Green Notes

SearchDatacenter.com recently had a great article by Bob McFarlane with several handy tips on sizing computer room air conditioners and save on energy. Here are some excerpts:

Sizing a data center air conditioner is not like choosing a refrigerator. Bigger is not necessarily better! Correct sizing is even more critical to effective operation and energy efficiency than right-sizing the uninterruptible power supply (UPS). But with so many factors that determine capacity, it can be a bit tricky.

 

When someone plays with the thermostat at home (not you of course!), the temperature is never right. It gets too hot, then too cold. It’s worse with computer room air conditioners (CRACs). The unit that’s the wrong size can mess up cooling. Wrong settings or improper location will make it even worse.

 

Under-sizing can’t cool effectively — that’s obvious. But over-sizing won’t either. Thankfully, many CRACs will adjust to a range of loads, but there are many that won’t. They all need to be sized realistically, but over-sizing will always result in cooling going on and off too often. It’s called “short cycling,” which is hard on the machine and does a lousy job of maintaining room temperature and humidity. Yes, temperature swings do hurt computing hardware!

Air conditioners have to deal with two kinds of heat. Sensible heat — the kind we can feel — is what our computers give off. Latent heat is what evaporates moisture. Simplistically, dealing with moisture or humidity requires more latent capacity from our air conditioners, which steals from sensible capacity. There’s not much reason to keep a data center above 45% relative humidity (RH), but if you over-cool you’ll pull moisture out of the air (latent cooling) and have to use more energy to re-humidify. The problem is that relative humidity is “relative” to temperature. Warmer air has a lower relative humidity for the same moisture content because it can hold more vapor than cool air. Temperatures in a data center vary widely, so RH depends on where it’s measured, which is why we’re trying to get away from using it. However, RH is still the most common way to determine humidity.

Thankfully, today we can use variable frequency drives (VFDs) to automatically adjust fan speeds for appropriate air flow, controlled by sensors in the room. These can be retro-fit to most existing CRACs, and can save a lot of energy. (A professional computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, analysis is a good idea before buying any expensive air conditioner.)

So Step 1 is to know your real loads. Step 2 is to see if you can get higher temperature return air back to the CRACs. Step 3 is to decide cold air temperature. The American Society of Heating, Refrigeration & Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Technical Committee 9.9 has recently increased the temperature envelope, so there’s no need to over-cool the equipment. Step 3 is to set your humidity standard. ASHRAE TC 9.9 now recommends dew point monitoring and control, but existing CRACs may not be able to do that, so you’ll still need to control relative humidity. Then, if possible, pick an air conditioner that can adjust to load and choose a sensible capacity that will operate Day 1 in its midrange. That will give the best stability and control.

Let’s look at three other important issues before we finish: reheat, humidification, and water temperature. If you have more than three or four CRACs, it should not be necessary to put humidifiers on every unit. Moisture diffuses and stabilizes in the room pretty quickly (another reason for dew point sensing). Putting humidifiers on every air conditioner can be counterproductive if one unit humidifies while another de-humidifies. That’s wasted energy for no better result.

Reheat was the norm for years, and it’s the biggest energy waster of all. The CRAC over-cools the air and a heater warms it back up to discharge temperature. In many situations it’s possible to design without reheat, or to use minimal reheat. But it takes a knowledgeable engineer to make that determination and to provide a proper design.

If you’re using chilled-water computer room air handlers, you’ll need to have a knowledgeable engineer involved. Published capacity ratings are based on specific entering water temperature and water temperature rise. Chiller plants today may be designed on higher numbers to improve energy efficiency, but that reduces the effective cooling capacity of the CRAHs.

For the full version of the original article, visit  http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid80_gci1371079,00.html?track=sy185# . Free Registration might be required on the site to view content . To know more about Green Rack Systems and the suite of services we offer in addition to sustainable cooling practices for Data centers, contact us at sales@GreenRackSystems.com .

Financial giant Citi is priding itself on the company’s modern data center infrastructure that is flexible enough to take on a variety of requests from clients.Five years ago, Citi ‘s data center faced a number of challenges lack of capacity, limited flexibility limited and high risk of proximity.

Due to lack of cohesive, global data center strategy Citi  decided to reduce the number of data centers worldwide from 52 to 14 strategic sites, including five constructed from the ground up. As a first step, it implemented a global standard for data center construction and engineering. One of Citi’s latest constructions in Georgetown, received Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). It was a team effort with the data center team providing the engineering perspective and the corporate real-estate representatives lending the construction expertise to the projects.

The 100,000-square-foot Georgetown data center delivers 75 watts per square foot of power, expandable to 100W/square foot. Citi has divided the data center into four equally sized rooms. This setup reduces the amount of cabling needed and allows Citi to group technologies by room based on cooling requirements. Compared with the previous newly constructed data center, the Georgetown site uses 800 kilowatts less power for the same footprint, for a 30% reduction in energy costs, the company reports. Virtualization increased server density and led to 30% to 35% reduction in the number of physical servers. Citi was also able to put a cap on Power consumption for technology . According to Computer World , in the 2002 to 2007 timeframe, Citi’s data center power consumption grew by 10% to 12% per year but now thanks to virtualization, Citi has been flat on consumption year over year. Other major Citi projects that have received LEED certification include data centers in Singapore, Frankfurt, Texas, two Citi office parks in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and a 15-story skyscraper in the New York City Borough of Queens.

Projects looking for LEED certification have to meet certain prerequisites and specific performance standards to gain credits. According to the credits won, you will be certified, Silver, Gold or Platinum. The standards prescribe options for site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality. LEED-certified buildings must also adhere to benchmarks set by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) promoting reduction in energy consumption. Data centers certified by the LEED Green Building Rating System need not necessarily be owned by huge corporations with attached office space. Innovative design, responsible building practices and expert energy management consultation provided by a green consultation firm like Green Rack Systems can help you achieve your green goals.

IBM, Syracuse University (SU), and New York State have built a computer data center on the university’s campus that  incorporates advanced infrastructure and smarter computing technologies to make it one of the most energy-efficient data centers in the world. The data center is expected to use 50% less energy than a typical data center today making it one of the greenest computer centers in operation.

A key element of the design is an on-site electrical co-generation system that uses natural gas-fueled microturbine engines to generate all the electricity for the center and provide cooling for the computer servers. SU will manage and analyze the performance of the center, as well as research and develop new data center energy efficiency analysis and modeling tools. The data center operates completely off-grid.

In addition, a liquid cooling system has been created that will use double-effect absorption chillers to convert the exhaust heat from the microturbines into chilled water to cool the data center’s servers, with sufficient excess cooling to handle the needs of an adjacent building. Server racks  incorporate IBM’s Rear Door Heat eXchanger “cooling doors” that use chilled water to remove heat from each rack far more efficiently than conventional room-chilling methods. Sensors  monitor server temperatures and usage to tailor the amount of cooling delivered by each Rear Door Heat eXchanger–further improving efficiency.

The project includes the creation of a direct current (DC) power distribution system. In a typical data center, alternating current (AC) electricity is delivered by a central power plant through the local utility’s electric grid and then converted to DC to power the servers. This conversion process results in power loss. By directly generating DC power on-site, transmission and conversion losses are eliminated.

What makes the IBM-Syracuse University project different from many other similar ventures is the fact that special attention has been paid to greening the actual infrastructure of the data center itself, not just the computer hardware and software. Other design solutions that we recommend at Green Rack Solutions to update your data center’s basic design are:

• Managed airflow system to avoid hot spots, to assess cooling capacity required for IT equipment and to separate cool intake air from warm server exhaust air.
• Using energy saving cooling methods such as airside economizers and direct evaporative cooling.
• Larger but fewer variable speed motors to power air handlers for energy saving.
• Data center designs that eliminate need for raised floor which creates additional losses and leakages in the air handling system, thereby reducing the efficiency of the overall cooling systems.
• Designing by density zones. High-density applications represent 10 percent to 15 percent of a total data center usage. Medium-density apps account for another 20 percent. The rest is low-density. If you mix and match densities you save money on the build-out.

Google announced that they would open source the PowerMeter API that integrates home energy monitoring devices directly into Google’s Power meter . The Google meter is a free software tool that lets you monitor your personal energy consumption from  iGoogle homepage so that you can make more efficient use of power at home.

Using the open standards based Apps interface, developers can now customize the energy information available to customers while assuring privacy. Google also has provided resources for utility service providers and device makers in terms of samples and implementation guidelines to build their own Google meter compatible systems. For more info, check out Google’s official blog site: http://blog.google.org/search/label/PowerMeter.

For help with greening your IT strategy and choosing the right open source software to boost your energy efficiency, contact us at GreenRackSystems; sales@GreenRackSystems.com.

When we think of vibrant open source software communities, we think of active collaboration, open and free exchange of latest practices and enhancements and a collective, unified approach to innovation.  A new group announced this week called Open Source Data Centre Initiative is working on applying these open source principles to data center design. It will act as a “repository and test bed for mechanical and engineering advances in data-center design” and will play an educational role for customers.  The knowledge base is expected to be enriched by small engineering firms, graduate students doing research with federal grant money, and others who will contribute by sharing their projects and publishing real-world statistics on design and construction specifics and testing. Manufacturers could submit their technology solutions that could be put together in different ways as a part of the user’s unique end design. In return the contributors would benefit from access to resources that would make them more competitive in the market place especially as compared to bigger players. Special attention would be given to green and sustainable designs from the end-user perspective as opposed to merely the manufacturing side. Latest advances in data center engineering related to energy efficient cooling practices and power conservation will be made accessible allowing customers to customize their own design. The venture also hopes to increase awareness and participation among construction companies so that they would be educated on what they are getting involved with instead of merely implementing the designs handed out to them from the engineering firms at the last minute.

The founder of the group, Dave Ohara who also writes the Green Data Center Blog has partnered up with University of Missouri and ARG Investments on this initiative .The alliance says it does not intend to compete with groups like the Green Grid Forum and the Uptime Institute, but would like to accelerate the rate of progress. 

For a professional consultation on cutting edge breakthroughs in energy efficient data center practices, contact us at Green Rack Systems/ 408-213-8144.

The AFCOM association, whose members include 4,500 administrators from 3,900 data centers around the world surveyed  436 data center sites last year. Some of the findings of the survey indicated that cyberterrorism is an increasing concern, mainframe deployment is on the decline, storage deployment is on the rise, and “green” technologies are definitely happening.

It was found that there is a shift in data centers away from mainframe computers and toward other types of servers.Just less than 40 percent of data centers run two or more mainframes, with 45.7 percent of such data centers planning to replace at least one of their mainframes in the next year. However 33 percent of those replacing mainframes plan to replace them with other types of servers.

The market is flooded with energy efficient products and services that claim to optimize data centers and save on power. Data center power consumption has become out of control the past few years and companies have been clamoring to offer solutions for addressing not only the problem of green house gas emissions but also to make business sense by saving up some green.

Some of these tools are free such as American Power Consumption APC’s Efficiency Quotient online tool (http://www.apc.com/tools/calculator/efficiencyQuotient/) which helps IT managers determine the efficiency levels of their data center. It provides a fact-based rating of a data center’s current efficiency levels; recommends steps for improvement; gives access to related white papers, tools and information. More recently it has released another tool that will help managers make decisions regarding the physical requirements of a data centre after a virtualisation project. The Virtualisation Energy Cost Calculator can be downloaded from the APC site.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has also developed a data center efficiency tool, DC Pro that analyzes 12 months’ worth of a data center’s utility bills to answer specific questions about electricity distribution, airflow management and data center cooling. The tool provides suggestions for improving efficiency.

The Green Grid,  a global consortium of IT professionals dedicated to improve energy efficiency in data centers, has launched several new tools and reports to promote the cause of data center efficiency including a new power usage effectiveness (PUE) reporting tool and regional tools for calculating free cooling. It’s free online tool for data center managers records their power usage effectiveness (PUE) scores that will establish global consistency in reporting the split between energy flowing to IT equipment and facility operations.In addition to free cooling from outside air, the tool provides information about savings that could be obtained using water-side economizers.

Software firm CA  has introduced a program called ecoMeter in its new ecoSoftware products, which helps companies manage energy use from data centers, as well as other facilities. The program allows a company to know, at any given time, how much energy is being used by each element in the data center – be it a server, generator, cooling unit or backup power supply, reports Earth2Tech . Another new tool launched by Arch Rock Inc., called Energy Optimizer – Data Center Edition is a wireless monitoring system that allows IT managers to make knowledgeable decisions about their data center efficiency in real-time. It  judges a system’s efficiency against standards from the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers, estimating the actual dollars the data center is spending on electricity and its carbon footprint. It also identifies hot spots, such as short-cycling, missing blanking panels and sub-floor obstructions that cause energy waste. Others approach the problem from a completely different angle. For example, Milford, N.H.-based Degree Controls Inc., has developed active airflow management products that include airflow monitoring tools to control cooling. Then there is a new chip by Teridian Semiconductor  that does accurate energy measurement as a way of addressing this growing enterprise data center power consumption. Teridian’s chip enables manufacturers to integrate smart energy measurement tools into data center equipment including power supplies, and communications equipment, as well as servers.

We have barely scratched the surface in this blog of the zillions of options available with respect to freebies and other efficiency tools for sale. Free tools can be handy to give you a broad perspective of where you need to be looking at to solve the issue. A professional consultation service like Green Rack Systems would help you sort through the plethora of choices in the market today to identify the right suite of products to invest in tha meet your data center’s unique challenges.

Once we have proper systems in place at our data centers, it becomes equally important to maintain the infrastructure to ensure seamless delivery without any bottlenecks that might hinder the services provided to clients. The advanced nature of computing which our data centers currently provide us with further complicates not only mere maintenance but also quality assurance. Depending on functionality and targeted usage, the priorities of a co-location facility change. For example an IT data center servicing the needs of bank or governmental agency would have to mitigate constant security risks in terms of confidentiality of data processed. A data center catering to a high energy social networking site would want to maintain the constant fluidity of the site. How many of us get fed up of waiting endlessly for our updates to show up or photos to be uploaded on some of our popular networks. Apart from the main concerns in a set segment for upkeep, there are other related risks to be managed and avoided. Once you take all precautions to reduce the risk, data centers usually conduct regression tests to recreate threat scenarios with realistic data feeds and test environment. Disaster recovery plans once in place should be tested and updated constantly. A full scale testing environment with all the hardware, networking equipment etc can be hard to re-create for smaller data centers. Also there is additional risk of leaking of sensitive information during these tests and current budget cuts due to macro-economic conditions might not provide the resources to design elaborate testing scenarios. Our complete data center services at Green Rack Systems can assist you in quality assurance, security and testing by creating application relevant production environments outside of your facility for reliable performance testing to pinpoint areas that need improvements. Our professional testers skilled in this specific arena can take the pressure off you for not only investing in a test lab but also training and breeding a test team. In this way your data center will be able to run smoothly without running into routine errors, crashes, inefficient downtimes, security threats etc that could be damaging to your reputation vis-à-vis clients.

Please contact us at Green Rack for a one time inspection or ongoing quality assurance and risk mitigation services for your data center.

At Green Rack Systems, we have been saying for a long time how this emphatic shift towards clean energy is inescapable. A November study by AFCOM finds that “greening of the data center is no longer just a concept – it is actually taking place”, and on a large scale, with 71.3% of all survey respondents indicating that they are actively engaged in Greening. Now, thanks to Executive Order 13514 requiring rigid energy efficiency targets, even Federal agencies have to follow what they preach by taking the lead on reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Further, they will have to divert 50% of their waste by 2015 and arrive at a net-zero energy building requirements by 2030 for all of its 500,000 buildings. This will be made possible by key changes made in their massive IT departments, servers and data centers. The laudable target of net-zero for their buildings would be impossible to achieve without adopting efficiency strategies that we have been discussing about in our previous blogs, such as virtualization, renewable energy, alternative cooling methods, energy tracking technology etc. The new initiative also dictates that 95% of new acquisitions must be Energy Star or Federal Energy Management Program compliant, be EPEAT certified, contain recycled content, or otherwise be more sustainable than other products

  Some specifics of the order include:

Procurement preference for EPEAT- registered electronic products;

Policy implementation to enable power management, duplex printing, and other energy-efficient or environmentally preferable features on all eligible agency electronic products;

Environmentally sound practices in case of agency excess or surplus electronic products;

Procurement of Energy Star and FEMP designated electronic equipment;

Best management practices for energy-efficient management of servers and Federal data centers.

Cost-effective, innovative strategies, such as highly reflective and vegetated roofs, to minimize consumption of energy, water, and materials;

Reduction in the the consumption of energy, water, and materials, and identifying alternatives to renovation that reduce existing assets’ deferred maintenance costs.

Find opportunities while procuring real estate to consolidate and dispose of existing assets, optimize the performance of the agency’s real- property portfolio, and reduce associated environmental impacts

Rehabilitation of federally owned historic buildings utilizes best practices and technologies in retrofitting to promote long- term viability of the buildings.

In addition to the above, the directive advices employees to consider alternatives to traditional commuting and business travel such as telecommuting, web meet technologies etc.

The above practices are implementable for any office or data center outside of the governmental offices that it meant for. Now with Washington setting definite, targeted goals for itself in the green department, commercial enterprises who have lagged behind would very soon have no choice but to follow the lead.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, data centers across the United States accounted for 1.5 percent of total US electricity demand in 2006 — equivalent to the annual electric consumption of the state of Florida — and have become one of the fastest growing users of energy. While the power consumed at these individual data centers may be small, the consumption in totality at EPA and other large organizations is significantly enormous. Even as much is written about greening data centers and as non-profit organizations like the Green Grid are striving to bring about a new improved way of approaching this data center energy crisis, there is not much initiative on the part of the data centers themselves. They are often found to be slack on basic essentials in measurement and tracking equipment.

A recent study by Gartner released in September found that as many as 48% of data centre managers have still not even considered the issue of energy management metrics. “Without metrics it is impossible to get accurate data, which is essential to evaluating basic costs, proportioning these costs to different users and setting policies for improvement.” , Gartner remarked of its findings. Gartner said that energy management both in terms of capacity and cost can only be effective through advanced monitoring, modeling and measuring techniques and processes. Further, it encouraged organizations not to rely on internal metrics, saying that evaluating server energy needs to be done in an open and transparent manner. Gartner went so on to note that in many companies the IT department neither sees nor pays the electric bill, and thereby lacks the incentive to save energy. The research firm recommends that data centre managers use sensors to monitor potential hotspots, develop a dashboard of data centre energy-efficient metrics, and improve the use of the existing infrastructure through consolidation and virtualization before building out or buying new/additional data centre floor space.

Gartner’s study is further substantiated by a report released by Aperture Research Institute in 2008 that states “that organizations are unable or unwilling to meet the expectations set by the introduction of green initiatives.74% refused to activate power saving features on devices if it would require a drop in performance. When it comes to procurement, energy efficiency and ease of disposal are the lowest priorities. 37% of data centers have no plans to measure energy efficiency, and 76% do not charge the business for the power used by the IT commissions. One reason is a lack of infrastructure for measuring power consumption.We concludes that data centers lack the tools and processes they need if the organization is to effectively balance its environmental impact and its business priorities.”

Redundant methods of monitoring power efficiency, lack of digital tracking capabilities and reluctance to open up to external consultation could be major impediments in the road to energy optimization. Please contact us at Green Rack Systems for discussing your current IT situation and a detailed analysis of how we could bring more productivity and value to your energy consumption.