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AS OF 9/5/2008 11:37PM EST

Facilities and Data Centers Dance at Conference
By Alex Handy

July 18, 2008 — When it comes to heating up a room, the IT industry can give the heating and air conditioning industry a run for its money. At the DatacenterDynamics conference in San Francisco today, the hot topics of power and heat reduction were of top importance.

At the conference, Andy Broer, senior IT manager at Cisco Systems, detailed his company's movement towards dynamic power consumption adjustment. The goal of his project, which is not yet complete, is to enable the movement of virtualized workloads to data centers that can handle the extra heat, power consumption and connectivity.

“With data centers around the globe, if I've got a non-latency-sensitive application, I can base my job anywhere,” said Broer. Thus, if it's a hot summer in California and a cool afternoon in Massachusetts, power and cooling may be easier on the company budget if a necessary application is spun up in New England rather than Santa Clara.

Martin Otterson, director of data center and IT systems at OSIsoft, spoke alongside Broer on the topic of dynamic data center provisioning. He laid out a road map for systems managers who wish to move toward the Cisco model.

“Where do you start? IT and facilities must come together and generate best practices, where you're linking the two groups and agreeing [on] something like the implementation of agreed upon metrics,” said Broer. Additionally, he said that executive buy-in is of utmost importance.

It's in the Cables
Another stop on the road to less power consumption is in the cabling, said Ken Hall, program manager for Netconnect data center solutions at Tyco Electronics. Hall's presentation pointed out a number of areas in which power can leak through the cracks, even in the most efficient of environments.

“Every time you save a watt of power on electronics, you're saving a watt of power to cool it,” said Hall. While earlier Ethernet standards don't require a tremendous amount of power, Hall showed that gigabit Ethernet uses 1.8 watts of power per active port on most switches. Optical connections, however, use less electricity than all forms of copper cabling.

Of course, all of these ideas about power consumption, dynamic electricity provisioning and processing power per watt are only as good as the metrics used to measure them. Stephen Worn, conference chair, CTO and group director of DatacenterDynamics, opened the show with some interesting numbers gathered from previous shows. The DatacenterDynamics team conducts numerous events like the one in San Francisco and polls its attendees at each event.

Those polls yielded some interesting statistics on power consumption in data centers. In 2007, the average server rack in the United States consumed 5.5kW of power. That number was lower when mixed with the rest of the world: Worldwide rack power consumption averaged out at 3.9kW per rack.

But average loads only tell half the story. U.S. servers topped out at an average maximum of 11.8kW per rack, with the rest of the world averaging 9.6kW.

Worn went on to detail some of the hot technologies, according to attendees. At the top of the to-do list for 37.6 percent of DatacenterDynamics attendees was the implementation of rack-level temperature monitoring. Another 36.5 percent of attendees were considering rack-level power management as well. Perhaps because just under half of attendees had already implemented virtualization, these rack-level monitoring systems were the most popular potential changes being considered by attendees.

Related Search Term(s): data centers, HVAC, power, Cisco, DatacenterDynamics, OSIsoft

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