Post on 25-Aug-2020
Data Centre Energy Is keeping up with demand sustainable?
December 2011
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Data Centre Energy
•Why should we care about data centres? •Demand issues •Data centre (in)efficiency •What do we need to change?
Why should we care about data centres?
Data centre energy
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Data Centre Energy
Energy consumption
• Many estimates of data centre electricity consumption
• Gartner most often quoted at 2% of total electricity supply
• These estimates are unlikely to be accurate
• Consumption is growing, even in a recession - 56% since 20071
(1) Jonathan Koomey : http://www.analyticspress.com/datacenters.html
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Data Centre Energy
Energy consumption
• European data centre energy
consumption is equivalent to
Portugal2
(2) Paolo Bertoldi – EC JRC
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Data Centre Energy
Energy consumption
• A single 1U commodity (<£1,000) server in a corporate data centre is
responsible for more energy and CO2 in 1 year than driving a Range
Rover the entire circumference of the equator
Data centre demand
Data centre energy
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Data Centre Energy
Demand elasticity
• William Stanley Jevons wrote “The coal question” in 1865
“It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of
fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the
truth.”
• We have the same problem with data centres
– Mature markets such as petrol are relatively inelastic
– Immature markets such as ICT can be very elastic
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Data Centre Energy
Demand elasticity
• Corporate
– More demand for “traditional” data centre services
– Cloud hype – outsource your energy responsibility
– New services claiming to replace some physical process
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Data Centre Energy
Demand elasticity
• Consumer activity moving to the data centre
– New retail services
– Claim to reduce overall energy by replacing some physical process
– Video on Demand, Digital lockers etc.
• New services
– Social networking, gaming, entertainment etc.
– Do not replace any existing physical process – new demand
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Data Centre Energy
Demand elasticity
• “Thin client” and “Virtual desktop infrastructure”
– Neither provides a net energy saving
• New applications are server based
– Supporting thin / mobile client devices
– “Cloud” delivered
– More network and more data centre overhead
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Data Centre Energy
Demand elasticity
• Variable end user device energy consumption is being moved into the
data centre
– In the data centre this becomes fixed energy consumption
– EUC energy consumption is equivalent to existing data centre
consumption
– Network operators have rapidly rising demand
Data centre efficiency
Data centre energy
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Data Centre Energy
Data centre efficiency
• We call it PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness)
• How much of the generated electricity is used to do work?
• First – a set of charts from 2007
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
Data centre efficiency
• Lots of research
– Vendors now market the efficiency of their devices
– Energy Star for servers, SPECPower benchmarks
– EU Code of Conduct for Data Centre Energy Efficiency
– Operators understand the significance of power cost
– Nobody really cares about carbon – yet
– Everybody measures their transfer efficiency (PUE)
– Internet data centres increasingly eliminating mechanical cooling
– We don’t need any data centre refrigeration in the UK – no excuses3
(3) Liam Newcombe : http://dcsg.bcs.org/data-centre-cooling-analysis
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Data Centre Energy
Where the energy goes
We don’t need any mechanical cooling
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
Data centre efficiency
• How have things changed from 2007 to 2011?
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
Data centre efficiency
• What impact have we had?
• Lower overhead = more IT power available
• People buy more servers than before
• People buy even more network and storage to support virtualised
servers
• We have found that we can’t keep processors loaded properly
– Modern processors are too fast
– Our software doesn’t parallelise properly
Fixed energy consumption
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
Embodied energy
• Mechanical and Electrical plant – 10 to 20 year lifespan
• Servers – 18 to 48 month lifespan
– Server lifespan is getting shorter thanks to virtualisation
– Recycling the metal box has little impact
– Majority of the embodied energy is in the silicon
What do we need to change?
Data centre energy
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Data Centre Energy
Decision information
• Many vendors tell us to upgrade to new more efficient equipment
• We do not know the embodied energy or pollutant of this equipment
• We need to know the embodied (capital) energy to amortise against the
in use (operational) energy
• Supply chains are extremely complex
– Perhaps we need to embed the knowledge of the embodied energy in
each component?
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Data Centre Energy
Allocation and attribution of energy
• I don’t care if a data centre is “green”
• I want to know how much energy / carbon / pollutant is due to the
service or transaction delivered to me from the data centre
• Without this information we will continue to make the wrong decisions
– We need a working market in energy efficient services where we can
choose on real numbers not marketing
– We need to be able to compare the energy of an IT service with the
energy we are saving through using the IT service
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Data Centre Energy
Demand elasticity
• We know that ICT is an immature market
• Each efficiency improvement drives further demand in both existing and
new demand areas
• Can we manage or constrain demand elasticity?
– Can we add a demand side tax, a CAT?
– How do we avoid impacting the energy savings due to ICT?
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Data Centre Energy
Fixed energy consumption
• With all the work to improve server performance why is data centre
utility load still fixed?
• If your car used fuel at the same rate idling stationary as it did at 70mph
on the motorway you would consider this unacceptable…
• There is too much focus on metrics we don’t need
Fixed energy consumption
• We need to measure and manage the energy:work relationship
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Data Centre Energy
Utilise our resources properly
• Most servers are << 50% utilised
• Virtualisation has not cured this problem
• Our software is not written to use the hardware properly
• Our software frequently prevents the hardware from implementing
power management actions
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Data Centre Energy
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Data Centre Energy
•Decision information •Allocation and attribution •Demand elasticity •Fixed energy consumption •Resource utilisation
Thank you
Liam Newcombe
CTO Romonet Ltd
liam@romonet.com
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Data Centre Energy