Building the Green Data Center

By Wayne Epperson

There are a few reasons for building green, and fortunately for the environment, the business bottom line runs pretty parallel to the interests of the environment – cutting back on cooling and energy consumption means dollars saved

Environmentally conscious is a preferred business standard these days. And there is a wealth of data – appealing to both the sympathetic and the business-minded – making the case for companies to go green. In most businesses, however, the bottom line for green energy initiatives is the same as ever – reducing costs and improving earnings.

Fortunately for the environment, the bottom line for business runs pretty parallel to the bottom line for the planet in the hosting business, where power-hungry data centers account for a sizable chunk of operating expenses. If those operators can lower electricity consumption and costs while increasing efficiency – voila, they’ve joined the green revolution.

The best way for a hosting provider to go green would be to build their data center from the ground up with efficiency first on the list of directives. But if the data center already exists, it doesn’t make fiscal sense to tear it down, just to build a green one. In practical terms, there are a number of steps hosts can take to retrofit their existing operations to simultaneously reduce both their carbon footprint and operating expenses.

 

Last summer, Douglas J. Erwin, chairman and chief executive officer of Houston-based dedicated hosting giant The Planet challenged Jeff Lowenberg, vice president of facilities, to cut electricity costs by 10 percent across the board in 2008.

Though electricity rates in Texas are far from being the country’s highest, the line item for electrical power in The Planet’s budget ranks third or fourth among all operating expenses. And since Lowenberg couldn’t reduce the power required to run the data center’s servers, the only cost-cutting option he saw that could affect that level of savings was a cutback in cooling expenses.

First, he focused on the company’s 36,000-square-foot data center in Houston where 14,000 servers were consuming 3.5 megawatts of power. Then he set out to bandage the cooling of the data center to make it as efficient as possible.

That process involved rearranging floor tiles to better manage cold airflow; installing seals and grommets in the ceiling, walls and beneath the floors to reduce bypass airflow; installing blanking plates in all server cabinets to direct airflow more efficiently; and sealing the holes beneath 48 480-volt power distribution units to reduce bypass airflow. Koldlok and Plenaform products were used to seal the cracks, crevices and the areas around the power distribution units.

The Planet also invested $57,000 to extend the return air plenums on all 48 30-ton computer room air conditioning units. After the return air plenums were extended to within two feet of the ceiling, they could further reduce bypass airflow by cycling air from the hottest part of the data center.

Lowenberg discovered that standards set by the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers state that data centers can operate at 77 degrees and below and at about 45 percent relative humidity. So he increased the temperature settings on all computer room air conditioning units by an average of 10 degrees, and placed temperature monitors on the top of server cabinets to assure the data center would be cooled near the high end of the ASHRAE temperature standards.

He turned 16 of the CRAC units off after making the alterations because, with so much more cool air going where it needed to go – instead of going where it wasn’t needed – the data center cooling was over capacity.

During the data center’s pilot period, critical server loads increased by 5 percent, yet power used for cooling decreased by 31 percent. Overall, the data center’s power usage decreased by 13.5 percent.

“Five years ago, if you had come to me and said if you seal up these holes and move some of these tiles around you are going to save $200,000 in electricity in this one data center,” says Lowenberg, “I would have told you that you were crazy.”

But that’s just what happened. And the efficiency of that data center wasn’t bad to begin with. By following industry best practices, Lowenberg showed CEO Erwin the progression of power usage in the data center.

“He said, ‘Great, now you are going to save me 10 percent across the board next year,’” Lowenberg says.

The pilot project in Houston was rolled out to The Planet’s other five data centers, which house more than 50,000 servers and operate more than 150 CRAC units.

The improvements are expected to deliver cost savings of more than $1 million in 2008.

Lowenberg began running data centers 10 years ago and credits much of his education about improving data center efficiency to the white papers and other resources of The Uptime Institute and its Site Uptime Network.

Since The Planet is a network member, Lowenberg had the opportunity to deal directly with Robert F. “Dr. Bob” Sullivan, Ph.D., a senior staff member at the Uptime Institute, who conceived of the hot/cold aisle concept for cooling data centers in 1992.

“I’ve been able to spend a lot of time with him,” says Lowenberg, “asking a lot of questions and using his experience. It’s the simple stuff that makes a difference.”

All of the major work has been done in the other five data centers with similar gains in every case. Still some minor fine-tuning is going on in all six data centers in a quest for further improvements.

Attention to the energy consumption of data centers nationwide was brought into sharp focus last summer when the Environmental Protection Agency presented a report to US Congress on server and data center energy efficiency. In the report, the EPA put data center power usage in 2006 at a whopping 61 billion kilowatt-hours.

The EPA didn’t make any recommendations to Congress, but it is working on new Energy Star certifications for a range of products, including servers. In the opinion of The Uptime Institute, the EPA report should spur an industry-wide green data center movement.

One measurement used by the EPA and the Uptime Institute to determine the energy required to operate a data center’s servers is known as the “coefficient of efficiency.” The Planet’s rating had been 2.0, a good mark prior to the energy efficient project. Afterwards, it’s rating stood at 1.7, a near-ideal number.

In addition to Site Uptime Network, Lowenberg also relies on the Association For Computer Operations Management, an association providing education and resources for data center managers for more than 25 years. He recently attended AFCOM’s data center world conference held in Las Vegas.

“I didn’t invent anything,” he says of the pilot project. “It’s basically an industry best practices kind of thing that we went through and implemented.”

But what if he could start with a blank sheet and build a green data center? How would he go about doing that?

He doesn’t profess to be a green expert, but the first thing he would look at is locating the facility at a site where electricity is generated by some form of renewable energy, such as wind or hydro-electric power. One reason for that being renewable energy doesn’t produce a lot of greenhouse gases in creating energy, and in the case of hydro-electric power, it saves a lot of money on the electricity itself.

Lowenberg would also aim for a climate where, for a good part of the year, outside air temperature would aid water-side or air-side economization to help cool the data center.

Then, of course, he would implement all the best practices for managing airflow.

Another side of the green data center equation is the virtualization of servers. The Planet, however, cannot use virtualization to consolidate server use since most of its 22,000 small- and medium-size business customers run their own servers. 

One of the ways The Planet sells servers is directly off its Web site, where a customer selects the server and the software they want running on it. That server is provisioned automatically, there’s no hands-on process by The Planet. But for that process to work, servers must be up and running in the data center waiting for selection by a customer. Lowenberg wants to change that so the first part of the provisioning is to turn on the server automatically when a customer makes a selection.

“That in itself will probably save us about $100,000 a year,” he says.

Gartner, the IT research and advisory company, recently issued a report on conceptualizing green IT and data center power and cooling issues. The report dealt with three building blocks to a green IT strategy, and while much of it focused on corporate IT operations, many of the points were applicable to data centers as well.

The three building blocks recommended were: create a baseline of the environmental footprint; develop reasonable green objectives; and implement green practices with potential for significant impact.

At Affordable Internet Services Online, the plan to go green dates back to the company’s inception in 1997, when management made a strong commitment to help fight pollution and preserve natural resources.

“When we built the data center we made sure it was environmentally friendly through and through. We built it to be very energy-saving,” says Steven Craig, systems administrator.

The first step was to install solar panels. Because they represented a major up-front investment, they weren’t put in use until 2001. But since then, solar power has actually powered the servers in the data center and no energy has been pulled from so-called dirty power.
All of the data center equipment employed by the company, whose trademark is “Web Hosting As Nature Intended,” was chosen because of energy-saving features. The environmentally friendly components of its data center include solar tubes that bring in natural light from outside – the building has lots of windows so as to take advantage of the sunlight in southern California; specially-made water-cooled air conditioners, 50 to 60 percent more energy efficient than regular air conditions commonly found in data centers; a special device installed to actually clean the power when the air conditioner comes on so it doesn’t use more power than necessary; a green roof on the building – native low shrubbery, about three to four inches high and drought tolerant, is planted on the roof to naturally cool the building and thereby reduce heating and cooling costs by more than 50 percent.

After adding enhancements a few years ago, AISO’s data center has been totally green. The company is the first – and currently the only – public data center member of the US Green Building Council.

AISO invested between $500,000 and $750,000 to equip the data center as it is today. The solar panels alone cost $100,000. But the company is most pleased with its return on investment.

“Most data centers don’t do anything like this,” says Craig, “because one, they don’t think of it during the design process, which is the best time to do it. Then two, their cost would be two to three times, if not more, than ours because of the data center size and the way they do things for existing designs and operations.”

AISO doesn’t use much electricity and plans call for it to soon get rid of the batteries it uses with the solar panels and convert to a waste vegetable oil generator. Vegetable oil waste discarded by restaurants will be retrieved and used to power the generator.
“Batteries aren’t that environmentally friendly and they need changing out every five years, which isn’t a good long-term thing to be doing,” Craig says.

AISO has more than 50,000 customers worldwide, says Craig, and part of the company’s growth can be attributed to word of mouth about its eco-friendly operation. The company says it has been debt free from the beginning and does not lease any equipment. Its average growth rate is 20 percent a year and it expects that trend to increase over the next few years.

Another unique green initiative for the host will be the way the vegetable oil is heated. Instead of using 1,000 to 2,000 watts of power to heat the oil to run a diesel engine, AISO will build a compost pile where the temperature can reach 195 degrees. Barrels of oil will be placed within the compost pile and the liquid drawn out through treated PVC tubing so it remains at a consistent temperature. If it gets too hot inside the compost pile, an air fan will be used to cool the temperature.

Taking its green initiative another step, AISO will gather the components for the compost pile from tree trimmings and shrubs that landscaping companies would otherwise discard in landfills. The company says it will post the latest chapter in its green story on its website when the compost pile and waste vegetable oil program is in full swing.

Not all hosting providers aspire to be as environmentally friendly as AISO, but Craig does offer advice to those who want to be greener in their data centers. Start with small things like energy conservation through server virtualization, and replacing light bulbs with LED lighting or compact fluorescents, and solar tubes where possible.

“Start out with the small stuff because you have already got the data center in place and it’s going to be tough to go green with huge data centers that eat up a lot of power,” Craig says.

Meanwhile in Houston, Lowenberg continues to fine-tune his data centers. A few months into 2008, he’s working toward that goal CEO Erwin set for him. If Lowenberg can save $1 million in power costs this year, will he reach that 10 percent cut Erwin asked for?

“It’s going to get me real close,” he says.

Tags: AFCOM, AISO, cooling, data center, EPA, renewable energy, solar, The Planet, trade show, Uptime Institute, virtualization