Environmental connections

CXO. Can you give a brief overview of the main objectives behind The Green Grid?

Rich Shuckle. Ultimately, we knew at the outset that in order to solve the issues our customers are facing regarding overall data centre energy efficiency concerns, we needed to step back and look at the bigger picture. When we looked at the holistic picture of the data centre and other information service type of groups – between all the silicon vendors, hardware vendors, power and cooling vendors, etc. – we all needed to communicate better, understand the scope of the problem and then make sure our technology and equipment had the capabilities to address this challenge.

The Green Grid is a consortium dedicated to developing and promoting energy efficiency for data centres and other information services through defining meaningful user centric models and metrics. Today we all have various metrics and models so we ultimately need to speak the same language and have the same targets. The next piece is to develop standards, measurement methods, processes and any new technologies to help improve the performance against those defined metrics. Once we figure out the end goal and the real target for the user, we need to figure out ways that we can communicate, interrelate and improve the overall situation. Getting those standards adopted, the processes, the measurements and any new technologies is the real goal and mission for The Green Grid.

CXO. What would you say are the advantages for both end users and vendors to support or participate in The Green Grid?

Bruce Shaw. The highest advantage to the entire organisation and to the community is we are striving to enable the ability to save power while being able to do more computing, which is always the goal of IT. It’s really only gone in one direction since the beginning of information sharing, which is up and to the right in terms of the scale, capacity and desire to do more with either a stable or lesser amount of power, which given the bigger picture, is clearly very important for us. Being able to set that language is crucial to that first step in that discussion.

Once the language is set we can then as an industry focus on the holistic effort as opposed to looking at various pieces. If you were unable to look at it as an ecosystem or as a holistic organisation, two problems suddenly arise. One is you fail against the ultimate measurement, which is how much power do you pull from your local power station. The other piece is that you may end up doing things that, while you believe they are helping your situation, they may actually be making it worse because you’re not able to look at the holistic picture.

A very simple example is a company installed an air conditioning system to cool their data centre by adding additional cooling. They then later thought they had to add another one. What they really had done when they took a look at the holistic system is they added one air conditioner to cool the second one because the first one was simply pulling the air in the wrong direction across their data centre floor and it was creating a convection current. If you’re not able to measure and look at the data centre as a whole, suddenly you may have greatly increased the amount of power and created more problems and layered one on top of the other. We want to save energy, we want to make a common language that everyone can work to, we want to drive innovation to the industry, but ultimately, we want to help people make smart choices.

CXO. Just looking at the top issues today related to power management, what efforts are you making to not only raise awareness but also encourage vendors and users to take actions to tackle those issues?

RS. One of the things we did initially when we started this long-term effort to develop all these new technologies and specifications, we identified a number of areas that you could call low-hanging fruit, the best practices in the data centre that people could follow today yet only some of the more knowledgeable folks knew about, or people just hadn’t internalized.

Right now we’re really pulling together the right folks and pulling together the industry to identify these new metrics, new directions and really drive the technology going forward to address the need for energy efficiency. The next question is how to move forward as an industry and make the transition to future technologies and products so customers can understand how to best take advantage of them as they become available.

CXO. What are your plans for establishing industry standards?

BS. Our plans for establishing industry standards first go back to the notion that before you can set a standard, you have to agree on how to measure. Once you have an agreement on measurement, then you can set targets. While we as an organisation would like to get to the point where we’re able to very clearly issue targets and give a notion of what is good for the industry and for the corporation, you first have to set the language, then you can talk about the benchmark you’re striving to achieve for this or that type of application or this piece of hardware, etc.

RS. We’ve set up a technical committee and broken it down into four different working groups, each concentrating on its own piece of the problem. We have a group that’s concentrated on data collection and analysis; and we’re going to work with the member companies to collect and aggregate all the useful data that we can get on data centre characteristics and performance that’s out there.

The second group is a data centre technology and strategy working group, and they’re investigating and providing guidance on existing and emerging technologies that help address data centre energy efficiency. This can be anything from different ways to run utilities in to different types of IT equipment, so for example, to help identify if you’re looking for this type of data centre, it makes sense that you look at ‘x’ technology or if you’re running that type of data centre, your best bet is to look at ‘y’ type of technologies.

The third group is a data centre operations group. If you look at the data centre and compute requirements, those vary all the time on a day-to-day basis, so how do we set up these use models and identify the sort of operating scenarios that happen on a day-to-day basis? For example, the compute power out of your data centre might not be the same during the day as it is during the night. So how do you get to that use model and then how do you improve the efficiency on a day-to-day basis?

The fourth working group is this concept of metrics and measurements, so they’re concentrating on identifying the right way to measure a data centre and how to develop the right performance characteristics of all the things that go into a data centre so that we can properly measure ourselves and see how well we’re doing. The first thing in any closed loop process is you’ve got to figure out how to measure yourself so you that can make improvements over time.

CXO. How has the formation of The Green Grid helped to assimilate vendor efforts and promote collaboration in finding new ways to measure and reduce power consumption?

BS. The mere fact that you have the kind of companies that have founded The Green Grid come together, if you look at the roster of names, many of them work together but many of them are also fierce business competitors. So having a body of equals that can come together, start this dialogue, and form these technical workgroups, is different than anything that’s happened in the industry before. Clearly it’s a recognition of the magnitude of the problem and a recognition that it transcends any one company’s ability to solve it. This is going to require an industry effort that’s very large to even begin to address the problem.

CXO. Do you advocate any particular technologies in helping to promote efficiency in the data centre?

BS. We’re in the process now where we’re looking at the technologies that go into a data centre and understanding how to measure them to create a common language around looking at them as opposed to saying one is better than the other. One of the great challenges that’s faced by the industry is there won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution for data centres or for enterprise customers. It’s going to vary and that really is what drives the notion of sharing best practices. There are potentially multiple existing standards out there as well as ones that haven’t been invented yet. It really is going to come down to being smart about the way that you look at the problem that you are trying to solve, given the resource envelope that you have, and doing it in the most efficient manner possible.

RS. Our goal is not to endorse any particular technology but to allow customers to understand better how that technology fits into their environment. So fundamentally having a metric that a customer understands and trusts, so he or she can understand how one technology may be better for his or her environment than another.

CXO. How would you rate the technology industry overall today in terms of their responsiveness to addressing the rise of power and cooling costs in the data centre?

BS. While certainly there’s a lot of work to be done, the fact that you see companies that are such fierce competitors coming together to work on this problem is unprecedented in terms of its impact and scope. I think the industry as a whole has responded incredibly quickly with positive speed and energy to address this. This isn’t something that has been mandated by any one company; it’s a collaborative effort and that speaks volumes in and of itself.

RS. There’s always room for improvement. The real change comes when customers start asking for these types of things, and I think the message has been pretty clear across the industry that this has been a growing concern in the customer base. The growing use of compute resources is also a big part of the issue; it’s become a much bigger challenge as the appetite for compute power has just gone up immensely in the last couple years.

CXO. What’s your future outlook for the organisation and the overall state of data centre and power management cooling over the next five years?

BS. I think the last five years have seen a tremendous evolution. If you look at the amount of compute power that’s out there, I don’t think those trends will change. I don’t think any of us see the desire for information content or online delivery of multiple media types decreasing, and certainly companies will continue to invest in information technology as both a profit centre and competitive advantage, so we see the need and the problem only becoming more significant. Over the coming years, The Green Grid, by starting this industry dialogue and driving to set standards, will provide a framework upon which to build as well as a data collection point to indicate where we’re heading.

About the contributors

Bruce Shaw, Director of Server and Workstation Marketing at AMD, is responsible for AMD’s commercial product marketing strategy and execution as well as joint go-to-market strategies with Tier 1 partners.

Rich Schuckle is a Senior Technical Staff member in Dell’s CTO Office. He is a leading technologist in the core architecture team, driving product architecture directions based on future processor and memory technologies, power management and thermal trends.

About The Green Grid

The Green Grid is a major industry group dedicated to driving efficiency in the data centre, founded by eleven companies: AMD, APC, Dell, HP, ICXO, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun Microsystems and VMware. As the rapid rise of power and cooling costs in the data centre has become a top concern across the IT industry, the global consortium seeks to open channels of communication by bringing together key IT players and competitors alike to address the problems around data centre power management and cooling.

Founded in February of 2007, the growing collaborative group is connecting both vendors and users in the IT industry to collectively help find new ways to measure and reduce power consumption. The group aims to improve data centre efficiency by defining meaningful, user-centric models and metrics; developing standards, measurement methods, processes and new technologies to improve performance against the defined metrics; and promoting the adoption of energy efficient standards, processes, measurements and technologies.

The Green Grid’s chief objective is working to first create a common language in order to define, measure and develop metrics and best practices around efficiency in the data centre that can be employed industry-wide. Through education and establishment of measurement standards, the group hopes to set a new precedent in the efforts around improving data centre power efficiency.