Power & Cooling

Earth Day is a day to reflect on our planet’s condition and to re-dedicate ourselves to the work that lies ahead. One of the keys to effective conversation is having good metrics that indicate the progress we are making. That’s why we became one of the founding members of The Green Grid, an international consortium of companies dedicated to improving energy efficiencies in data centers and business computing ecosystems. One of the first Green Grid initiatives was to develop standard measures of infrastructure efficiency. As we said in an earlier podcast, there was no standard way to determine if you had a data center that was wasting energy. During its first full year, The Green Grid has been very successful in promoting the first set of these measures: Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE) and Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).(PDF link)

DCiE and PUE are reciprocal metrics that describe how efficiently a data center powers and cools its equipment. A DCiE of 33% (the equivalent of a PUE of 3.0) means that 33% of the total power use is going to the data center. A PUE of 3.0 means that 300 watts into the facility in order to deliver 100 watts to the IT equipment. The other 200 watts is overhead. Obviously, efficient data centers look to reduce that.

Why are these measures so important? You can only improve what you can measure. Standardization is essential to the development of benchmarks, which then can be used for improvements. Individual companies cannot do this all alone, which is why The Green Grid is having such a seminal impact on improving efficiency in data centers. DCiE and PUE are just the beginning. We’re looking forward to expanding our work to include data center productivity, methods for assessing data center designs, operations and technologies to improve data center efficiency.

Dell believes The Green Grid helps our customers directly address the power and cooling issues that they face. These efforts, along with our own, will not only increase data center efficiency, but provide the ReGeneration for a much more sustainable computing ecosystem. The February issue of Power Solutions magazine has a number of excellent articles to read (PDF link) that can bring you up to speed.

Our new M-Series Blades are getting noticed. Maybe it’s because we’re trying very hard to listen. Customers tell us that blading (is that a verb?) a data center isn’t a strategy, but it is a viable technology solution for power, space, cooling management, and performance requirements. More precisely they tell us they want blades that are modular and can be easily re-purposed as their needs change. Competitive blade offerings are designed for specific workloads with a small set of configuration options for memory and processor upgrades, but they don’t address infrastructure changes such as new network interfaces (10 Gig Ethernet) and switch architectures.

Independent analysts like what they see. Gartner said our “positioning of its blade servers also differentiates it from competitors… Dell supports the premise that blades, racks and towers all demonstrate specific market competencies; it believes that, in the coming years, there will be room for all three. This premise is consistent with Gartner's view of the market.” You can also read what InfoWorld, BladeWatch and The Register said.

Change is inevitable. The M-Series adapts to it with modular snap-in flexibility down to the switch interconnects. If you need to add more I/O bandwidth or want to upgrade your switches you can add upgrade modules to the M-Series on the fly. That’s the sort of simplicity our customers demand. They also want simple management of blade components. We’ve responded with the most efficient, greenest, lead-free, and fastest-to-deploy blades on the planet. Listen to a podcast describing it in more detail.

We are trying to do the things that matter most to our customers. It’s our strategy and we are sticking with it.

TechRepublic recently ran an article by Jason Hiner about Gartner's predictions of the 10 technology trends that will shape IT.  In it, Mr. Hiner adds insightful comments, some of which inspired me to write this post.

Gartner predicts that half of business travelers won't take their laptops with them by 2012.   The timing is perhaps aggressive but the idea is spot on.  Many people want smaller mobile systems, but there is probably going to be a point where small isn't necessarily better. Others want  larger laptops. Look at the newer notebook computers that have 20 inch monitors.  Some people want modular, multi-purpose devices - think "laptop/smartphone/PDA/emaildevice."   The range of products will undoubtedly expand.

Gartner predicts that open source will penetrate 80% of enterprise software.  To put a finer point on it, they think 80% of enterprise software will include "elements" of open source.  I think it's an  improvement to substitute the words "standards based" for "open source." Why?  Ask, and I''l explain.

The article says power efficiency will become key criteria in IT purchases.  We hear it from customers every day.  The convergence of limitations on power, cooling and space are hitting the entire IT infrastructure hard.  That's why we started years ago, and why we're delivering products and services today that address these issues head on.  We're already offering the greenest servers, client PCs and solutions on the planet.

The CO2 footprint ("carbon footprint") of the data center, was also mentioned as becoming part of PC purchasing criteria.  We're well on our way to having a zero carbon footprint for our company by the end of this year.  Dell is the only company to offer free recycling for consumers and low-cost asset recovery services for business.  You can offset the carbon footprint of the entire life of one of our products with the "Plant a Tree for Me" and "Plant a Forest for Me" programs.  CO2 is still a pretty abstract concept for most people.  One way to think of it is that using an Energy Smart server that consumes 19% less power can save 3,200 watts per rack per year (about $30,000), which eliminates 18 tons of CO2 emissions, which equals about four acres of pine forest.  Please check out our credentials, and our Sustainability Report. 

I also agree with the idea that end user preferences will drive many IT decisions.  IT organizations will govern the directions and architectures, but end users will drive what IT delivers to them as tools.  Tablet PCs, RFID devices, smart phones, email devices, telephony, fax, and other devices will all need to be interconnected.  Users will demand a single identity that travels with them and the ways they use and access information.

In short, we agree with a lot of what's in the TechRepublic article, but differ over the timing.  What do you think? How fast is our IT world changing and in what ways?

Dell just announced a very cool green initiative. The company will now run its 2.1 million square-foot global HQ campus – home to more than 10,000 employees - using “green” power exclusively. Obviously, that includes a lot of IT infrastructure to power, not to mention keeping the lights on or the building cool in the Texas heat.

What is green power and where does it come from? According to the EPA’s definition – “ green power is a subset of renewable energy and represents those renewable energy resources and technologies that provide the highest environmental benefit. EPA defines green power as electricity produced from solar, wind, geothermal, biogas, biomass, and low-impact small hydroelectric sources. Customers often buy green power for avoided environmental impacts and its greenhouse gas reduction benefits.”

In this case, Dell will be getting the power from two sources. Dell is using all of the power generated from Waste Management’s Austin Community Landfill gas-to-energy plant, meeting 40 percent of Dell HQ needs. The remaining 60 percent comes from existing wind farms and is provided by TXU Energy.

Full news release, Dell’s 2008 carbon neutral commitment. Dane Parker, Dell’s director of environmental health and safety, has a post and video about creating a clean energy future on Direct2Dell.

Good for the environment. Good for the company. Good all around.

HP got an early jump on April Fool’s day yesterday when they announced their new blade server, the Proliant BL260c G5, with the claim that it has 64% better energy efficiency than the Dell PowerEdge M600 blade server.  The details of this Internet Vaudeville act can be found here: http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/downloads/HP_ProLiant_BL260_SPECjbb2005_032808a.pdf

Normally, vendors try to establish comparisons using similar configurations, such as those done by Principled Technologies here: Yes, Dell commissioned this work, but if you look at Appendix B of that report, you'll notice that a professional rigor was applied to making sure there was a level playing field.  By contrast, the HP report published yesterday makes no attempt at comparing similar configurations.  Different processors, running in different power modes with different memory and disk configurations, etc.

If HP had substituted one of their own servers in place of the M600 – one that was actually comparable to the M600, such as the BladeSystem c-Class tested by Principled Technologies, the power savings would probably have been over 75%, instead of the 64% they reported.  But they couldn't very well come out and say that their high mileage lab experiment was so much better than an HP product that many of their customers already own.