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.

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.

It seems like the most simple logical solution to energy conservation-powering down servers not in use. After all not all servers are used all the time. For example servers that perform only a single predictable function such as for calculating the employee pay are used only on certain days in a month. Or those used for special testing or running backups and so on. It makes sense that they power themselves down when not in use just like in commonplace electronic gadgets.

The Alliance to Save Energy, Kelton Research and 1E, a software IT company, found through surveys of server managers and analysis of industry data that out of the world’s 44 million servers, roughly 4.7 million of them are idle and not doing necessary work.

“Contrary to popular belief, one of the largest causes of energy and IT operational waste in data centers are servers that are simply not being used. The savings from decommissioning non-productive servers cannot be ignored. Organisations need better information on server efficiency and more effective ongoing server energy management,” comments Sumir Karayi, CEO, 1E.

The key problem highlighted in the study is that over eight in ten (83%) of IT managers admit that they do not have an adequate grasp of server utilization . That is they have no idea which of the servers are actually in use and which are not at a given point of time. So to be on the safe side and avoid any unwanted interruptions while running applications, they supply power to all servers uniformly even those that are not working.

But not all IT managers approve of powering down servers. The old school of thought seems to be that servers should run 24/7 for fear of ruining the hardware and also of getting a bad rap sheet from clients. Others dread the difficulty of getting a server back to an operational state once it’s turned back on after powering down.

Ted Samson in infoworld interviewed several experts on this issue:

Infrastructure technologist at HP, said powering down servers is completely safe. “It’s not at all bad for the server. It’s something we do to electronic devices all the time. It can handle it from a hardware perspective,” said Baker.

But Brad McCredie, an IBM fellow for the Systems and Technology Group, wasn’t quite so sanguine. He explained that, technically speaking, powering off and on any kind of computer can have a detrimental effect over time.

“[Temperature cycling] is a well-established failure mechanism and a stress on components,” McCredie pointed out. “What it really comes down to is all these things — chips soldered on modules, soldered on boards and connectors — that expand and contract when they heat and cool…. When they all contract and expand at different rates, they can fail. That’s ultimately the bad thing with power cycling,” he said.

Mark Monroe, director of sustainable computing at Sun, suggested that machines can handle being shut down a finite number of times. Arguably, the number is large enough for regular power cycling over an extended period of time. “Most server vendors today say they’ll support a certain number of cycles of powering things on and off,” Monroe said. “I believe most of the server vendors would say [the number] is in the hundreds as opposed to the thousands.”

From the above survey it is safe to assume that for the most part , datacenters armed with the burden of reducing power costs are willing to at least take a look at this controversial method in moderation.

There have been a host of products in the market recently to tackle efficient power downs without mess-ups. IE launched its power management software for servers that use smart algorithms to figure out which servers are doing work and the energy they are using. According to IE its “NightWatchman Server Edition” can power down servers into a drowsy state, cutting their energy use by 12 percent. IBM has a product called Active Energy Manager that features advanced energy control options designed to boost performance per watt by slowing processor clock speed or even putting processors in “nap” mode when not in use. There are numerous others following the same trend including VMware that offers a functionality in VMware Infrastructure 3.5 called Distributed Power Management that powers servers on and off according to demand level.

Not all servers are automatic candidates for shutdowns however. Servers dedicated to specific scheduled computing that occurs only at certain times of the month or wanes at certain pinpointed times during the day are ideal targets for powering down. For more expert consultation on powering down processes and other methods of energy saves for your data center, contact us at GreenRack Sysems/408-2138144.

While the high tech world buzzes with non stop talk about virtualization and other power monitoring technologies to increase data center efficiency, improvement in basic storage can go a long way to green up your facility. On an average 10 to 40 percent of energy cost in data centers is used to run storage. Yes, managing storage can be expensive especially in a situation like data centers which struggles to cope with excess of data resulting from global initiatives, web commerce, rapidly enhanced computing expectations and security pressures. If businesses do not address their storage budget issues and reduce their data footprint, the problem is likely to blow out of proportion in this era of faster, more ever increasing computing. To keep up with this massive growth, organizations must look at smart storage capacity solutions.

SNIA, Storage Networking Industry Association is a non profit association made up of about 400 companies dedicated to knowledge exchange of end-to-end storage solutions and development of standards in information management products. Some of the energy efficient storage solutions that it recommends are thin provisioning, multi-use backup, virtual clones, de-duplication, compression, using RAID 5 or RAID 6 disk arrays instead of the higher-level standards and smarter coupling of technology and the actual needs.

Most industry experts recommend against indulging in highest grade equipment and to stick to what is actually required instead. Multi purpose, elaborate storage solutions not only cost more but most of the times you may not even be in need of them. So you might be powering them for doing things that you may not even need. So stick with RAID 5 if that’s all you will be using. While Solid State Disk translates to an enhanced performance level, it also costs an arm and a leg. So data that is not critical can be allocated to lower cost tiers and primary storage. Sometimes storage solutions come with automated management software to give information on how much of solid state disk you need to optimize your application. Virtualization of your storage also can go a long way in helping with storage consolidation by providing better storage distribution among servers and reducing hardware requirements. Vendors that provide server virtualization often offer tools to improve the management of storage as well.

The latest buzz in the storage world is data de-duplication also called single instance storage. It significantly reduces the amount of physical disk space needed for backup and other archival functions by configuring data processing and storage functions in a way that removes redundant files, bytes, or blocks of data. It thereby makes sure that only unique data is stored on disks and eliminates redundant files.

The other popular storage solution is thin provisioning which doles out on-demand shared storage to servers instead of allocating tens or hundreds of gigabytes in advance based on anticipated demand which may go unused while consuming a lot of energy. Provisioning helps in cost reduction as it costs less to provide power to one drive loaded to capacity than a number of them each storing a fraction of their capacity.

Please contact us at Green Rack Systems for updating your storage solutions and to reduce your energy bills in the bargain.

The commercial IT vendors make a constant pitch to sell new, better and improved versions of their hardware and software every quarter. But as there is no real motivation for them to promote reuse, apart from the odd brand that exchanges older models for an upgrade or volunteers to recycle for you, we hardly get to hear much on that note.

At Green Rack Systems, we promote reuse of old equipment, as a means to not only lower the stress on landfills but also save some money in the bargain.

Eric Geier in Wi-Fi planet had some great ideas recently about the reuse of old wireless routers. He says:

Don’t throw away your old 802.11g routers just yet. The new slick-looking 802.11n routers may provide higher speeds and performance, but there are still many ways your old gear can help out, including extending your wireless coverage, improving a new network, assisting in offering public Wi-Fi, providing network authentication, or enabling secure remote or site-to-site VPN connections.

Some of these ideas consist of moving the old router around to serve a different purpose. However, most make use of the neat features that replacement firmware projects offer for the popular WRT series from Linksys and many other vendors and brands. Nevertheless, all the ideas can be quite helpful and save you a lot of money.

1) Extend coverage by using it as an AP

Though wireless routers are designed to connect to and distribute an Internet connection, they can be used just for their Wi-Fi capabilities. In other words, you can use it as an access point (AP) instead of a wireless router. If you have a small network with only a single wireless router, this can just about double your wireless coverage—and it’s essentially free.

Like a regular AP, you want to place the makeshift AP in a thoughtful spot to provide the best coverage. You want the wireless coverage boundaries of each router to overlap some. Then you have to run an Ethernet cable from the network’s router or switch all the way to the makeshift AP.

The trick to turn the router into an AP is to turn off the router’s DHCP server and to hook the Ethernet cable to one of the switch ports instead of the old router’s WAN port. For more help with this project, click here.

2) Relieve 802.11n routers from supporting 802.11g

When using 802.11n (or Draft N), it’s best to allow only 802.11n connections on the router. If 802.11g clients connect, they can slow down the newer clients. However, you can set up the old router again, just to support the old clients. You’d use the router as an AP, such as discussed above, except you could place it right next to the new router since you aren’t trying to get more coverage.

So you can better differentiate between the 802.11g and 802.11n signals, you should use different SSIDs or network names. To make sure someone loaded with a 802.11g card doesn’t accidentally connect to the new router, you can change the default wireless mode to 802.11n only.

3)Make it a repeater to take the signal further

Another way you can use an old router to extend your Wi-Fi footprint is to turn it into a repeater. Instead of having to run an Ethernet cable out to an AP, a repeater gets its network connection by listening to the airwaves and retransmitting the Wi-Fi signals between the existing wireless network and the users out of the main coverage area. This is great if you can’t or don’t want to run wires.

Though this range-extending technique doesn’t require running cables, it does require flashing your router with replacement firmware. That’s because routers don’t come with the repeater feature out of the box. If you have a supported router, you can use the DD-WRT, Tomato, or Sveasoft firmware replacement.

4) Use it as a wireless bridge

If you have computers or other network devices that need to be connected to the network but only have an Ethernet port and aren’t close enough to the router, you could convert your old router into a wireless bridge. In bridge mode, the old router would communicate with the new router via the airwaves. Any computers connected to the old router’s Ethernet ports would be just like they were wirelessly connected with the new router themselves.

Like with the repeater mode, to get this bridging capability, you’ll have to use a firmware replacement: DD-WRT, Tomato, or Sveasoft.

For more on wireless bridges, read Ask the Wi-Fi Guru, Episode XVI.

5) Offer VPN connections or connect offices together

Another feature provided by some firmware replacements is a built-in VPN server and client. This lets you set up the router for secure remote connections, so you can access files and services or secure your Wi-Fi hotspot connections. Plus if you have multiple locations, you can securely connect them via the Internet. You can find this functionality in the DD-WRT or Sveasoft firmware replacements.

6) Turn it into a hotspot

If you have a business, you could convert your old router into a hotspot gateway. Though you can simply plug in a regular wireless router to offer wireless Internet, you should implement the hotspot features. A captive portal makes users see a disclaimer or advertisements, or make payment, before getting Internet access. Plus some hotspot gateways can manage user accounts if login is required.

Both DD-WRT and Sveasoft include hotspot features. You might also want to check out the CoovaAP firmware replacement and all their free services. Sputnik offers a modified version of DD-WRT along with their paid services.

7) Make it a RADIUS server

If you want to use the enterprise mode of WPA or WPA2, but don’t have a RADIUS server to do the authentication, you may be able to convert your old router into one. If you have a supported router, you can flash it with the TinyPEAP firmware replacement.

Do your own brainstorming

We’ve discussed many ideas on how to use your old gear. Now you can review the features and documentation of the firmware projects to see if there are even more features that interest you. If all else fails, list your equipment on eBay…

Great points! For some more fresh ideas on recycling and reuse of your older datacenter hardware, please contact us at sales@GreenRackSystems.com