A detail area from the infographic for this issue's Innovate column.
For the current ‘Innovate’ column in Sierra magazine, I took a look at what’s being done to green the data center. The task was challenging not just because data centers themselves are complex, or because energy efficiency is hard to explain, but because creating an infographic that shows how these two interact was enough to make my brain bleed. I hope the graphic (done with graphic designer Brian Kaas) is understandable, and I welcome your comments on how it turned out.
Data centers have long been energy hogs, mainly because it takes so much air conditioning to keep thousands of servers from overheating. Meanwhile, these computing powerhouses continue to multiply and grow as more and more computing work occurs in ‘the cloud.” Now data centers are caught in two competing crosscurrents of the early 21st Century: the need for ever-greater computing power and the need to reduce our carbon footprint and energy use. How do we meet the burgeoning demand for data centers and have them collectively make less impact?
While researching this story I learned about the metric of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) that has become the industry standard in the last few years. You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and now that power usage can be measured, data centers are becoming dramatically more efficient. But PUE doesn’t tell the whole story. Organizations like The Green Grid are pressing forward on creating other metrics to reduce the footprint of data centers, such as Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE).
Other efforts are afoot to make data centers work in tandem with sources of renewable energy, like solar and wind farms. A few months ago I wrote about one such research push being made by HP, AMD, and NYSERDA. But the field is young, and it will probably be years before anyone can boast that they are Googling entirely on power drawn from the sun.
Christian Belady
The profile subject for this month’s column is Christian Belady, the general manager for data center research at Microsoft. Belady is credited by many as the creator of the PUE metric and is a leader in prodding his employer toward greater computing efficiency. As a lover of camping, I was amused to hear Belady’s story about how he help start the drive toward energy-sipping data centers by shoving some servers into a tent during the Seattle winter, to show that they could operate just fine without all that wasteful air conditioning. Now that’s my kind of tough love.
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