Data Centre Energy · Presentation to insert name here 8 Data Centre Energy Demand elasticity...

Data Centre Energy Is keeping up with demand sustainable?

December 2011

Presentation to insert name here 2

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


Data Centre Energy

Energy consumption

• European data centre energy

consumption is equivalent to

Portugal2

(2) Paolo Bertoldi – EC JRC


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


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


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


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


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

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Data Centre Energy


• 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


Data Centre Energy


Data Centre Energy


• 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


Data Centre Energy

Where the energy goes

We don’t need any mechanical cooling


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Data Centre Energy


Data Centre Energy


• How have things changed from 2007 to 2011?


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Data Centre Energy


• 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


Data Centre Energy


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

04


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?


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


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?


Data Centre Energy


• 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


• We need to measure and manage the energy:work relationship


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


Data Centre Energy


Data Centre Energy

•Decision information •Allocation and attribution •Demand elasticity •Fixed energy consumption •Resource utilisation

Thank you

Liam Newcombe

CTO Romonet Ltd

[email protected]


Data Centre Energy

Data Centre Energy · Presentation to insert name here 8 Data Centre Energy Demand elasticity...

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