The Greening of Data Centers

By Amy Quinton on Tuesday, April 22, 2008.

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You may think telecommuting, online business meetings, or emails may be the more environmentally friendly way to save energy.
But the large data centers and server farms that provide that technology are not green at all.
Data centers are the S-U-V’s of the tech world – guzzling one and a half percent of the nation’s energy supply.
As New Hampshire Public Radio’s Amy Quinton reports, efforts are underway to make data centers more green, but it might not be easy.

Walk into any data center and the first thing you’re likely to hear is this…
(nats)
That’s the combined sound of more than 200 servers and the roar of air conditioning and powerful fans.
(Two rows of racks, one row here and the other row was this one up here….)

The servers, each one about the size of a pizza box, sit in racks 6 feet tall, inside the data center of lighting manufacturer Osram Sylvania in Manchester.

I-T Manager Dan Wilson says it takes a lot of power to run this place.

"when I first took over I got the bill for the electricity and I said, wow, that’s a big bill”

Until last year, this data center was using 125-thousand kilowatt hours every month.
Data centers have to manage this energy puzzle: First it takes power to run the servers.
But each server can crank out more heat than a small space heater.
Too much heat and the servers shut down.
So running a data center is like running a bunch of space heaters inside a huge refrigerator.
In 2005 alone, data centers in the U-S used enough power to run nearly 6 million homes.
Jon Koomey, a project scientist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, says data center energy use doubled from 2000 to 2005 and will likely do so again by 2011 if present trends continue.
As a result, the power bill to run a computer over its lifetime will cost more than the computer itself.

“typically in these facilities about half the electricity is associated with the computers, and half is associated with cooling and the losses associated with getting the power to the computers.”

Cooling these energy hogs is a huge problem.
Osram Sylvania’s data center was using two 30 ton air conditioners and one seven ton a/c unit for their 2,000 square foot data center.
The company hired Milford based Degree Controls, a company that specializes in technologies designed to make data centers more energy efficient.
Degree Controls C-E-O Eric Birch says traditional ways of cooling powerful servers aren’t necessarily the best.

"what happens now is that people run into a hot spot and they say, oh I have a thermal problem and I must have a thermal solution, add more air conditioning. The fact is they already have too much air conditioning in total, they’re just not getting the cold air where they need it.”

Osram Sylvania had that problem, so Degree Controls installed a new air flow system to help.
It uses temperature sensors that can tell when a rack of servers is overheating.
The sensors turn on fans placed underneath to speed up and cool just that one rack.
Other technologies allow multiple computers or servers to be combined onto one server.
I-T Manager Dan Wilson says 18 racks of servers were taken out, replaced with only three.
Between the two approaches, the company cut its electric use by 25-percent.
"that comes out to about 20,000 dollars a year that’s a significant amount, and electricity is only going to go up so it’s an ongoing savings over the years. We figure we’ll get paid back within at least a year on that with the way we were using electricity."

Rising energy costs give companies plenty of incentive to make data centers more efficient and a little easier on the environment.
But so far, no one has come up with a solution that gets data centers out of the basic paradox of needing to run a space heater inside a refrigerator and having to pay for the power to do both.
For NHPR news, I’m Amy Quinton.