Posts Tagged ‘Efficiency’
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
Most people uses the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) as a metric to measure how efficient is their data center. However, increasingly, the DCiE (Datacenter Efficiency) metric is becoming more and more accepted as the metric of measurement.
Both metrics were proposed by the Green Grid in 2007, as a means to estimate the energy efficiency of their datacenters and to compare the results against other datacenters as well as to determine if any energy efficiency improvements need to be made. (more…)
Tags: Consolidation, Data Center, DCiE, Density, Efficiency, PUE, Virtualization
Posted in Consolidation & Virtualization, Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Monday, December 7th, 2009
The latest news on the wire is that IBM has taken Syracuse University’s (SU) data centre off the electric grid. SU’s data center will be supported by tri-generation, which burns gas to provide heating, cooling and electricity in one. This is being touted as one of the world’s greenest with the on-site power generation system, liquid cooling and DC power.
In a statement released this week, IBM and Syracuse said that the $12.4 million (£7.5m) , 12,000-square-foot facility is set to become fully operational in January and will use around 50 percent less energy than an equivalent sized facility according to IBM. The computer giant, which is backing the data centre to the tune of $5 million, is also planning to build a Green Data Centre Analysis and Design Centre in 2010 to help other organisations who want to create similar facilities.
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Tags: Data Center, Efficiency, power, PUE
Posted in Data Center Facility, Going Green | Comments Off
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
I read with interest the developments around using Ammonia as an alternative, cleaner, easier to transport and easier to store energy source. This reminds me of the movie Mad Max, where ammonia from pig’s urine was used as their fuel source.
Since 2004, the Iowa Energy Center has brought together researchers, investors and government officials to set the course for ammonia energy to provide relief from the U.S. reliance on imported petroleum.
Ammonia is molecular compound made up of Nitrogen and Hydrogen, and exists in a trigonal pyramidal shape (as shown in picture). Its chemical formula is NH3. Combined with Carbon Dioxide, it is what we know as urea (the main component in urine). Although Ammonia is found in trace quantities in the atmosphere and ammonium salts are also found in small quantities in rainwater, it is one of the most highly produced inorganic chemicals in the world. There are dozens of chemical plants worldwide which produces ammonia and in 2004, 109 million metric tonnes were produced (28.4% of these were from China alone, 8.2% from the U.S.). However, majority of these ammonia produced is used for fertilizing agricultural crops.
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Tags: Clean Fuel, Efficiency, Energy, Environmental
Posted in Going Green | Comments Off
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
As we look at the many ways to improve storage utilization, data deduplication often pops up as a potential technique. Data deduplication, or sometimes referred to as “intelligent compression” or “single-instance storage”, is a method of reducing storage needs by eliminating redundant data. Deduplication is quite similar to data compression, but it looks for repeating sequence of very large chunks of data across very large comparison windows. Long sequences are compared to the history of other such sequences, and where matched, only one unique instance of the data sequence is actually retained on storage media. Redundant data is replaced with a pointer to that first unique data sequence copy. 
For example, a typical email system might contain 300 instances of the same two megabyte (2 MB) file attachment. If the email platform is backed up or archived, all 300 instances are saved, requiring 600 MB storage space. With data deduplication, only one instance of the attachment is actually stored; each subsequent instance is just referenced back to the one saved copy. In this example, a 600 MB storage demand could be reduced to just 2 MB. Imagine the huge economic benefits! Of course, in a storage system, this is all hidden from users and applications, so the whole file is readable after having been written.
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Tags: Capacity, Deduplication, Efficiency, Storage, Utilization
Posted in Consolidation & Virtualization, Emerging trends | Comments Off
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
Larry Dignan wrote on his blog about Data Center design 101, but his knowledge about the data center essentially boils down to one word: Money. Larry attended two Gartner IT Symposium presentations to learn more about data center designs and shared his views about why companies are building new data centers and how the vendors are “killing each other to be the data center king“.
In his blog post, he shared what he had learned, which are: (more…)
Tags: Consulting, Data Center, Density, Efficiency, Emerging trends, strategy
Posted in Data Center Facility, Going Green | Comments Off
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
I’m scheduled to speak at a Sun briefing event entitled “Turn Obstacles into Opportunities” in Jakarta on Nov 24th. The agenda will be about achieving efficiency and maximizing ROA (Return on Assets) through future-proofing data centers, consolidation, virtualization of IT environment to maximize utilization and improve efficiency.
In business terms, ROA is defined as an indicator of how profitable a company is in relative to its total assets. In other words, ROA measures how efficient a company’s management is at using its assets to generate earnings.
Taking this into the IT perspective, most of the time, IT is viewed as a cost and most of the time, IT is leveraging on technology assets to enable and support the business. Maximizing efficiency, utilization of technology assets or being able to support the critical business functions with less assets are ways to achieve ROA in the IT context.
I hope to share some of these insights with our Indonesian friends and clients during this event. See you all there!
Tags: Consolidation, Efficiency, strategy, Virtualization
Posted in Business, Consolidation & Virtualization, Miscellaneous | Comments Off
Friday, October 16th, 2009
It has been almost four days since I last blogged. Have been busy with a client in Tokyo.
This photo is a view from my hotel room at Shibuya. On the top left, you can see Tokyo tower at a distant away.
Look carefully at the picture and you’ll see that in general, there are buildings which are 10 stories high, in the middle of smaller buildings and there are occasionally a few which are 20 or more stories high. And here I am, looking out of my hotel room window, on the 29th storey. This is exactly the same state that we most likely will observe in a typical data center floor. There will be racks with highly densed equipment, consuming upwards of 15kW or more power, and right next to it, might be a patch panel rack with a few layer 2 switches, which is lower density. Each row of equipment racks and each individual rack will have varying composition of density.
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Tags: Architecture, Data Center, Density, Efficiency, PUE
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
Since I’m on the subject of facility, I might as well cover a few more points on data center facility, measurement and sensors. When I think about sensors, it reminded me of my first job. I used to be with a Systems Integrator, working on Plant Information Management Systems (PIMS) for refineries, gas plants, utilities, etc. I remember once, I was 120km west of Doha, Qatar, and was commissioning the PIMS system together with my customer and main contractor. It was August, in the mid-90’s. We were going through the screens and data points / tags with values collected from field instruments in the plant via their Distributed Control System (DCS).
As we review the data points, we came across a few thermocouples out in the plant indicating measurements of 54′C to 60′C. Although it was a hot summer day, a reasonable reading for those tags should be in the range of 45′C to 50′C. It was an interesting anomaly…
For a gas plant, it is very critical that the plant data collected are accurate as the data are used for planning purposes, production controls, yield accounting, and many other forms of analysis.
For a data center, data accuracy is also equally important.
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Tags: Data Center, Efficiency, electrical, Metric, Operation, Operations, RH, Temperature
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
I spent some time over the weekend reviewing ASHRAE’s latest document on Real-time Energy Consumption Measurements in Data Centers. It is quite a comprehensive book in explaining and providing guidelines on energy, power systems, air and hydronic measurements.
One of the interesting topic explained in this ASHRAE book was related to how accuracy of sensors may influence the efficiency of chillers.
(more…)
Tags: Chiller, Data Center, Efficiency, PUE, Temperature
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
One of the technology that is often being evaluated for HPC (High Performance Computing) or Cloud infrastructure is named after a stuffed elephant toy called Hadoop.
Hadoop is actually a framework for distributing data and running applications across a large cluster of servers built on commodity hardware. Today, I’m going to put away my service management, operations, facility hats and put on my old software hat to tell you a little story about this elephant and explain what Hadoop framework is composed of (in a layman’s terms).
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Tags: Architecture, Cloud Computing, Efficiency, productivity
Posted in Cloud Computing | Comments Off
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
In our daily life, we deal with recurring capacity problems day in and day out. Planning for capacity allocation, whether in our personal lives or at work, is a mix of science, art, guess works and perhaps some level of luck too. This is the same whether it is for sizing up physical compute and data arrays for a virtualized environment and likewise, for data center facilities.
Michael Manos wrote an interesting piece around data center capacity planning (entitled “Chiller-side Chats: The Capacity Problem“) and provided a very impartial explanation to bridge the understanding between IT, data center manager and the business around this complex subject. In Manos’ blog, he elaborated using an example of planning the power allocation and distribution in a data center. (more…)
Tags: Data Center, Density, Efficiency, electrical
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Friday, September 18th, 2009
A recent report from Forrester, which surveyed 774 senior IT executives at enterprises with more than 500 employees across ANZ, Japan, South Korea, India, China, Singapore and Vietnam, shows that generally IT spend in Asia Pacific region is down during this economic downturn, even in the economies witnessing growth. The research focused on trends in current IT spend and cost cutting measures.
The findings shows that almost half of the respondents said their 2009 IT budgets will be down, and only 15% of the respondents expects an increase in their IT budgets. Even in China and India, both of which are expected to register strong economic growth this year, many enterprises are decreasing their IT spend. In this two emerging markets, only those organizations that businesses rely primarily on the local or Asian markets continue to see IT budget growth, while those that have higher exposure to the Western markets will see decrease in their IT budgets.
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Tags: Cost, Efficiency, productivity, Service Management
Posted in Business | Comments Off
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
I chanced upon this scene (below) on the way out for lunch over the weekend. While the bank branch was under renovation, they placed a few containers outside and created a make-shift containerized temporary banking center outside. Innovative use of containers.
Actually, there are many many ways to make use of containers. Currently, approximately 90% of all non-bulk cargo worldwide are moved by containers stacked on transport ships. Although ISO standardized containers into five common standard lengths, 20-ft (6.1 m), 40-ft (12.2 m), 45-ft (13.7 m), 48-ft (14.6 m), and 53-ft (16.2 m), we usually hear of just the 20-ft and 40-ft versions.
One of the many creative way of using a 20-ft standard sized container is to turn it into a compact data center facility. (more…)
Tags: Container, Data Center, Efficiency, Emerging trends
Posted in Data Center Facility, Emerging trends | Comments Off
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
Air Management is a discipline to address and minimize re-circulation of warm air and by-pass of cold air in the data center. The main objective of air management is to achieve energy savings and a better thermal condition for the data center. The picture below illustrates what by-pass and re-circulation means:
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Tags: Air Management, airflow, by-pass, Efficiency, re-circulation
Posted in Data Center Facility, Going Green | Comments Off
Sunday, September 6th, 2009
Following up on my previous post regarding PUE. What does it mean for an organization to have a low or high PUE?
PUE = (Total data center facility + IT equipment power utilization / Total IT equipment power utilization)
where PUE is a ratio, e.g. a PUE of 1.5 means that for every 1kW of IT equipment (be it server, network devices, firewalls, etc.), it would require 0.5kW of power to keep the data center operating to maintain sufficient cooling, de-humidification / humidification, availability (UPS), etc. to sustain and house the said IT equipment.
(more…)
Tags: Efficiency, Metric, OPEX, PUE
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Saturday, September 5th, 2009
There is a saying “what you can’t measure, you can’t manage”.
When it comes to the data center facility, the Green Grid recommended using PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) as a metric to measure data center efficiency. PUE is quite widely adopted in the industry today. It was intended (and still is) to be a simple metric for data centers that is easy to understand and use, that enables DC operators and IT administrators to quickly estimate the energy efficiency of their data centers, compare the results against other data centers, and determine if any energy efficiency improvements can be made or if there are potential problems. The PUE metric – which is the ratio of a facility’s total power to the power being drawn by IT equipment – requires complete knowledge and understanding of each component in the data center and its power consumption.
However, if you would analyze the ratio carefully, you realize a catch. “Power being drawn by IT equipment” – this is a variable number. IT equipment’s power consumption varies from time to time, depending on their utilization. For example, a server with 10% utilization will consume less power than a server utilized at 90% level.
(more…)
Tags: Data Center, Efficiency, Metric, PUE
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
