Mark Bramfitt - Utilities & IT

SupeNAP is as Big as Vegas Gets

I often refer to "utility scale" data centers in presentations and education forums because the scale of these facilites drives home the magnitude of the impact they are having on utilities and energy use in this country. (I do give credit to the operators of utility scale data centers for driving the industry emphasis on energy efficiency.)

Until now, I've called out data centers that just exceed 100 MW of load as the behemoths in the segment, or the data center "parks" that have loads of 250 MW or so.

Now comes word of an expansion of the Switch SuperNAP facility in Las Vegas in a report in DatacenterDynamics newsletter: when complete, the facility will exceed two million square feet, with room for 31,000 equipment racks. And power? Right at 500 MW, with equivalent generator backup (that's 250 units, assuming 2 MW per).

Perhaps my standard way of converting load figures into layman's terms are now out of date. Energy use by SuperNAP could serve 375,000 homes in California, but maybe we need to start comparing these power draws to full-fledged cities, or oil refineries, or total loads of familiar utilities...

 

 

Intel vs. ARM from The Economist

I've posted before about the potential use of ARM-designed chips in servers as an energy efficiency play. This article from The Economist focuses on the potential market battle between Intel and the ARM cluster of companies, noting that energy efficiency is the basis of the competition.

In a nutshell, ARM chips dominate mobile electronics applications, which of course means that energy efficiency is a prime design attribute (to maximize battery life). Intel dominates in desktops, laptops, and data center gear, and their processors bring awesome computing capability to bear at increasing energy efficiencies. (Disclosure: Intel is one of my clients.)

It's been posited that ARM-like designs would be applicable to Intel's markets on the basis of energy efficiency - a server running ARM chip sets could use as little as a tenth of the power of an Intel-based model, according to HP (HP has a project to develop ARM-based servers called "Moonshot"). ARM chips might also be suitable for PCs - certainly in the laptop, tablet, and new "ultrabook" categories.

The article points out many of the barriers that would prevent one side from gaining traction in the other's turf: the PC market is stagnant (so why bother), Intel has developed the Atom processor which has efficiency on a par with comparable ARM products, ARM designs likely lack the performance needed for server workloads, and the whole issue of whether software companies and other industry players will support new platforms.

I'll raise just two issues.

First, it has always appeared to me that issue of server energy efficiency is mooted by the incredibly low average utilization rates in most applications. Even the best internet-focused companies with largely homogeneous workloads only report rates in the twenty percent range, and enterprise users are lucky to see rates over ten percent. So efficient power supplies or even comparative advantages in processor efficiency simply don't make the difference that improved utilization would. 

Second, the PC market is relatively stagnant, but there are tremendous opportunities to drive efficiency through refresh and power management. The latest generation of Intel processors are far more efficient than cores made just three years ago, and coupled with power management, desktops use just a little more energy than a late generation laptop.

Which is why I counsel utilities to promote server virtualization and consolidation and desktop power management as their primary programs in these markets. Yes, there are discussions at some utilities about designing programs that reward the purchase of premium efficiency desktops and servers, but that will drive marginal energy savings compared to these two measures.

As to the ARM/Intel foray - battling over energy efficiency is a great thing!

 

Reading Now: Free Ride by Robert Levine

 

Okay, this has nothing to do with energy efficiency, IT, or data centers, except in the most peripheral way, but given the debate this week regarding SOPA and the government's efforts to address appropriate and fair use of copyrighted material, I thought it worth a review.

Free Ride is a great read! Mr. Levine describes the fundamental battle between the high tech and communications industries on one hand and media companies and copyright holders on the other.

With chapters covering the music industry, newspapers, movies, and books, we get a clear picture that the current model will not hold: while content delivery companies certainly drive innovation and provide a valuable channel, media companies, artists, and other producers of content will certainly fail in the long term if a means of providing them reasonable earnings for their efforts aren't established.

And while the content delivery companies were able to mount a surprising "grass roots" puch this week to counterbalance whatever sway traditional media companies have over the legislative process, I can't say I'm at all confident that a reasonable solution can be found - at least in the legislative arena. (Lawyers, however, will be well-employed.)

Have we already passed the point of no return? Have we conditioned ourselves to view content as free and copyright as something to be ignored?

The US entertainment industry is our leading exporter. If we don't respect the fair use of content here, how can we ask foreign nations to do the same? And how can we preserve a free press if it isn't financially sustainable? These are crucial issues for us as a nation and society, in my view.

As the subtitle suggests, Free Ride includes suggestions for how we might establish a fair use system that keeps content generation alive, and I hope it can form the basis for a meaningful accomodation between industries that show no sign of mutual cooperation.

 

Speaking At: AESP's 22nd National Conference in San Diego

I'll be delivering a paper presentation on Wednesday February 8th in San Diego at the Association of Energy Service Professionals 22nd National Conference, which runs Monday through Thursday.

We'll post the paper, which I wrote with Alan Rose at Intel, after the event. The title is Opportunities for Desktop Computer Energy Efficiency Programs, and here is the abstract:

There are proven technologies that dramatically improve the energy efficiency of desktop computing infrastructure, but poor market adoption calls for the engagement of utilities and their service providers to employ program approaches to stimulate the three large user markets of large businesses and institutions, small and medium businesses, and consumers. Although there are challenges in delivering programs that will deliver cost-effective, defensible results, the opportunities for dramatic energy efficiency accomplishments are too large to ignore. This paper makes recommendations for program approaches that leverage vendor support, meet regulatory requirements, and that benefit consumers. 

 

 

Moderating: Panel at Technology Convergence Conference

I'll be moderating a panel again this year at the Teladata Technology Convergence Conference on Thursday February 2nd at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Our topic this year is Server Rooms and Closets: The New Frontier for Energy Efficiency Engagements, and I'll be joined by two close colleagues, Mary Medieros McEnroe from Silicon Valley Power and Bill Dunckel from Pacific Gas and Electric, and a new acquaintance, Dr. Munther Salim, who works on energy efficiency and sustainability at HP.

If you haven't attended the Teladata events in the past, I highly recommend going given the focus on sustainability and energy efficiency, as well as the caliber of the presentations.

 

Video: NetApp on Data Center Efficiency

Thought I'd dig through some of my files and clean up directories, and came across a couple of videos I thought I'd share. (Don't you just hate watching yourself - or even just hearing a recording of your voice? It never matches the image you have of yourself somehow.)

Here's a video I helped NetApp with some time ago:

  

Great Site For Guidance On Data Storage

Here's a great site for those of you interested in developments in the data storage world.

The three Davids (Vellante, Floyer, and Butler) behind this effort have perfected a great model for sharing industry insight and developing and delivering high-quality content. They have a real interest in the energy efficiency attributes of storage technology, so this is the place to gather information on that subject.

I recommend signing up and enrolling in the subscription service, and watching out for regular webinar briefings. I sat in on one this week which clued me in to the move to solid state storage in data center applications, which utilities and data center operators should be watching with keen interest.

(It's clearly time that I develop a resource links section on my landing page - I'll get right on it!)

Intel Site: Great Utility Data Center & IT EE Program Resource

This is one of those things I should have posted a long time ago, but a recent client inquiry at least prodded me to do it now.

The client wanted to know how to find out about utitlity energy effciency program offerings for data centers across the US, without having to do endless internet searches on his own.

Intel has created just such a resource at their Premier IT Professionals site, which features not only a map and lookup feature for program information, but a blog, technical resources, and useful links.

Full disclosure: Intel is one of my clients, and I have been producing some blog content for this site. But I don't at all mind you bookmarking it along with my blog!

Reading Now: Collapse by Jared Diamond

I must confess I was wary of delving into Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, as I was never able to plow through to the end of Guns, Germs, and Steel.

I'm glad I worked through this one though, even if it was a few years after publication, as Mr. Diamond has added to my world view of environmental issues beyond my extensive reading about climate change.

Here, for both ancient societies and our current global community, he describes how societies have failed to manage natural resources to such an extent that they completely fail.

I highly recommend the work, though I would steer people to read the Prologue, maybe just the section on Easter Island in Part Two, the chapters on China and Australia in Part Three, and all of Part Four, where he discusses practical lessons that can be applied based on the analyses of each collapsed or collapsing society.

There is no explicit discussion of energy resources in the book (though it does come up in the discussion of China and Australia), but it isn't at all difficult to apply the thinking around resource depletion to the energy sector. 

In summary, a challenging read in terms of scholarly tone and sobering conclusions, but worth the high praise it has received.

SVLG Data Center Efficiency Summit - Recap

I attended SVLG's annual data center summit last Friday at the stunning IBM Almaden Research Center south of San Jose.

A pretty jam-packed agenda, with some customer case studies and three tracks of technical presentations and workshops. Facebook talked about their Prineville OR data center design, and the Stae of California described their data center consolidation efforts - trying to pull over four hundred data centers and server rooms run by all of the state agencies into a central DC outside of Sacramento.

(The stunner of that presentation was that the Department of Corrections was able to consolidate all of their IT workloads, formerly on hundreds and hundreds of servers in a 10k sq. ft. data center, into just three racks of equipment at the central site - a consolidation ratio of 100 to 1!)

The best workshop was one dedicated to thinking about how to extend the efficiency message to server rooms and closets - an issue I have been working on with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

I think utilities can offer three programs to address this market (virtualization/consolidation rebates, upstream incentives for EnergyStar servers, and an airflow management tune-up program for server rooms), but the true hurdle is how to engage service providers. Who can make a business out of doing energy efficiency projects in the two-and-a-half million server rooms in use in the US?