Posted by Michael Bullock on Thu, Jun 04, 2009
I absolutely believe green is good. Unless it's being used in a misleading, manipulative or self-serving way.
I feel like the world is stuck in some kind of mash-up of the movies Wall Street and Groundhog Day. It’s an unsavory mix of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas’), “Greed is good!” mantra combined with weatherman Phil Connors’ (Bill Murray’s) loop of selfish, hedonistic habit.
In our real life version, we’re seeing entire industries cycling greed and going nowhere fast. Here is the pattern:
1. Find an angle to exploit.
2. Run it into the ground while ignoring the future.
3. At the end, when the check comes due, look for a handout.
Think about it. First we had the whole banking subprime mortgage fiasco. Once the government “modernized” the banking industry, practically everybody could borrow any amount of money they wanted based on the hype-fueled upward spiral of property values – which, of course, was a fantasy and not sustainable. And once the government stepped in to fix the problems it helped create, it became more difficult for qualified borrowers to get timely loans, making sure times stayed tough. This despite the fact that Bank of America and Citigroup received over $100 billion of taxpayer money combined (of the $200 billion banking total). (By the way, how much of that cash did you get? I’ve yet to receive my slice.)
And then we have GM which was loaned $15.4 billion by the US Treasury Department under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) in 2008 and then received another $30 billion this year. So where did those billions go? They circled down the toilet of debt service, payroll, severance, and other “black hole” expenses, and now they’re gone. Again, it’s a Groundhog Day loop with a centrifugal spiral of greed and habit.
I suppose I side with Texas Congressman Ron Paul who last November wrote, "In bailing out failing companies, they are confiscating money from productive members of the economy and giving it to failing ones. By sustaining companies with obsolete or unsustainable business models, the government prevents their resources from being liquidated and made available to other companies that can put them to better, more productive use.”
So where is the IT industry in this cycle? We’re definitely in the “find an angle to exploit” stage and that angle is “Green is good.” And you don’t need to buy into the whole global warming scenario to acknowledge that energy conservation and sustainability are worthy initiatives if for no other reason than that they conserve capital and preserve resources.
It certainly appears that everyone who sells goods, services and information to the IT sector has embraced green. Now don’t get me wrong. I absolutely believe green is good … unless it is being used in a misleading, manipulative or self-serving way.
For instance:
I recently attended the Network World, “IT Roadmap Conference and Expo” eager to hear what groundbreaking insights were going to be offered by Cisco and Verizon.
These companies sponsored a green IT seminar to discuss power management in the data center and office environments, utility computing, thin clients and virtualization as a green enabler. Unfortunately, what we got was an hour long infomercial on the merits of telecommuting and video conferencing. I felt like I had been suckered with a resort timeshare-type bait-and-switch.
There are, of course, good reasons to green IT. Virtualization clearly offers the promise of better resource utilization and lower operating expense. Energy-Star servers, outside air economizers and the like offer true green advantages. But, for example, are floor tiles with embedded fans green? No. In fact, they’re entirely unnecessary in a truly green facility. If you’re convinced you need them, I’m sure you’re wasting a lot more electricity than you realize. Is cogeneration green (i.e., producing your own primary electricity from fossil fuel-based generators)? While it may lower your electricity costs, it’s by no means carbon friendly and it’s certainly not green.
Here’s a question: When you think of Symantec, what comes to mind? Do you think “Green IT and data center optimization?” I don’t. Yet they’re on the green bandwagon: “Symantec helps IT decision makers to reduce energy consumption and increase space utilization by providing solutions that increase desktop, server, and storage efficiencies.” Ok, maybe this is a side benefit of their offering but it’s a bit of a stretch to call it green, no?
That said, Symantec has produced a decent white paper worthy of a peek: The Green Data Center – A Symantec Green IT Guide. Early in the report Symantec notes that half the power required for a data center is NOT used by the IT equipment; it’s used for power distribution and cooling. And then the remainder of the paper focuses on the IT side where the savings are more difficult to attain and quantify, and require a significant investment of time and money.
Why do so many companies, like Symantec, focus on the more difficult side of the equation? Because that’s the only side they can influence. It reminds me of the old adage: “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
If you are running out of power, space, or cooling, you should be thinking about data center facility optimization because that’s where you’re likely to achieve substantial and immediate gains. When you hear the “green is good” drum beat, take the time to figure out what’s truly relevant. In many cases, you’ll find a lot of hype and very little substance.
So, are IT vendors are heading toward a Groundhog Day crash-and-bailout-and crash cycle? I don’t think so. This industry thrives on competition and innovation. With a relatively low level of unionized labor and a very small pension burden, the ground rules in tech are entirely different than they were for, say, GM. In the tech sector, boom and bust is as natural a cycle as cicadas and solar storms. We’ve all been there before. Companies offering innovation and substance will survive. Those that depend upon hype will perish. It has always been that way in tech and it always will be.
Posted by Michael Bullock on Fri, Feb 20, 2009
If you’re running out of power, cooling or physical space in your data centers, pay attention. Not to the snake oil hype promising to solve all your problems, but to the Power-Density Paradox. If you don’t, it could ensnare you in an unappetizing manner.
The power-density paradox is this: As you increase power density in your data center, the need for support space (power, cooling and humidification) will increase disproportionately. And this in turn means that you efforts to recover space in the raised floor area of your data center may be more limited by your space outside of the data center floor. In other words, your efforts to free up space in your data center could boomerang if you don't have sufficient space for the support gear needed for these higher power densities.
Of course, it’s reasonable to want to increase capacity in a limited space by turning to higher density server and storage systems. By packing more gear into your current space, it may be possible for you to delay or avoid a costly data center relocation. Deploying high density blade servers and storage, data center containers, modular power systems, virtualization and cloud computing offer the potential for optimizing the space you already have.
But (and this is a big but) you need to plan carefully or you’ll fall victim to the power-density paradox. Drilling down, the paradox says that as you use more dense equipment (which places greater demands on power and cooling), you will quickly reach an inversion point where more floor space is consumed by support systems than is available to your IT equipment – typically between 100 and 150 watts per square foot. This translates into greater capital and operational costs, not the reductions you were hoping to achieve.
How much space will you need? At a power density of about 400 watts per square foot, plan to allocate about six times your usable data center space for cooling and power infrastructure. And if you are running your CRAC units on the raised floor space, you will lose even more precious space for these additional units and the mainenance buffer each demands.
So before you embrace high-density as a quick fix to your space problem, make sure you have adequate room to house the additional power and cooling infrastructure, sufficient raised-floor space to handle the increased airflow demands of hotter-running boxes and, of course, sufficient available power to operate the hungry systems and their support gear. If any of these resources are unavailable or inadequate, your data center will not support the increased power density. And you will have wasted your time and money.
In meeting the power-density paradox, your challenge is to balance the density of servers and other equipment in your data center with the availability of power, cooling and space so you truly gain operating efficiencies and lower net costs.
If you are already bumping up against these limits, all is not lost. There are many steps you can take to extend the life of your current facility. I’ve previously blogged about ultrasonic humidification, which is one way you can decrease your power demands while increasing your cooling capacity, letting you drive more IT equipment by recovering precious electricity wasted on inefficient humidification and cooling. You can retrofit high efficiency motors, pumps and transformers into your mechanical, electrical and plumbing infrastructure.
Besides saving on power at the point of use, the cost of these upgrades can often be recovered through utility company rebates. I’ve seen paybacks in a few months and annual power savings exceed a million dollars for a single company.
If you would like to learn more about the power-density paradox, drop me an email. As always, thank you for sending comments, tips and topic suggestions to me at CIOblog@TransitionalData.com.