Green Grid Forum Reveals Progress on Energy Efficiency Metrics

In his keynote at the third annual Green Grid Technical Forum last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pointed out that when economics are transformed by certain externalities, moral motivations can run orthogonally to traditional business considerations in guiding the transformation. While much of the interest in Green practices around the world is driven by societal factors, many IT organizations are simply concerned with reducing the impact of monthly electric bills on their total cost of ownership. However, reducing IT’s contribution to the utility bill is impractical without a meaningful way to measure the power usage that can be specifically attributed to IT. The Green Grid is currently attempting to define and gather data for such efficiency metrics, and these efforts were highlighted at the conference.

Energy usage has become a larger percentage of the total cost of ownership, sometimes surpassing the actual cost of the hardware. With IT currently consuming roughly 2% of all power in the United States, it is becoming essential for users to make strides in improving its efficiency. For data centers, The Green Grid has created the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric, defined by the ratio between the amount of power going into a data center with the amount of power that is available to the IT equipment. Given the safe assumption that the laws of thermodynamics are correct, the absolute limit that can be achieved for a PUE is 1.0, an ideal that is unlikely to be achieved in the real world. Measuring PUE in more typical environments is only useful if there is some benchmark to indicate how a particular center compares with its peers. Anand Akela from HP and Jon Haas from Dell unveiled a soon to be released online tool hosted by The Green Grid that allows a business to enter its PUEs. The tool will aggregate the data that is submitted by users so that it can be used for statistical studies and to set benchmarks.

Aside from the PUE performance of datacenters, a parallel issue remains: reducing the power usage and increasing the efficiency of the IT equipment itself. Fundamentally, any efficiency metric for computing equipment must balance the utility of a computer cycle with the energy needed to create that cycle. This convoluted equation depends on the fact that not all computer cycles are created equal. For instance, a simple way to reduce power would be to eliminate spam, but measuring the “utility” of email messages has proven to be somewhat of a grand challenge. Similarly, measuring the “utility” of a particular workload is difficult to automate, and thus requires human intervention for accurate classification. The other difficulty is to determine the actual non-nameplate power usage of IT equipment. A few of these data points can be derived from the new TPC-Energy  and SPC-1/E benchmarks (as well as IDEAS ServerCAR, which is populated with vendor supplied data). The EPA is also creating standards for measuring energy consumption of servers and storage through its Energy Star program, which will list typical power usage.

In a poll conducted by The Green Grid, 60% of the managers concerned about power efficiency were implementing virtualization to achieve targets. One speaker discovered that large IT environments follow the 20-80 Pareto principle, with 20% of the servers doing 80% of the workload. If true, the potential for virtualization is obvious.

The Green Grid is composed largely of volunteer engineers from sometimes competing companies working together to create the critical metrics needed to drive power efficiency. As was shown in a previous blog, and confirmed by a poll conducted by The Green Grid, IT efficiency is not an exponentially growing concern for budget managers. However, Mayans had wheels on toys but did not use them for work. This form of myopia could be similar and cured by easily digestible metrics. The Green Grid continues to make strides in creating the necessary tools to achieve this goal.

Comments

[Data Center Geek]

FYI, The Green Grid already has the tool up for companies to report their PUE.

http://www.thegreengrid.org/sitecore/content/Global/Content/Tools/PUEReporting.aspx

Jon Haas' section of the presentation had to do with the current reporting (link above)

Anand's presentation had to do with reporting to the industry as a whole. You can see his presentation at:

http://www.thegreengrid.org/en/Global/Content/TechnicalForumPresentation/PUEPublicReportingandUsageGuidelinesBuildingaDatabasefortheIndustry (Members Only)