Implementation of 1) Greener Processes and 2) Power Capping can help data centers trim energy costs and reduce carbon emissions.
1) Greener Processes: Two types of technology that complement data center Greening efforts are:
i) Data De-duplication, which reduces redundant data, and thin provisioning, which divvies up shared storage to servers on an as-needed basis. Reducing unnecessary data, using software and appliances, reclaims precious capacity, and applications and workflows don’t usually suffer because they’re pointed to the location of the now-unique data. Sounds simple, but scaling the technology for enterprise environments with petabytes of data hanging in the balance is a challenge. Indeed, companies today are missing out on the technology’s full potential because vendors don’t implement de-duplication technology across all of their storage resources. However, EMC’s recent acquisition of Data Domain will help proliferate deduplication tech because their combined technologies will cover more parts of the storage value chain, according to Eco Ventures.
ii) Thin Provisioning, on the other hand, parcels out on-demand shared storage to servers instead of allocating tens or hundreds of gigabytes in advance (the traditional method), much of which may go unused and consumes a lot of energy. Provisioning helps tackle the problem of under-utilizing storage and can lower the cost, too, because it’s cheaper to power one drive that’s loaded with data than a handful of drives each storing a fraction of their capacity. The leader in this technology, according to Eco Ventures, is 3Par, which “has been a pioneer in thin provisioning for the last 10 years.”
2) Power Capping: The newest technique, called "power-capping," may be your answer, even though at first blush it sounds like a very scary proposition. Power-capping does exactly what it says: It limits the amount of electricity that servers can consume at any given time. This not only controls the amount of electricity used in a data center, but also increases data center density. So enterprises save in two ways: Lower utility bills, and less real estate needed for their data center.
Here is an example: Let's say you have a max power envelope of 1MW. For the sake of argument, let's say 400,000 watts of that megawatt goes to power, cooling, storage, and networking equipment, which leaves 600,000 watts to allocate to your servers. You decide to stick to the power allocation printed on the nameplates of your machines, which is 400W. That means that your budget allows 1,500 1U servers in your datacenter.
But what if, in reality, your servers never need more than an average 300 watts of power to maintain their required performance level? If there was a way to ensure you didn't exceed your 1MW power limit, you could pack 2,000 1U servers into the same amount of space -- with little to no need to add power and cooling infrastructure.
That's where the power capping comes in. With power capping and complementary management software, you could ensure that no server draws more than 300 watts at once.
Some companies, such as Intel, have developed power capping technology that can be applied at the rack level. The Intel technology is called Dynamic Power Node Manager Technology, and it is designed for servers running Intel's Xeon 5500 chips. Intel also has an add-on to it called Intel Datacenter Manager, that monitors and controls power for an entire group of servers. In total, Intel managed to reduce power consumption by as much as 50W at the server level, without significant impact on workload performance. At the rack level, they saw a potential for around 20 percent more capacity within the same power envelope and without performance impacts
Intel isn't the only company with power-capping technology. AMD, IBM, Dell, and HP all have it as well. Anyone operating a data center should start investigating the technology now, on a pilot basis. Going whole-hog at first isn't recommended; you first need to make sure you don't affect important applications. But based on the pilot, you may end up deploying it, with substantial savings as a result.
That's quite impressive; you can see how the energy savings, and return on investment, can add up very quickly. To know more about storage companies and technologies that are helping data centers chart a greener course, do contact Eco Ventures at, ecoventures@ymail.com.
