Mark Bramfitt - Utilities & IT

Koomey's Report For New York Times on DC Energy Use

A day late in commenting, but I found this report from the New York Times on data center energy use fascinating in many ways, not the least of which is that the report prepared by Jonathon Koomey was in fact sponsored by the newspaper.

Jonathon was asked to revisit his influential 2007 report from the E.P.A that predicted a doubling of server and data center energy use over the 2005 to 2010 time period, reaching a demand of 12 gigawatts this year. (I know: these reports conflate energy use and demand to a degree that can confuse an engineer, let alone a layman.)

His report concludes that data center load in the US has only hit 17 GW because of a combination of the economic downturn and a new focus on energy efficiency. (My guess is that the economic downturn is by far the prevalent factor.)

This droop in the growth curve has been predicted by others - I know Christian Belady at Microsoft predicted it as well. My question is whether the focus on energy efficiency has moved down into the enterprise data center market or is rather more contained in the utility scale operator group. If it hasn't, then the industry has a chance to deliver energy efficiency gains at the same time as the economy (hopefully) picks back up.

I noticed too that Google is mentioned in the article as being responsible for less than one percent of the energy use in the sector, attributing the low number to their intense focus on efficiency. That puts their demand at something like 150 MW. For perspective, there are a handful of data centers in the US that have loads in the 100 to 200 MW range by themselves.

 

Consolidation and Actual Data Center Closures: Two Examples

While at Pacific Gas and Electric Company, I often claimed that we had never seen a customer abandon data center infrastructure - rebuild and reconfigure, or sell, yes, but never decommission the infrastructure investment required for this power hungry use.

Two recent developments may belie that kind of claim.  First, the federal government appears to be hastening it's move to consolidate data centers, as reported in today's New York Times, and that includes outright closure of data centers.  I expect that most of these will actually be in the server room/server closet category, but a large data center operated by the Homeland Security Agency is slated for closure as well.

To some extent the federal story is about moving to cloud infrastructure as a means of containing infrastructure sprawl, and perhaps gaining efficiencies from higher utilization and newer, more efficient infrastructure.

I've also heard that a major financial institution is closing two large legacy data centers in the Bay Area, consolidating the workloads in facilities in the south where the company is headquartered. Given the large number of mergers and buyouts in this sector, I suppose it is no surprise that eventually back office operations like IT are eventually consolidated.

The two centers in the Bay Area, while quite large in size and electric load, were hampered by low power capacity - they could support something like twenty-five or thirty watts per square foot. In today's world, that leaves you with highly-loaded racks with lots of open floorspace, which prevents efficient cooling system operation.

If you can't bring more power into these legacy centers, or if the costs of adding cooling and power infrastructure to the existing space is high, it's worth building new. I still wonder whether new tenants at these facilities will make use of the data center space, perhaps by reducing the floor area or just living with the low available power densities.

On Politics: Campaign Noted in Local Press

While I will continue to focus my blog postings on my professional consultancy, I will occasionally provide updates on my incipient campaign for First District Supervisor in Sonoma County.

With a mention in a story in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat this morning, I would have to say that we've at least "soft-launched" an announcement regarding my interest in running. 

The primary election of course is more than a year away (June 2012), but stay tuned for updates here, as well as an announcement of my campaign site.

All wishes of good luck are welcome!

My Absence - Explained!

To regular readers and my patient clients, my apologies for the lack of new material over the past three weeks or so.

Elated to report that my wife Nicole and I were in Richmond Virginia for most of that time, greeting our newborn adopted son into the world.

I expect I'll post perhaps more frequently than I have done in the past, but some may be written in the middle of the night!

Lots to catch up on, so check back in over the next few days.

Jay Fry Interview

My decision to leave PG&E, or at least my announcement in October, caused rather more interest and speculation than I had anticipated.

Fortunately, Jay Fry of CA, who I got to know when he worked for start up Cassatt, offered me the opportunity of an interview on his blog, where I could explain my future plans.