NAB pools data to save power

The SMH has an article on NAB's new energy efficient data centre in Melbourne (interestingly the trigeneration setup used at NAB's primary data centre isn't mentioned for this new data centre) - NAB pools data to save power.

National Australia Bank will officially open a new data centre in Melbourne this week, hoping to eventually save the financial institution $22 million over decade. The bank's 23 existing data centres, ranging in size from small broom closets to large computer rooms, will be amalgamated into the new facility at Deer Park, 17 kilometres west of the Melbourne CBD, as well as an existing building across town at Knox. When completed and fully operational in seven years, the downsizing will cut NAB's power usage by 40 per cent, its chief technology officer, Denis McGee, said. ...

The average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of the bank's 20-plus data centres is 2.5. PUE measures the total energy use of a facility divided by the energy used by the ICT equipment within. McGee hopes the Deer Park facility will almost halve the bank's PUE, to less than 1.3, a coveted goal for data centre owners and users. Google claims a PUE of 1.12 across all of its data centres. ...

The scale of the new facility, and the bank's promise to meticulously manage its power usage, allowed it to negotiate near-wholesale rates directly with the electricity supplier, data centre transformation senior manager Tim Palmer said. In the case of a power outage, six diesel generators will provide a back-up source. An underground concrete tank holds enough diesel to fuel the engines for three days. Free cooling will regulate the temperatures at Deer Park for half the year, where ambient air cooler than 30 degrees will be used instead of airconditioning. ...

The bank is also embarking on a virtualisation strategy improve server usage rates from 12 to 60 per cent ... "We have about 10,000 physical and virtuals, and 55 per cent are virtualised, and we have an ongoing program to virtualise more," McGee says.

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2011: The Year Data Centers Turned Green

Wired has a look at the slow greening of data centres last year - 2011: The Year Data Centers Turned Green.

The amount of data the world stores is on an explosive growth curve. According to research outfit IDC, the digital universe will grow 44 times larger over the course of the decade, thanks to the rise of worldwide obsessions with things like social media and cloud computing. And that means more data centers.

But this data center boom comes at a time of high energy prices and heightened concern about carbon emissions. The days of cramming truck loads of servers into a room and firing up a bunch of industrial air-conditioners to cool them are over.

Data center operators are gaining control of their energy bills and earning green points by increasing data center efficiency, from server processor chips to warehouse-size buildings. There’s no how-to manual on building green data centers. The industry is feeling its way on energy efficiency — and no two data centers are alike.

Out of necessity, the huge Internet players — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Yahoo, and Apple — are finding ways to use greener energy and get more out of the energy they use. Google has continued to earn praise for its energy and environmental practices, and Facebook is actually sharing its progress with the rest of the world. This year, it launched the Open Compute Project, encouraging the rest of the industry to exchange technologies and techniques for building efficient data centers.

2011 was a banner year for green data centers, with dozens of state-of-the-art facilities opening for business. Here, Wired takes a look at nine of the more innovative facilities that came online in 2011, rating each by Power Utilization Effectiveness (PUE), the industry standard measure of a facility’s energy-efficiency. PUE is ratio of all electricity a facility consumes to electricity used by the IT equipment it houses.

The ideal — 1.0 — means a facility’s lighting, power, and cooling systems consume no power and its power distribution system is perfectly efficient. Most data centers are in the 2.0 to 3.0 range, meaning ancillary systems and losses consume as much or more energy than the electricity used to run the servers, but the cream of crop have PUE ratings well below this range.

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What It Takes to Power Google

Technology Review has an article on Google’s (suprisingly low) energy consumption - What It Takes to Power Google.

Google is the first major Web company to reveal exactly how much energy it uses—information that will help researchers and policy makers understand how the massive explosion of Internet usage and cloud computing is contributing to global energy consumption.

Google uses 260 million watts continuously across the globe, the company reported on Wednesday. This is equivalent to the power used by all the homes in Richmond, Virginia, or Irvine, California (around 200,000 homes), and roughly a quarter of the output of a standard nuclear power plant.

By far, the majority of Google's energy use is associated with its data centers, according to Jonathan Koomey, a professor at Stanford University and a researcher who focuses on energy and IT. He says that 80 to 90 percent of those watts are used solely by the company's data centers, based on estimates he made of Google's power use in an August 2011 report. Most of this energy is used in powering the IT equipment in Google's data centers. Google custom builds many data centers, such as a new one in Finland that uses a seawater cooling system, to cut down on electricity costs.

This has enabled Google to be relatively energy efficient, says Koomey, who estimates that the company owns about 3 percent of servers worldwide and uses only 1 percent of electricity for data centers worldwide. "They're operating more efficiently than other data centers," he says.

Other Web giants, including Amazon and Facebook, probably operate their data centers with similar efficiency due to hardware and software customization, and innovative cooling equipment, Koomey says. However, the majority of data center power use comes from non-IT companies running their own data centers less efficiently [which is in turn, far less than that used by equipment in homes and offices].

In its report, Google compares the energy usage of companies' in-house computer systems to the energy used by its cloud servers. It estimates that running Gmail instead of an in-house e-mail system can be almost 80 times more energy efficient. Google says that 25 percent of its energy was supplied by renewable fuels—such as from wind farms—in 2011, and plans to increase that to 30 percent this year.

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