Richard Clark, Raritan

What does it really mean to pursue a greener policy for the datacentre? Is it a matter of good planning or just window-dressing designed to match the corporate green messaging? In reality, will most businesses just keep ploughing on, demanding more power, more processing and cooling to feed their growth with a few token measures for the environmentalists? Richard Clark considers the answers and offers some solutions.

Unless you have been living on a different planet in the last year or so, you will have seen the green message from every major company. For most organisations, the push for a greener world has become a key part of their marketing strategy.

This 'greening' of corporations has started to filter through to IT, with most technology manufacturers headlining greener messaging. However, in the data centre world a different driving force was expressed to me when a CTO of a major financial institution was explaining his need for new data centres: 'The more processing power we get, the more accurate we can predict and execute our business,' he claimed. 'By the end of the year we will have exceeded our capacity and therefore our data centre will limit the business we do.' This was the first time I had heard the insatiable demand for IT processing power expressed like this. In conclusion, if they had an infinite amount of processing cycles then the business would use it.

The downside of this continuing demand for processing is the accompanied need for removing limits on power and cooling. So for companies whose expansion is dependent on more processing power, such as Google, Microsoft and E-Bay, are building their new high-density processing facilities in cooler northern areas near to greener and cheaper power production infrastructure such as hydro-electric power. This helps ensure their growth demands for power can be satisfied in a more cost-effective and green way.

To address this trend the way data centres are located and built and the equipment within them must attempt to resolve the conflicting demands for more power at less environmental cost. With the barrage of claims and counter claims to deliver more for less, how green are the initiates designed to help alleviate the situation?

Server hardware manufacturers are promoting their own solutions as the way to solve this conundrum. Each is promoting the reduced power and cooling requirement for their various individual systems or platforms, but this only addresses some of the many building blocks of a data centre. It should also not be forgotten that while breaking the link between processing power and power draw an increasing demand for processing cycles results in an ever increasing pressure on the power required. So, we still need to perfect a cold fusion reactor.

Data centre planning is now focussed on provisioning 10-25MW or even 50MW of power in anticipation. Although the price of electricity is off the highs of last year, the underlying impact to a business's bottom line will continue upwards and will become a significant factor in the life cycle costs of server hardware. In fact in the UK we have actually seen transfer of processing facilities out of the UK, using virtualisation techniques, to take advantage of cheaper utility costs in France.

So what does it really mean to pursue a greener policy for your data centre? Can it really be good planning or is it window-dressing designed to match the corporate green messaging? Is the reality for most businesses that they will just keep ploughing on demanding more power, more processing and cooling to feed their growth with a few token measures for the environmentalists?

Let's take an example of a greener data centre: take a 10MW data centre, cover the roof in solar panels, invest in heat pumps for redistributing waste heat and put up wind turbines in the car park (make the IT staff leave their cars at home). All of this work would roughly provide a saving of 1-5 per cent of the annual power required!

For all of this work and having ignored the investment costs, is this a reasonable saving despite the publicity gain? It should not be forgotten that less glamorous but more practical savings can be made by better planning and more efficient use of space. For example, a data centre manager, on completing a detailed audit of his facility, the servers deployed and the work they do, found 19 per cent legacy hardware that was still powered and paid for by its business units. This was despite them being superseded by later software applications running on different newer, more power efficient platforms: 19 per cent power reduction by simply switching off old servers.

This example illustrate the decisions businesses needs to make: adopt a green policy for data centres that shows it recognises the problem but still carry on delivering whatever the business demands for growth. You cannot square this circle but as with all decision-making, accurate, relevant data will assist in better decision-making and clearer outcomes.

This data can only be provided by implementing a proactive programme to first measure, then analyse and compare and finally control power use. The more granular the data captured, the easier it will be in making decisions on maximising the processing cycles that a data centre can produce for the power it absorbs.

The real trick as we move forward will be the ability to gauge how efficiently your data centre is operating. The current debate on the right 'efficiency' measurements and targets are being resolved by legislative bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency in the US and DEFRA in the UK. These bodies are putting both power reduction and carbon criteria at the top of the agenda, so most businesses will be affected in the future. Such broad-brush forced measurements can be achieved by simply reducing overall use but as explained earlier, this will not fuel the growth of your business. Stagnation in business is not, we assume, an intended product of these initiatives. The real-world question then is the measure of what you are delivering for the power you use, for example, the benefit to the business overall or maybe 'work cycles per kW used'?

To give yourself the ability to contribute to the decisions about the performance of your data centre you therefore need to measure and record usage data down to the granularity of individual platforms and the applications running on those platforms. If you can capture the power signature for not only a server but also a server that is running a particular application, you can then start to make some informed assessments, for example, on the benefit of a virtualised environment. You can then track these and report the improvements to the business as your positive contribution to achieving their greener targets

The key is to capture data in the right format and thus be able to use it in the main business control processes. No longer will it be acceptable to run the infrastructure of data centres as a silo site, completely separated from the business. CTOs are being tasked to tame the rising costs of provision of processing power and the days where IT directors can continue to ask for platforms/apps to be provisioned without a view on the footprint on power/cooling and ongoing costs will become resigned to the past.

Integration into the main systems of the business is vital for the success of all new power designs. Capturing power use data to the individual platform level and delivering it as part of a federated data initiative (for example, an ITIL®-based Service Knowledge Management Systems) will be common practice. Planning future power systems to deliver this will ensure power efficiency data is available to all relevant parts of the business.

The latest open standards for platform management are helping in this development. New standards (Web Services, IPMI, ASMI, WS FED, SMASH) are giving organisations the ability to glue power signatures into other systems in a secure way. All new power measurement designs should aim for adherence to the emerging platform management standards.

The data centre has now become the boiler house of most large businesses. To keep the business engine travelling at increasing speed without adding ever increasing fuel, the boiler house will need to run at greater efficiency. The tests for data centre efficiency will be clearer in the next few months but only by capturing an increasingly more detailed view will organisations be able to prove individual platform values and meet the legislative restrictions that are coming along.

Richard Clark is the country manager for Raritan in the UK and Ireland. Raritan has been designing and manufacturing remote data centre management and intelligent power control systems for nearly 23 years.