Put Your Data Center through Its ABCs

Monday, 14 June 2010 19:06

Written by Rakesh Dogra

Without a doubt, making data centers greener makes sense, not just for the company’s financial coffers but also in terms of environmental impact.

The widely used definition of a "greenness" states that a data center is green if it is designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimum environmental impact. Such a data center will also ensure that it invests time and money in systems and techniques that will lead to minimization of the building's footprint. These systems and technques could encompass landscaping, waste recycling, alternative fuel or energy sources, managing or optimizing power flows through the data center, and so on.

Although being green certainly has a price, companies are realizing long-term operational and maintenance savings when they invest in green technologies right from the start. Companies can also reap great benefits in the "softer" areas like employee happiness as well as social and community relationships. Today, there is also a rising demand for financial and other governmental support for companies investing in green data centers.

Perhaps it is fitting to ask a pertinent question: how does one certify that a data center is truly green? After all, going green is not just a question of chalking out power usage for operations and cooling, or even the mere usage of electric cars in the facility. Today, books and firms are dedicated to providing companies with action plans to help them implement green data centers. These plans involve areas ranging from energy-efficient servers to processor technologies, virtualization, lighting and cooling, and many more. A number of certifications are available to help a data center go green. Take, for instance, the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification offered by the US Green Building Council. The Green Grid has also contributed to LEED with its PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness, and Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency, or DCiE, measurement systems.

In an effort to set a benchmark for measuring how green a data center is, the Green Grid has now come up with the DCeP. The DCeP (Data Center Energy Productivity) metric is rather simple in its parameters. It quantifies the volume of useful work produced and the amount of energy used to produce this work. The Green Grid has also detailed the meaning of "useful work," which makes DCeP a viable common-use benchmark for all data centers.

DCeP now needs to be made a ubiquitous standard. Data center operators are increasingly realizing that power usage is a large part of their operational expense. As Mallory Forbes says, “every year as we revise our standards, the power requirements seem to go up. It creates a big challenge in managing the data center because you have to continually add power.” Forbes is senior Vice President at Regions Financial Corp in Birmingham.

Green data centers are not just about saving power; they also can minimize the need for costly infrastructure additions as time goes by. The DCeP comes into play because the PUE and the DCiE focus more on the infrastructure--electrical and mechanical systems--of a data center. The DCeP on the other hand, takes into account both the infrastructure and IT equipment.

What makes the DCeP more sophisticated? For one, as mentioned earlier, it quantifies useful work. This kind of work pertains to the tasks being performed by the hardware during the assessment window. The DCeP is also time bound. The DCeP has an “assessment window” within which useful work and energy are compared. This window cannot be shorter than 20 minutes. The measure either can be applied to a cluster of IT equipment or can be localized to a single device.

Ideally, new data centers can start with the implementation and use of the PUE and DCiE standards. A continuous evaluation of their results can take the data center operators through improvements in infrastructure. Once such tweaks have resulted in optimum usage of systems, operators could then focus on the output and productivity of their data centers. A combination of these standards will result in a better match between commercial needs and physical and virtual infrastructure.

For the Green Grid, this measure, too, is a work in progress. With changing needs, measures for important criteria must also change. The DCeP is a vital progression in metrics because it includes productivity.

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