Pacific-Tier Innovators

The FCC finally moved the network neutrality debate forward Thursday, voting to begin developing open Internet regulations. The topic has become quite interesting over the past week, as strong-willed proponents and opponents of net neutrality turn up campaigns to influence law makers prior to voting on any net neutrality principles that may become law.

The debate is actually quite simple – should the government regulate, or not regulate the Internet? That discussion revolves around the six principles of network neutrality proposed by the FCC:

Under the draft proposed rules, subject to reasonable network management, a provider of broadband Internet access service:

• would not be allowed to prevent any of its users from sending or receiving the lawful content of the user’s choice over the Internet;
  
• would not be allowed to prevent any of its users from running the lawful applications or using the lawful services of the user’s choice;
  
• would not be allowed to prevent any of its users from connecting to and using on its network the user’s choice of lawful devices that do not harm the network;
  
• would not be allowed to deprive any of its users of the user’s entitlement to competition among network providers, application providers, service providers, and content providers;
  
• would be required to treat lawful content, applications, and services in a nondiscriminatory manner; and
  
• would be required to disclose such information concerning network management and other practices as is reasonably required for users and content, application, and service providers to enjoy the protections specified in this rulemaking.

The Pro Argument of Network Neutrality

Oddly, former adversaries Google and Verizon issued a joint statement regarding their position on net neutrality. Both companies have significantly changed their positions since the debate originally hit the headlines in 2005, with a highlight of the joint statement:

"For starters we both think it’s essential that the Internet remains an unrestricted and open platform — where people can access any content (so long as it’s legal), as well as the services and applications of their choice.
Transformative is an over-used word, especially in the tech sector. But the Internet has genuinely changed the world. Consumers of all stripes can decide which services they want to use and the companies they trust to provide them…

…This kind of "innovation without permission" has changed the way we do business forever, fueling unprecedented collaboration, creativity and opportunity. And because America has been at the forefront of most of these changes, we have disproportionately benefited in terms of economic growth and job creation."

This oddly puts Verizon in opposition to the other main anti-net neutrality supporters such as AT&T, Cox Communications, and Comcast.

Certainly companies like Google have come a very long way from 2005 when the debate was clearly one of who pays whom, for what kind of service, and who has the right to determine the quality of services over basic Internet infrastructure. In the early days content providers wanted a level of government regulation to ensure the Internet transmission and network providers did not have control over the end user experience, and objected to statements by AT&T’s then CEO Ed Whitacre who stated in an interview with Business Week:

"How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

This set off both a furor among Internet users, as well as a new movement to ensure the "telcos" did not ever again have an opportunity to restrict or limit free access to their networks. Arguments ranged from identifying the US taxpayer and AT&T customers paying for basic infrastructure our of Universal Services Fund/USF (meaning the US taxpayer is actually the owner of much of AT&T’s USF-funded infrastructure), to AT&T subscribers being forced to use AT&T preferred content providers based on their control of the network.

There are many organizations representing both users and Internet industry companies supporting the idea of network neutrality. The current law in the house is sponsored by Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) who introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 (H.R. 3458) in July 2009.

The Con Argument

Not surprisingly, the Con argument is dominated by conservatives in both the government and corporate communities.

John McCain (who is also accused by the Huffington Post as having received more than $800,000 in campaign funding by AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast) rejected the FCC’s vote, and offered a new proposal called the "Internet Freedom Act."

"Today I’m pleased to introduce the Internet Freedom Act of 2009 that will keep the Internet free from government control and regulation," McCain said in a statement. "It will allow for continued innovation that will in turn create more high-paying jobs for the millions of Americans who are out of work or seeking new employment. Keeping businesses free from oppressive regulations is the best stimulus for the current economy." (CNN)

The only thing missing in the above cliché-filled statement is a series of pictures of crying babies, unemployment lines, and California wildfires. The bottom line here is that politicians, bending to pressure or contributions from opposition parties, will use any words available to tug at either emotions or heart strings, regardless of the presence of factual data to support the position.

AT&T allegedly sent notice to all their employees, including union members and families, to write their representatives in favor of knocking down network neutrality. Perhaps that is a natural activity in the political process, however bandwagon appeals without supporting fact will not give the American people the broadband environment needed to compete in the global market placed.

Let’s look at both arguments in detail. Do a Google, Bing, Yahoo, or other web search on the topic of Net/Network Neutrality. You will find a lot of web references, news stories, blogs, and opinions on the topic. Much of it anarchistic noise, much of it very valuable information.

Hunter Newby, CEO of Allied Fiber, asks the question "What
if the United States falls further behind Europe in deployment of broadband networks? What if we lose track of the need to wire each and every community? What if the United States falls so far behind Europe and the rest of the world due to politics preventing innovation that we can never economically recover?"

There are those who still believe the carriers, such as Verizon, AT&T, broadband wireless providers (such as Clearwire), and the cable companies should concentrate their efforts on delivering connectivity to each and every addressable community in the United States. Facility-based carriers (those who own the physical cable) should concentrate on providing bundles of "big, fat, dumb, communications pipes."

Comments on Net Neutrality are Now Open with the FCC

The great thing about the US system is that no national law is ever a unilateral decision. We have a wonderful system of due-diligence through the congress and senate, with support from the executive and judicial branches of government.

The Federal Communications Commission under the leadership of Chairman Genachowski has opened discussion and the period of comment on the FCC guidelines. The period for comments is open until 14 Jan 2010. Some links for those interested in the topic include:

FCC Seeks Public Input on Draft Rules to Preserve the Free and Open Internet
NPRM: Word | Acrobat
News Release: Word | Acrobat
Genachowski Statement: Word | Acrobat
Copps Statement: Word | Acrobat
McDowell Statement: Word | Acrobat
Clyburn Statement: Word | Acrobat
Baker Statement: Word | Acrobat
Staff Presentation: Acrobat

The question arises, "what if we, as Americans interested in the future of the Internet, American innovation, the American economy, and our future generations actually took the time to read through the issue of Network Neutrality? What if we used our research as a basis for making our own decision on which side of the debate we fall, or if there is yet another strong argument to consider?"

It is a difficult topic, with a lot of noise and clouds shrouding the core issues. Weigh-in, let us know your opinion.

John Savageau, Long Beach

The Station Fire ripped through communities along the northern rim of Los Angeles in August and September, consuming an area more than 160,000 acres. Evacuations came with little or no warning, homes and buildings lost, and the entire ordeal put a tremendous strain on utilities and resources. Including water.

When the city of Glendale needed to quickly alert residents to lower their water and power use to enable fire fighters to gain access to critical resources, they turned to a local company, Everbridge, to reach citizens with real-time notifications alerting them to the emergency.

On Thursday night Marc Ladin, VP of Global Marketing at Everbridge, walked CTC members though an introduction to emergency and incident communications management.

The Need for Emergency Management

Communications technology has made incredible leaps in utility, applications, ands capacity over the past few years. We can reach nearly any point or person in the world through telephone, mobile phones, Internet email, Twitter, Blackberry messaging, radio, television – the list is becoming endless.

Regardless of the technologies, natural and man-made disasters and problems remain a part of our lives, and will always be part of our lives. Our businesses, governments, and even survival, depends on how we prepare for disaster, and are able to respond to events that touch our lives. Good events and bad.

Marc Ladin makes a living solving the problem of communicating during emergencies and events. The residents of Glendale, like most communities in the United States, offers residents the option of registering their preferred communications devices with the city.

This gives the city an immediate channel to reach and inform residents in the event of disasters and other incidents of interest or impact to the city and residents.

In the case of the Station Fire, Glendale was able to immediately reach enough residents, and the city was able to lower residential utility draw to the level fire fighters had adequate water resources to protect the community.

The same model applies across the spectrum of emergency notification.

The Enterprise Business Continuity Plan

Nobody wants to think of a disaster that will hurt people, or isolate them from their family or organizations. However, it is also clear that any organization needs to have a business continuity plan in place, and a disaster response plan in place to allow the organization to quickly respond to, and manage, any event that will potentially damage the organization’s ability to function.

Consider this scenario. A large multi-national chemical products company. Highly visible in the world business community, and customers located around the world.

The worst case scenario happens. At the HQ site an explosion occurs in the manufacturing plant, killing several person in senior leadership roles, and requiring a massive response by emergency services and evacuation in the surrounding community.

Who do we need to notify to respond to the emergency, and who needs to know about the problem?

• First responders – fire fighters, HAZMAT teams, ambulances, local hospitals, police
• Local Community – residents, media (radio and television)
• Company leadership – management, public affairs, operations
• National and global media

How do you get the message – the real message – out to those people?

How do we determine if somebody is trapped in the disaster area, and needs help?

The process is getting easier. Every person, machine, and device connected to the Internet or other global communications service can be part of the event notification process.

Registering Your Communications Device for Notification

A company such as Everbridge offers as utility for managing emergency and event notifications. The utility (Everbridge) operates as a SaaS (Software as a Service) application, physically separated from the users. The SaaS application resides on several geographically diverse data centers, with multiple communication providers providing the conduit for global device notification access.

An organization will compile a table of their users and devices, with an individual having the ability to register all their available communications devices (mobile phones, email, Twitter accounts, etc), including a preference on notification priority (i.e., mobile phone message first, email second, home phone third…).

The organization then has the ability to sort members into different categories of notification. An example of how an organization might be sorted is:

• C-level management notifications
• Persons notified during emergencies
• Geography (everybody in the Long Beach office, everybody in the Atlanta office, everybody in Japan, etc)
• Function (operations, engineering, marketing and sales)
• Local area first responders
• And any other desired sort

Of course a single entry is easily tagged for multiple notification categories.

How to Make a Notification

In a traditional environment company leadership wants to make a notification. They may have their secretary make phone calls, might call an operations center and open a notification checklist, or other time-tested process.

The modern notification system can use a wider variety of methods for generating a notification:

• A human being opens a web page and types in a notification message for distribution
• A human being prepares an email or SMS message, and sends it to an address that spawns the desired notification tree
• A machine experiences a condition that requires a human response
  • Fire alarm
  • Equipment failure
  • Security break-in or event
  • Etc

Once the message is triggered, and the notifications made, then you need to make a decision on whether or not the notified persons need to acknowledge or respond to the notification. Modern systems also manage and automate the acknowledgement process by logging replies to the notification message, allowing the alert initiator to determine if everybody has received the message.

This is important if you are managing a disaster, and need to determine if somebody could potentially be hurt or in danger, or if you need to escalate a decision situation to the next person in a business continuity plan.

With GPS capability, it is now even possible to determine the exact location of a desired device, further helping locate persons in a disaster. Consider a heart patient with an active monitoring device – that device can be registered in a hospital, first-responder, family, and neighbor notification matrix. This will increase the probability that person will survive in the event of health problems.

Other Creative Ways to Use a Notification System

Of course the same system that handles emergencies can also handle positive messages. The marketing group can use the same notification system for press releases, management can deliver positive company results to employees – basically once the person and device/s are registered in a data base, the entry can be used for whatever desired.

Marc Ladin presented a great vision. His company is putting the vision into reality, and has a lot of exciting features available today, and in the mill for tomorrow.

John Savageau, Long Beach

In 2005 Marty Plotnick, a long time supporter to information technology in Honolulu, put together a brief history of the telephone company in Hawaii.  History should never be lost or forgotten, so here a reprint of Marty’s great contribution.

Select the link next to the short entry and you will be directed to Marty’s old CyberZone website for the full page.

Marty is now retired, living in Honolulu.  If you would like to contact him, please send a note to info@pacific-tier.com  and we’ll get the message through.

A History of the Telephone Company in Hawaii

PART 1.  In earlly 1878, Maui’s Charles H. Dickey installed Hawai’i’s first two telephones between his home and his store. The phones were rented from a Mainland firm and ran on wet cell batteries.On December 23, 1880, a charter was granted to the Hawaiian Bell Telephone Company.  (Bell had nothing to do with the company. The name "Bell" was added to honor Alexander Graham Bell.) The primary investor was the Orient Bell Telephone Company of London and the first order was for 50 phones from a Belgium manufacturer. 

PART 2. For most of 1900 transmitting/receiving stations were set up, but failed for the most part. The Marconi techies were sent back to the Mainland and Marconi sent an "expert" to solve the problem. He did. He used Ben Franklin’s kite experiment and found the right locations for the stations. Service was spotty and Wireless Telegraph ran into debt. The "expert" bought the judgments for $600. and got local businessmen and sugar planters to put up $1,000. a month to continue attempts to get reliable service.

PART 3. The first strike against Mutual was called by the IBEW, beginning on May 3, 1920. Approximately 75 of Mutual’s employees were union members, including 60 linemen.  During negotiations before the Public Utilities Commission, Mutual surprised everyone by voluntarily offering a general wage increase totaling $87,000 a year if the PUC would approve it.

PART 4. The Great Depression had begun in October 1929 and by late 1931 was beginning to bite at Mutual’s business. During late 1931, 180 small businesses disconnected their phone service but a whopping 823 residence subscribers cancelled. In the country districts, six percent cancelled along with the nine percent on the city side.

PART 5. Some of these wait-listed folks had been on the list for up to four years. But even though had laid 12,500 miles of cable in 1945, it still had problems getting copper and lead, as government restrictions had not been lifted. It took over six months from War’s-end to get 200 lines installed. From that point in March 1946, 500 went hot in May, 800 in June, etc. By the end of 1940, 3,800 new lines were installed. 1946 began with 978 employees, double that of 1940. The payroll went from 1940’s over $1 million to $2.25 million.

PART 6. In August, 1959, Statehood became reality after decades of attempts. At Hawaiian Telephone–the new name for Mutual Telephone–growth was spurred by the Territory’s new status.  By the end of 1960, Hawaiian Telephone had 200,000 lines installed.  These customers now had dial service assistance and toll-free dialing on all islands was operational. This feat made the Island of Hawaii the single largest toll-free calling area in the United States.

PART 7.  This installment begins with the end of the company’s first century and beginning of it second in 1983. This benchmark was also the start of an upheaval in the telecommunications industry unprecedented in the entire history since Watson answered Bell’s hail.   This new era exploded the sedentary legacy phone company attitudes nationwide with a whole new vocabulary of technology and business concepts.

PART 8.  In 1989, after 105 years of service, Hawaiian Tel went modern by leasing an IBM 3090-200E mainframe computer to handle its accounting "chores". The company would not disclose the cost of the lease.

PART 9.  1991 saw HawTel finishing its 1990 fiscal year ending with $539.3 million in gross income and $52.0 million in profit. The company paid its parent–GTE Corp.–a record $$43.5 million in dividends.

John Savageau, Long Beach

For those of us old-timers who muscled 9-track tapes on 10 ft tall Burroughs B-3500 mainframe computer tape drives, with a total storage capacity of about 5 kilobytes, the idea of sticking a 64 gigabyte SD memory chip into my laptop computer is pretty cosmic.

Terms like PCAM (punch card adding machines) are no longer part of the taxonomy of information technology, nor would any young person in the industry comprehend the idea of a disk platter or disk pack.

Skipping a bit ahead, we find a time when you could purchase an IBM "XT" computer with an integrated 10 megabyte hard drive. No more reliance on 5.25" or later 3.5" floppy disks. Hard drives evolved to the point "Fryes" will pitch you a USB or home network 1 terabyte drive for about $100.

Enter the SSD

October 2009 brings us to the point hard drives are now becoming a compromise solution. The SSD (Solid State Disk) has jumped on the data center stage. With MySpace’s announcement they are replacing all 1770 of their existing disk drive-based server systems with higher capacity SSDs, and quoted that SSDs use only 1% of the power required by disk drives, data center rules are set to change again.

SSDs are efficient. If you read press releases and marketing material supporting SSD sales you will hear numbers like:

• "…single-server performance levels with 1.5GB/sec. throughput and almost 200,000 IOPS
• … a 320GB ioDrive can fill a 10Gbit/sec. Ethernet pipe
• … four ioDrive Duos in a single server can scale linearly, which provides up to 6GB/sec. of read bandwidth and more than 500,000 read IOPS (Fusion.io)

This means not only are you saving power per server, you are also able to pack a multiple of existing storage capacity into the same space as currently possible with traditional disk systems. As clusters of SSDs become possible through additional tech development of parallel systems, we need to mentally get our heads around the concept of a three dimensional storage system, rather than a linear systems used today.

The concept of RAID and tape backup systems may also become obsolete, as SSDs hold their images when primary power is removed.

Now companies like MySpace will be in a really great position to re-negotiate their data center and colocation deals, as their actual energy and space requirements will potentially be a fraction of existing installations. Even considering their growth potential, the reduction in actual power and space will no doubt give them more leverage to use in the data center agreements.

Why? Data center operators are now planning their unit costs and revenues based on power sales and consumption. If a company like MySpace is able to reduce their power draw by 30% or more, this represents a potentially huge opportunity cost to the data center in space and power sales. Advantage goes to the tenant.

The Economics of SSDs

Today, the cost of SSDs is slightly higher than traditional disk systems. Even with fiber channel or Infiniband supporting large disk (SAN or NAS) installations. According to Yahoo Tech the cost of an SSD is about 4 times that of a traditional disk. However they also indicate that cost is quickly dropping, and we will probably see near parity within the next 3~4 years.

Now, if we remember the claim MySpace made that with the SSD migration they will consume only 1% of the power used by traditional disk (that is only the disk, not the entire chassis or server enclosure). If you look through a great white paper (actually it is called a "Green Paper") provided by Fusion.io you will see that implementation of their SSD systems in a large disk farm of 250 servers (components include main memory, 4xnet cache, 4x tier 1/2/3 storage, tape storage) you will see a reduction from 146.6kw to 32kw for the site.

Data centers can charge anywhere from $120~$225/kw, showing that we could potentially, if you believe the marketing material, see a savings of $20,000/month @ $180/kw. This would also represent 47 tons of carbon, using the Carbon Footprint Calculator.

Fusion .io reminds us that

"In 2006, U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy, which accounted for about 1.5% of the total electricity consumed in the U.S. that year, up from 1.2% in 2005. The total cost of that energy consumption was $4.5 billion, which is more than the electricity consumed by all color televisions in the country and is equivalent to the electricity consumption of about 5.8 million average U.S. households.

• Data centers’ cooling infrastructure accounts for about half of that electricity consumption.

• If current trends continue, by 2011, data centers will consume 100 billion kWh of energy, at a total annual cost of $7.4 billion and would necessitate the construction of 10 additional power plants. (from "Taming the Power Hungry Data Center")"

When we consider the potential impact of data center consolidation through use of virtualization and cloud computing, and the rapid advancements of SSD technologies and capacities, we may be able to make a huge positive impact by reducing the load Internet, entertainment, content delivery, and enterprise systems will have on our use of electricity – and subsequent impact on the environment.

Of course we need to keep our eyes on the byproducts of technology (e-Waste), and ensure making improvements in one area does not create a nightmare in another part of our environment.

Some Additional Resources

StorageSearch.Com has a great listing of current announcements and articles both following and describing the language of the SSD technology and industry. There is still a fair amount of discussion on the quality and future direction of SSDs, however the future does look very exciting and positive.

For those of us who can still read the Hollerith coding on punch cards, the idea of >1.25TB on and SSD is abstract. But abstract in a fun, exciting way.

How do you feel about the demise of disk? Too soon to consider? Ready to install?

John Savageau, Long Beach

"If everyone purchasing a room air conditioner in 2009 chooses an ENERGY STAR qualified model, it would save 390 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. That would prevent more than 600 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions each year—equivalent to taking more than 50,000 cars off the road—and save consumers over $43 million each year in energy bills." (Pickens Plan Fact of the Day, 8 Oct 09)

California has always prided itself as being a leader in alternative energy innovation. Driving through the hills around Livermore, Palm Springs, or between San Diego and Yuma bring skylines full of wind turbines. The California Energy Commission claims that wind turbines generated 6,802 gigawatt-hours of electricity – about 2.3 percent of the state’s gross system power. By the end of 2009 California actually expects to hit nearly 5% energy production from renewable sources.

While the wind turbine program has slowed down a bit due to animal rights groups objecting to bird casualties due to propeller strikes, California has not slowed down at all in the state’s aggressive goals for green energy production. While it is probably a bit too aggressive, California’s Energy Commission has set a goal of hitting 20% by the end of 2010 (Senate Bill 107), and 33% by the end of 2020 (Executive Order S-14-08).

The US Congress is shooting for 20% renewable energy production nationwide by 2010 – a far lower threshold than desired in California.

Energy Programs and Incentives in California

Each state has some level of renewable energy initiative supporting energy efficient homes. California’s program falls under the "The California Energy Commission’s New Solar Homes Partnership" (NSHP). This is a great resource not only for existing home owners in California, but also those persons planning to build new structures. The objectives of NSHP’s program include:

In the Home

A solar home with high energy-efficiency features offers homeowners:

• Clean, renewable energy
• Utility bill savings
• Predictable utility costs
• Protection against future rising electricity costs

California is also offering financial incentives to homebuilders to design energy efficiency and the potential of renewable energy planning into the new home. Solar energy "is one of the most significant personal actions one can take to cut air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, while helping to conserve precious energy resources for future generations. Plus, it reduces the need for costly new power plants" according to the NSHP.

All California homeowners implementing solar panels in their homes also qualify for the federal tax credits up to $2000.

An unscientific jog around the Sunset Canyon Drive area of Burbank on 17 Oct 2009 tallied around 1 of every 5 homes observed supporting some level of solar panel on the property, visible from street level. Using guidelines from the National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) you will see the average family in the Los Angeles area will save nearly $714 a year with solar panels supplementing their electrical supply.

For us apartment and condo-dwellers, that could almost pay 100% of our energy requirement during normal conditions, if we have a means of storing energy during evening hours and period of bad weather.

Don’t forget our earlier discussions on other simple things such as painting your rooftop white, or using solar reflective material on your roof to reduce the amount of heat in your home during the summer. By the way… you also get a one-time energy credit for that simple task.

"More than 50% of the energy used in a typical American home is for space heating and cooling. Much of that conditioned air escapes through poorly sealed, under-insulated attics. Only 20% of homes built before 1980 are well insulated.  Properly sealing and insulating your attic can save you up to 10% annually on energy bills." (Pickens Plan Fact of the Day7 Oct 2009)

In Commercial Sites

Companies such as the Bank of America (in Riverside, California) have built their facility with solar covering the entire rooftop of the building. Not only do they enjoy a tremendous savings in energy costs, but with a commercial property the BoA will receive a 30% federal construction tax credit, accelerated equipment depreciation, and additional financing support to help defray the cost of installing renewable energy resources.

California will tack on an additional incentive of $1.90 per watt up to a 1Megawatt solar panel system.

All focused on getting us to that 20% milestone in 2010, and the world-leading 33% renewable energy target for 2020.

Some Resources to Look at During Energy Awareness Month (October)

The State of California, California’s energy utilities, and the US Department of Energy have great resources to guide us in meeting our energy awareness and energy planning goals. Here is a partial list, but a great start. The Internet and Google searches will help lead you further.

• The California Energy Commission Home
• California Renewable Energy Handbook
• Go Solar California Home
• California Solar Initiative
• SoCal Edison solar initiative website
• PG&E solar initiative website
• State of California CSI rebate calculator
• US Department of Energy Solar Initiatives
• The Pickens Plan

What Are You Doing?

Share your energy stories with us. What has worked for you? What has failed? Are you an alternative and reneable energy skeptic like Texas’ Governor Rick Perry? Are you an energy leader? Let us know.

John Savageau, Long Beach

Data Center "X" just announced a 2 MegaWatt expansion to their facility in Northern California. A major increase in data center capacity, and a source of great joy for the company. And the source of potentially 714 additional tons of carbon introduced each month into the environment.

Many groups and organizations are gathering to address the need to bring our data centers under control. Some are focused on providing marketing value for their members, most others appear genuinely concerned with the amount of power being consumed within data centers, the amount of carbon being produced by data centers, and the potential for using alternative or clean energy initiatives within data centers. There are stories around which claim the data center industry is actually using up to 5% of power consumed within the United States, which if true, makes this a really important discussion.

If you do a "Bing" search won the topic of "green data center," you will find around 144 million results. Three times as many as a "paris hilton" search. That makes it a fairly saturated topic, indicating a heck of a lot of interest. The first page of the Bing search gives you a mixture of commercial companies, blogs, and "ezines" covering the topic – as well as an organization or two. Some highlights include:

• 42U (Private Company Pitching Green)
• Green Data Center Blog
• Web Host Industry Review – Green Data Center Info (ezine)
• http://www.greenhousedata.com/ (private advocacy group)
• http://www.thegreengrid.org/ (industry Organization)

With this level of interest you might expect just about everybody in the data center industry to be aggressively implementing "green data center best practices." Well, not really. In the past month the author (me!) toured not less than six commercial data centers. In every data center I saw major best practices violations, including:

• Large spacing within cabinets forcing hot air recirculation (not using blanking panels, as well as loose PCs and tower servers placed adhoc within a cabinet shelf)
• Failure to use Hot/Cold aisle separation
• High density cabinets using open 4 post racks
• Spacing in high density server areas between cabinets
• Failure to use any level of hot or cold air containment in high density data center spaces, including those with raised floors and drop-ceilings which would support hot air plenums

And other more complicated issues such as not integrating the electrical and environmental data into a building management system.

The Result of Poor Data Center Management

The Uptime Institute developed a metric called Power Utilization Efficiency (PUE) to measure the effectiveness of power usage within a data center. The equation is very simple, the PUE is the total facility powe3r consumption divided by the amount of power actually consumed by either internal IT equipment, or in the case of a public data center customer-facing or revenue-producing energy consumed. A factor of 2.0 would indicate for every watt consumed by IT equipment, another watt is required by support equipment (such as air conditioning, lighting, or other).

Most data centers today consider a target value of 1.5 good, with some companies such as Google trying to drive their PUE below 1.2 – an industry benchmark.

Other data centers are not even at the point where they can collect meaningful PUE data. The previous Google link has an extended description of data collection methodology, which is a great introduction to the concept. The Uptime Institute of course has a large amount of support materials. And a handy Bong search reveals another 995,000 results on the topic. No reason why any data center operator should be in the dark or uniformed on the topic.

So let’s use a simple PUE example and carbon calculation to determine the effect of a poor PUE:

Let’s start with a 4 MW data center. The data center currently has a PUE of 3.0, meaning of the 4 MW of power consumed within the data center 3MW are consumed by support materials, and 1MW by actual IT equipment. In California, using the carbon calculator, this would return 357 tons of carbon produced by the IT equipment and 1071 tons of carbon produced by support equipment such as air conditioning, lights, poorly maintained electrical equipment, etc., etc., etc…

1071 tons of carbon each month, possibly generated by waste which could be controlled through better design, management, and operations in our data centers. Most commercial data centers are in the 4~10MW range. Scary.

The US Department of Energy recently did an audit entitled "Department of Energy Efforts to Manage Information technology in an Energy-Efficient and Environmentally Responsible Manner," which highlights the fact even tightly regulated agencies within the US Government have ample room for improvement.

"We concluded that Headquarters programs offices (which are part of the Department of Energy’s Common Operating Environment) as well as field sites had not developed and/or implemented policies and procedures necessary to ensure that information technology equipment and supporting infrastructure was operated in an energy-efficient manner and in a way that minimized impact on the environment." (OAS-RA-09-03)

What Can We Do?

The easiest thing to do is quickly replace all traditional lighting with low power draw LED lamps, and only use the lamps when human beings are actually within the data center space working. Lights generate a tremendous amount of heat, and consume a tremendous amount of electricity. Heat=air-conditioning load if that wasn’t already obvious. Completely wasted power, and completely unnecessary production of carbon. If you are in a 10,000sqft data center, you may have 100 lighting fixtures in the room. Turn them off.

If your data center requires security cameras 24×7, consider using dual-mode cameras that have low light vision capability.

Place blanking panels in all cabinets. Considering removing all open racks from your data center unless you are using them for passive cabling, cross-connects, or very low power equipment. Consider using hot or cold aisle containment models for your cabinet lineups. Lots of debate on the merits of hot aisle containment vs. cold aisle containment, but the bottom line is that cool air going into a server makes the server run better, reduces the electrical draw on fans, and increases the value of every watt applied to your data center.

Consider this – if you have 10 servers using a total of 1920 watts (120v with a 20 amp breaker <at 16 amps draw>), that gives you the potential of running those 10 servers at full specification draw. That includes internal fans which start as needed to keep internal components cool enough to operate within equipment thresholds. If the server is running hot, then you are using your full 192 watts per
server. If the server is running with cool air on the intake side, no hot air recirculation producing heat on the circuit boards, then you can reasonably expect to reduce the electrical draw on that component.

If you are able to reduce the actual draw each server consumes by 30~40% by removing hot air recirculation and keeping the supply side cool, then you may be able to add additional servers to the cabinet and increase your potential processing capacity for each breaker and cabinet by another 30~40%. This will definitely increase your efficiency, cost you less in electricity and power, give you additional processing potential.

Sources of Information

Quite a few sources of information, beyond the Bing search are available to help IT managers and data center managers. APC probably has the most comprehensive library of white papers supporting the data center discussion (although like all commercial vendors, you will see a few references to their own hardware and solutions). HP also has several great, and easy to understand white papers, including one of the best reviewed entitled "Optimizing facility operation in high density data center environments" – a step-by-step guide in deploying an efficient data center.

The Bing search will give you more data than you will ever be able to absorb, however the good news is that it is a great way to read through individual experiences, including both success stories and horror stories. Learn through other’s experiences, and start on the road to both reducing your carbon footprint, as well as getting the most out of your data center or data center installation.

Give us your opinions and experiences designing and implementing the green data center – leave a comment and let others learn from you too!

John Savageau, Long Beach