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Sci Tech
IT TRENDS
Energy efficiency: IT’s smart to go green
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It has become a pressing concern for corporate computing with some spin offs for lay users
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De-duplication leads to an important saving Green plug replaces multiple DC power supplies
Going green: Large data centres are looking everywhere for energy efficiency.
Green is ‘in’ — and not just when it comes to handing out Nobel Peace Prizes. As global computing needs increase — so does the burden that the information technology industry places on energy resources. Enterprise data centres, those concentrations of corporate computing power that come in all sizes end up using the largest chunk of energy within a business entity.
A recent study sponsored by AMD and conducted by Dr Jonathan Koomey, Consulting Professor at Stanford University, drawing on data from industry analyst IDC, was an amber signal for the technology industry: The additional consumption of power by servers in data centres worldwide between 2005 and 2010 was estimated to be roughly equivalent to the energy generated by 10 plants of 1000 megawatt capacity.
In Asia-Pacific, a high growth area, this would represent a doubling of power needs.
That was the bad news. The good news was that with so many innovative power efficiency techniques available, this estimate of energy consumption could be reduced by almost a fifth.
What are these techniques?
Virtual is the way to go; and virtualizing the server bank — making it immaterial, where your data resides as long as it is available when you need it — is a key efficiency. This has led to the enormous popularity of third party Virtualization tools like VMWare, XEN and Microsoft Virtual Server.
Hand in hand with server virtualization goes consolidation also known as ‘tiering’ — making sure that the storage that feeds the server is consolidated and placed in a hierarchy so that only the most mission-critical needs are addressed by costliest storage technologies like mirrored or duplicate servers on ‘hot stand by.’
Less critical functions like back up and archiving can be handled using a combination of disk and tape storage. An important saving lies in ‘de-duplication’ — ensuring that the same data is not repeated in multiple files.
Closely monitoring power consumption of a server farm, is an important function, because the over-all efficiency of the server system is the sum of its parts. Symantec, which after its acquisition of Veritas, has responsibility in the storage management business, has sponsored the recently-released, ‘2007 Green Data Centre Study’ by Ziff-Davis which listed many of the server and storage efficiencies listed above.
The 14-nation study also revealed that ‘greening’ is a key driver in the Asia-Pacific region with 63.2 per cent of the data centre players polled in India saying that they intended to “go green in the near future...” which makes this country, with China and Korea, a leader in such energy-efficiency.
In India, Dataquestmagazine has launched a year-long campaign on green technology issues. Says Editor-in-Chief, Prasanto K. Roy: “In Gurgaon or Bangalore, businesses face 6 hours of power cuts — and back up everything, with big UPSs, batteries and gensets. Take a company with 500 PCs and their CRT displays — that’s a lot of power and heat, so you need a major UPS, a giant genset and a major air-con. If you use LCD displays you save 25 KW of power — even if it adds up to an extra Rs 30 lakh. The spend is worth it in many technology-intensive sectors.”
An off-beat idea
One off-beat idea being mooted by the US-based International Data Security (IDS) is to float the data centre out to sea: It uses the cargo holds of decommissioned ships to house the servers; powers them using bio-diesel, uses sea water for cooling the computers and the heat out flow for warming the living spaces during winter.
Compact farms
Such confined spaces have also created a market for compact and integrated server farms, like Sun Microsystems’ BlackBox data centre in a shipping container. Earlier this month, HCL in India launched a cleverly conceived ‘Data centre in a Box’ — with six hot-swappable blade computers using the latest Intel Quad core Xeon 5400 processors — 48 processing cores in all, with 2 terabytes of networked storage housed in 10.5 inch racks.
If one can do fab-less chip designing, why not data-centre-less IT management? Brian Cinque, a Sun data centre architect, created some waves last week by suggesting in his blog that by 2015, the company could operate without a single data centre of its own.
Other Sun executives clarified that by 2013 they planned consolidate and reduce their data centres worldwide from 8 to 3 , and then progressively going to zilch, by taking the SAAS route — that is Software As A Service.
Indeed, this is a trend — also known as Utility Computing — that is slowly gaining strength: a shift from private data centres to rented server space on a public grid.
But how much of an energy saving is that in real terms? Granted, there will be efficiencies of consolidation, but from a ‘green’ point of view Server-As-A-Service seems like paying into a Carbon Fund for the energy one uses. It only shifts the consumption.
One good side effect of all this greening in the server industry is that some of the spin off is benefiting lay consumers of PCs: Chip giants like Intel and AMD have entered a new design regime where performance-per-watt is as important as raw performance.
We can already see the difference in energy-efficient laptop chips which allow you to work for 4 hours or more on a single battery charge — and without burning your lap. HP recently promised that by 2010, its PC families will consume 25 percent less power than what they used in 2005.
The company achieves this in many ways — including shrinking desktops to ultra-small form factors and going for external rather than internal power supplies.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, the message was ‘Geek, go green’ — the organisers, for the first time set aside a corner to highlight energy-efficient designs.
One interesting offering was Green Plug — an ingenious device which replaced multiple DC power supplies for different gadgets in your house with a single USB hub that charged all the devices, switching off power once any device is fully charged ( www.greenplug.com).
Such technology might be one small step for greening your computing in 2008 — but if enough users switched over, it could well become a giant leap for mankind into a greener, more efficient future.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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