Green Grid Archives

October 14, 2009March 11, 2022

PUE, Are you Managing Power, Energy or Productivity?

With a renewed focus on Green IT including energy Efficiency and Optimization of servers, storage, networks and facilities, is your focus on managing power, energy, or, productivity?

For example, do you use or are interested in metrics such as Greengrid PUE or 80 Plus efficient power supplies along with initiatives such as EPA Energy Star for servers and emerging Energy Star for Data Center for Storage in terms of energy usage?

Or are you interested in productivity such as amount of work or activity that can be done in a given amount of time,or how much information can be stored in a given footprint (power, cooling, floor space, budget, management)?

For many organizations, there tends to be a focus and in both managing power along with managing productivity. The two are or should interrelated, however there are some disconnects with some emphasis and metrics. For example, the Green grid PUE is a macro facilities centric metric that does not show the productivity, quality or measure of services being delivered by a data center or information factory. Instead, PUE provides a gauge of how the habitat, that is the building and power distribution along with cooling are efficient with respect to the total energy consumption of IT equipment.

As a refresher, PUE is a macro metric that is essentially a ratio of how much total power or energy goes into a facility vs. the amount of energy used by IT equipment. For example, if 12Kw (smaller room/site) or 12Mw (larger site) are required to power an IT data center or computer room for that matter, and of that energy load, 6kWh or 6Mw, the PUE would be 2. A PUE of 2 is an indicator that 50% of energy going to power a facility or computer room goes towards IT equipment (servers, storage, networks, telecom and related equipment) with the balance going towards running the facility or environment which typically has had the highest percentage being HVAC/cooling.

In the case of EPA Energy Star for Data Centers which initially is focused on the habitat or facility efficiency, the answer is measuring and managing energy use and facility efficiency as opposed to productivity or useful work. The metric for EPA Energy Star for Data Center initially will be Energy Usage Effectiveness (EUE) that will be used to calculate a ratting for a data center facility. Those data centers in the top25 percentile will qualify for Energy Star certification.

Note the word energy and not power which means that the data center macro metric based on Green grid PUE rating looks at all source of energy used by a data center and not just electrical power. What this means is that a macro and holistic facilities energy consumption could be a combination of electrical power, diesel, propane or natural gas or other fuel sources to generate or create power for IT equipment, HVAC/Cooling and other needs. By using a metric that factor in all energy sources, a facility that uses solar, radiant, heat pumps, economizers or other techniques to reduce demands on energy will make a better rating.

By using a macro metric such as EUE or PUE (ratio = Total_Power_Used / IT_Power_Needs), a starting point is available to decide and compare efficiency and cost to power or energize a facility or room also known as a habitat for technology.

Managing Productivity of Information Factories (E.g. Data Centers)
What EUE and PUE do not reflect or indicate is how much data is processed, moved and stored by servers, storage and networks within a facility. On the other hand or extreme from macro metrics are micro or component metrics that gauge energy usage on an individual device basis. Some of these micro metrics may have activity or productivity indicator measurements associated with them, some don’t. Where these leave a big gap and opportunity is to fill the span between the macro and micro.

This is where work is being done by various industry groups including SNIA GSI, SPC and SPEC among others along with EPA Energy Star among others to move beyond macro PUE indicators to more granular effectiveness and efficiency metrics that reflect productivity. Ultimately productivity is important to gauge, the return on investment and business value of how much data can be processed by servers, moved via networks or stored on storage devices in a given energy footprint or cost.

In Figure 1 are shown four basic approaches (in addition to doing nothing) to energy efficiency. One approach is to avoid energy usage, similar to following a rationing model, but this approach will affect the amount of work that can be accomplished. Another approach is to do more work using the same amount of energy, boosting energy efficiency, or do same amount of work (or storage data) however with less energy.

Tiered Storage
Figure 1 the Many Faces of Energy Efficiency Source: The Green and Virtual Data Center(CRC)

The energy efficiency gap is the difference between the amount of work accomplished or information stored in a given footprint and the energy consumed. In other words, the bigger the energy efficiency gap, the better, as seen in the fourth scenario, doing more work or storing more information in a smaller footprint using less energy. Clock here to read more about Shifting from energy avoidance to energy efficiency.

Watch for new metrics looking at productivity and activity for servers, storage and networks ranging from MHz or GHz per watt, transactions or IOPS per watt, bandwidth, frames or packets processed per watt or capacity stored per watt in a given footprint. One of the confusing metrics is Gbytes or Tbytes per watt in that it can mean storage capacity or bandwidth, thus, understand the context of the metric. Likewise watch for metrics that reflect energy usage for active along with in-active including idle or dormant storage common with archives, backup or fixed content data.

What this all means is that work continues on developing usable and relevant metrics and measurement not only for macro energy usage, also, to gauge the effectiveness of delivering IT services. The business value proposition of driving efficiency and optimization including increased productivity along with storing more information in a given footprint is to support density and business sustainability.

Additional resources and where to learn in addition to those mentioned above include:

EPA Energy Star for Data Center Storage

Storage Efficiency and Optimization – The Other Green

Performance = Availability StorageIOblog featured ITKE guest blog

SPC and Storage Benchmarking Games

Shifting from energy avoidance to energy efficiency

Green IT Confusion Continues, Opportunities Missed!

Green Power and Cooling Tools and Calculators

Determining Computer or Server Energy Use

Examples of Green Metrics

Green IT, Power, Energy and Related Tools or Calculators

Chapter 10 (Performance and Capacity Planning)
Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)

Chapter 5 (Measurement, Metrics and Management of IT Resources)
The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

August 3, 2009July 7, 2020

Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the greenest of them all?

If you subscribe to the notion that Green IT is all about carbon footprints, you may be missing out on some real opportunities to go green. After all, carbon is part of the green movement, there are many other aspects including supply chain, efficiency, sustainability in addition to recycling, not to mention optimizing power, cooling footprints in order to do more work in a productive manner.

So who is the greenest of them all? Could it be Brocade, CA, Cisco, EMC, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, LSI, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle, Symantec, VMware or 3PAR? What about the cloud crowd or perhaps one of the industry trade groups such as Green grid, SNIA GSI, Climate Savers Computing or Carbon disclosure project perhaps among others?

You might be surprised, now granted, this list is for consumer products. However, given their broad adoption, and looking at Green as more than carbon impact, and with the EPA implanting Energy Star for Servers and now Energy Star for storage in the works, not to mention factoring in the green supply chain, have a look here.

Here’s an interesting read about how the Internet is causing global warming. How ironic, given Al Gore’s carbon crusade, and the folk-lore claim about (or mistaken have claimed) to have invented the Internet, no wonder he has been able to cash-in and transform Green to Gold.

For those interested in saving money with efficient and optimized storage (e.g. the new Green) to boost productivity, here’s an article to check out.

Ok, that’s enough "Green" fun for now.

Cheers gs

April 26, 2009January 23, 2019

U.S. EPA Looking for Industry Input on Energy Star for Storage

Following up on previous blog posts, here is some information that the U.S. EPA is looking for comments from industry on an Energy Start for enterprise storage program following on the heels of the Energy Star for Server program.

U.S. EPA Energy Star Wants and Needs You!

Here’s the message received from the EPA via their mailing list this past week (in italics below):

Dear Enterprise Storage Equipment Manufacturers and Other Interested Parties:

Please see the attached letter from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announcing their intent to pursue development of an ENERGY STAR specification for Enterprise Storage equipment. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Andrew Fanara, EPA, at fanara.andrew@epa.gov or Stephen Pantano, ICF International, at spantano@icfi.com.

Thank you for your support of ENERGY STAR.

Here’s the intro letter excerpted from the above email notification (in italics below):

April 23, 2009

Dear Enterprise Storage Equipment Manufacturers and Other Interested Parties:

This letter is intended to inform all stakeholders that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) intends to continue its efforts towards the development of an ENERGY STAR® specification for enterprise data storage equipment. Following is an outline of EPA’s general goals and next steps.

ENERGY STAR is a voluntary partnership between government, businesses, and purchasers designed to encourage the manufacture, purchase, and use of efficient products to help protect the environment. Products that earn the ENERGY STAR prevent greenhouse gas emissions by meeting strict energy efficiency guidelines. Manufacturers that qualify their products to meet ENERGY STAR requirements may use the label as a tool to educate their customers about the enhanced value of these products.

To date:
•More than 2,000 manufacturers are partnering with ENERGY STAR,
•More than 40,000 product models carry the ENERGY STAR label across more than 50 product categories,
•More than 70% of Americans recognize the ENERGY STAR label,
•Consumers have purchased more than 2.5 billion ENERGY STAR qualified products, and
•Americans, with the help of ENERGY STAR, saved enough energy in 2008 to avoid greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those from 29 million cars — while saving $19 billion on utility bills.

In the last several years, the energy saving opportunities in data centers have been well documented. However, barriers to energy efficiency still persist and need to be addressed. EPA is pursuing a dual strategy to overcome these challenges by helping purchasers more easily identify energy efficient IT equipment with the use of the ENERGY STAR designation, and by encouraging organizations to benchmark the energy performance of their data centers.

In pursuit of this strategy, EPA will introduce an ENERGY STAR Computer Server specification in the coming weeks. In addition, EPA recently conducted a scoping effort to evaluate enterprise storage products for inclusion in the ENERGY STAR program. EPA reviewed available market research and facilitated discussions with product manufacturers, industry associations, and other interested parties. EPA concluded that IT purchasers would benefit from access to standardized information about the energy performance of storage equipment made available through the ENERGY STAR program. As a result, EPA intends to begin the specification development process. Details on this process will be forthcoming in the next several weeks.

To be added to the enterprise storage e-mail distribution list, please send your full contact information to Stephen Pantano at spantano@icfi.com. To stay informed about the ENERGY STAR specification development process for computer servers and other EPA data center initiatives please visit: www.energystar.gov/datacenters.

Thank you for your continued support of ENERGY STAR and please direct additional questions to Andrew Fanara at fanara.andrew@epa.gov or Stephen Pantano of ICF International, at spantano@icfi.com.

Sincerely,

Andrew Fanara
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Climate Protection Partnerships Division ENERGY STAR Program Manager

My take on the Energy Star programs is that as long as they add value including reflecting how energy is effectively used both when IT equipment such as servers and storage are in use, as well as in energy saving or avoidance modes are reflected, they can and should be a good thing.

However industry will need to work together across different trade and focus groups as well as factor in how supporting metrics will be applicable and reflective thus accepted by IT data center environments. This means metrics and measurements for both active or working while in use energy efficiency modes such as IOPS, bandwidth, messages or transactions, files or videos per watt of energy, as well as metrics for in-active or dormant data such as capacity per watt per usable footprint. Check out Chapter 5 (Measurements and Metrics) in "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC) to learn more.

Various industry trade and focus groups including Storage Performance Council (SPC), SNIA GSI, Green Grid, SPEC and others are working on various metrics and aligning themselves to work with EPA. If you are in an IT data center involved with servers or storage, consider getting involved with one or more of these groups to help influence and shape what these programs will look like or affect your organization in the future.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

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