Server

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.

I used to have a Kyocera phone. I liked it well enough, but since my account is with Verizon and they don’t carry that brand anymore, I have since migrated to a LG’s enV(2). But when I had the chance to check out what Kyocera is doing in their IT department, it got me thinking about my old phone again, and wondering if I should try to get a new one. The business decisions Kyocera are making seem to be pretty smart, so I’m betting their phones are too.

Recently, they were investigating new ways to meet customer demand for their communications services, and they turned to Dell to help them design a solution. They came up with a virtualized infrastructure using VMware and PowerEdge R805 servers. And for storage, they chose Dell EqualLogic PS5000 Series SAN arrays.

By now you’re thinking, so what? Unless you get really geeked out about technical stuff, you probably don’t really care much what’s behind the IT curtain, right? Well hang with me a minute longer because it’s about to get interesting.

See, I think that companies who are figuring out new ways to save money, be more streamlined and more standardized are the kinds of companies I want to buy from - and buy stock from. The old school companies who are all about doing things they way they always did are the ones who are going to tank. Kyocera revised it’s IT, turned a high opex department into a low opex department, and saved the company a ton of money annually.

I think that rocks and I think other companies should be doing the same. Don’t you?

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!

As you may recall, I published a post a few weeks ago about Dell's involvement in the launch of Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine that is built on servers from Dell's Data Center Solutions team.

In this video, R Systems' CEO Brian Kucic outlines the infrastructure behind Wolfram Alpha and how it was built out in less than two weeks.

Brian says the cluster, called R Smarr, is the fastest privately owned cluster in the U.S., the fifth fastest Dell cluster in the U.S. and the 44th fastest supercomputer in the world (according to the June 2008 Top 500 list).

Wolfram also did a post on their deployment over on their blog today. The post is titled "Building Rome in a Day," appropriate for the significant amount of work that was done to bring their supercomputer online in such a short period of time.