The Green Grid
Japan
The Green Grid
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” said John Tuccillo, chairman and president of the Green Grid and vice president of global industry and legislative initiatives at APC, a division of Schneider Electric (SU). Tuccillo was speaking at “A Call to Action for Data Center Efficiency,” a conference held at the New York Stock Exchange on October 2. He and other leaders in energy efficiency spoke to some 80 participants at the conference, which was co-hosted by the Green Grid, a three-year-old global consortium of about 200 companies, government agencies and educational institutions dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in business computing ecosystems. The full-day event included presentations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Department of Energy, the Green Grid delegates and corporate leaders.
The Green Grid
Participants praised the Green Grid’s creation of energy measurement tools as a motivator in improving data center efficiency. In particular, delegates pointed to the power usage effectiveness formula — widely known as PUE — which is total facility power divided by IT equipment power.
Another free new tool announced at the conference by the Green Grid: cooling maps that indicate locations in U.S., Europe and Japan where data centers can, according to Tuccillo, cool naturally through practices such as opening windows to reduce indoor temperature if fans, filtration systems, air flow and other factors permit.
EPA techniques that improve efficiency by 20 percent can mean savings of $15,000 per year in one data center.
The Green Grid also presented the results of a recently completed assessment of a mid-tier data center operated by the EPA, along with recommendations for next steps the EPA can follow to improve efficiency. “If the EPA can deploy techniques that improve efficiency by 20 percent, they can save $15,000 per year in this one data center,” Tuccillo said, adding that “IT market analysts from International Data Corp., a subsidiary of International Data Group, estimate that there are 75,000 similarly sized centers across the U.S., and if all of them could achieve that same level of savings, more than $1.1 billion in annual energy costs could be avoided in data centers across the country.”
Participants also learned about DC Pro, an online software tool the Department of Energy provides to help industries worldwide identify how energy is being consumed by their data centers and the best opportunities for savings.
Members of the industry panel discussed motives behind increasing efficiency at their data centers. Coach Inc. (COH) adopted widespread virtualization when it refurbished its main data center in 2005, said Serge Minassian, vice president of technology services for Coach. He is also currently undertaking a large storage consolidation initiative. The practices allow “not just energy reduction, but also reduction in maintenance, reduced software licensing costs and fewer staff,” he noted. “If we can get more out of what we have, I make fewer trips to the CFO’s office to ask for money.”
Conference participants indicate that the day provided useful food for thought — and action. “Learning from other companies and industries is very helpful,” says Harkeeret Singh, London-based head of data center energy optimization, technology operations for Thomson Reuters Corp. (TRI). “Thomson Reuters employees incorporate their experiences and work with the data center/IT industry to drive our own efficiency ambitions.” Adds Donough Roche, senior sales engineer at Digital Realty Trust Inc. (DLR): “The conference provided a great venue and mix of people. As a builder and outsourcer of data center solutions, we’re always interested in finding ways to improve efficiency and effectiveness for our customers and sharing these methods with the community.”
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The Green Grid members and energy providers are also enthusiastic about the information sharing. “It was extremely useful to hear in the panels the audience questions and the informal networking discussions about what is most on the mind of current and future practitioners of data center energy efficiency,” says Kathrin R. Winkler, chief sustainability officer at EMC Corp. (EMC) and a director of the Green Grid. “It is this kind of information that guides our activities to ensure the relevance of our work to the end-user community.”
Mark Bramfitt, principal program manager for PG&E Corp. (PCG), told attendees how his San Francisco utility provides incentives for companies to become more efficient. “The conference gave me the opportunity to reach influencers whose headquarters might be elsewhere, although they may have a data center in the Bay Area,” he says.
Bramfitt adds that the event allowed him to preach the gospel of energy efficiency to other company executives he might not ordinarily reach. “Fundamentally, PG&E feels a responsibility to share our knowledge,” he says. “Energy efficiency is a leadership issue, and it’s my job to potentially light a fire among my customers.”