Energy Saving Power Apc
Energy Saving power apc
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Green It Tip: Super-Power Get-Realistic Wastage-Is Atrocious
Fewer fatty and fried foods. More fruit and veg. Regular brisk walks. Less London Pride. Six to eight glasses of water a day. Jogging. A few sit-ups perhaps. Oh, and plenty of fibre. It comes to us all in the end. The oft-postponed trip to the GP, the wagging finger and the sheepish, resigned nod, inexorably followed by the lonely, reluctant trudge down to Holland & Barratt to stock up with Acai Berry concentrate, bran buds, Multivita 8000, and a maxi pack of organic muesli nut bucket. Oh the indignity.
So has it been for the datacentre just recently. Having been happily revelling in its own corpulence for years, it has barely noticed as yesterday’s full-fat, bread and butter infrastructure has turned quietly into tomorrow’s middle-aged spread. But now, what with all the new, buff, young green IT technologies muscling their way in, strutting their stuff all around the place, and promising to revolutionize the way IT and the environment interact by cutting IT spending, improving IT energy efficiency, conserving floor space, and simplifying management, there’s been little choice for the datacentre but to hit the treadmill, slim down, consolidate, and virtualise and become a truly green datacentre.
We at iQ Insight, however, think that there has been a major and unexpected side-effect to this fitness push.
The same green IT technologies that aim to improve IT energy efficiency and are proving to be such a boon for extending IT budgets, utilisation, and efficiency are dramatically impacting the datacentre’s power infrastructure too, with some companies suddenly finding themselves with more energy and cooling capacity than they need, and others with not enough.
The first scenario is both costly and hugely wasteful; the second a significant threat to IT and business continuity – and in turn a serious danger to the overall well-being of the business, given ramping energy prices and the obdurate ill-health of the wider economy. Something’s got to give.
“Organisations with under-sized power chains risk having insufficient electrical capacity for peak loads, potentially leading to system shutdowns”, explains Chris Loeffler, Datacentre Applications Manager for Distributed Power Solutions at the Eaton Corporation.
Furthermore, if the datacentre architecture includes fail-over capabilities, a serious outage in one part of the datacentre can overload power systems elsewhere. All of that adds up to more downtime, lower productivity, and reduced profitability.”
Under-sized power infrastructures can also delay hardware expansions essential for planned growth, with firms having to make costly, time-consuming power upgrades before they can add new server capacity.
Does creating a green datacentre mean opting for a position of over-supply then? Not a bit of it, says Loeffler. Having too much capacity can be as bad or even worse than having too little. Even if green technology is being used, under-loaded electrical and cooling systems tend to operate less efficiently, so an oversized power infrastructure can actually drive up energy costs.
As such it isn’t just a question of how much energy is being used by IT, says Paul Tyrer, VP UK & Ireland at APC by Schneider Electric, but how much is being wasted. And with the move towards virtual systems, green technology and green IT tools unlikely to slow down any time soon, the only option is for best-practice power management to speed up.
“The continued adoption of virtualisation technology shows no sign of abating and rightly so; the industry has to take steps to maximise its productive use of energy. (But) the simple fact is that companies have not been able to realise the full financial and energy reduction benefits of virtualisation and in many cases have seen the PUE (Power Usage Efficiency) of their facilities dramatically worsened.”
More succinctly, says APC’s VP for Datacentres and Alliances, Peter Hannaford, that the situation in some companies’ post-virtualisation and upgrading to a green datacentre can be likened to domestic electricity consumption – close all your windows and you’ll need less power to heat the house – but you’ll only see that saving reflected in the Electricity Bill if you turn down the thermostat.
One way or another then, a more balanced energy diet is clearly in order: contingency for enough clean reliable power and no more. Accordingly, says Loeffler, the need is for a power infrastructure right-sized to the business’s precise energy requirements utilising tactics such as freeing-up stranded power capacity, modular datacentre architecture, and energy efficient power components.
APC suggests a simple five-stage approach to power planning for IT energy efficiency.
The first is to “Get wise to the myths”. To get an understanding of how energy is being gainfully and wastefully employed in the datacentre in powering, cooling, and protecting IT equipment. Consolidating physical servers on to virtual machines is often pitched as a silver bullet for solving IT energy efficiency woes, for instance. And sure enough, if you reduce the number of servers in your datacentre by 90%, you will cut energy costs. But fail to address the physical infrastructure – the power and cooling (P&C) – that provisions those servers, and IT energy efficiency will actually be reduced and energy wastage will increase proportionally.
The second stage is to “Test the theory”. Starting out on any journey it’s useful to have an idea of your destination. So APC has published a number of free, simple to use ‘TradeOff Tools’ on its website to help users make fundamental decisions by comparing power use in the pre- and postvirtualisation environment.
The “Virtualization Energy Cost Calculator” tool, for example, breaks out the impact of a green technology like virtualisation on the energy, infrastructure, and IT costs for the whole facility, and allows the user to see the effect of green datacentre “improvements” like blanking panels, right-sized and High Efficiency infrastructure equipment, and precision cooling.
Thirdly, say APC, it’s important to “Get wise to the hotspots”.
Green IT and virtualisation projects often result in the deployment of clusters of high-density and or blade servers – power “hotspots” of an order of magnitude greater than the densities found within typical datacentres. Additionally, with virtualisation enabling applications to be dynamically started, stopped, and moved around, loads can change both over time and in terms of physical location. The thermal profile of the room can therefore shift unseen, with virtual and physical changes in equipment.
Cooling systems using perimeter CRAC and under-floor air distribution are neither predictable nor efficient in such dynamic environments, which instead require predictable, efficient cooling techniques like InRow cooling that can respond automatically to variations in power density to match cooling precisely to demand.
The fourth factor is scalability.
The reduced IT load resulting from server consolidation offers the opportunity to take advantage of state-of-the-art modular, scalable P&C architectures that allow physical infrastructure to be scaled down to remove unneeded capacity and improving IT energy efficiency, while retaining the option to scale up again as necessary.
And whether scaling up or down, the idea is the same; P&C equipment is much less efficient at lower loading, so it’s doubly wasteful to run more capacity than needed. Right-sizing a green technology keeps a datacentre’s capacity at a level appropriate to actual demand and therefore at its most efficient.
Fifth and last is automated, intelligent capacity management– capacity management capable of monitoring power, cooling, and physical space capacities at a room, row, rack, and server level. Comprehending server locations and loads, the P&C capacity available to servers, temperature fluctuations, and power consumption, this not only protects against downtime from localized power or cooling shortages, it also increases datacentre and IT energy efficiency by optimising its use of resources.
In simple terms then, utilizing green IT techniques like virtualisation on a datacentre without properly considering the underlying power and cooling infrastructure that serves it will very likely have a dramatic impact on overall IT energy efficiency and cost-saving potential. The reverse is also true.
In even simpler terms, says Hannaford, smart, virtualised datacentres need smart, virtualised power and cooling infrastructures.
In the final analysis, anything else just isn’t healthy.
About the Author
Daniel Moore is an IT expert at Insight (http://uk.insight.com). He has worked in the Technical Services department giving both pre-sales and post-sales advice. He can now be found giving pre-sales advice on the Insight’s on-line chat facility and is often working on new projects for the web.
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