For the past two years, Power Assure has been trying out a new
approach to data center energy efficiency: turning servers themselves
into power-aware, energy-shifting assets. The idea is to move beyond the
individual data center as the core measure of energy value and take on
the actual operations of the fleets of servers that do the computing
work.
Imagine managing a data center’s server fleet to push certain energy-hungry operations to different times
of the day, to help mitigate peak power loads or tap available green
power production. Or consider being able to move real-time computing
tasks to different servers or virtual server environments across a company’s data center portfolio
-- for example, by regularly tapping otherwise-idle disaster recovery
systems -- to take advantage of differences in energy prices across
regions, or even across oceans and continents.
It’s a simple
concept, but quite complex in its execution. Data center operators
aren’t about to risk messing around with uptime and performance just to
shave their energy bills. That means that anyone trying concepts like
these will have to get some pretty noteworthy partners to join in and
demonstrate how it works, preferably in a real-world deployment.
This week, Power Assure and partner RagingWire are doing just that. In a real-world demo
taking place at the 2013 Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas,
the two will be switching computing loads between RagingWire’s data
centers in Sacramento, Calif. and Ashburn, Virginia to adjust to
real-time energy usage signals. They’ll also allow observers to watch
servers in both data centers turn on and off via live webcam, as well as
to log onto a test website to see for themselves how their sites are
being switched from servers in California and Virginia, and back again.
“We
don’t start with a data center at the top level,” Power Assure CEO Pete
Malcolm told me in an interview last week. “We start with the thing
that’s important, which is the application.” It’s all based on the Santa
Clara, Calif.-based startup’s “software-defined power”
technology, which details power use down to individual applications
across physical or virtual server environments, then provides the
software tools and policies to make use of that capability to drive an
array of energy-oriented business cases.
Those
include being able to power down idle servers, which is a major target
of many IT-oriented data center efficiency approaches, given estimates
that up to 85 percent of servers are using energy without doing work in most environments. Other technologies exist to power down idle servers,
then kick them into gear when IT workloads require it -- but Power
Assure’s method links specific applications to that process, while most
other systems merely use CPU utilization as a metric, Malcolm said.
It
also includes the ability to constantly use, and thus test, a company’s
disaster recovery IT assets, to avoid the estimated 80 percent of
disaster recovery failovers that don’t work or require human
intervention, with resulting loss of uptime, revenue and reputational
damage, he said.
Beyond that, however, “There are loads of other
use cases, in responding to pricing, to demand response programs, all
the way to participating in wholesale markets” for energy purchasing, he
said. All told, “we can reduce your energy costs by doing this by at
least 50 percent,” he said, and deliver a return on investment within
six months after implementation.
“Without taking extreme cases, we
can demonstrate...how these are very realistic numbers,” he added.
According to Power Assure’s data, reduction of idle servers and
wholesale power purchasing benefits drive the majority of those savings,
at 45 percent and 20 percent to 40 percent, respectively. Demand charge
reduction, demand response program participation and peak pricing
reduction add single-digit savings on top of that.
For two
1-megawatt data centers with an annual energy bill of $2.2 million,
making use of all these use cases could deliver savings of $1.2 million
to $1.5 million per year, or roughly three to four times Power Assure’s
installation and ongoing annual licensing costs.
“This is not
something that every data center is going to be able to deploy
tomorrow,” Malcolm noted. Data center operators will need to have
multiple sites available to take advantage of energy price arbitrage
between different utility service areas, for example. They’ll also have
to take on a certain amount of upfront work to ensure that their IT
environments match up with Power Assure’s metrics for measuring energy
consumption per unit of computational work, known as PAR4.
“The
reality is, yes, the configuration of your server matters to some
extent,” he said. “But the overriding factor that causes power
consumption is the CPU, or CPU-driven,” making the PAR4 measure a workable stand-in for energy-per-application.
While a handful of internet giants like Facebook,
Google and Yahoo have custom-built their own servers and data center
architectures to optimize efficiency, most data center owners and
operators are using standard server equipment, either for their own
purposes, or as providers for others at so-called colocation centers.
These
colocation providers could use Power Assure’s software to actually
track each customer’s energy use per application, then bill them only
for the power they consumed, rather than tacking estimates of energy
costs onto their bills, he said. That’s something that RagingWire is
doing to try to differentiate itself from its competitors, he noted.
In October, Japan’s NTT announced plans to spend $350 million to take an 80 percent stake in RagingWire,
which could give it an inside view of how Power Assure’s software could
be put to use for the Japanese data center giant’s other operations, he
said. Other Power Assure customers include NetApp, Twitter, NASA and
other federal agencies, and the company’s partners include VMware,
Cisco, Dell and IBM.
Investors include ABB, the Swiss grid giant
with a significant share of data center power management business, and
Dominion Energy Technologies, the investment arm of Dominion Power, the
utility company that’s been a core partner in Power Assure’s
grid-focused data center energy management work.
There are plenty
of other contenders in the data center efficiency space. These range
from companies focused on more efficiency facility management, such as SynapSense and Vigilent (formerly Federspiel Controls), to those tackling the IT loads in data centers, such as Sentilla, as well as JouleX, which Cisco bought for $107 million earlier this year.
Then there are IT giants like HP, IBM, Intel, Cisco,
Microsoft and Oracle that are improving server performance per watt and
integrating energy data more closely into their data center
infrastructure management platforms, plus big grid players like ABB, Siemens, GE and Schneider Electric that are building up platforms to better manage their power systems in the data center.
Bringing
the energy efficiency efforts inside the data center more into line
with utility needs could be a major selling point for technologies that
can dynamically control power consumption at the server level, Malcolm
noted. “Data centers have never been able to participate in that before,
but utilities are very keen that they be able to do it, because data
centers are a huge user of power.”
http://theenergycollective.com/jeffstjohn/315021/putting-smart-grid-enabled-data-center-test
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