Power & Cooling

You might think that after two full days of keynotes, breakout sessions, events and meetings at Oracle OpenWorld it would be hard to excite a convention hall full of business and IT leaders, but Michael Dell had just the right formula with:

• A compelling vision - Redirect IT dollars from management and maintenance to innovation and improving the business by building an Efficient Enterprise;
• Big commitments for quantifiable results like working to take $200 billion of inefficiency out of the $1.2 trillion IT infrastructure industry spend and driving $200 million in savings for Dell's own IT;
• Impressive statistics, something almost all of us in the IT industry get into, of the power of the Dell and Oracle partnership and Dell's leadership and track record in providing solutions;
• Cool products, including:
  • Dell's 11th generation of PowerEdge servers were onstage and Michael highlighted the enhancements in these new servers to simplify deployment, enhance performance, reduce complexity and lower power and cooling requirements;
  • He also discussed more innovation to come next year with new PowerEdge servers based on Intel Nehalem EX architecture; and,
  • Talked about continued enhancements to the EqualLogic storage products, like SSD (launched this year) and 10Gbps Ethernet (coming soon) that will drive efficiency and performance for storage.
• A blueprint to make this vision a reality including:
  • Standardization on open standard solutions built on x86-based servers;
  • Simplification by starting with the applications and taking the complexity out of the way they are supported and managed, and by using Virtualization and Storage Consolidation;
  • Automation by streamlining Services delivery and enabling self-service IT models where critical business services can be deployed through the cloud.
• Dell's own plan - Robin Johnson, CIO of Dell, shared how he is driving inefficiency out of the Dell IT machine
• Having fun - Everyone was excited by Larry Ellison's surprise appearance and from the return of the Tech Force alliance!

Hopefully you are as excited as we are about building the Efficient Enterprise, and if you’re here this week, be sure to come see us in the booth. 

You can follow us on Twitter @dellatORACLEwld and check out my earlier post on Direct2Dell with details of all our activities.

Good question but since you’re reading this on Dell’s CIO-focused blog and not Creem, you should assume it is the latter. This is a topic that's been widely discussed across our industry, including this article from Jeff Burt of eWeek.

Grid designs for data center power grid infrastructures need to include careful consideration of uptime and efficiency. Current flow needs to be steady and always available. It should also be cost-effective and “green.”  The most fundamental consideration to be made when planning a new data center is whether to provision it with AC or DC power.  The majority of IT data centers today use  AC power throughout. This is not surprising, given the prevalence of AC power grid infrastructure in centers of global commerce.  A century of AC power grid refinements (i.e. transformers, circuit breakers, fuses, standards) have resulted in a generally accepted view of AC power as dependable. Couple that with these limitations imposed by the perception of DC power grid selection (distances of less than one mile and fewer available hardware choices) and you might conclude that DC power type data centers are rare. This is not true.

There remain a large number of DC powered data centers throughout the world, and new ones continue to be built, driven by telecommunication service expansion across emerging regions. DC power holds advantages for telecommunication networks that relate to always-on “dial tone” service level requirements. Network data flow for audio streaming is circuit-based, rather than packet-based. Slight disruption in sequential read/writes results in a poor user experience. Until recently, 1993 to be exact, AC power was susceptible to a bad thing called “current harmonics,” which can result in overheated neutral circuits and transformers. 

For these reasons, telecommunication companies embraced DC power early in their history of operations. DC power continues to be preferred for telecom networks due to the massive install base already in use, and DC power’s success in delivering incredible “dial tone” service levels -- “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” you might say.

Some other verticals for which DC power is attractive include:  remote and mobile computing (oil rigs, ships, jets), military, and video-content providers. The debate goes on, about the virtues of AC vs. DC power and while the efficiency rating between the two standards has come close to parity over the years, Dell remains a strong advocate of choice in the OEM market. This is why we have chosen to partner with NEI to introduce the NEI E2710, a DC-powered server that meshes with Dell’s DMC systems management console and packs the same performance punch that Dell’s Nehalem-based PowerEdge servers do.

The past few years have seen dramatic enhancements in the efficiency of IT equipment, which has resulted in impressive efficiency gains for AC power equipped servers and storage.  Power supplies now run at 80 percent and higher efficiency levels.  Airflow and cooling design considerations have pushed out bulky component cables, in favor of skinny ones.  Heat dissipation from components inside a  chassis is now carefully considered when product design teams develop new platforms.  Airflow is paramount, low “drag coefficients” enable fans to cool heat producing components with ease.  The fans themselves have been completely redesigned, and are more power efficient themselves.  In some large scale processor intense deployment, servers are “running naked” sans chassis, further eliminating drag coefficients while nestled inside their 19 inch-wide, 42U high racks.  As a result, the power efficiency possible in today’s AC powered data center environments is excellent.  This is fantastic news, both for companies with AC powered data centers and for everyone. 

Now, you have a DC powered server that takes advantage of all of these recent enhancements, and delivers Dell dependability and power.  Use it wisely.

In the 2002 movie, Minority Report, Police Chief John Anderton, played by Tom Cruise, manipulates data and images on massive computer screens to prevent crimes before they happen in the "pre-crime" department. Pretty cool concept and compelling visuals. 

Imagine if you could enter a virtual data center and manipulate 3D images to create the most power-efficient, cost effective data center for your business. Now you can do it, and its

not science fiction with an interactive Web experience. Enter the Intel Dell Data Center 360 Tour- a new website from Dell and Intel that let's you walk through various ways to get more out of your data center. 

Recently there has been expansive growth in data centers to keep pace with the need for data management and the demands of an ever-more connected workforce. With this growth comes the increased need for electricity and space, which pose environmental, energy and economic challenges that IT must solve within the data center environment. Optimizing the data center forces a business's IT department to make important decisions about which technology they wish to deploy in their data centers. As a result of these new business problems, now - more than ever - IT has been charged with maximizing the value of the most expensive real estate in their corporation: their data center.

Take a virtual walk through our new website to learn ways to address the most pressing topics: power and cooling, virtualization, server strategy, new and emerging technologies, and data center management. The virtual tour not only lets you explore the data center, but to take a deep-dive into its components and gain a full understanding of how they function within the larger system. We've included tools like ROI and energy calculators, white papers and online resources to help you plan the ideal data center.

There’s a lot to learn from taking a quick tour of the data center. Be like Tom Cruise and solve the problems before they exist.

We’re all familiar with those blue and white Energy Star stickers that show us the average energy uses on our home appliances like refrigerators and clothes driers. Now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released Energy Star specification for servers. The efficiency requirements are a positive step in creating an industry standard to help reduce power consumption.

The focus on energy efficiency isn’t just about being tree-hugger-green, but more about saving green – as in dollars. Limitations on space, power and cooling capacity combined with rising energy costs can give data center managers incredible headaches. IT departments are counted on to maximize compute capacity without expanding their server footprint and to find ways to effectively cool these power-intensive systems—all while working within the boundaries restricted operating budgets.

Dell understands those challenges, so we partnered with the EPA to develop the new energy-efficiency specification for servers. Not only that, but we just released details of its first Dell PowerEdge servers that meet the new Energy Star specifications. In fact, Dell is the first major vendor to certify entire platforms to meet the exact performance per watt requirements with the Dell PowerEdge R610 and R710 server platforms qualifying for the new Energy Star specification.

Our focus on energy efficiency isn’t new and didn’t start with the development of Energy Star specifications. In 2007, Dell introduced Energy Smart to help customers maximize performance per watt for their particular workload and meet operating expense goals. Dell PowerEdge servers with Energy Smart technology include Dell Energy Smart power supplies, Dell Energy Smart system design, Dell Active Power Controller (DAPC), Dell Energy Smart management and high-effi­ciency processors and memory to achieve the highest performance per watt for standards-based servers.

We build PowerEdge servers with a comprehensive, system-wide approach to balancing performance with energy efficiency by focusing on design, measurement, control and reporting for energy-efficient infrastructures that reduce total cost of ownership.

• Design: The holistic approach follows efficient design principles across electrical, mechanical, and thermal systems and combining them with intelligent component selection.
• Measurement: Real-time, accurate measurements of performance, power consumption and thermals feed into the Energy Smart control algorithms so the system can make intelligent decisions to help optimize performance-per-watt.
• Control: The architecture incorporates firmware running on a high performance baseboard management controller embedded in the system to provide an intelligent, centralized control mechanism to help determine performance-per-watt optimizations.
• Reporting: The architecture incorporates the Dell Management Console powered by Altiris from Symantec provides in-band reporting, while the standard Web Services for Management protocol provides out-of-band reporting to make intelligent performance and efficiency decisions.

I had a chance to catch up with Daniel Bounds, Dell PowerEdge solutions manager and energy efficiency guru, to hear more about the new Energy Star specifications. Here is what he had to say.

World Environment Day was June 5 and I thought it was only fitting that we highlight a customer who is committed to keeping their company green and providing technology to help their customers save energy as well. Atlanta-based Southern Company is the premier energy provider of the Southeast, serving over 4.4 million customers. While the company is committed to be green, they were seeing their kilowatt hour consumption grow by as much as 15 percent and producing more of the corresponding CO2 emissions every year because their own data center.

By instituting a green data center program, the IT team at Southern realized they needed to do something to stop the server sprawl and energy consumption. By virtualizing and consolidating its data center servers using VMware ESX technology on PowerEdge R900 servers, Southern has eliminated over 1,340 tons of CO2 emissions.

“As a result of the virtualization, we avoided more than two million kilowatt hours worth approximately $200,000 over a period of a year and a half,” says Dan Traynor, IT infrastructure director, Southern Company. In the process, they were also able to put a little money back in their pockets to the tune of $1.3 million by not having to add new equipment in their datacenter. That was a huge savings, especially with many organizations trying to extend the life of their equipment.

Read more on Southern Company and how they leveraged technology to be greener. To learn more about Dell and their commitment to the environment, go to Dell Earth.

What “cool” things is your organization doing to be green in the data center? I’d love to hear your stories!