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Is the Cloud a Key to Sustainability?

Computing Power

The MIT Industrial Liaison Program holds an annual conference for its sponsors focused on technology and telecommunications.  This year’s event had excellent breadth, featuring Esther Dyson, the CTO of Blue State Digital (developers of Obama’s online social media platform), the director of MIT’s game development lab in Singapore and several others.  The one presentation that really got me thinking was by the IT Energy Coordinator for MIT’s own infrastructure, Laxmi Rao.

Her presentation centered on the consumption of electricity by computing infrastructures and what some organizations are doing to improve power efficiency.  There were two things I took away from her talk.

Power Usage Efficiency is Under-Appreciated

The average data center is very inefficient in its ability to effectively move electricity from the power grid to the computers that need it.  One measure of power efficiency is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) which measures the ratio of total power coming into a data center to the power that actually reaches the computing devices (there is a lot of great PUE info here).  Laxmi said that the typical data center has a PUE of 2.0, or about 50% efficiency.  Some say the average is worse.  So what?  Inefficient power usage wastes money and power.

Cloud Infrastructure Providers Are Doing Something Right

While the typical data center is inefficient, the massive data centers built recently by Google, Amazon and Microsoft, represent not only a new trend in cloud-based computing but also a view into the next generation data centers.  Specifically, each of these vendors are emphasizing power and cooling strategies and have lowered their PUEs into the 1.2 – 1.3 range, according to Laxmi and other published reports. They are achieving this through large scale application of water and air cooling techniques, hardware configurations and data center designs.

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After all of the “easy” techniques have been applied, like virtualization and server consolidation, we will all be faced with a capacity issue that will require more strategic thought to solve.  For some, maybe adding on to an existing data center will make sense.  For others, like one of our consumer products clients in the southeast, there was no more power available from the utilities in their region.

All IT leaders should take it upon themselves to get smarter about how much power we are using  and if there are lower cost and lower impact ways to consume it.  I believe that the cloud infrastructure providers’ efforts provide at least a model for us to follow to improve our private infrastructures if not a service to seriously consider.

  • Ben Downe

    Another dimension to power consumption is when it is used. The cost of energy varies significantly throughout the day as demand peaks and troughs. Data center designers should identify how they can shift energy usage to cheaper times. The more granular they can make this the better, for example significant savings could be made by enabling real time pricing information to be used on decisions to turn air conditioning on and off. Extending this model further – application designers could apply this to when discretionary tasks run on their applications for example by running database indexing using cheap electricity.

  • Ben Downe

    Another dimension to power consumption is when it is used. The cost of energy varies significantly throughout the day as demand peaks and troughs. Data center designers should identify how they can shift energy usage to cheaper times. The more granular they can make this the better, for example significant savings could be made by enabling real time pricing information to be used on decisions to turn air conditioning on and off. Extending this model further – application designers could apply this to when discretionary tasks run on their applications for example by running database indexing using cheap electricity.

  • Mark Thiele

    The issue of inefficient use of compute infrastructure (especially Data Center design) has been something my organization (www.datacenterpulse.org) has been working on for three years now. We’ve partnered with The Green Grid (www.thegreengrid.org) and with other organizations like the Silicon Valley Leadership Group to bring attention to the improvement opportunity in the data center space.

    There has been significant progress in the last three years, but we still have a long way to go. We’ve even made proposals to the DoE and spoken with elected officials in an effort to use policy and incentives to electrify the efforts. Unfortunately, we’ve had little success in the area of Federal support. Regardless, the move to cloud isn’t in and of itself a “Sustainability” play, but it can be. Generally speaking IT uses whats available, with cloud you have the ability to use less for more, but you also have the equal ability to make more faster. So our dilimna is “how do we focus on obtaining improvement in the efficient use of IT infrastructure, while not hampering the natural growth of the industry. In some cases, the growth of IT is in direct correlation to a reduction in carbon output from other industries (driving, manufacturing, flying, etc).

    Would be happy to chat further if you’re interested.

    Mark Thiele
    Founder & President Data Center Pulse

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