In the chill of a massive cave beneath an orthodox Christian cathedral in Helsinki, Finland, a city power firm is preparing what it thinks will be the greenest data center on the planet.
Excess heat from hundreds of computer servers to be located in the bedrock beneath Uspenski Cathedral, one of Helsinki's most popular tourist sites, will be captured and channeled into the district heating network, a system of water-heated pipes used to warm homes in the Finnish capital.
"It is perfectly feasible that a quite considerable proportion of the heating in the capital city could be produced from thermal energy generated by computer halls," said Juha Sipila, project manager at Helsingin Energia.
Beneath Helsinki's Uspenski Cathedral a new data center is being built whose heat will help warm homes in the Finnish capital.
(Credit: Jrielaecher/Wikimedia Commons)Finland and other north European countries are using their water-powered networks as a conduit for renewable energy sources: capturing waste to heat the water that is pumped through the system.
Due online in January, the new data center for local information technology services firm Academica is one way of addressing environmental concerns around the rise of the Internet as a central repository for the world's data and processing--known as "cloud computing."
Companies seeking large-scale, long-term cuts in information technology spending are concentrating on data centers, which account for up to 30 percent of many corporations' energy bills.
Data centers such as those run by Google already use around 1 percent of the world's energy, and their demand for power is rising fast with the trend to outsource computing.
One major problem is that in a typical data center only 40-45 percent of energy use is for the actual computing--the rest is used mostly for cooling down the servers.
"It is a pressing issue for IT vendors since the rise in energy costs to power and cool servers is estimated to be outpacing the demand for servers," said Steven Nathasingh, chief executive of research firm Vaxa.
"But IT companies cannot solve the challenge by themselves and must create new partnerships with experts in energy management like the utility companies and others," he said.
Data centers' emissions of carbon dioxide have been running at around one-third of those of airlines, but are growing 10 percent a year and now approach levels of entire countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands.
Energy savings
Besides providing heat to homes in the Finnish capital, the new Uspenski computer hall will use half the energy of a typical data center, Sipila said.
Its input into the district heating network will be comparable to one large wind turbine, or enough to heat 500 large private houses.
"Green is a great sales point, but equally important are cost savings," said Pietari Paivanen, sales head at Academica: the center, when expanded as planned, will trim 375,000 euros ($561,000) a year from the company's annual power bill. Academica's revenue in 2008 was 15 million euros.
"It's a win-win thing. We are offering the client cheap cooling as we can use the excess heat," Sipila said.
The center's location in the bowels of the cathedral has an added bonus: security. It is taking over a former bomb shelter carved into the rock by the fire brigade in World War II as a refuge for city officials from Russian air raids.
Story Copyright (c) 2009 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Additional stories from Reuters
SOUTHBURY, Conn.--IBM's "green" data center here is kind of like a techie version of the "This Old House" television show. But in this case, the project was to build a showcase for energy-efficiency computing, rather than construct a new addition for a suburban home.
IBM's main problem was data center sprawl. Five years ago, internal IT staff could barely keep up with growing demand for computing resources from employees, causing an expansion from one data center location to four--a situation that was costly and inefficient.
Now, those four data centers have been consolidated into a single spot with the latest in energy-efficient tech gear, including a network of 200 sensors and water-cooled servers. It also uses what are considered the best practices for physically laying out a data center, with close attention to everything from cabling to air flow.
Making data centers more energy efficient has been a growing priority for technology managers for the past few years, as companies seek to trim spending on electricity and reduce their environmental footprint. The Environmental Protection Agency in 2007 estimated that data centers alone use about 1.5 percent of all electricity in the U.S. and are on a pace to double consumption in the coming years. In IBM's case, it deals with high volumes--its wikis are used by 365,000 people--and a growing number of applications.
IBM's tech staff did what many others in their position have done: they consolidated their computing workload with virtualization and upgraded to new, more energy-efficient hardware.
But packing more servers--each with multicore processors--into smaller spaces creates more heat, exacerbating the challenge of keeping the space cool. IBM is using a number of techniques to cool efficiently, but the guiding principle is to match the cooling with the required heating load.
"You have to physically integrate the IT and physical (cooling) equipment so you can adjust the air conditioning to match the thermal load--the system should be very dynamic," said Peter Guasti, program director for IBM's Green Innovations Data Center.
Just office buildings or hotels heat or cool rooms even when there are no people in them, many data centers operators don't have fine-grained control over cooling systems. That means the temperature can be set lower than it needs to be or a "hot spot" emerges when one piece of equipment has a heavy computing load.
Combining IT and building architecture
To keep the air conditioning well tuned, IBM is gathering lots of data. Sensors are placed behind, in front of, and top of server and storage racks to monitor the temperature. The data is collected and analyzed so that the air and water cooling systems can be automatically adjusted as needed, Guasti explained.
Operators can get a "thermal map" of the data center based on the sensor data to help find trouble spots. They are also beta testing an upcoming version of IBM's Tivoli Energy Management software, which will be able to incorporate the sensor data into the systems management program.
"The bright idea is not so much putting the sensors in. It's what you do with the data--you get reams of information so you have to try to figure out what's important and not," Guasti said.
Air flows along a predetermined path with "cold aisles" pumping cooled air to the front of equipment from the floor and hot air behind server fans being sucked upward from the ceiling in "hot aisles."
To lighten the overall cooling load, IBM is using its liquid-cooling systems, originally code-named Cool Blue, which fit onto the back of server racks. These heat exchangers cool the hot air coming from servers' fans by circulating cold water through coils, which absorb the server heat and then are cooled using the building's chiller.
IBM is looking at a variety of other ways to lower energy consumption, including using solid-state hard drives and using outside air--filtered to clean out contaminants and humidity--to cool the building, Guasti said.
Saving green or green PR?
The Green Innovation Data Center was designed for tours so customers can get some ideas on how to lighten their own data centers' energy load. But it's not just for show--the center runs applications used by thousands of people.
And the investments IBM made in making the center more efficient are "very cost justified," said Patrick Toole, the company's newly named chief information officer, in an interview. IBM as a company has wrung $3 billion in costs over the past year, which it plans to continue, he said.
But the company measures the "payback" from upgrading its data center not only with energy savings and environmental benefits. It's also measured in business process improvements, Toole said.
For example, the data center allows IBM to operate an internal "cloud computer." Employees can procure computing resources--server processing and storage space, for example--for a certain amount of time on a subscription basis. In the past, employees asked the IT group to install a server for each new application, which is less efficient than a shared-resources model.
Also, the influx of data on energy use lets data center managers better track related costs.
"The instrumentation we have with what is going on is so much more granular than before. We haven't had dashboards with regard to the green aspects before," Toole said. "Now we can see things like energy on a smartphone and we're able to manage that."
Updated at 7:15 A.M. PT with corrected title for Toole and video added.
Cisco is betting that utilities are more likely to invest in new data centers than new power plants in the coming years.
The tech giant is developing a suite of smart-grid products designed to add networking smarts to the existing grid, including routers for substations and home energy-monitoring systems. But a large chunk of the $20 billion per year in smart-grid spending that Cisco anticipates is in traditional data centers.
Since smart-grid technologies rely on a steady flow of information, Cisco expects that utilities will need to invest in more sophisticated IT systems, said Mark Weiner director of Data Center Solutions and a member of a Cisco smart-grid team.
Once utilities put in smart meters, their data processing and storage needs explode. Instead of sending a person to read meters once a month, information for billing or other applications can be sent back once a day, once an hour, or even every few minutes.
If utilities are regulated to reduce peak-time usage, their IT needs shoot up even higher. Demand response, where a utility can turn down energy use at participating customer sites, requires utilities to poll information regularly from a potential large number of locations.
"The requirements are for huge amounts of data to be involved when you have these more advanced pricing models where the goal is to mitigate power generation," said Weiner. "The catcher's mitt for that data is the data center."
By cutting peak-time usage, utilities can avoid turning on auxiliary "peaker plants" to supply electricity on a given day or, potentially, avoid building new power plants to meet growing demand.
Cisco is involved in a handful of smart-grid pilot programs, including projects in Amsterdam and Miami, where it is providing networking gear that transmits information from people's homes and the electricity grid back to utilities.
Duke Energy contracted with Cisco to build an "information architecture" to handle an anticipated flood of data from its smart-grid programs where it will be installing hundreds of thousands of smart meters in the next two years. Duke Chief Technology Officer David Mohler said last month that gathering data from sensors on cables, people's appliances, and substations could add up to a million nodes on the network.
Cisco is certainly not the only tech company that's targeting the utility industry and stimulus money dedicated to the smart grid. The large IT suppliers--IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft--have long had offerings geared specifically for the utility industry.
The number of smart meters in the U.S. is projected to grow from about 8 million units installed, or about 6 percent of all meters this year, to 13.6 million installed next year and to over 33 million in 2011. Utilities will also need to upgrade their computing infrastructure so that their systems for controlling the delivery of electricity can talk with other applications, such as billing, Weiner said.
But even with millions of dollars available, building out the smart grid--and smart-grid data centers--will likely take years.
"We'll start seeing a significant impact (in data centers) in five years because the moment you start using meters, the data's coming in," Weiner said.
Energy start-up Baryonyx has won bids for three land leases from the state of Texas to build data centers powered primarily by wind farms.
The Texas-based company's leases include two offshore sites in the Gulf of Mexico and one on land in the Texas panhandle. One of the offshore tracts is submerged land off Mustang Island near Corpus Christi; the other is submerged land off South Padre Island. Both sites are each over 19,000 acres.
According to the Texas General Land Office, the Baryonyx coastal projects are poised to be the "biggest offshore wind farms in the nation."
Baryonyx said its offshore farms will each produce a minimum of 750 megawatts of power and use turbines that produce up to five megawatts each.
The third lease includes 8,064 acres in Dallam County, an area in the northwest corner of the Texas panhandle.
"Developing wind energy for Texas is just plain smart, it's not just sustainable energy to power our businesses, it's sustainable funding for public education too," Jerry Patterson, commissioner of the Texas General Land Office, which granted Baryonyx the leases, said in a statement.
Patterson is referring to the lease provisions in which Baryonyx--once the wind farms are operational--will provide power to the Texas General Land Office. The land office will, in turn, sell the electricity to schools, prisons, and cities. The money from the sale of that electricity will then go directly into the state's Permanent School Fund, which holds the rights to all income garnered from the state's submerged coastal lands.
Over the 30-year lease, the wind farms must provide the school fund with a minimum of $338 million, according to the Texas General Land Office's statistics on the deal's agreed energy royalties.
Baryonyx's goal is to become a "leading provider of both renewable energy and low-carbon, on-line data storage and computational services," according to a company statement on the deal. The start-up plans to build Tier 4 data centers--the most secure type of data centers typically used to house mission-critical systems.
Baryonyx's offshore projects in Texas could be the largest wind farms in the U.S. when completed.
(Credit: Baryonyx)Yahoo thinks its plan for a new data center could eventually help the company achieve carbon-neutral status without having to resort to the purchase of carbon offsets.
Yahoo's David Dibble discusses the company's plans for a Buffalo-area data center with New York Senator Charles Schumer (right, red tie) and other state officials.
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo designed its forthcoming data center to let outside air cool the servers at all times, borrowing the idea from the design of a chicken coop, according to Yahoo co-founder David Filo. The company joined New York officials such as Governor David Patterson and Senator Charles Schumer Tuesday to unveil plans for the data center, the design of which Yahoo is attempting to patent.
Data centers are vital to huge Internet businesses such as Yahoo, and companies throughout this industry have started paying more and more attention to the amount of energy consumed by facilities that can have thousands of servers running all day, every day. Google has talked up its own push for greater efficiency in its data centers, and Microsoft just announced plans for two new data centers geared around energy efficiency.
As part of the announcement of the new data center in Lockport, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo, Yahoo also revealed that it will no longer purchase carbon offsets as part of its energy strategy. Carbon offsets have been controversial in some quarters, but they allow companies to claim they are "carbon neutral," in that purchasing offsets diverts money to green projects.
Yahoo plans to focus its green strategy on projects such as the Buffalo data center rather than the purchase of offsets, which means it will take them some time to return to the carbon-neutral goal set in 2007. "We believe creating highly-efficient data centers will have a greater long-term, direct impact on the environment and gives us the best opportunity to play a leadership role in addressing climate change," Filo wrote.
Corrected at 3:05 p.m.: Yahoo clarified the new data center will be in Lockport, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo.
Ice Energy said on Monday it has partnered with data center cooling company Data Aire to make a hybrid air conditioner that uses ice for efficient cooling.
Ice Energy's rooftop ice-cooled air conditioner.
(Credit: Ice Energy)The idea behind Ice Energy's Ice Bear air conditioner is to make ice in a storage tank during off-peak times to take advantage of lower rates. The machine uses the stored ice to make cool air during times of higher energy demand--and higher rates.
Ice Energy and Data Aire said they have tested a way to link the Ice Bear to Data Aire's cooling systems. The companies said that the combination is more efficient than stand-alone systems and will cut peak electricity usage.
Ice Energy originally expected to make these refrigerator-size units for consumers, but has since focused on selling to commercial customers. California utilities PG&E, Southern California Edison, and Anaheim Public Utilities offer incentives for installation of the Ice Bear.
The first version of an Energy Star rating for enterprise servers is poised for release on Monday, with about one quarter of available servers expected to meet the standard.
The specification, which has been under development for a few years, is designed to give buyers a starting point for evaluating the energy-efficiency of servers, according to Andrew Fanara, a program manager for Energy Star at the Environmental Protection Agency.
It includes a common "power and performance data sheet" that reports energy data in a common format. Compliant products will also have relatively efficient power supplies, which means they will give off less waste heat.
Other criteria are the ability to report energy-related statistics to data center management software and relatively efficient idling, Fanara said.
The top-tier server vendors and some of the second-tier vendors are expected to comply with the standard. It covers different categories of products but does not address servers with more than four processors.
"We need better tools to work with to have a more in-depth discussion. This sheds some more light on this issue," Fanara said. "It's not the be-all, end-all but it's a good start to get better educated."
The most energy-efficient products will already meet the standard. The EPA plans to update the specification over time and is looking at establishing a benchmarking system that would reflect real-world energy performance, he said.
Waste heat from a new data center being built in London Docklands will power nearby homes and businesses, the company behind the project says.
The Telehouse West facility, which is due for completion in 2010, is being built by Telehouse Europe alongside the WSP Group, a sustainability consultancy. Work has started on the new data center, which will be nine stories high and provide 19,000 square meters of floor space.
In its announcement on Wednesday, Telehouse Europe said the $91 million data center would provide up to 9 megawatts of power for the local community by exporting the heat from the building's cooling systems. Green-energy systems and high-efficiency chillers are also being used to reduce carbon emissions.
An artist's rendition of the planned Telehouse West facility in London Docklands
(Credit: Telehouse Europe)"We recognize that any attempt to address the lack of space within the data center industry has to be undertaken with a level of environmental awareness," Bob Harris, Telehouse Europe's technical services director, said in the statement. "By making good use of the waste heat from the facility, we can minimize the environmental impact of Telehouse West and provide a valuable resource to the local community."
The Telehouse West heat-export strategy follows on from The Mayor's Energy Strategy, introduced in London in 2004 by the then-mayor, Ken Livingstone. That document called for large-scale planning applications to "include combined heat and power and community heating where feasible."
While the idea of combined heat and power was considered unfeasible for Telehouse West--data centers do not require extra heating--the heat-export element of the mayor's requirements was worked out in consultation with the Greater London Authority during the planning assessment stage.
The viability of this scheme was enhanced by the fact that a new housing development is also planned for the vacant site next to where Telehouse West will be built, according to Telehouse Europe and WSP's energy strategy report.
Telehouse Europe already has two data centers in Docklands. Its co-location facilities are used by many major ISPs and large companies.
David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.
The Green Grid consortium has a radical idea for cooling energy-intensive data centers: opening the window.
The group on Thursday released an online tool for evaluating how data centers in North America can tap the outside air to augment data center air conditioning systems during cooler weather.
(Credit:
Green Grid)
The Green Grid said that a data center in San Jose, Calif., could save $66,000 a year with outside air cooling and one in Herndon, Va., could get $20,000 a year in free cooling.
Outdoor air cooling is already done among some new data data centers designed with energy efficiency in mind.
Hosting company ADC (Advanced Data Centers) opened a facility in Sacramento, Calif., last year that got a platinum level LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building certification. It will be 25 percent to 30 percent more energy efficient than the industry standard, in part by using an outdoor air circulation system.
The Green Grid, a group of IT industry leaders including heavyweights like AMD and Hewlett-Packard, unveiled a new standard for measuring data center efficiency at the second annual Green Grid Technical Forum in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday.
The white papers released by the consortium have been advising companies on how to properly measure, quantify, analyze and report on PUE (power usage effectiveness) and DCiE (data center infrastructure efficiency) since 2007.
Click on the image to take a tour of an existing California data center designed for efficiency.
(Credit: Elsa Wenzel, CNET)"At the 2009 Technical Forum, attendees will walk away with actionable information to help measure energy consumption and significantly improve energy cost savings," Larry Vertal, director of the Green Grid and senior strategist at AMD, said in a statement.
The Green Grid's white paper released Wednesday adds a new metric for IT folks to think about.
It's called PUE Scalability.
"However, to better assess how well a facility's infrastructure handles the dynamic changes in IT power loads, a data center needs to understand how well its total energy consumption scales with changes in IT power load," said the white paper, whose contributors include employees from HP, Dell, and Emerson Network Power.
The paper suggests through sample scenarios and formulas that it's not enough to look at long-term facility assessments, but that managers need to evaluate how their infrastructure deals with fluctuations in IT equipment power loads throughout a given day in order to make them more efficient.
For that, the group recommends measuring something it calls PUE Scalability, a formula which includes tracking a data center's energy consumption roughly every 15 minutes to evaluate its responses to fluctuations in usage.
It further recommends the use of "meters, monitors and analysis tools" that can evaluate power usage and response to loads in real-time.
The new paper is a follow-up to the Green Grid's February 2007 proposal in which the organization introduced the idea of using the PUE and DCiE (originally called DCE) system to compare the efficiencies of data centers, as well as suggesting some efficiency-oriented best practices.
This latest suggestion from the Green Grid is not revolutionary.
Companies like Sentilla have already begun to offer hardware and software tools for real-time data center energy consumption evaluations. But with a significant group like the Green Grid behind the practice, data center managers may now take more interest in those types of products.
