Mark Bramfitt - Utilities & IT

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?

A Modular DC Design Suitable For Bond, James Bond

I just had to laugh at the report in my daily e-mail from Data Center Dynamics this morning about the latest modular data center offering, this time out of Sweden. 

MDC Stockholm, a new offshoot of the hosting company that housed Wikileaks in their data center in a cave, is offering their version of a container-form-factor modular DC with some features more suitable to the new James Bond film (titled Skyfall) than to traditional aspects like power density and cooling.

Nevertheless, MDC is claiming that each paired server room unit supports almost 400 kW in 35 racks, with cooling delivered to a central aisle. There are ancillary cooling, power delivery, and "command center" pods that make up the balance of the system.

Nice to see that MDC is claiming 100% use of outside air, but there are no other details on efficiency.

I have to recommend checking out the site, where you'll learn that the
containers will feature bullet-proof steel shells, and where the primary design paradigm seems to be whether or not the system looks cool. Perhaps the rest of the industry will take note and drop the boring standard shipping container look, which only leaves room for paint colors and logos as design attributes.

First to hire Peninfarina to design their unit wins...with extra points for delivery by jetcopter.

Better Than Free Power - No Kidding!

My colleagues in the high tech world may not quite believe this, but electric power on the open market is occassionally priced at less than free - producers will actually pay you to take it.

Here's what happens: utilities or customers enter into power supply contracts including ones that feature "take or pay" clauses for base load capacity. Hydroelectric plants fall in this category because there is a minimum amount of flow through the dam to preserve habitat downstream.

So how do we get to negative pricing? Let's say a utility has 1000 megawatts of take-or-pay base load resources, but in certain times of the year customer load drops below that. Now the utility is faced with paying the generator for power that can't be used. (Easy enough for a hydro operator to back off on production by altering the pelton wheel profile or bypassing the turbines completely.)

Now the utility would be happy to pay a customer to take the power as long as the price was less than what he had to pay the generator (better to pay you a penny a kilowatt-hour than the generators two cents).

In my experience, this is a rare occurence, maybe happening on winter nights when loads are lowest.

But that situation is changing in interesting ways. In the Pacific Northwest, wind producers have contracts that feature take-or-pay clauses, and the operators receive favorable tax treatment based on the actual power delivered to the grid. Bonneville now has something like 30% of their portfolio coming from wind, with much of the rest hydro.

So now, even on some summer nights, customer load isn't enough for the power generated by the hydro and wind plants, and there are significant costs and impacts involved in curtailing the power production. The wind operators in particular don't want to be curtailed because of those tax breaks.

The four state region is grappling with this issue in a positive way - seeking opportunities to engage customers who could use power during these surplus events. They're looking at traditional load shifting strategies like precooling office buildings and refrigerated warehouses, and time shifting electric water heating loads.

And...we're trying to think about how data centers could participate. I personally don't see a pre-cooling strategy being viable, but I keep coming back to thermal energy storage as an exciting solution for data centers. You get load shifting capability (and might even get paid for taking off-peak power sometimes!) along with redundancy in your cooling infrastructure.

I know of only one data center that has implemented a thermal storage system, but I can't help but think this is a larger market opportunity.

HP Looks to ARM for a Leg Up on Server Efficiency

HP announced today that they will be offering servers in the middle of next year that use ARM chips (and eventually, Intel's Atom processor). The stated benefit is primarily energy efficiency, and HP figures that maybe fifty of the largest data center operators (those with web serving applications) will be interested in the product.

I dug around the web to find out as much as I could on the "Moonshot" line; this coverage in the New York Times sums it up pretty well, HP's press release is here.

Note the description of the energy use of HP's system compared to a "base" load of 400 servers - energy use drops by almost a factor of ten, from a load of over 90 kW to just over 9 kW. The space required goes from ten racks to just half a rack, so the new architecture pushes the density envelop into the 20 kW per rack range, which can be cooled with air, but is likely to push operators to consider at least close-coupled cooling solutions.

It will be interesting to see if the product line makes headway, and whether other users may adopt it as well. HP notes that scientific and financial processing loads, which require intensive data analysis, might be suitable for the equipment also.

And it appears that we have two fundamentally different approaches to server energy efficiency coming from HP and Dell, with Dell offering more traditional architectures but warranting equipment to much wider environmental conditions - essentially offering equipment that can allow air-side economizer use all of the time, anywhere in the country. HP is countering with fundamentally more efficient equipment, but with the potential liability of high energy density.