Data Centres Europe 2009 Presentation

Today I gave a presentation as part of a panel on the Efficient Green Data Centre at the 5th Data Centres Europe 2009 Conference and Awards in the City of London. It was attended by over 300 executives.

Summary of what I said is below together with my slides.

When I started in IT over twenty years I worked with ICL mainframes where five gigabytes storage was the size of a juggernaut and modest processing power took up a size of an aircraft hanger and you needed a power station just to run it.

It’s perhaps ironic that I have spent most of the twenty two years in the IT industry working out how to get power into data centres and now have spent the last four years on ways to remove power.

Interestingly enough I attended a virtual webinar by Intel last week where they claimed that computer systems are more 2.8 million more efficient when compared to 1978 while the car industry had only managed 40% in the same time period.

Today is Earth day which started 39 years ago in 1970 and is now followed by over 1 billion people around the world to create more awareness.

I think the phrase 'Green data centre' is tainted by over hyping of Green IT or 'Green Wash' by some vendors and has cogitations of hippies in sandals proclaiming doom for the world.

In the current economic climate I prefer the word Efficient Data centre rather than Green
so I will talk about efficient data centres today.

The great thing about the word efficient is it means different things to different groups. To the CEO and CFO it means cost savings, to the environmentalists and Green IT supporters it means reduced carbon emissions and to the IT professional’s reliable and low maintenance computing.

Sometime we forget why we run data centres. The key aim of any data centre should be to cost-effectively support the technology needs of the business. The data centre should be the right level of facility and matched to the needs of the business

Data centre experts recommend building as much standardization and modularity into the hardware inventory as possible.

In our case our modular building blocks are Cisco networks, HP blade servers and Netapp Storage.

If you are going run an efficient data centre you need to use metrics such as Green Grid (PUE) Power Usage Effectiveness to measure the efficient use of cooling and plant equipment. The holy grail is a PUE of 1.0 where no energy is used for cooling or plant. The average would be 2.0 where the same amount of energy is used for facility as computing systems.

In our efficient data centre the use of 64 bit computing, server virtualization, blade servers, consolidation of storage, 90% plus power supplies and free cooling have helped us achieve a PUE of 1.3.

Research has shown that it already costs more to power and cool a server over its lifetime than the capital cost of the server so why isn’t efficiency of equipment at the top of the procurement requirements. It always amazes me that IT purchasers will fights over a a few hundred pounds for the capital cost of a server but may no attention to energy ratings and the total cost of ownership to power and cool that server in it's lifetime.

I also believe you can’t manage what you can't measure and you can't measure what you can't see.

CIO’s, IT Director’s and IT departments should be responsible for the electricity bills for the data centre and perhaps the whole company if IT consumes a significant part of the power bill.

Gartner has recently announced that Green IT is still forefront of organization’s plans, despite recessionary cutbacks.

Almost half (46 per cent) of European respondents said they expect to spend at least 15 per cent of their IT budgets on green projects in 2009

In some ways the current world recession is the catalyst that efficient green computing has been waiting for.

Hopefully we can all work towards running efficient data centres which reduce costs at the same time as reducing their impact on the environment.