Exploring deeper shades of green IT

Although the buzz surrounding green tech has quieted significantly over the past couple of years, don’t take that to mean the job is finished. Despite the significant innovations that have helped organizations boost the energy efficiency of their operations while reducing waste, there are still plenty of opportunities to raise the green bar.

Such was the clear takeaway from a Samsung-Dell sponsored CIO forum in Half Moon Bay, Calif., last week. Representatives from Dell, Samsung, VMware, Microsoft, Facebook, SAP, and other leading tech companies touted the cost-cutting advantages of embracing greener practices, particularly within the context of the big data explosion.

All those petabytes of Web content generated on a daily basis need to reside somewhere, ready to be pushed at a moment’s notice to the increasing number of smartphones and other mobile devices flooding the market. All of that translates to more storage and processing, which in turn translates to higher capital and operating expenses for companies. The solution: green IT, which allows you to make more efficient use of IT by doing more with less.

Much of what was discussed at the forum covered fairly familiar green territory. In a nutshell, data center operators — be they cloud service providers or enterprises — need to take a holistic view of the data center to reap the benefits of green, from the silicon up to the facility itself. Install just the right amount of hardware necessary to perform the required amount of work. Use as little cooling as possible. Manage, monitor, and measure it all on an ongoing basis and look for areas that could use improvement. Easy, right?

Well, perhaps not easy, but easier, thanks in part to the products and innovations that tech vendors have designed and, increasingly, are baking into their products as standard features. Additionally, hardware vendors are pushing the limits of just how much heat servers can withstand.

In the perfect data center world, servers could sit in a shed sans any kind of air conditioning, relying on free outside air to stay sufficiently cooled. That vision may draw closer to reality: ASHRAE not long ago adjusted the recommended temperatures for operating servers; Dell recently announced an array of servers, storage, and networking equipment capable of operation in temperatures up to 113 degrees F; and vendors like Intel have conducted experiments to determine just how resilient servers can be.

Hardware vendors still have work to do, though, in creating gear to meet organizations’ green needs. It remains common for Google and Facebook to use their own specially designed servers in their data centers, rather than going with off-the-shelf offerings from the server makers. Those companies have been quite open with their special server designs; for example, they both embrace techniques such as eliminating superfluous components. Facebook has gone so far as to place dual processors side by side on a motherboard, rather than one behind the other, because it improves airflow enough to make a difference.

Beyond sharing the secrets of their green servers, the two companies have been quite open about their respective data center designs, too. Facebook has gone so far as to launch the Open Compute Project, through which it has published its own data center specs for the greater good.

Proponents of green IT point to other challenges that the industry continues to face in boosting energy efficiency in the data center. For starters, according to the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, organizations are failing to taking full advantage of power-management features in desktop computers and servers. The latter particularly is a challenge, as data center operators are loathe to power down servers when they’re not in use for fear that they won’t wake up quickly enough (if at all). Solving that dilemma likely requires software and hardware vendors to better collaborate on reliable solutions while convincing admins that powering down servers isn’t necessarily as risky as they might fear.

Further, many companies have yet to take full advantage of virtualization, which is proving itself time and again a key technology to enable companies not only consolidate their infrastructure but also to boost server utilization, which is traditionally pathetically low.

The tech industry is also working to come up with a better metric than PUE for gauging data center efficiency. PUE compares how much energy a data center consumes as a whole (powering IT equipment as well as for nonproductive tasks such as cooling, lighting, and watts lost to conversions) to how much the facility uses for just powering its IT equipment. A PUE of 2.0 would mean that for every two watts at the meter, only one watt gets to the IT hardware, for example; a PUE of 1.0 — the lowest possible — means that every watt a data center consumes goes toward powering IT equipment.

The problem with PUE: It doesn’t always provide a fully accurate picture of a data center’s efficiency or inefficiency. For example, if a data center’s servers are cooled at the rack level instead of with full-room or aisle-by-aisle CRAC units, the PUE doesn’t penalize the facility for the watts “wasted” on cooling.

That’s not to say that PUE is going away anytime soon, as it still has value. A data center operator could gauge the general progress of various green technologies and practices by measuring PUE on a regular basis. (Google, for example, does just that.)

But the ideal metric would allow a data center operator to measure performance per watt, or performance per watt per dollar, to gauge just how much bang a facility is getting for its buck. The challenge is coming up with a meaningful, universal way to measure data center (or IT equipment) performance. A data center for a lightweight search engine, for example, could be just as efficient as one for heavy-duty financial crunching — but the former would have far more transactions per minute. Think in terms of MPG for vehicles. A hybrid sedan has a higher MPG rating than an SUV, but it’s not an apt comparison if you don’t know how the vehicle is being used: carpooling on the freeway to work or hauling heavy equipment off-road?

This article, “Exploring deeper shades of green IT,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.