Time to power down

Despite datacenters heating up as their electricity demands skyrocket, Hong Kong enterprises may find it difficult to implement "green" initiatives.

In a research note published November 2006, research firm Gartner predicts that traditional datacenters waste more than 60 percent of the energy they use to just cool equipment. The research firm also forecasts that half the world's datacenters lack the energy capacity to meet the power and cooling requirements of new high-density computing equipment by end-2008.

Lack of standards: red flag

The lack of energy-efficient labels for datacenter products is one of the major barriers to green adoption. "It would help if Hong Kong's EMSD [the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department] extends its energy-efficiency labeling scheme to datacenter-grade equipment," said Franklin Lau, deputy general manager, Group Information Technology Services, CITIC Pacific.

At present, EMSD's labeling scheme covers 17 types of products, but only six of them are office-use tools: photocopiers, multifunction devices, laser printers, LCD monitors, computers and fax machines. The scheme is on a voluntary basis only, meaning manufacturers can choose whether they want to provide information about a product's energy efficiency.

The government proposes to introduce a mandatory energy efficiency labeling scheme, but no datacenter gear will be included in the initial phase. According to the EMSD website, the department will include three products: room air conditioners, refrigerating appliances and compact fluorescent lamps initially.

The Energy Star program in the US (another voluntary energy-efficient labeling initiative for electrical goods which started in 1992) doesn't cover datacenter equipment yet. But the US government's Environmental Protection Agency is currently working with the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories to study ways to promote the use of energy-efficient servers. A specification could be in place later this year.

The absence of standards today is equally a hurdle, leaving corporations no objective ways to compare energy efficiency of different products. Currently, many vendors (including HP, IBM and Intel) report some energy efficiency figures, but these aren't directly comparable due to differences in workload, configuration, and test environment, according to a statement by Standard Performance Evaluation (SPEC), a US non-profit corporation formed to develop a standardized set of relevant benchmarks for high-performance computers. The organization is working on a performance-per-watt benchmark for servers slated for release later this year.

Another force working for change is the non-profit, vendor-neutral Green Grid Consortium, which seeks to establish standards for energy consumption in the datacenter. Its members include AMD, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Sun, and EMC.

The green curve

A corporation can't force its datacenter to become more efficient overnight, especially as facilities are built to last for 10-20 years.

According to Michael Sham, service product line manager, Integrated Communications Services and Site and Facilities Services, IBM China/Hong Kong, about 70 percent of Hong Kong's datacenters were built before 2001. These facilities weren't built to accommodate newer equipment like blade servers.

"The amount of power needed to cool blade servers is triple that of older servers," said Tony Leung, director, Intel Solution Services, North Asia. "Sometimes it's impossible to improve cooling at older datacenters, and some companies just add fans."

Building a new datacenter is a solution to the cooling problem, but firms must plan ahead. "If a company wants to build a new datacenter in 2012, it must start planning now," said Leung. "For an optimal design, you plan for the capacity of the next 10 years."

Management buy-in

Another challenge in establishing a new and green datacenter is support from senior management. This endorsement is crucial because datacenters are strategic and long-lasting, according to Leung.

A related management buy-in issue is ROI, which IT heads must specify to management when proposing any datacenter build-out. Forrester Research's senior VP Chris Mines said ROI estimates are indirect at best. Mines said that many of a green datacenter's benefits-corporate citizen image and brand improvement-are hard to quantify and plug into an ROI figure.

Business management executives should be involved in the planning process. Chun Lauener, senior VP and president for Greater China at APC/MGE said: "[Management executives] have the greatest sense of which business requirements should be supported by the datacenter." She added that these executives should submit key business plans including planned growth and focus areas.

Lauener also stressed the importance of financial managers, who should provide estimates of a firm's growth in the coming years, plus a sense of budget for building and maintaining IT infrastructure. "Based on the budget, IT should come up with projections for ROI in building and running the datacenter," she said.

Energy isn't a traditional IT consideration-the IT unit's top concerns are systems' reliability and response times. "IT doesn't see the electricity bill. The facilities people pay it," said Mines. "It takes IT some time to incorporate energy considerations into their mindset and goal setting."

Mines also pointed out that IT departments are risk-averse by nature. "IT folks say: 'don't fix it if it's not broken'," he added. As a result, IT seldom think of improving utilization rates if an application, server, or system is still up and running.

Green strategies

Despite the barriers, Mines said corporations still need to think about greening their datacenters because of increasingly high electricity bills.

George Ng, director, Systems Practice at Sun Microsystems Greater China, advised companies to spend time studying their datacenter electricity bills before planning for new facilities. "Get an accurate and detailed monthly meter reading and electricity bill for your datacenters," he said, "so you can work out the electricity ROI."

Mines echoed Ng's assessment of an energy-consumption perspective as the first step, adding that goal-setting is also critical. "You must know if your goal is to save money, reduce energy use, brand enhancement, or a combination of these," said Mines.

Keeping your cool

Ng said understanding the growth of computing demands and resultant changes in energy consumption is crucial, because most electricity used to power machines creates heat which must be dissipated.

Forrester estimated that 25 percent to 35 percent of the power consumed in the datacenter is used for cooling. Research firm IDC pegged worldwide spending on powering and cooling IT systems at US$29 billion during 2006. Gartner wrote that energy costs will emerge as the second-highest operating cost in 70 percent of datacenters worldwide by 2009.

The increased use of high-density gear such as blade servers explains the growing electricity bill and why firms over-design for electrical capacity. Blade server installation will continue to grow a CAGR of nearly 40 per cent from 980,000 units at end-2005 to a worldwide population of 7.2 million by end-2011, according to Gartner, while blade density will grow from 30 units per rack to 70 over the same period.

The increase in density translates into higher power demand, which will spiral from an average of 15kW (kilowatts) per rack in 2005 to about 52.5kW in 2011.

Gartner's research VP Michael Bell said that high density equipment eliminates space-related economies of scale beyond a density of 8kW per rack with traditional under-floor cooling. "This is because of the need to add space for additional air conditioning units, larger UPS systems, additional batteries, and other support needs," he said.

He advised firms to monitor power demand by rack. "As the kW per rack average approaches 6kW, consider alternatives such as in-rack water cooling," said Bell. "Identify high-density zones in the raised-floor area that should be considered for water-cooled or other liquid-cooled methods." In-rack water cooling products use a built-in cooling which provides chilled air to the servers-the exhausted air is then recycled back through the cooling units.

Firms should also do airflow dynamic analysis, which can help avoid the creation of 'hot spots' by enabling them to optimize equipment deployment, rack layout and computer room air-conditioning units.

Despite the blade-cooling issue, Gartner foresees that longer-term technology advances in products such as chips, enclosures, processors and cooling systems will help contain the problem by 2011.

But in the shorter term, firms should take actions to address their cooling needs. According to Gartner, some measures include:

• Ensuring an ambient temperature between 21.1 to 23.3 degrees Celsius and maintaining a relative humidity of 45 percent to 50 percent;

• Setting redundant systems by installing multiple HVAC (heating, ventilation, air-conditioning and cooling) units;

• Optimizing airflow to maximize the flow of chilled air through the racks. This requires chilled air flow from bottom to top and front to back through the racks; and

• Mixing high-density gear with low-density equipment and maintaining a 6kW average per rack.

Joe Locandro, IT director for CLP Hong Kong, said that his utility company ensures cooling efficiency by adopting a hot-and-cold aisle arrangement, allowing sufficient depth of raised-flooring, insulating the datacenter from direct sunlight, and partitioning unused areas.

Other green practices leading to a cooler datacenter at CLP Power include turning off retired hardware and switching off unnecessary lights, he added.

Is Hong Kong keeping up?

Wider green datacenter adoption won't happen overnight, but Leung foresees more firms building energy-efficient facilities in less than five years. "Companies are moving their regional datacenters back to Hong Kong because it offers cheaper electricity and we have no earthquakes," Leung said. "I expect these new regional facilities to adopt green practices."

However, Locandro isn't as optimistic. "Corporations might not want to invest in optimizing datacenters and turn them into greener environments," he said. "It's expensive to make changes such as optimizing the number of racks or raising floor."

Is Hong Kong lagging behind in the green datacenter movement? Par Botes, EMC's CTO for Asia Pacific/Japan doesn't think so. He said that the green concept was born two to three years ago. "We have just started to incorporate green elements into solution proposals to local customers since Q3 last year," said Botes. "Hong Kong isn't backward in this area."

Five-point plan

George Ng from Sun Microsystems recommends these five actions in planning datacenters:

• Figure out what's using the most electricity in the datacenter: air conditioners, power converters or transmission lines? Once you work this out, you can put a plan in place to reduce usage.

• Assess equipment age. Firms must assess the age of the datacenter's technology and decide if it's time to update.

• Make applications mobile. IT should consider uncoupling specific applications from systems because this brings down the cost of running them over time. Virtualization technology, process changes and architecture tweaks enable firms to achieve this.

• Seek the right location. As your business grows, you will need more datacenter space. When seeking new locations, firms need to consider energy rates, energy sources, temperature, and proximity to clean-energy alternatives.

• Environment-friendly treatment of used products. If you decide to buy new energy-efficient servers and other datacenter gear, make sure you dispose of old equipment in an environment-friendly way and explore recycle/reuse opportunities.

Vendors' green datacenter initiatives

HP

HP's targets a 20 percent energy cut by 2010. HP is now in the second year of a three-year project, scheduled to complete in 2008, to consolidate 85 datacenters worldwide in just six in the U.S.

Three of the six new sites are already up and running while the remaining three are expected to be completed before end-August, said Randy Mott, executive vice president and CIO of HP at the HP Technology Forum held in Las Vegas in mid-June. He added HP has already decommissioned 12 of the 85 datacenters.

IBM

In early May, Big Blue announced a US$1 billion-annual initiative to double energy efficiency first in its own datacenters, and then in those of its customers. The firm has over eight million square feet of datacenter space worldwide.

Its green make-over involves:

• greater use of virtual servers to make hardware do more with no increase in energy consumption;

• automatically switching servers to a power-saving standby state when not in use;

• only switching on cooling when it's needed;

• using the heat from liquid-cooled gear to generate power and store it for use later; and

• use of thermal engineering and 3D modeling to optimize cooling datacenter air-flow.

IBM aims to double its datacenter computing capacity by end-2010 without increasing energy use. This is equivalent to saving 5 billion kilowatt-hours per year.

Intel

Intel started to consolidate its 130 datacenters worldwide two years ago, and has now reduced the number of its datacenters to eight, said Tony Leung, director, Intel Solution Services, North Asia.

Sun

Sun has committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 20 per cent by 2012 from 2002 levels. It also promotes its Project Blackbox, a datacenter in a shipping container, as a more energy-efficient datacenter.

IDG staff contributed to this report.