities so that measurement of IT energy consumption directly at the IT load (e.g., servers, storage, network, etc.) becomes the common practice.”   …

Recommendations.

Team of Facebook engineers has develop custom software, servers and data center configurations to achieve a leading energy efficiency performance.  The company has recently open sourced their technologies to advance the state of the industry.

Virtual I/O is shared among servers saving the power and costs of individual server NICs.  …

…   “other forms of virtualization, such as VDI and I/O virtualization, have emerged as the next candidates for disruptive technology of the year.”   …

via Data Center Dynamics: I/O virtualization.

Oracle updates its Linux kernel and provides for optimization of power requirements and efficient energy consumption.  …

…   “Modern: Provides optimizations for large NUMA servers; improved power management and energy efficiency; fine grained CPU and memory resource control. “   …

Via Oracle: Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux.
     

SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman provides insights into the company’s low-energy servers.

HP delivers its roadmap of converged infrastructure that integrates power discovery to provide transparency into energy performance.  …

…   “HP Intelligent Power Discovery: Eliminates over-provisioning in the data center: Accurate and timely power usage data and control can save companies millions of dollars in data center energy costs.

HP Intelligent Power Discovery is an industry-first advancement for green data centers that creates an automated, energy-aware network between HP ProLiant servers third-party facility management tools and data center power grids.

Expanding on HP’s Data Center Smart Grid solutions, the software provides greater transparency and insight into power usage by creating a real-time, graphical map of energy usage across servers and facilities.

By accurately provisioning energy, clients can extend the lives of their data centers and save up to $5 million per every 1,000 servers in one year. “   …

Via HP: Converged Infrastructure.

Intelligent power discovery.

MLS power efficiency lowers cooling costs.

SeaMicro has commercialized a low-power Internet-optimized x86-server that reduces energy consumption and space by 75 percent. The company’s SM10000 servers are setting the bar for internet workloads. The server integrates 512 Intel Atom processors with Ethernet switching, server management and application load-balancing. The server consumes one-quarter of the power and takes one-quarter of the space to match the best-in-class internet server. …

…   “Beyond the fundamental mismatch between today’s servers and the dominant workload, SeaMicro made another critical observation that set the stage for massive reductions in server power.

The CPU, usually the focus of power reduction efforts, consumes only one third of the power in a server.

This means that large improvements in the CPU have only modest impact on the total power consumed by a server. In order to achieve large-scale power reductions, SeaMicro technology focused on the two-thirds power consumed by the non-CPU components.

To this end, SeaMicro transformed the volume server into a high density, low power, single-box cluster computer, optimized for Internet traffic.

SeaMicro further improved total cost of ownership and reduced the power consumed in a data center solution by integrating the functionality traditionally found in an entire data center rack – compute, storage, networking, server management and load balancing – into a single, low-power system.

Building on the dramatic reductions in power achieved at the system level, SeaMicro was then able to leverage low power CPUs, such as Intel’s Atom processor. “   …

Via SeaMicro: Low power server technology (Link).

can be enabled through adoption of standard definitions for productivity.  Labels such as EnergyStar can be susceptible to eligibility-creep, which results undifferentiated products.  …

…   “It is difficult to define energy efficiency for a complex system such as a data center or a server. Energy efficient is usually defined based on the delivery of the same or better service output with less energy input, but for servers and data centers service output is difficult to measure and varies among applications. Data center operators need standard definitions of productivity in order to purchase energy-efficient equipment, operate it in an optimal way, and design and operate the buildings to house it. “   …

Via EPA: Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency (PDF).
   

Synology launches new network attached storage devices that optimize power consumption for the small and medium sized businesses. …

… “The Synology DS110+ calls for just 21 watts of power under normal operation while the DS210+ consumes 30 watts. Features like Wake on LAN/WAN, scheduled power on/off and hard drive hibernation further help to reduce not only carbon footprint but also operation costs. ” …

Via Synology: DiskStation DS110+ and DS210+ NAS Servers (Link).
   

IBM adds new service delivery center to its North American facilities. …

… “The new service delivery center will primarily support IBM’s U.S. strategic outsourcing clients, providing server systems operations, security services and end-user services, including maintenance and monitoring of computer hardware and software systems. The services utilize collaborative problem solving and defect prevention processes based on service management standards. Employees will manage the servers and storage systems that are critical for assuring optimal IT infrastructure performance for IBM’s clients. ” …

Via IBM: Service Delivery Center in Missouri.