Doug Gourlay Jul 19, 2007

Good feedback Victor, are there others?  What are your thoughts on having the PDU being outisde of the building and using the heat for regeneration?  I heard that idea discussed before.

Also one other piece I heard chatted up is raising the temperature in the DC.  From a semiconductor perspective it may not make a lot of sense (a warm chip draws more power than a cold chip and doesn’t have as long a lifecycle due to floating current increase if I remember right).  Is this a valid point?

dg

Bryan Stiekes Jul 30, 2007

Platform consolidation and virtualization offer the benefit not only of reduced power consumption but also of space reclamation.

What is Cisco doing to reduce the amount of power required by its chassis, reduce it’s watt/port ratio, and/or improve the efficiency of its own power supplies?

Morgan McLean Sep 11, 2007

On top of trying to stick with 220-240v power, even just running hot and cold rows can really make a difference in the cooling required. I agree that virtualization is great for compacting down the server bulk, but it can also introduce some unneccesary overhead in my opinion. Depending on the application, say load balancing, I don’t think it would be wise to combine the jobs of multiple load balancers onto virtualized machines. Keep in mind that if the load balancer ever has issues, all of the servers directed by it are going to reflect those issues.

Doug Gourlay Sep 11, 2007

Morgan,
I can appreciate your thoughts on fate-sharing for some services like load balancers and firewalls, etc.  In some environments discrete equipment makes perfect sense.  Why though would we hold a load balancer to a significantly differing standard than the actual application that is being executed on a server?  especially if the application is monolithic and not active-active wheras the load balancer is stateful active-standby or active-active configured?

I raise this because I saw a customer recently who had 3000 load balancers for the exact reason you mention above.  Average utilization 5%.  Another had a requirements for 1000 firewalls, 1000 load balancers, and some inordinate number of switches for fate-sharing purposes.  By tiering the applications and assigning a logical distribution of asset against resource they were able to reduce this number dramatically and save 310kwh.  Over a 3-4 year operating period for the IT implementation that’s quite a bit of $$$.

dg

Robert Aldrich Oct 11, 2007

These are all great points and should make it clear that driving power efficiency into a data center operation is a culmination of multiple “solutions”.

Many people often jump straight to the component level but should realize that while looking at the components is important, this issue is really 80% process and 20% product.  The majority of data center products from the large IT vendors have AC power supplies that are in the range of 90% efficient.  It is how these products are specified, deployed, managed and decommissioned that is where the big gains can be realized.

A good example of this is server and storage utilization.  Some analyst figures suggest that utilization of servers in US enterprise data centers in the range of 20% and storage only slightly higher at 38%.  However, data center managers have the ability to drive utilization up through virtualization today.  A key challenge to taking advantage of the power benefits of virtualization has to do with aligning facilities to accommodate more dynamic power and cooling requirements.  A simple way to address this challenge is to bring on facilities staff onto the IT payroll.

Brining in facilities skill sets into the IT organization can have profound benefits in aligning facilities supply with IT demand which is ultimately where the biggest efficiency gains can be realized.

In addition to transforming the organization to include facilities on the IT payroll there are several best practices that users can take advantage of today and to get started on driving efficiency into the data center operation.  We detail these in the Cisco White Paper:  Energy Efficient Data Center Solutions and Best Practices.  A summary of the best practices:

1)  Perform Regular Utilization Audits
2)  Bring facilities onto the network
3)  In-source facilities planning into IT
4)  Establish a Change Advisory Board for Green
5)  Monitor power consumption and thermals via the network
6)  Develop power profiles for services and infrastructure
7)  Develop a green scoring framework for services and infrastructure

The good news is that if the costs of power are considered by IT, there is a strong ROI for driving power efficiencies along with benefits around risk and capacity.

Robert Aldrich
Cisco Energy Efficient Data Center Solutions

battery Jun 24, 2008

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