Power & Cooling

Earth Day is the time of year when everywhere you turn it’s green. The newspaper, radio, and of course TV: several broadcasting networks are featuring special green-themed logos and programming.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise to see thousands of “green” consumers at this year’s Go Green Expo in NYC. I had the pleasure of speaking at the conference on Saturday about Dell’s green IT strategy. While I'm usually I’m talking to CIOs and business executives about the importance of being green, this conference provided me with an opportunity to connect with another important group—data center end-users or consumers. Besides, it’s not everyday I get to follow Mariel Hemmingway or present before Nigel Barker.

Given today’s digital lifestyle, more and more consumers are becoming concerned about where their data comes from. When they access e-mail, download a video or share photos they want to utilize the greenest technology or systems. Many now realize that a simple Internet search could access a server database say in China, affecting the carbon emissions in that country. Consumers understand that someone has to power all the sheep throwing on Facebook and know that it’s better for the planet if it’s powered by green servers. The energy efficiency of our data centers is no longer just a business challenge, it’s a global, widespread issue affecting everyone. This was one of the topics I discussed during my keynote and it seemed to resonate well with the audience.

So my green data center crusade continues. This week I’m in Washington D.C. with Paul Bell, president of Dell’s Global Public-Sector, talking to federal-agency leaders and policymakers about energy-efficient IT.

I, along with others at Dell, continue to spread the word about the energy efficiency of our products, our efforts to be the greenest technology company on the planet and how we’re helping customers meet their environmental goals.

Until next time, Happy Earth Day!

Last month Daniel Bounds wrote that Conspicuous Consumption is Out of Style on the AMD at Work blog and described how Dell and AMD worked together to create energy efficient servers.

Time for an update: this week Dell is shipping two-socket and four-socket blade and rack PowerEdge servers with the new AMD Opteron HE (code name Shanghai) processors. Now the Dell PowerEdge R905, InfoWorld’s Best Virtualization Server of 2009, consumes even less power.

When combined with Dell Energy Smart platforms, these energy-miser Opteron HE processors can dramatically improve overall efficiency to drop power and cooling bills in the data center. Our PowerEdge engineers have included temperature-sensitive fan technology, more efficient power supplies, smaller form factor hard drives and low-voltage processor options to keep the power meter ticking slowly.

To hear more about power reduction, AMD’s @Jake_Whitman talked with Brent Kelley, Sr. Manager, performance/power characterization lab at AMD about innovations in the new processors. Here is what he has to say about changes to the processor. (I apologize in advance for the low audio levels.)

On this blog, we've posted a lot on the benefits of virtualization. But, some skepticism still remains in part to the myth that blades are not as powerful as conventional servers, and therefore not a good platform for virtualization. In reality, Dell offers blade servers designed with virtualization in mind.

When blades were first introduced, they were mostly designed as low-power Web servers in a more dense form factor. They were built with low-speed, single CPU chips. Today, blades are available with all the same options as rack servers, with multiple CPUs, multicore, and lots of memory. They are now the functional clones of rack servers in terms of processors and memory configuration options.

If you are going through consolidation planning… and you have the option of choosing new server hardware, blades today offer the same CPUs, socket counts and memory as rack servers, including chips with virtualization assist.

Click here to read the entire E-Guide from which these posts were taken, and read more about virtualization on InsideIT.

In my last post about blade servers, we focused on price, and the TCO savings blades can provide. The E-Guide on Blade Server Trends also tackles the myth that blades require too much power and cooling. Here’s a snippet from that guide:

[It’s true that] early blade systems generally used more power and cooling, even with lower speed processors and less memory. Today's blades have more efficient power supplies and improved overall thermal design. Many also have sophisticated software to help in managing heat and automating certain actions to address problems, including powering down components as needed when the temperature gets too high.

There is, however, a power and cooling issue with blades in terms of density. Even though one blade uses less than one rack server, since blade systems are designed for high density, the number of blades per footprint can be substantially higher than rack servers. (This is fact is one of their biggest advantages in space savings.) So it's important to pay attention to power and cooling issues from an overall data center planning perspective, and to ensure that you plan appropriately.

So, the benefits of blades won’t go against your business’ green goals. When planning your data center, how do you factor power and cooling factor into the discussion?

Gartner Symposium is taking place this week in Orlando and Dell has a team of folks at the conference to present on aspects of its enterprise strategy and business.  We caught up with Dell's Chris Auger, enterprise technologist in the company's technical sales organization, and Dr. Albert Esser, our vice president of power and infrastructure solutions (read: power and cooling expert) to get a sense of what they talked about with customers.

Chris Auger, Enterprise Technologist

Albert Esser, VP, Power and Infrastructure Solutions

Albert was also interviewed by eWeek’s Scott Ferguson during the conference and told him many of the same things including an overview of Dell’s Green IT strategy and what customers can do to increase their energy efficiency and ultimately lower costs.