Building the Green Data Center

blackbearnh writes "O'Reilly News talked to Bill Coleman, former founder of BEA and current founder and CEO of Cassett Corporation, about the challenges involved in building more energy-efficient data centers. Coleman's company is trying to change the way resources in the data center are used, by more efficiently leveraging virtualization to utilize servers to a higher degree. In the interview, Coleman touches on this topic, but spends most of his time discussing how modern data centers grossly overcool and overdeploy hardware, leading to abysmal levels of efficiency."

He's missing real world experience

[afidel]

He talks about turning off unused capacity like it's some future panacea, HP and VMWare have been doing it for a couple years already. He also dismisses turning servers off as not being a big deal but anyone who's run a datacenter knows that servers that have been running for years often fail when they are shut off. There are numerous physical reason for this from inrush current to bearing wear. A modern boot from SAN server is probably much less likely to fail at boot then older ones with DAS, but the chance is very much non-zero. Of course with a good dynamic provisioning system a single host failure doesn't matter because that new VM will just get spun up on a different host that's woken up.

Re:Overcooling?

[jabuzz]

And I think you don't understand thermodynamics either. Cooling to say 18 Celsius when you can happily get away with 25 Celsius will have a big impact on your cooling bill even through you are getting rid of the same amount of heat.

Re:He's missing real world experience

[Calinous]

This "grossly overcooling" business is done for several reasons:
      There are 18 Celsius just out from the cooling units, but there might be pockets of warmer air in the data warehouse (based on rack position and use).
      This "grossly overcooling" allows the servers to have a long duration of functionality when the air conditioning breaks.
      The PSUs are working better at lower temperatures (even if they are perfectly fine otherwise). Also, the cooling fans (plenty of them in thin servers) work easier at lower temperatures.
     

Good info sources on Green Data Centers

[1sockchuck]

This is a huge topic, since so many different strategies are being brought to bear. For data center operators, energy efficiency is a business imperative since the power bills are soaring. Here are some sources offering ongoing reading about Green Data Centers:

The Green Data Center Blog [greenm3.com]
Data Center Knowledge [datacenterknowledge.com]
Groves Green IT [typepad.com]
The Big List of Green Technology Blogs [datacenterknowledge.com]