Yahoo keeps data center efficiency secrets to itself

The data center industry has embraced green goals in a big way over the past couple of years, and companies of all shapes and sizes are vying to crank out the most energy-efficient facilities with the lowest PUE (Power Utilization Effectiveness) rating. Plenty of companies have not only trumpeted their success in attaining admirable PUE scores, many are refreshingly — and surprisingly — open in sharing their secrets with the rest of the industry.

Yahoo is a notable exception to the trend — at least in part. The company appears to have a handle on wringing a high levels of per-watt performance from its data centers. Just this week, the company announced a new data center facility in Lockport, N.Y., with a jaw-dropping PUE of 1.08. In comparison, the industry average is 1.92 according to the EPA; the lowest reported PUE on record that I’ve seen, prior to Yahoo’s announcement, is 1.11 from Google, but its average among all its datacenter is 1.23.

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Where Yahoo parts ways with other green data center leaders is in its reticence to disclose its homegrown best practices. This would be easy to forgive were it not for the company’s stated commitment to environmental leadership and its claim that it has “been sharing best practices to encourage the entire industry to put smarter policies in play.”

In promoting its Lockport facility, here’s what Yahoo has disclosed: The company has developed a modular data center called the Yahoo Compute Coop (YCC, pictured right), named so because it resembles a chicken coop, a design that promotes better airflow. The facility uses no mechanical cooling whatsoever, which means no electricity goes toward spinning fans to push cold air up through the raised floor or down from the ceiling. Rather, the facility relies entirely on outside air, supplemented by evaporative cooling. Servers are lined up in hot aisle/cold aisle formation to prevent air mixing.

To Yahoo’s credit, the company has done a fine job in building an environmentally friendly data center that uses far fewer natural resources than average. It even runs on hydropower delivered by a NYPA utility. The design earned Yahoo a hefty $9.9 million chunk of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Green IT grant program.

But aside from the chicken coop design, Yahoo has not disclosed anything especially new or innovative here that sheds any light on how it’s managed such a high level of energy efficiency. The data center industry is well aware of the greens merit of modularity, free cooling, and hot aisle/cold aisle containment. Plenty of companies practice those techniques, yet none has achieved a PUE of 1.08 (or if they have, they aren’t saying so).

Is that PUE rating even possible? Admittedly, my first reaction to Yahoo’s declaration of a 1.08 PUE was skepticism, in part because the company was giving me the runaround when I pressed for details. I went so far as to run Yahoo’s claim by Digital Realty Trust CTO Jim Smith, who tracks the space very closely, for his take. He said, “Yes, this is possible and plausible. The key is to run the systems very warm/hot. This approach gets rid of most of the mechanical/cooling ‘overhead’ so you are really left with just the power conversion losses through the system.”

Thing is, putting a dent in power-conversion losses — energy lost to heat waste as electricity is converted from DC to AC back to DC — as well as cutting waste attributed to backup power takes some ingenuity. Some data centers, such as Syracuse University and IBM’s Green Data Center, have embraced direct DC to get rid of wasteful conversion. Google has disclosed that it’s made efficiency gains getting rid of central UPS systems and instead equipping each server’s power supply with a battery, enabling them to act as UPSes.

So what is Yahoo doing on the power delivery side or the backup power side? Your guess is as good as mine — and I suspect the data center community would like to know as well. “They are in the 99.99th percentile of operations and their techniques are relevant to about 80 percent of the rest of us,” said Digital Realty’s Smith.

But Yahoo hasn’t been forthcoming in sharing its data center secrets, neither on the facilities side nor the IT infrastructure side, where I’d wager the company has pioneered some innovative techniques.

Contributing to the green pool In contrast, Google has been extraordinarily transparent with the techniques it has cooked up to cut power waste in its data center. Among the more interesting practices, the company has specially designed servers stripped of superfluous components. Moreover, Google publicly reports its collective PUE score across its data centers every quarter.

Google isn’t alone. Microsoft has also talked up its experiences with containerized data centers, provided a close look at its homegrown data center monitoring system, and dispensed nuggets of knowledge mined from its data center work. Intel has shared the fruits of an innovative experiment in which the company pushed the limits of free cooling. Cisco has revealed the results of its experiments in powering down servers when they aren’t in use. Sun, pre-Oracle assimilation, divulged the knowledged gained from its in-depth testing of various cooling techniques. Heck, even companies such as Digital Realty Trust, Raging Wire, and Hurricane Electric — all of which design, build, or host data centers for a living and, thus, rely on trade secrets to set themselves apart from their competitors — have spilled their efficiency beans.

Like every other company, Yahoo has a right to cling to its trade secrets. Perhaps doing so represents a wise business decision, one that will set Yahoo apart from competitors when it starts to license out its YCC design. But if the company is, indeed, committed to being an environmental leader, it should join other companies in contributing to the collective knowledge pool about data center efficiency.

At the very least, Yahoo needs to stop claiming it has “been sharing best practices to encourage the entire industry to put smarter policies in play.”

This article, “Yahoo keeps data center efficiency secrets to itself,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog.