Why is power and cooling an important solution for Green IT?

With Green IT continuing to rise on the agenda for many firms, a number of solutions are being pushed as a Green alternative.

Core to many Green offerings is the notion of power and cooling, particularly in the data centre.

According to IDC, the number of spinning disks in external enterprise storage continues to increase every year. Over the next five years (2008-2012), the industry will ship nearly eight times what the industry shipped over the past 11 years, according to IDC.

There is a cost beyond just acquiring these disks – the cost to power and cool them.

With an aggregate worldwide electricity cost of $0.07 per kilowatt-hour last year, IDC estimates that the total amount spent on powering and cooling these drives exceeded $1 billion in 2007.

Fortunately, there are options for companies that wish to become “Greener” in their use of enterprise storage.

A number of strategies have emerged, and will continue to emerge, to help reduce the energy associated with external disk storage, including “thin provisioning,” data deduplication, and low-power operations, according to IDC.

End customers will likely have to decide on the trade-offs with which
they are willing to live when adopting a Green storage strategy.

“As companies continue to add storage capacity at an aggregate rate of more than 50 percent per year, the number of spinning disks continues to be a larger part of the overall power and cooling costs within a data centre,” said David Reinsel, group vice president for IDC Storage and Semiconductors research.

“Vendors must do more to promote and enable well-rounded Green storage strategies that includes data centre redesign, data consolidation, and data reduction.”

The vendor community is also alive to the importance of power management and cooling. HP is currently developing a technology that precisely targets the source of hot data centres: the processor chips themselves.

The HP Labs research team is using thermal scanning technology to indentify the hottest parts of a processor.

Once identified, a system using the diffusion principles found in thermal inkjet print heads sprays liquid coolant from tiny nozzles onto these areas.

IBM is turning to water cooling for its new server range and is claiming
a 40 percent reduction in power costs.

The new Power 575 supercomputer uses water-cooled copper baffles to keep the heat from the 448 processor cores.

The method is so efficient that 80 percent fewer cooling modules are needed and this translates into a 40 percent cost saving on power.

We ask our experts this week:

“Why is power and cooling an important solution for the Green IT issue?”

Bart Mascorella
Channel sales manager, APC

Australian organisations are increasingly dependent on high-density applications and computing environments to maintain a competitive edge.

High–density computing environments however have much greater power and cooling requirements than legacy environments.

As such, power and/or cooling issues are now the single largest problem facing data centre managers.

A recent by survey by research house Gartner found that power and cooling issues in the data centre were the main focus area for 70 percent of IT managers.

More than 50 percent of the power going into a typical data centre goes to the power and cooling systems and not to the IT loads.

Gartner predicts that by 2008 half of the world’s data centres will run out of power.

Some Australian organisations have been told if they want additional power, they must pay to have their local substation upgraded.

Facing legislative challenges such as the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Scheme — which will require large businesses to report power usage and greenhouse gas emissions — CIOs are looking first to their data centres to minimise the organisation’s energy consumption.

For most Australian organisations, the first step is learning how the company uses power and minimising power consumption.

Many organisations are turning to resellers to devise an optimal strategy that allows them to meet requirements and expectations, whilst balancing between financial performance.

Some resellers have identified the opportunity and are changing their focus in the next year to address power and cooling issues linking IT and environmental services as one strategy for customers.

Peter Spiteri
Marketing director, Emerson Network Power

It’s not so much power and cooling, but efficient power and cooling through reduced and sustainable energy use.

Nowhere is this becoming more evident than in the data centre, where racks of high-density blade servers are being installed to keep up with the insatiable demand for computing power by all levels of business in almost every industry.

You only need to look at the push by government — most recently the NSW government’s $150 million energy saving plan — to know ‘Green’ is a big issue for households and also small-to-large business.

The more power consumed in the data centre, the more cooling necessary to reject the heat expelled by equipment using that power.

Our figures show that up to 50 percent of the energy bill in the data centre goes to the infrastructure used to power and cool the equipment, and that’s a conservative estimate.

The solution for this is not a piecemeal approach to buying more efficient equipment, or adding more cooling.

After all, the biggest obstacles for most CIOs in the data centre are the lack of sufficient power and space in which to grow. Only a holistic approach that takes into account equipment efficiency, best-practice data centre design, and uses clever cooling technology such as supplemental ceiling-mounted coolers over high-density hot-spots, will achieve the required reduction in power consumption.

With increased government regulation, this is no longer a nice-to-have goal, but a prerequisite for doing business.

As new data centres are built in Australia that can consume as much energy as 25,000 households, the time is now for local companies to make a concerted effort to reduce their power consumption.