US Data Centers Wary of Sharing Energy Data With Feds 101
1sockchuck writes "The EPA has been seeking at least 100 data center operators willing to share data about their energy usage to help the government develop an Energy Star program for data centers. Thus far, only 54 data centers have signed up, which suggests that few data center operators are eager to tell the government exactly how much energy they are using. The EPA issued a report to Congress last year on data center power usage, and is already developing an Energy Star program to rate servers. Can a program designed to rank the energy efficiency of appliances and computer monitors be a useful tool in addressing the enormous energy consumption of data centers?"
!evil, just no trust (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:!evil, just no trust (Score:4, Insightful)
To some degree, but some possible improvements would require a standardization mandate. For instance, I was reading here a few years ago that Google can make (or get made) hardware to their own specifications, and they save an awful lot of power by using strictly 12V DC to the motherboards, if not the whole boxes. They were advocating for the rest of the industry to do that, but if you run a data center and can't buy the hardware to do that, you're out of luck.
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You know--rather than a government mandate to get that hardware out there, how about demand?
Seriously--if I could purchase devices that consume DC power and I could get DC at my house CHEAPER than I could go the whole AC route, I'd do it--especially if saved me money too.
That's probably why data centers don't want the government involved. The government
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If they have a decent power distribution board they can get an instantaneous readout from that.
Targeting one industry for it's power usage is a bit dumb. For instance I work in a fairly normal sized supermarket which pulls 415Vx3 at around 400A on each, so how many supermarkets are there around the world?
And if you want worse, here in Australia and other countries with large mining operations, the mines and other associated industries can pull the entire out
54% response rate (Score:1)
Few? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Seems a reasonable fear to me.
Re:Few? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Few? (Score:5, Informative)
They are seeking "at least 100 data centers" to participate.
It DOES NOT SAY that they asked 100. They have put out a general request for datacenters of 1000 square feet or more.
So, out of all the data centers in the US that are over 1000 square feet, only 54 have agreed to participate. That is NOT 54/100 or 54%, it is a drop in the bucket, and it does seem to indicate a reluctance to participate. Although it could just as easily be apathy.
Re:Few? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Few? (Score:4, Informative)
However, even RTFA-ing twice didn't give you a complete grasp. The article never mentions querying any data centers, just that they want them. They may have called/emailed/mailed to some, or they may have just put it up on the web and hoped.
Additionally, it says that the participants will begin collecting 12 consecutive months of data at the start of the program, "and submit the data by June 1, 2009." That's next year.
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After filing his taxes for the year,
Re:Few? (Score:4, Informative)
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> That seems pretty good to me.
Indeed, I would consider a 54% response rate high for this kind of thing.
> How many of the rest just didn't know how much energy
> they used, or couldn't be bothered to look it up?
Or have better things to do than fill out silly questionnaires for Yet Another Pointless Government Study Destined To Accomplish Precisely Jack Diddley Squat? I know what my response would have been: after reading about half of the first s
Transportation energy use is the key (Score:3, Interesting)
But it is a completely different story when it comes to the energy consumed in transportation. There is no viable alternative to gasoline for cars, diesel for trucks and kerosene for the airplanes in the near future. Nothing. And all the crude oil we import goes to transportation.
The politicians are clueless dumb idiots who go through the motions of doing something, on the crazy logic, "we must do something, it is something so we are doing it".
Re:Transportation energy use is the key (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, you're right for now. While we're starting to develop alternative fuels...let's try to get past the ECO-freaks out there, that won't let us drill for our own oil, in our country!! China is drilling in cuban waters just o
Re:Transportation energy use is the key (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a long term strategy.
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If you subscribe to the theory that oil is a finite resource then you are better off consuming everyone else's before you tap your own.
Might not have anything to share (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Might not have anything to share (Score:4, Informative)
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If a whole building is dedicated to a data center, there really isn't anything else to include (because the lights in the building and so forth are part of the data center).
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Re:Might not have anything to share (Score:5, Insightful)
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That would work well for DCs that are self contained. Most of the DCs I've been in are part of a campus or a building that is all on the same grid, so determining what is being used just by the DC would be a project.
I don't know about you, but our business, and I would venture to gues
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I can take 5 minutes, or 5 hours to read the electricity bill, if I had to. The problem is, which you seemed to miss in my post, our building gets one bill for electricity. Inside that building we have a dozen heavy printing presses, cardboard crusher, electric lift trucks that get charged nightly, lights, security system, etc. etc., and yes, a data center.
It's all on one bill. How the fuck am I suppposed to tell how much the DC
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In most place I've worked on, I've been involved in designing Building Automation Systems that connect to the UPS's, etc., relay alarms to the proper people, gather histories on usage, and generally monitor and control everything in sight (or hidden).
Re:Might not have anything to share (Score:5, Insightful)
Data centers have to know how much they're using as they have to have sufficient UPS backup to keep their systems running in the event of street power outage.
Groups that maintain these data centers also wind up paying the electric bills, so even if they don't know how much is actually in use at ant single point in time, it's pretty easy to look at a few bills and see what the usage over the past 30 days were.
Yeah, that would be nice (Score:4, Interesting)
In any case, our data center is part of a larger facility and while it's easy to report on overall power use for the facility, it's mixed in with so much else that it's hard to get a good estimate for power use by the data center alone. As we found out the hard way, the UPS wasn't adequate for downtimes longer than 15 minutes. We've since made a big push to improve the UPS and reduce the number of physical servers in the data center (switching to virtual whenever possible).
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Might I suggest you replace your Engineering Staff as well? If your "operators" didn't notice their generator wasn't online and that you were on batteries, they have no business being anywhere near a data center.
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My computer was on the building UPS. One day I am working away, and the computer power went off.
Shit, I thought, the mains went off. Then I remembered I was on building UPS, and I also realized that other machines NOT on the UPS were still working.
Then my power came back up. We rushed to the server room which had also gone off and recovered
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I wouldn't be surpised if there was some format(s) that the EPA needs this data
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It is also important to note that the people who might have access to this data - the IT people, HVAC people, and building engineers, are almost certainly not the people who see and pay the bills.
At my workplace, the data center expenses comes out of the data center funds, so while you're right that the HVAC person doesn't literally see the bill, the head of the department needs to know those numbers to stay on-budget. Whether the department head shares that with the staff...perhaps that is another question (in our case he does).
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is this really necessary? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:is this really necessary? (Score:4, Insightful)
While setting monitors to sleep mode and powering things off do help, data centers have a lot of power use in a small space. It's clearly in everyone's interest to reduce that power since it results in a lot of savings across the board.
Users can put in more systems per square foot, data center managers can rely on fewer UPS systems and fewer tons of AC, and the resulting lower utility bills is just icing on the cake.
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I can see the headlines now.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Whose Really Republican? (Score:2)
Hmmm. Here's the thing. The great irony of American politics is that despite Liberals being aligned to Democrats and Conservatives being aligned to Republicans, it is the Republicans that have actually passed most of the liberal legislation over the last 40 years.
Check this out:
Richard Nixon (R) - Clear Air Act, Clean Water Act, EPA
Jimmy Carter (D) - deregulates the transporation sector. His 1b loan to chrylser would la
Which party ran the House and Senate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Those are the people in charge of writing legislation.
There is a healthy impulse to create gridlock in DC. A R president often means a D congress, and vice versa.
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Much of the legislation you mention was either inevitable, the work of their predecessors, or had little to no impact.
That said, even though I don't particularly like Bush at all, he has had a small number of bright moments. His most recent Veto of the $288 billion farm bill was absolutely the right thing to do, even thoug
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Plus, data center managers are generally busy enough to avoid yet another stack of forms to fill.
Finally, some DC managers barely know where the power is going. They see the power bill, they seem some automated power meter reading at key points such as power distribution units, but they cannot really tell you how much a machine, or even a rack, is consuming.
The problem with manufacturers' plates is that the power rating on the plates is ridiculous overkill. A rack-moounted server rated for 600 W on
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This way I know exactly how much the rack as a whole is pulling. More importantly, I know that each of the PDU's in the rack is under 50% so that in case a power supply causes a short, I dont loose the entire rack due to a cascading failure. (I've seen it happen w
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Out of professional curiosity, how does your DC manage to keep track of equipment status, installs and decommissions? Do you use a specific DC management package, or do you subscribe to the "ad-hoc spreadsheet on a shared drive"
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We dont go through enough adds/moves/changes to make it worth the effort of tracking with anything more than a spreadsheet. Given that I've managed to cut the number of physical servers in half over the past 4 years (during which ime the number of services have gone up 10x) I dont predict the need for anything more specialized anytime soon.
I've seen some palces that turn over a a few doezn servers a day and they needed a management app to keep track of everythi
The headlines will be stealthier than you expect (Score:2)
Every data center that exists has a high carbon footprint. The San Francisco Bay Area is host to a myriad number of data centers that'll now find it convenient to relocate to a more hospitable environment or purchase indulgences in the form of carbon offsets.
When it comes to killing a golden goose, governments have no competitors. That goes double for state governments looking to fill a $15 Billion deficit. That goes triple fo
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Therefore, there is no value in the government's environmental agency knowing how much energy data centers are using.
Despite your beliefs, there are some things that national governments excel in. Surveys of issues of a national scope is one of them.
Slightly OT: I would love to know how much power the NSA datacenters suck down.
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Google is large, but efficient energy user (Score:2)
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Also, there are still quite a few CRT displays out there, and a CRT uses more power than an LCD in the first place.
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All it does is change the power usage of third parties who use Google on their OWN crt's.
Data Centers use a LOT of power! (Score:5, Insightful)
One company was building a fan control system to reduce the power used by cooling fans in the racks. We just had a Slashdot article about being more selective about load distribution and shutting down systems not being utilized for the load.
Data centers use redundant power which is more expensive than line power because UPS system are never 100% efficient.
To top it off, servers put out a LOT of heat. That is two types of load: The power draw of the server and the power draw of the data center cooling system.
Data centers are a prime target for green work, and I bet with a little development work you could EASILY cut the power utilization by 30%. Upgrading and replacing four older machines with two newer machines will cut power usage.
Maybe software efficiency is important again as doing more with less power is greener.
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We just got over the case of what to do with companies who allowed the government to spy on their customers and
105 Watt Max Server (Score:2)
I'm too dumb to accept the conventional wisdom, so I've been prototyping a mini server that pulls 105 watts under maximum load (both CPU's at 100% and a RAID-1 rebuild, was how I defined 'max') and about 70 watts when mostly idle. It's 'only' a Core2Duo w/ 6MB of cache, but it's a 1.333 GHz FSB with memory clocked at half of that to minimize wait states, and that's plenty for the kinds of servers I usually need (web, mail, web database, etc.). If I need more I'
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Replacing machines has a cost though both in terms of staff time and in terms of risk. I would imagine this is especially true of datacenters that perform a wide range of different functions, possiblly for a wide range of different customers.
Virtualisation is a possible soloution bu
Is. new MS one in Northlake IL that .. sub station (Score:2)
There should of looked at a way to get some power off the 70 mph + traffic on I-294 right next to it.
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The part by the data center is wide open.
Total = Sum of the Parts (Score:3, Interesting)
The total energy used in a data center is just the sum of the energy used in the various component parts. The components include the various boxes of electronics, the power supplies, the lighting, and the cooling.
Every data center operator is intensely interested in power consumption. The power and cooling cost real, serious money. Any reduction in that cost goes straight to the bottom line. And, we have finite power and cooling for the building, so if/when the needs of the various boxes exceed those limits, we have to do expensive and disruptive upgrades.
If every component part (computer, network switch, ups, monitor, etc.) were labeled with its power and cooling requirements, data center operators would use that information to select equipment that costs less to operate. In the life cycle of a piece of equipment, the electricity to operate it is a big part of the cost. When we go to buy new equipment, we usually have to choose from among several different units that could fit the purpose. The numbers that determine the operating cost absolutely would be used during that selection process.
A publicity campaign, like "Energy Star" could help us to paint the business "Green". But the numbers are what we really need to make rational business decisions.
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The new 32 nanometer processors use less power. (Score:3, Insightful)
That is one of the few world problems that is already being solved. Intel and AMD and others are working on the next generation of processors, that use less power: Intel Says Chips Will Run Faster, Using Less Power [nytimes.com]. Intel is currently delivering processors built on 45 nanometer rules. (At that size, there are perhaps 1000 transistors in the width of a human hair.)
They are working on a 32 nanometer process [wikipedia.org], which has already been demonstrated. The next after that is 22 nanometers [wikipedia.org] and then 16 nanometers [wikipedia.org] and 11 nanometers [wikipedia.org] as the Wikipedia articles say. The smaller conductor width rules use smaller transistors which use less power.
At the same time, they will make processors with wider silicon wafers, 18 inches wide [zdnet.co.uk] rather than the 12 inch wide wafers they use now. The smaller devices and larger wafers mean that there will be many more processors per wafer, making the costs go down.
What these companies are doing is VERY impressive.
The companies have not been as good at proposing new uses for the greater processing power. Data centers need the greater processing power as well as use of smaller amounts of energy, but where else is more processing power needed? Will grandma's octo-core cell phone of the future not just report the weather, but calculate it? Will games use full ray-tracing?
I suspect that the greater processing power is needed, but all the needs haven't yet been discovered. To me, that's a very interesting problem.
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"60 degrees Centigrade" (Score:2)
That slowed my reading until I realized that it means "60 degrees Centigrade".
Wary, or Don't Care? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Hi, we'd like you to generously share some internal data and in return we'd like to give you responsibilities and guidelines about how we'll let you give your data to us! Sweet deal, right?"
Presumably they are paying their power bills and thus have some incentive to take "reasonable" steps toward conservation. The government will need to use a carrot or a stick to coax this information from a busy business. I'm surprised simply announcing an interest in the information has netted as many responses as they've gotten.
Goverment intrusion? Spyware? (Score:2, Interesting)
In other news (Score:4, Funny)
Ignored like a credit card application (Score:3, Interesting)
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Also, it's not clear this is the biggest problem (Score:4, Insightful)
So the EPA likes it because it's tractable. But in many organizations, most IT-related energy use is actually at the edge - factoring in thousands of computers, monitors, printers, edge switches, wireless access points, VOIP phones or digital handsets (a simple analog phone on-hook uses almost no power), etc. Dozens of computers in an open office area adds a significant amount of heat that has to be removed. And as more and more equipment runs uses Ethernet and TCP/IP, you need more and more network switch ports, often delivering PoE. I think a lot of organizations are going to end up pointing fingers at their IT departments because they can identify the cost, and it's easier to blame one group in one location than to face the fact that everyone's incremental usage adds up to significant numbers.
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I think there is a real future for thin-clients and some sort of centralized resources in the future, at least for larger departments and corporations. The costs of maintaining 100's or 1000's of PC's with licenses, administration, maintainence and energy costs is huge. If you can reduce that by thin-clients and virtualized
54 out of ??? (Score:1)
Here's Your Chance (Score:3, Interesting)
OK /.ers, how would YOU categorize or classify data centers to provide a little more sanity|classification|taxonomy to this generic study? For example:
Transaction Processing Center
High Performance Computing Center
Corporate Support Data Center
Web Host or ISP Data Center
Search Engine Data Center
Have at it.
We want data to regulate you (Score:1)
1) Gather data from volunteer data centers.
2) Establish "Energy Star" rating.
3) Use "Energy Star" rating to regulate how big datacenters can be, what kind of layout they must have, etc., etc.
4) Demand that any company bidding on government contracts must be "Energy Star" level 5 or whatever. New regulatory branch to monitor all this...
In general
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Once the door is opened, then it's only a matter of "preventing terror" to demand access to the actual data being transacted and stored.
Cops, come and try to snatch my crops (Score:1)
Universities and Government Data Centers (Score:2)
Energy Usage (Score:1)
What was even more amazing was that the laptop and router together were only using 35-40 watts. It's also interesting to watch the power usage go up temporarily when the CPU is exercised and then to see it drop immediately back down. How do they get a laptop with a 15.4 screen and speakers to use