Energy-Arizona^1.4

http://www.forbes.com/business/energy/2007/08/20/green-servers-virtualization-tech-07egang-cx_ag_0820datacenter.html

Andy Greenberg, 08.21.07, 6:00 AM ET

The Internet doesn't produce belching smokestacks or toxin-spewing drainpipes. Instead, the environmental impact of the data centers that power the Web and private networks is about as visible as the electrons moving around a company's servers.

But visible or not, the ecological and economic costs of those servers are massive. A report released last week by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that U.S. data centers (collections of computers used to power businesses' and government agencies' IT infrastructures and Web sites) consumed around 61 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006 at a cost of about $4.5 billion. That's about 1.5% of total U.S. electricity consumption, more than the electricity used by American televisions, or equivalent to the output of about 15 typical power plants.

As the Internet expands and data centers multiply, networking hardware is only getting more power-hungry. U.S. server energy consumption is more than twice what it was in 2000, the EPA's report says, and by 2011, it's expected to nearly double again.

But there's also good news: In an industry where yesterday's servers are tomorrow's doorstops, that data center power-crunch could potentially be outpaced by innovation. Moore's Law, which states that computing power doubles every two years, also applies roughly to server efficiency, says David Douglas, Sun Microsystem's vice president of eco-responsibility. That means new, energy-saving servers quickly pay for themselves.

"It turns out there are a lot of gains to be made from easy, low-hanging-fruit projects," says Douglas. He describes a server upgrade on one of Sun's own data centers last June that turned 22 outmoded servers into 11 modern machines, whose processors run at a slower speed but are capable of far more simultaneous tasks. That test case cut the center's energy use by about 93%, saving Sun about enough to recoup the project's $300,000 cost in just three years.

And Sun isn't the only company who could benefit. Instead of growing, U.S. data center energy costs could actually be slashed by as much as 55% if state-of-the-art technology was fully implemented, according to the EPA.

The biggest hope for that technological transformation may be a process called virtualization. Most traditional servers do nothing for about 90% of their lives and continue to burn about half their peak energy consumption even while idle. Virtualization turns each of those underperforming machines into pieces of software and packs them together on a single physical server that runs continuously.

The savings from that consolidation can be dramatic. "The result is that a hundred physical servers turns into seven," says Steve Kaplan, chief executive of the IT consultancy AccessFlow. "That means you eliminate the energy use of 93 servers, the air conditioning you would have used to cool them, the back up generators for them, even the lighting you needed in the bigger data center."

For every server that's virtualized, a company saves around $560 a year, according to VMware, the fast-growing technology company that pioneered the process. Three California power companies are also offering cash rebates for every server its customers remove through virtualization.

"The Googles of the world are growing up, and using more online applications than ever," says Mark Bramfitt of Pacific Gas and Electric, which offers its customers rebates of as much as $300 per virtualized server. "There are phenomenal opportunities for energy conservation. These data centers use 50 to 100 times the power per square foot of an office building."

In fact, Google and PG&E are two of the big names that launched an environmental technology consortium in June known as Climate Savers Computing Initiative. The group, which also includes Yahoo!, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems and Advanced Micro Devices, aims to drastically cut the energy wasted by computing devices, with the goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 54 million tons a year and saving $5.5 billion in energy costs by 2010.

More recently, a somewhat overlapping group of tech heavyweights called the Green Grid, including Intel, HP, Dell, Microsoft, IBM, Sun and AMD, announced a "roadmap" for the IT industry's adoption of more efficient data center hardware. Jim Pappas, Intel's representative to the group, says the group's recommendations still haven't been decided; the goal for now is to develop rigorous standards for green IT infrastructure.

"Meaningful metrics are what really matter," Pappas says. "When you can see a car's mileage, it really changes the way you think about buying. It causes competition and innovation."

But Bogomil Balkansky, director of product marketing for virtualization company VMware, is even more ambitious. "Instead of incremental improvements, we want to get rid of servers in a wholesale fashion," he says. "People talk about increasing car mileage. But imagine if we could remove millions of cars from the highway altogether."

Cut Your IT Energy Costs

Most of us never see the rooms filled with servers that run corporate networks and Web sites. But if you run a business, you're likely to see their effects on your energy bill. As America's information technology infrastructure grows, servers in data centers around the country now account for more power consumption than televisions and cost $4.5 billion in electricity last year. At that rate, implementing green IT is no longer a matter of being a good Samaritan.

"This isn't about green for goodness' sake," says Richard Hodges, a consultant with GreenIT. "This is about a substantial return on investment."

Upgrade Your Servers

At the rate that servers chew through power, it doesn't take long for a hardware upgrade to pay for itself. Sun Microsystems, for instance, says its Niagara servers offer 60% greater efficiency over previous models. In some of the company's own IT improvement projects, new servers have saved more money within the first year than they cost originally, according to Sun's Vice President of Eco-Responsibility Dave Douglas. Later this year, a group of tech companies called the Green Grid plans to make the benefits of upgrading more measurable, releasing metrics that rate servers by their energy use.

Virtualize Your Servers

Most data center servers sit idle for about 90% of their lives. During that downtime, they still consume energy at as much as half their peak rate, take up space and give off heat that has to be combatted with cooling systems. VMware has a solution: The company converts physical servers into software and stores several on a single machine. The result is a dramatic consolidation of data center machines, turning as many as 10 machines into one. VMware says companies save around $560 a year in energy bills for every virtualized server.

Cool Servers More Efficiently

All the power flowing into servers produces heat, and cooling them off with air conditioners takes more power. But simple measures can cut cooling costs. Removing the tangled wires on data center floors can unblock the flow of cool air beneath server racks, says GreenIT's Richard Hodges. Servers should also be turned so that hot air coming out of their back panels is pulled away, instead of mixing with cool air from air conditioners. Systems that use liquid coolants server racks rather than air conditioning may also be more energy efficient.

Strip Down Your PCs

Servers aren't the only energy hogs in the IT infrastructure; so are the increasingly powerful and power-hungry PCs on every employee's desk. Just switching to a laptop saves as much as 90% of power consumption, according to GreenIT's Richard Hodges. Even better, implement a thin client system, where employees use barebones desktop machines as terminals that connect to a centralized server. A company called NComputing offers another solution: a system in which many employees connect to a single PC via a small terminal machine about the size of a bible, with as many as 10 users sharing a single PC.

Turn PCs Off

Most enterprises leave desktop PCs running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Leaving computers on at night costs Americans $1.72 billion a year, according to a study by the software company 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy. Encouraging employees to turn off computers when they leave work can save a midsize company $165,000 a year, the study claims. Another solution, offered by the software company Verdiem, automates the process. By monitoring the use of machines around a company's network, the company's Surveyor software finds downtime in employees' schedules and shuts off their computers appropriately.

Converge Your Cables

Every year, around 1.5 billion pounds of copper is freshly mined to produce IT cables. Those wires are then "jacketed" in materials that contain lead and other harmful chemicals proven to cause cancer, birth defects and diabetes. One way to cut cable consumption is putting telephones and the Internet on a single system, using voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) technologies similar to Skype and Vonage. VoIP also cuts energy costs; in a project with Cisco, GreenIT found that voice and data convergence allowed an office to cut its number of power-drawing devices in half.

Encourage Telecommuting

Why have employees drive up your energy bill when they'd rather use their own resources? Encouraging employees to telecommute can save real estate space, cut power bills and increase employees' productivity. Sun Microsystems provides its telecommuting employees with thin clients to save energy and allow them a secure connection to the company's network. By their calculations, Sun's telecommuters prevented 29,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from being released last year, and worked for 60% of the time they would have spent on their daily commute.