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Recent Posts by Andrew Binstock
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Solid state drives (or SSDs) are an emerging storage technology that has been getting increasing press over the last year due to its availability as an option for laptops and, in certain segments, for IT sites. Many claims have been made on behalf of SSDs, including that they are faster and greener and that, as such, they represent the future of disk storage. In this column, I look at how the technology works and why they're not greener nor a widespread alternative to hard disk drives.
Before diving into the topic, it's important to be clear what I am referring to as SSDs, as the term is already in the process of corruption. I am referring to drives made up of flash memory, not the DRAM disk products that have been around for decades for sites that need high-speed disk I/O.
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In June and August of last year, I wrote a pair of columns in which I extolled the value of virtualization as a solution to excessive energy consumption. The primary benefit, as I described it, is that virtualization makes it possible to consolidate multiple applications onto a single server. That is, apps that currently run on dedicated systems can be moved en masse to a single server that consumes less power -- generally, far less power -- than that required by the dedicated servers.
This economy derives from two principal factors:
1) Modern servers are much more energy-efficient than their forbears. This is true in absolute terms and relative terms. In fact, in relative terms, such as watts per mips, today's systems are orders of magnitude more efficient.
2)
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Until very recently, the need for IT to really include eco-concerns as part of overall strategy did not have universal appeal. Surely, sites located in areas such as southern Manhattan where power distribution is already running at maximum capacity have a grave problem. And likewise sites that need more room but have tight expansion constraints. For them, green has been a key preoccupation for a while.
For most other IT sites, however, the main driver for green has been cost reduction -- and until the last few months, the cost of energy was tolerable even if somewhat higher than budgeted. So, pressure existed to reduce unnecessary consumption, but not place the issue at the center of IT concerns. However, with oil now regularly surpassing $130 per barrel, there is no longer any
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The golf expression "It's the rub of the green" means the equivalent of "them's the breaks." It refers to the fact that you're going to have your share of good luck and bad luck when your ball is on the green. Every so often you'll hit a divot or other irregularity -- and sometimes the results will be good, other times not so much. It's the rub of the green. Today, I want to refer to the expression in a rather different sense: when green rubs people and IT the wrong way. The world today is so prone to over-marketing, so accustomed to rapid cycles of surging popularity followed by a precipitous descent into oblivion that, at times it feels like the only sane way to deal with new trends is to tune them out. This applies even to green. Let's not forget that the
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As reported in the March 26th issue of GreenerComputing News (you do subscribe, right?), the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) is in the process of formulating a power-consumption benchmark for workstations. SPEC is a vendor-neutral, non-profit organization that designs benchmarks for the computer industry. It also hosts a website, www.spec.org, that presents benchmark results for various platforms. Those results are provided by vendors of hardware and software systems who certify that they ran the benchmarks in accordance with SPEC guidelines. While SPEC cannot and does not vouch for those results, the industry puts real effort into maintaining the integrity of posted results. And because those results often figure
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Green Metrics for the Data Center: If Only...
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Early this month, I attended the Technical Forum of the Green Grid vendor consortium. The Green Grid is a recently formed group that brings together major businesses to establish useful tools and policies for eco-responsibility in IT shops. Its activities include defining metrics for the IT industry, establishing best practices, and encouraging adoption of both.
The two-day forum was narrowly focused on the quest for useful, usable metrics that measure energy efficiency in data centers. While many members of the technical committee have been working on this problem long before Green Grid existed, I was surprised by how little consensus there was on how to measure energy efficiency and how crude the proposed measures currently are. This observation does not in any way denigrate the efforts of the committees; rather it points out how terribly difficult it is to formulate useful indices.
Let me give you an example and you'll see the problem. Then I'll try to give some guidance on what you can do until the Green Grid, or some other organization, comes up with guidelines and measures we can all use.
The principal measure presented at the Forum was called data-center infrastructure efficiency (DCiE). This metric is the ratio of power consumption by IT equipment to the total power consumed by the data center, expressed as a percentage. Or, put algebraically:
IT power consumption is defined as the power consumed by true IT functions and devices: servers, networking gear, etc. The larger data center consumption includes all the IT consumption plus cooling, lighting, and other common power sinks.
This ratio posits that the more overall data center power driving IT equipment, the more efficient the data center is. In other words, a higher DCiE ration represents a more efficient data center. Before discussing all the limitations of this metric, let me give you a sense of the DCiE ratios that the Green Grid expects to reward:
At 50 percent, a site is at the lowest level that merits an accolade (the so-called "bronze" level). At 90 percent, a data center crosses the highest recognized level (platinum). This range presents a very crude gauge of where your data center should be. However, it's obvious that many, many adjustments have to enter into the DCiE computation before it can be useful.
The first, of course, is geography. Cooling a data center in Nome, Alaska will be require less power than the same data center in Houston, Texas properly chilled. The next problem is the kind of data center you're running: a Tier I center will have a very different profile than a Tier IV center. Green Grid proposes adding credits and penalties to DCiE to account for these factors. However, the formulas for these adjustments are not ready nor, it seems, close to release.
Another factor is that comparing DCiE ratios makes sense only within a specific industry sector. Surely, a financial center will have a very different efficiency profile than say, a chain of funeral homes. As a result, the DCiE will probably be assessed qualitatively by industry. Whether this changes the proposed formulation, or recasts its interpretation as relative to an industry benchmark, is hard to know.
A final point is that DCiE measures the efficiency of the data center, not of the IT equipment. In fact, replacing IT equipment with more power-efficient gear will lower, rather than raise, the DCiE, unless an even greater reduction of cooling power is implemented. Unfortunately, cooling power consumption and IT consumption don't move in lock step and so there will be gaps in the figures where sites are not rewarded for investment in energy-savings equipment. Surely, that has to be improved.
In this entire discussion, I have not touched on the difficulty of measuring IT power usage as well as the power consumed by the entire data center. Neither of these tasks is easy. The upshot is that the industry has a long way to go before useful metrics can be established for data center efficiency.
Despite this limitation, the 50 percent mark that the Green Grid proposes for recognition is a useful figure. It suggests a minimal level that is worth working towards. Doing so begins with figuring out how exactly you're going to gather the data. Once you have usage data that you feel is comfortably representative, you can begin monitoring the trend and figuring out what you can do to climb over this minimal threshold. After all, why is your data center infrastructure using more power than your IT equipment? If you don't know, this would be a good time to begin finding out.
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