Sun Battles for Greenest Data Center

• By David Hamilton, November 14, 2008

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November 14, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Data center design winners were once those with the most power. However, over the past few years, it has been the ones which use the least. As companies start to realize that more efficient data centers are reducing operating costs and opening up fantastic marketing opportunities, the competition to be the "greenest" has been driving much of the innovation in all facets of computing. While the battle to be the "greenest" in a particular field rages on, companies and customers are benefiting from this constant one-upmanship.

"It's happening on every level of the industry - and that's just because "Green" is such a focus now. And it's gotten so much publicity that everyone wants to have their spin on it," said Dean Nelson, senior director of Sun Microsystems' (www.sun.com) global lab and data center design services division. Nelson's division is currently managing more than $250 million in data center design and construction activity, and is working to support Sun's eco strategy.

Nelson has also helped Sun set up a battlefield of sorts in its "Chill-Off" challenges that began as a test of five modular cooling solutions to definitively find out how efficient the devices really were including participants Liebert XD, APC InRow, Rittal LCP+, IBM/Vette Cool Blue and Spraycool.

"The bottom line is that people are now starting to talk about their products and others can challenge them on how efficient they really are and then from their infrastructure itself," Nelson says.

Sun and other participants could draw many conclusions from the experiments, including the fact that in all cases, modular cooling solutions were more efficient than traditional designs like raised floors.

The tests also suggest that pushing for higher inlet temperatures will help increase efficiency - meaning that not having server fans hit higher speeds until temperatures reach 80 degrees Fahrenheit may become an industry norm, opening a huge amount of the world to air economizers, not just cold climates, echoing Intel's similar conclusion. (In late September when Intel released the results of an experiment in a temperate desert climate, showing that air economizers show tremendous promise even in hot climates.)

Nelson has released a summary of Sun's strategy for the second Chill Off, featuring some of the best practices from the results of the previous event. He notes that in sharing Sun's strategy, everyone in the industry wins, not to mention the environment. He says Google's decision to make its data center specifications public was a watershed moment.

"The fact that Google has opened up and actually shared something is excellent. That was the whole idea here - share your information so that we can all gain from it. It can also accelerate the pace that everybody else is working at," said Nelson. "Competition is wonderful."

The competitive drive to be environmentally responsible has also helped drive cooperation.

Along with VMware's (www.vmware.com) Mark Thiele, Nelson created the LinkedIn group Data Center Pulse (www.datacenterpulse.com) designed to connect data center professionals and clients as a place where they can interact with colleagues and form business connections. Sun Microsystem's has also worked with third parties including The Green Grid (www.thegreengrid.org), the Climate Savers Computing Initiative (www.climatesaverscomputing.org), the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (www.svlg.net) and the ENERGY STAR program (www.energystar.gov).

Nelson is a stauch defender of power usage effectiveness ratings, however, he notes that there are many problems with the way many companies distort their PUE metrics.

"A lot of people are saying, 'PUE's not the metric; DCIE's not the metric,' and I beg to differ on that. I think a metric is only as good as the data that goes into that metric. And PUE is the only real metric we've got."

Nelson continues, "It's been diluted - the actual metric itself. When people go out and they say they have a PUE of 1.1 to what ever it is, it needs to be qualified a bit more. I'm not beating up on anybody, I'm just saying that as an industry, we really need to consider all the factors around what those numbers are."

Careful not to pull punches, Nelson said factors that playing to PUE distortions are a data center's Tier level, whether measurements are taken as a snapshot in time or as an average (with an average being the more accurate), and the use of natural cooling and free power from renewable sources.

Practicing what it preaches, Sun shares its efficiency data on OpenECO.org. "We go and basically put our numbers out there and we'd like everybody else to do the same," said Nelson.

Tags:  green hosting  energy efficiency  Sun Microsystems  data center design 

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