Power & Cooling

"Nowhere are the potential benefits of a green strategy more compelling than in the data center." That's according to our power & cooling guru, Dr. Albert Esser in his new article "Using Green IT To Get Out Of The Red And Into The Black" that was just published in The Environmental Leader.

Also important in driving down costs is how an organization approaches power management across its PCs. A 2007 Gartner study estimates that 40 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions are due to PCs and monitors, while 23 percent are due to servers and associated cooling technology in data centers.

Statistics like this are among the reasons why we continue to take aggressive steps in providing with the most energy efficient products in the industry. Today, we just announced a 25% energy efficiency improvement commitment for our laptops and desktops. Read more here.

I got my bachelors ME degree at Michigan State and understand what competition means in the Big Ten.  You crush it when you can.  Well, the folks at Purdue University's Rosen Center for Advanced Computing crushed it on Monday. With a huge team effort, they installed their new supercomputer - including unboxing the equipment - in just half a day. C|net called it an "electronic barn-raising."

The supercomputer, named Steele, features 812 Dell PowerEdge 1950 dual-quad-core computer nodes and is predicted to have a peak performance of more than 60 teraflops, which means it could perform more than 60 trillion operations in one second, placing Steele in the top 40 on the current Top 500 computers list.  Tinkergeek has 249 photos of the install , which is probably some sort of record by itself.  You get to see them working on the raised floor, installing racks, rails, switches HVAC, power and network cabling.  My favorites are #s 79, 90, 152, 179, 200 and the last one - the rack with signatures of the team that worked on it - very cool.  They have a brisk stop action video too.  

The HPCC will be used for research across a variety of disciplines, including engineering, biological, earth and atmospheric sciences, mathematics and physics. The leading researchers at Purdue pooled their grants and provided a majority of the funding for the cluster, which is housed at Purdue's Mathematics Building on campus.

High-performance computing is helping to support research that benefits society and Purdue is one example of major universities using Dell technology to enhance their teaching, learning and research initiatives.

I spoke this week at the Uptime Institute’s Symposium 2008. Green IT is a topic that undoubtedly is becoming more top of mind among CIOs and data center managers.

Research from the Uptime Institute indicates that enterprise greenness is both socially responsible as well as economically smart. I couldn’t agree more.

Greening your data center for efficiency is both good for the environment, since you’re lowering your overall CO2 emissions, and good for your pocketbook, since you’re able to reduce power consumption across your IT infrastructure. And this can be done without sacrificing performance. Dell analysis has shown that customers can lower their data center energy consumption by 45 percent while maintaining the same compute performance. This is the result of taking a holistic approach to data center energy efficiency which takes into account the synergy between hardware, power utilization rates, cooling and software solutions.

Dell’s position is that you cannot afford not to be green. And the Uptime Institute would agree that the time to begin greening your data center isn’t sometime in the future – it is now. What questions do you have around the topics of Green IT or power & cooling? Let me know, and I’ll be sure to get back to you with answers.

A Dell employee emailed from the Microsoft Management Summit this morning:

I am in the opening keynote here at MMS. Being the featured hardware partner for SCCM is awesome. The room is PACKED and attendees are hearing Microsoft talk about how great Dell systems management is.

Microsoft’s Bob Muglia, MS SVP, highlighted Dell’s preliminary bare metal deployment pack in his keynote. Hubba hubba and hey now.

Many of our customers use Microsoft’s System Center and Dell’s OpenManage to manage their infrastructure. And who do you think offers the most comprehensive device management through Microsoft’s System Center Suite? (Dell does) And we’re not resting. This week we’re announcing the upcoming availability of the latest Dell Management Packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager that will give customers superior monitoring and control of Dell desktops, portables, workstations, rack and tower servers, blades, networked storage devices and even printers.

Our new plug-ins and our roadmap to integrate Dell Services with Microsoft products means our mutual customers will continue to have industry leading tools to manage their IT infrastructures. All this talk about simplifying IT really means something.

Thanks for the kind words this morning Bob!

GreenBiz radio has an interview with Ken Brill of the Uptime Institute.  Its a bit long, but all the text is there so you can speed read through it if you want.

One of the more interesting things that Brill claims is that lots of energy can be conserved by turning off equipment that isn't being used.  Here's a quote from the interview transcript:

KB: Well, the institute believes that IT could radically reduce its energy consumption, and it would save money in the process. And there are a number of things that people can do and we're gonna be talking about these at our upcoming symposium. But the first thing that people can do is to go through their data center and identify what is running that could just be turned off. Between 10 and 30 percent of the energy consumption in a typical data center is for servers and storage and other things that is no longer in use.  And it could just be turned -- I mean, as literally, as simple as turning the switch.

Ken has some interesting things to say about blade servers too. Just like any other technology, there are important differences in blade server designs.