Data Center Efficiency Is More Practical Than Altruistic

Viridity Software is a green technology, so you might imagine that the inspiration for our company was to help data centers be environmentally correct. And you’d be right; that was part of it. At Viridity Software, we try to be environmentally correct. (You will find a few SUVs in our employee parking lot, and I have seen the cleaning crew use bleach to clean the bathrooms.) But truth be told, the inspiration for us at Viridity was more practical than altruistic. Green tech is often labeled as expensive--its implementation difficult and inconsistent with existing infrastructure.

Our path couldn’t be more different. We’re all for the greater good. But our motivation with Viridity has really always been about solving business problems—specifically about data center efficiency. 

Prior to co-founding Viridity Software, I was hired as a consultant for a software company that worked closely with the data centers of large Wall Street companies. I was actually working on a storage project in a data center; we really had nothing to do with data center efficiency or energy resource management.

Still, you couldn’t help but notice the chaos running amuck at these organizations. For the guys in IT, it was all about business applications. On the facilities’ side, it was all about where to put them. Too often, IT had no idea of the strain inflicted on the data center with the addition of new computers and applications. At the same time, data center operators had only vague notions about available remaining energy at their sites. They couldn’t really tell you how close they were to running out of power. Sometimes, the whole enterprise seemed to be hanging by a thread.

Ultimately, all that inefficiency—coupled with communication breakdowns—has to catch up with a business. And it did. At one of those very large Wall Street data centers, the IT department put in a requisition for $25 million in new storage arrays—a significant investment, but certainly worth it from a business standpoint. So the requisition was approved, and the equipment was ordered, purchased, and delivered.  It wasn’t until after the arrays were actually installed on the data center floor that someone said, “You know, you can’t actually plug those puppies in, there isn’t enough power….”  

Data and business systems were clearly the dominant concern here--energy less so. Until they ran out of power. No one checked with the data center, which already ran beyond capacity. That $25 million investment sat there on the data center floor, quietly not doing anything useful but annoy people, indefinitely. Rockin’ good use of dough.

Suddenly, energy resource management became a huge concern at the site. To make room for the new arrays, our group switched focus and spent the next six months chasing down and analyzing applications and hardware from an energy-demand standpoint, trying to figure out what applications we could move to other data centers to make room on the grid for the arrays. Unfortunately, we never made much headway. The data center maintained such a tangled collection of applications and servers and racks from different providers that the discovery process was next to impossible. We left before the job was finished. I wonder sometimes if those arrays were ever powered on ;-)  

What kills me is that this is not some isolated situation. It’s common. When I talk to clients and analysts about Viridity, I always bring up that story. It’s such a vivid anecdote about the need for energy resource management tools, and the connection between IT and facilities that it demands. And every time I bring it up, the response from customers is the same. I get a familiar nod of recognition. It seems data centers everywhere face the same problem. They need tools to make better use of the energy they have and to make informed business decisions. 

Green is the gravy.  

-- Michael Rowan, Co-founder and CTO, Viridity Software

Meet the Author of "The Green and Virtual Data Center"

Industry veteran Greg Schulz has written a great book called The Green and Virtual Data Center and we liked it so much, we invited him to do a webinar with us in July. (Stay tuned for details.)

Greg explains how data centers can use many of the technologies that exist now that allow  a green and efficient virtual data center to support and sustain business growth with reasonable return on investment.

Throughout the book, Greg offers his real-world insight in addressing best practices, server, software, storage, networking, and facilities issues concerning any current or next-generation virtual data centers. This book covers:

• Energy as well as data footprint reduction
• Cloud-based storage and computing
• Intelligent and adaptive power management
• Server, storage, and networking virtualization
• Tiered servers; storage, network, and data centers
• Energy avoidance and energy efficiency

We hope you can join Greg Schulz and Michael Rowan, Viridity Software's co-founder and CTO for the webinar.  We'll be giving away copies of The Green and Virtual Data Center to two attendees.  The live webinar will include a presentation by Greg, a demo of Viridity EnergyCenter by Mike, and will be open for Q&A afterwards.

>> Register for Webinar

About the Book:

• Hardcover: 396 pages (coming soon to the Amazon Kindle)
• Publisher: CRC/Auerbach Publications; January 26, 2009
• Language: English (but soon to be out in Chinese)

Information Week Interviews Viridity Exec at Interop 2010

In April, several energy resource managment experts from Viridity Sofware headed out to Las Vegas to Interop 2010.  Michael Tresh, Viridity Software's Director of Product Management, was interviewed by Information Week at the show.  Watch as Mike discusses the efficiency gains customers are realizing when they deploy Viridity EnergyCenter in their data centers.

Getting Started on a More Energy Efficient Data Center

On May 13, 2010 at 12:00 p.m. EST, Jed Scaramella, senior research analyst for IDC's Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends, IDC and Mike Rowan, CTO, Viridity Software will discuss how to get started on a more efficient data center.

Jed Scaramella will be presenting his latest research:  “Data Center Energy Management:  How Rising Costs, High Density, and Virtualization Are Making Energy Management a Requirement for IT Availablity.”  This IDC Insight provides an overview of energy efficiency in the datacenter, the business impacts from power and cooling challenges, and how energy management solutions can balance the needs of controlling operating expenses and delivering the required SLAs.  The study examines the worldwide server energy expense by the size of datacenter and provides historical and forecast data for the increasing server and rack densities. It also examines the energy savings customers have realized through virtualization and how the required increase in memory levels for virtualized systems have impacted server power consumption. An analysis of datacenter energy management is provided that includes a basic taxonomy, the different components and capabilities of the solutions, and a brief overview of the types of vendors in the market.

Mike Rowan will be discussing Viridity Software and will give a demonstration of Viridity EnergyCenter software.

To sign up for the webinar, click here.

Earth Day Tip - How to Save Energy When Your Computer is Not in Use

Vampire Computers

Vampire electronics are a well-known problem.  All those microwaves, set top boxes, and game consoles suck up lots of electricity even when they are turned off.

I decided to look at the problem for personal computers.  I have a Mac laptop at work, and a Dell desktop at home.  Both of them go into “sleep” or “standby” mode when I’m not using them, and both are still drawing power (presuming the laptop is plugged in, which it is most nights).  Part of my initial motivation was that the Dell in standby mode has a bright blue LED on the front panel that blinks, and when the rest of my house is dark that blinking light is bright and annoying.

Hibernate:  I made two improvements to both computers.  First improvement:  get the computer to really sleep.  What I mean by “real sleep” is like what Windows XP used to do in “hibernate” mode:  the computer saves a complete copy of all the programs that are running, then turns itself completely off, then when it restarts it can recover the states of all the programs that were running and all the windows that were open before it went to sleep.

Windows and Mac computers have different “sleep modes” that can be set by software, in ways that are unfortunately well hidden.  The terminology is also difficult.  The terms “sleep”, “standby”, “hibernate”, “safe sleep”, “hybrid sleep”, and others are used for different kinds of sleep, and have changed over the years, and are different between the Mac and Windows.   “Hibernate” seems to be the term that makes the computers do what I think is the right thing.  

Smart power strip:  the second improvement I made was to use a “smart power strip”.  Lots of computers have several peripheral devices attached: printer,  external monitor, powered speakers, etc.  The idea is to turn off all the peripheral devices when the computer is off, and turn them on when the computer is running.  Each peripheral device can be a vampire too, using a little bit of power all night even when the computer is turned off.

A smart power strip has one main device plugged into one of its plugs, and other devices in its other plugs.  When the main device is on, power goes to the other devices, and when the main device is turned off the power is shut off to all the other devices.   

Results:  here are the results I got, in watts:

	Running	Dumb sleep, normal power strip	Hibernate, smart power strip
Mac + monitor + printer	99	8	1
PC + monitor + printer	121	10	2

With all the improvements I made, there’s still a little bit of electricity being used.  The numbers in the right column are still not 0 watts.

Price of sleeping computer:  the PC+monitor+printer using the factory settings, sleeping at night, are using 10 watts of power.  That’s like having a lamp on all night, with a dim 10 watt bulb.  It’s not a huge amount of power but it’s something.

Doing the math, 8 watts * 24 hours * 365 days / 1000 = 70.08 kilowatts per year.  The price of residential electricity where I live is 14.81 cents per kWH, so the electricity cost savings per year for my sleeping PC is $10.37.  My computer isn’t really sleeping all year, but it’s sleeping a lot more hours than it’s awake.

Environment:  saving $10 per year on electricity for one computer is not huge, but it’s something.  If lots of people did it, it would add up to saving a lot of electricity and greenhouse gases and pollution.  On the other hand saving 80% of the electricity that the computer would otherwise be using during those off hours is big.

Vampire electronics suck.  Let’s kill some vampires!

To Microsoft and Apple:  I wish you would include “hibernate” as a default mode in the menus, along with “sleep”, the way it used to be on Windows XP.  It shouldn’t be such an obscure option.

Downside:  after hibernation the computer starts up more slowly.  It’s a little slower for the PC, a lot slower for the Mac.  The reason Microsoft and Apple have default sleep modes that aren’t very good for saving energy is market demand.  People want their computers to start up immediately.  Maybe that will change as people realize the cost to the environment of always-on “vampire” computers.

 

Details and References

Vampire electronics-#1

Vampire electronics-#2

Price of  electricity

Computers used for measurement:  MacBook Pro with Mac OS 10.5.8, Dell Inspiron 530 desktop with Windows 7 Pro, Dell 2407WFP monitor, HP Photosmart C4250 printer.

Explaining sleep & hibernate on Windows 7

Enabling hibernate on Windows 7

Enabling hibernate on Mac

Measuring power use of different electronic devices

Smart power strip

 

Mitch Gart, Principal Software Engineer

Viridity on 10 hot tools for the next-generation data center

Viridity EnergyCenter makes the list of 10 hot tools for the next-generation data center

In a recent Computerworld article, Beth Schultz chose Viridity EnergyCenter as a product that makes life easier for data center managers. She writes that what makes EnergyCenter interesting is that “Most power monitoring tools focus on the physical infrastructure. This is limiting, Viridity says, in that it provides data center managers no insight as to why power is being consumed. Viridity's software examines how applications consume energy – and then recommends how to eliminate inefficiencies. If the Viridity software delivers as promised, it should prove a boon for data center managers looking to increase energy efficiencies.”

To learn more about Viridity EnergyCenter download our free white paper on improving data center efficiency.