Mark Bramfitt - Utilities & IT

Apples and Oranges (Demand and Energy) Strike Again for Solar at DCs

As always, interesting news from Data Center Dynamics revealing the extent of solar photovoltaic on-site generation by eBay, including a new installation at a data center in Utah.

First, you simply have to commend eBay for the scale of their commitment to on-site generation: the new installation brings them close to 1.5 MW of solar PV, with another 0.5 MW in fuel cell capacity. To which I say "hear hear".

But the reporting does get a bit sideways when it comes to the numbers. eBay states that their "renewable energy generation capacity is...11% of the company's total data center power demand" (emphases mine).

That's exactly how I'd write it if I wanted to extoll the virtues of the projects, but I'll join Amazon's James Hamilton, who took Apple to task for their solar generation claims, in spinning this quite a bit differently.

While fuel cells can produce power around the clock, we all know that PV arrays have a much more limited operating cycle. So the correct comparison, especially against a block load like data centers, would be on energy production, not demand.  I would expect that the amount of energy produced by eBay's solar and fuel cell plants equates to something like five or six percent of the energy used by their data centers.

I haven't been able to find out if the Bloom Energy fuel cells at eBays Silicon Valley campus are using natural gas from the local utility or landfill gas (they are near a landfill). If the former, the power can't be called renewable, and if the latter I wouldn't call it renewable either. (The gas from the landfill will decline unless you continue to expand the facility, and let's be real, calling it renewable would be a corruption of the term.)

Lastly, I find it very hard to believe that the solar plant in Utah will pay for itself in only four years, given prevailing power rates there. It's on the order of seven or more years in California (after accounting for subsidies) where power rates are far higher.

Again, all due credit to eBay for their investment and commitment - it truly warrants attention and commendation. But have your engineers check the attempts by publicists to spin the data: it diminishes your accomplishments.

 

 

DCD on Apple's North Carolina Data Center

Bit of news reported by Data Center Dynamics on Apple's Maiden, North Carolina data center - I take particular interest as I am doing some consulting work with the local electric utility, Duke Power.

The squib is all about Apple's plan to install almost five megawatts of fuel cell capacity at the center (mistakenly referred to in the opening paragraph of DCD's piece as "cogeneration", unless Apple plans to do something with the low grade heat from the plant).

It appears that Apple plans to sell the plant output to Duke, rather than to use it to offset the data center load. This isn't necessarily a surprise.

If you have a self-generation facility, it can be more lucrative to sign a power purchase deal with a utility rather than offsetting your own use when you carefully assess the economics. For example, the utility will likely charge you a standby service fee if you use the power in-house to cover the infrastructure needed to serve you should the generation plant go off-line.

There might also be power purchase subsidies in play, which make the arrangement more lucrative.

And finally, there is real value in choosing when to run your plant. It would appear that running around the clock would amortize your investment the quickest, but off-peak power rates may actually be cheaper than your cost to produce power, so running only in on- and partial-peak hours may be better.

All by way of saying that I'm sure Apple has analysed the economics that support the purported power sale arrangement.

Via DCD: Emerson Lists Ten Data Center Trends

Great story in the DatacenterDynamics newsletter today (a must subscription) relating ten data center trends noted by Emerson - the power delivery and conditioning folks.

Ambrose McNevin of DCD claims not to be surprised by the list, though I have to say a few raised my eyebrows - at least in terms of raising more questions.

Take the first one: rack densities will increase to an average of 12 kW within three years. I certainly agree that if so, data center operators are going to be challenged with power delivery and cooling issues. It would suggest that airflow management will be a necessity, if not a move to completely isolated airflow, which will represent a big investment in legacy facilites.

The second one doesn't ring true, or certainly hasn't in the recent past. Data center operators replace power delivery and air conditioning systems with every third IT refresh cycle? Every ten years? My experience is that cooling systems have a fifteen year useful life. And I've seen UPS systems that are half my age!

I'll save one last critique for item ten, which states that IT workloads vary a lot by time of day, week, month, and even year. The examples certainly ring true, but with most users loading IT gear at ten percent or lower of capacity, these workload swings are essentially meaningless from a power or cooling perspective. Look at the utility meters, as I have, and most data centers have the closest thing to a base loading profile as you can get, with any variation more likely attributable to weather conditions (affecting cooling efficiency) than any other factor.

There's Still a Market for Utility-Scale DCs in High Power Cost Regions

Two reports out this week show that there is a market for large data centers even in areas with high power rates.

The first covers the new Vantage data center in Santa Clara - a 9 MW wholesale colo featuring outside air economizers and a reported PUE of 1.12. It's the second of three data centers that Vantage is building, and can be scaled up to an 18 MW load.

The GigaOm article also reports that Vantage has their own substation, so is able to purchase power on the wholesale market, which presumably means they can best Silicon Valley Power's retail rate for large customers of about eight cents per kWh. 

That's not really competitive though when some utility-scale data centers are getting power for under four cents a kWh in some markets. 

But it does show that there is still a big market for data center space in Silicon Valley despite the costs, and I'd point out that Vantage's center was built in just eight months - incredibly fast. Kudos to Silicon Valley Power for being able to serve a load that quickly.

The other report from the New York Times describes the conversion of a former telco high rise in Manhattan into a data center - something we've watched companies like Verizon and AT&T do in-house.

The project developers claim to have 40 MW of power availability at the site, and no knock against Consolidated Edison, but they'll be getting perhaps the most expensive juice in the country.

There's a good discussion of other data center properties in New York in the article, along with a description on how rental rates are structured. As expected, rent isn't based on floor area but power capability: $300 or so per kW of capacity per month, and then you pay for the power.

My quick back-of the envelope calculations tell me that to house one typical server in a colo in Manhattan would cost about $3000 per year. We used to say we'd passed the point where the power costs for a server over it's useful life exceeded it's purchase price; in this case you surpass it in just twelve months!

Government Giveaways To DC Developers - Why On Earth?

Datacenter Dynamics reported last week that two states - Nebraska and Iowa - are evidently in a shoot out to attract a $1.2B data center development project, and at least Nebraska is falling all over itself to offer attractive tax treatment. (I make that a 60 to 80 MW project.)

Maybe "attractive" isn't the word - Nebraska is willing to extend an existing program for large developments to data centers, absolving them of property taxes and providing refunds for local property taxes, and exemptions from sales taxes on equipment purchases and state use taxes.  To which I ask, what taxes does Nebraska plan to levy on the project?

They're even considering legislation allowing public power districts to sell so-called "excess power" to large projects at lower rates. I wonder what that means...

As always, the stated rationale is to attract high-paying tech sector jobs, but if you've been to utility-scale data centers in the past, you know that there is plenty of room in the parking lot. There just aren't that many employees, certainly after the site is up and running and close to fully utilized. I've been to 40 MW data centers that have no more than twenty employees on site.

Industry colleagues have noted that it isn't their fault that cities, counties, and states bend over backwards to attract major data center developments, but that is as much a cop out as saying the industry shouldn't be held responsible for the carbon content of the power it buys. 

If a company wants to build a data center in a community, they should pay their fair share of taxes to support that community and to mitigate any impacts of the project. Sure, seek out low power prices, but build to the highest efficiency standards and stand ready to implement carbon mitigation strategies. 

Just ask Facebook how it feels to be held accountable for these standards by their customers. That treatment will be extended to everyone building these large data centers eventually, so it would seem prudent to me to carefully consider whether loopholes are your best strategy today.

 

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!

 

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!

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.