The Green Quotient

A slew of metrics and technologies are helping data center managers cut power consumption and save heavily on expenditure. KTP Radhika maps the trend towards going green and what it means for the data centers that are doing so

Considering the recent spate of growth in business data, India is set to witness an explosion in the number of data centers. That said, the fact remains that data centers are energy guzzlers. The growth in data center space also means that power consumption will skyrocket. Unfortunately, power is a scarce resource in India. Hence, the need for energy-efficient or green data centers becomes all the more critical.

Greening a data center will make it energy-efficient with minimal environmental impact. It is also a big cost saver. For enterprises, the demand for green data centers are driven by the high operational cost.

“A green data center is a key imperative for all data center managers. Today, most enterprises usually use redundant infrastructure on the facilities front in order to keep the data center up and running 24×7. This increases the OPEX. The basic need for an energy-efficient design of a data center is to reduce both OPEX and CAPEX,” said Kenny Sng, Senior Solution Architect, Asia Pacific, Intel.

Dharanibalan Gurunathan, Vice-President, Offerings Management & Development, Global Technology Services, IBM India/South Asia commented, “CIOs are being challenged to rethink their data center strategies, adding energy efficiency to a list of critical operating parameters that already includes serviceability, reliability and performance. A green initiative can help an enterprise regain power and cooling capacity, recapture resiliency and help meet business needs while reducing energy costs and the total cost of ownership,” he said.

The evolution and development of global standards is a crucial catalyst for deploying energy-efficient data centers.

Measuring energy-efficiency

To track the performance of data centers and reduce their carbon footprint, companies use various energy-efficiency metrics and benchmarks. Prominent among these are Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCIE). Green Grid, a global consortium dedicated to developing and promoting energy-efficiency data centers, has developed these metrics. The PUE ratio indicates how much power a piece of computing equipment uses as compared to cooling and other overheads. “This is a credible and important standard to measure the overall energy-efficiency of a data center. DCIE is the reciprocal of PUE and is expressed as a percentage that improves as it approaches 100%,” said Kothandraman Karunagaran, Vice President – Global Infrastructure and Enterprise Services, CSC India.

“PUE does not give the root cause analysis to fix the issue of energy loss,” said Alok Sinha, AVP, IT Solutions & SI Sales, Huawei Enterprise Business Group. “Therefore, it cannot ensure energy-efficiency. Today’s IT managers need to get down from the 30,000 ft. view into each server and each node in order to understand the core reasons for the same.”

ICT analysts have created rating systems that take into account IT energy-efficiency. These include Corporate Average Data center Efficiency (CADE), Power-to-Performance Effectiveness (PPE), Rack Cooling Index (RCI) and Return Temperature Index (RTI). CADE combines the measurements of energy-efficiency and utilization of IT equipment and facilities into a single number. A higher CADE score indicates a more energy-efficient data center. Developed by Gartner, PPE helps identify at the device level, where efficiencies could be gained by allowing users to define their own optimal maximum performance levels. RCI measures how effectively equipment racks are cooled according to equipment intake temperature guidelines and RTI evaluates the energy performance of an air management system.

“Apart from this, there are a couple of other standards such as Data Center energy Productivity (DCeP), Energy Reuse Effectiveness (ERE), Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) and water-usage effectiveness,” explained Intel’s Sng. While ERE is the ratio of the total energy that’s required to run a data center facility minus the reused energy to the total energy drawn by all IT equipment, DCeP quantifies useful work compared to the energy that’s required to do it.

There are guidelines to ensure energy efficiency for data centers worldwide, such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), the EU code of conduct for data center standards and the ASHRAE thermal guidelines. “In most parts of India, the atmospheric temperature is quite high. So to reduce power usage for cooling, buildings have to be energy-efficient. For that, you have to take care of factors such as structure, orientation and window-to-wall ratio of the building. Data center buildings should be LEED certified,” said Shekhar Dasgupta, Founder & CEO, GreenField Software.

ASHRAE guidelines offer a scientific, data-driven approach to understand the operating temperature of data center computing equipment and help design the required cooling temperature necessary for the same.

Purshottam Purswani, CTO, Atos India, said, “On standards, organizations coordinate for developing a clear and well-defined language for energy-efficiency metrics.” Organizations such as the Green Grid are in the process of further refining PUE calculations so that the power consumed by equipment and cooling devices can be measured separately and adjusted in order to get a more accurate measure.

New greening methods

For enterprises, the potential for the deployment of green solutions is enormous. Organizations are looking for ways to reduce corporate energy consumption and to become more environmentally responsible. In the data center space, newer technologies and equipment are evolving, which require less power consumption, thereby reducing the carbon footprint.

One of the most popular methods to go green is to curtail power consumption at the rack and server level as well as Heating, Ventilation & Air Conditioning (HVAC). “Modern racks and servers have greater server density per unit of data center footprint. Advanced Grid Computing server appliances are slowly replacing traditional, power-hungry blade servers. Each grid computing appliance has provisions for multiple pluggable processor blocks or compute units, which use low power or low-cost processors, resulting in lower power consumption per benchmarked compute unit. Also hot aisle, cold aisle separation results in lowered HVAC consumption,” explained Surjit Lahiri, Vice President – Projects, Mindteck.

Many rack manufacturers are provisioning specialized cabinets that predictably route the flow of hot air from floor supply ducts to the ceiling. “Adaptive cooling is another technology that dynamically throttles cooling based on the heat load. Direct liquid cooling technology for server racks is an upcoming trend,” Lahiri added. LED-based lighting and intelligent lighting control also help curtail power consumption.

Adopting virtualization and Cloud computing ensures significantly better utilization of hardware assets in the data center thereby decreasing overall energy usage. Virtualization reduces the number of physical servers in a data center and, by reducing the power consumed, reduces the size of the necessary cooling equipment as well.

Surajit Sen, Director – Channels, Marketing & Alliances, NetApp India, said, “Using server virtualization technology, asset utilization can be dramatically improved, increasing the efficiency. Using a combination of thin provisioning, deduplication, thin cloning, thin replication, compression and RAID-DP, we have been able to drive storage utilization levels from an average of 30-35% to 70-75%. This has resulted in dramatically lower storage requirements that, in turn, translate into power savings.”

Rajesh Rege, Sr. Vice President, Data Center & Cloud, Cisco India & SAARC, said, “Adopting virtualization can increase service density and efficiency for network, servers and storage. This approach combines the manageability, energy-efficiency and space savings of a centralized infrastructure with the flexibility of a locally distributed system.”  Data center vendors are bringing out next-generation green data center solutions for Cloud computing.

Sinha of Huawei said, “Our modular IDS series was developed as a new trend in the construction of data centers around the world including in India. Together with our partners, we are working towards building a new generation of data center infrastructure, featuring unified planning, on-demand deployment and low energy consumption driven infrastructure. This new generation will help customers reduce the cost of operations, ushering in a new era of Cloud computing.”

Implementing modular designs also helps facilitate a data center’s greening. Companies want to build smaller data centers, which can later be upgraded as per requirements. Elaborated Gurunathan of IBM, “Companies prefer mobile and containerized modular data centers. IBM’s Portable Modular Data Centers can provide an environmentally isolated and physically protected, fully functional data center in virtually any location and can be quickly and easily relocated as per the requirement.”

Consolidating underutilized data center spaces to a centralized location can ease the utilization of data center efficiency measures by condensing the implementation to one location. Lower data center supply fan power and more efficient cooling system performance can be achieved when equipment with similar heat load densities and temperature requirements are grouped together, reducing energy usage in the process.

“Cloud-based, highly virtualized, consolidated, modular data centers are coming up and will make the data centers of the future more energy-efficient and green,” said Dasgupta of Greenfield Software.

Designing the data center building and using renewable energy as a power source is also gaining importance while going green. By using eco-efficient cooling methods, power consumption can be lowered. When it comes to any building today, particularly a data center, architects employ certain design techniques. Anil Kaul CEO, E-PAC International, explained, “In the design aspect, there is a great deal of thought not only about positioning (where you put your servers, spacing, window to floor ratio etc.) but also for the materials that are used. There has been a lot of progress in terms of building materials, which help reduce heat so that you need to use less power to cool. Also implementing renewable sources of power in new buildings such as solar panels will help decrease power consumption.”

Road blocks

Experts said that challenges like lack of planning, understanding the importance of technological change and operational shifts were the principal challenges here. Gurunathan of IBM opined, “Some of the key challenges faced by players in the data center scenario are keeping operational costs under check while managing data center energy-efficiency, ensuring high availability, successful server consolidation in terms of managing IT resources, optimum utilization of resources as well as gauging the cooling requirements of a data center.”

Organizational reluctance to refresh servers and even mainframe systems is a big challenge. “Just by refreshing the servers, where newer models typically offer more computing for the same power footprint, may help organizations avoid an expensive investment in a new data center,” argued Intel’s Sng. Also, resistance to accept new trends and new technology from application owners who are unwilling to accept change and unsure about the impact of infrastructure transformation is a barrier.

As techniques improve, the data center of the future promises to be secure, modular, scalable, mobile and green. While designing a green solution, companies need to be aware that the green aspect must align with their overall corporate strategy and the IT infrastructure plan. A state-of-the-art data center with homogeneous racks of IT equipment and targeted cooling to the right temperature is essential. It will be necessary to have a power monitoring data center management program, which can be managed at the individual server, rack and row level. In the future, regeneration and recycling will find newer meaning. Also heat generated by the power system can be used for unexplored purposes. Experts believe that the tomorrow’s data center will keep pace with the growing needs of  enterprises and at the same time will continue to gain momentum in the areas of power efficiency and energy consumption.

radhika.ktp@expressindia.com