Green Data Centers

Global climate change and the focus on environmental sustainability is an issue that can be ripped from headlines the world over. In the United States, debates over various concepts, such as carbon taxes vs. cap-and-trade programs continue unabated, with fascinating hybrid solutions such as Steve Randy Waldman’s (of interfluidity.com) proposal for “a scheme that starts as a carbon tax and evolves into a cap-and-trade, that creates incentives for consumers, businesses and politicians to reduce carbon use, that can be implemented gradually, that does not reward past polluters, and that leans just a little bit against inequality.”¹

On a more fundamental level, Fortune 500 companies and federal, state and local agencies are asking, “Why go Green?” And if we must, “How Green is Green enough?” Determining one’s place along what I call the "Environmental Sustainability Continuum" and driving toward, first carbon neutrality, then sustainable reduction, is becoming a primary preoccupation of business today. This is with the expectation that those who adopt sustainable business practices will be better positioned to address environmental challenges in the future than those who fail to do so.

Toward this end, it is apparent that one key aspect of a sustainable business is the evaluation and management of the environmental footprint left by a company’s facilities and other infrastructure assets. Specifically, we are acutely aware that many assets, both directly or indirectly, consume energy and emit greenhouse gases (GHG).
Generally categorized within production, transportation, facility and IT asset classes, this is especially relevant to certain types of assets in an organization’s portfolio of control rooms, assembly lines, labs, data centers and other assets that are extremely technology intensive. For instance, according to the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), in the United States alone, buildings account for:

• 70 percent of electricity consumption
• 39 percent of energy use
• 39 percent of greenhouse gas emissions
• 40 percent of raw materials use
• 30 percent of waste output (136 million tons annually)
• 12 percent of potable water consumption ²

Another element of a sustainable business is the understanding that this is a process, a journey that while structured along the Environmental Sustainability Continuum, will be different for each organization. That said, the Environmental Sustainability Continuum serves as the framework for a solution, one that accounts for individual levels of maturity along the way.

For some, the solution is making the case to begin the journey to go green. For others who have already “got it,” the challenge is to understand how green they are, with tangible validations and certifications. Yet, others are required to go green, with regulatory compliance issues as the entry point to their journey, until they reach the ultimate destination of sustained carbon reduction, and are actively trading in a carbon marketplace or are paying just the right amount of carbon taxes.

Beginning with an understanding of the Environmental Sustainability Continuum, we must address how and why the greening of our data centers can serve as a catalyst for taking this journey.

The data center is one of the greatest energy users and CO2 offenders. IBM indicates that per square foot, annual data center energy costs are 10-30 times more than those of a typical office building. (William Tschudi, March 2006).³ Ken Brill of the Uptime Institute, asserts that energy costs are actually 20-40 times the consumption of an office building. (http://uptimeinstitute.org/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1). ⁴  In its Tivoli and the Green Data Center presentation at the 2008 Pulse Users Conference,⁵ IBM reported:
• Between the years 2000-2010, server installations will grow by six times and storage by 69 times (IBM / Consultant studies).

• Data centers have doubled their energy use in the past five years (Koomey, February 2007).
• U.S. commercial electrical costs increased by 10 percent
in 2005-2006 (EPA Monthly Forecast, 2007).

Converging Challenges

Considering these statistics, BearingPoint’s vehicle of choice for this particular Environmental Sustainability Continuum journey is the Green Data Center (GDC), with its ability to leverage the convergence of mission, organization and technology infrastructure that has been an industry quest for years. As asset managers, besides the current focus on environmental sustainability issues, the challenge historically has been reconciling the potentially divergent and separate worlds of IT asset management and enterprise asset management (the facilities folks). With very different missions to accomplish and with  organizational structures that reinforce their differences, it is not surprising we are left with vertical silos that are virtually impossible to integrate.

This problem is exacerbated by the different technologies (both hardware and software) that have historically been used by each group. Branded distinctly as IT asset management/IT service management (ITAM/ITSM) and first computer maintenance management systems (CMMS), then enterprise asset management (EAM), these systems have only recently become available as a truly integrated suite of tools designed to support the two components of the organization.

With integrated technology solutions from Tririga and IBM’s Tivoli/Maximo, as well as other best-of-suite and best-of-breed applications in the market, we are able to provide an end-to-end solution for all asset classes and types. By employing change management and business process improvement as components of our implementation approach, our recommendations could include fairly radical steps to re-engineer the business. We could suggest reorganizing both departments with facilities and IT under one manager, titled for discussion purposes the chief asset officer, with the expectation that this person would also be the organization’s energy czar. Addressing new environmental sustainability issues requires new and often unorthodox solutions.

A green data center, powered by integrated, Web-architected solutions like these, accommodates the convergence with Building Management Systems (BMS) that can provide real-time information about the operational status of infrastructure assets such as humidifiers, chillers and computer room air conditioners, all key to the survival of a data center. Industry leaders including Siemens, Johnson Controls and Honeywell have developed comprehensive solutions that when integrated with wireless monitoring technology, such as SynapSense (SynapSoft™ 4.0), can provide “total data center visibility,”⁶ including the real-time visualization of thermal, humidity and pressure data.

These systems can also be integrated with Enterprise Energy Management Systems (EEMS), such as those from WebGen and Itron that also provide critical energy information about and for the data center. This information facilitates the balance of power and thermal capacity to the IT load, reducing risks associated with data center consolidation, system virtualization (server, client and storage), and energy optimization. Utilized together and leveraging the thermal and energy data now readily available, this integrated technology suite allows users to quickly address emergencies as they occur, prevent issues from escalating to crisis level and predict events based on a current trend, potentially preventing them from occurring at all. The primary challenge for a GDC is the quest for true operational efficiency, one with a comprehensive solution for power and cooling, which is now within reach. By embracing the tenets of consolidation, virtualization and optimization, the GDC is not an oxymoron.

The time-tested concepts of demand and preventive and predictive maintenance management are often linked to the maturity level of a facility’s organization and to the mission-critical nature of its business. Previously difficult to extrapolate beyond the maintenance department, these can now be merged with the sophisticated processes and standards IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL); robust, shared databases Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB); and comprehensive service management with service-level agreements (SLAs) and centralized help desks to provide clients with end-to-end control and management of their IT and non-IT assets. The GDC can be the right catalyst, serving as the least common denominator used by both departments and one that resonates well with the “C” suite.

Energy Reduction is Key

While availability and quality of business services are important, it’s maintaining service levels while reducing energy consumption that keeps us awake at night. According to IBM in a recent white paper,⁷ data centers today are facing an energy crisis due to the following:
• Increased computing demand creates rapidly escalating energy costs.
• Energy usage is exceeding supply and budgets.
• Power or thermal limits prevent data center consolidation.
• Data centers do not have granular reporting on energy usage so it can be managed better.
• Executives are under increased pressure to reduce carbon footprint, and the data center is a prime target for reducing energy use.
• U.S. energy consumption by servers and data centers is expected to nearly double in the next five years.
• Worldwide spending on powering data centers is projected to triple by 2010.
• Provisioning more power and improving cooling in a data center requires significant investment and can take 18 months or more to accomplish.
• Government regulations for carbon emissions and energy efficiency are driving the public and private sector to reduce energy use.

ComputerWorld stated in an article that when it comes to IT energy costs, little steps can save a lot. It says IT managers are paying more attention to the cost of power as servers become more powerful and as local utilities continue to raise their rates. According to Framingham, Mass.-based market research company IDC, the money that will be spent worldwide on power and cooling servers will exceed $44 billion by 2010, almost double the $26 billion of last year.⁸

The Robert Francis Group says, “Power will be the number one issue for most large company IT executives to address in the next two to four years. Ignoring this issue will NOT be an option. Power consideration must be incorporated into data center planning.”⁹

Based on information provided by the U.S. Climate Technology Cooperation Gateway (www.usctcgateway. net/usctc), IBM presented a fascinating case for the GDC by posing the question: What if all data centers were green? “Assuming a 20 percent efficiency improvement could save 36 billion kWh or 22m tons of CO2, we could remove 3,505,401 cars and light trucks from company fleets … or plant 502,440,757 tree seedlings and grow them for 10 years … or manage and preserve 16,329,325 acres of pine or fir forest per year ... or recycle 6,597,707 tons of company waste instead of sending to landfills.”¹⁰ This is definitely something to think about and consider aspiring to as we make paradigm shifts in response to the converging
landscape.

The goal is to have business processes, technology and tools, as well as people’s behavior and habits all synchronized in support of the environmentally sustainable business.

*Footnotes