Dell’s datacenter vanishing trick: all is revealed
Watch them explain how they take something that consumes the same amount of electrical power as over 8,000 staff and just make it disappear
An extraordinary insight into how Dell did something which meant that their entire rationale for building themselves new data centers was suddenly gone. I hear you asking: “but is this a good thing for a company that equips their customers’ data centers?”. Watch the video and see what you think.
Here’s an outline of what was discussed at the beginning of the session:
They start off with the claim that data centers are an increasing contributor to climate change.
They cite a report by McKinsey, which estimated that data centers would produce more greenhouse gases than airlines by 2020: almost 2% of the power in the US is used by data centers.
Dell did a survey about 2 years ago and discovered that 65% of their customers were considering additional data center space and that Dell were in the same situation, in that they had also reached the limits of their existing capacity.
In response to this discovery, Dell decided (as a short-term, interim measure, rather than to immediately make a strategic decision to increase their in-house data center provision) to ‘go colo’ (to co-locate their equipment) by renting the additional space they required from third party data centers, something which gave them a year to consider what to do about future data center capacity.
The key technology which Dell used to address the longer term requirement was virtualisation, which they went on to explain in simple terms.
If servers are likened to engines, conventional server usage involves using one engine per programme or application – virtualisation gives them the ability to put many programmes on one engine.
For much of the time, servers might only be using 5% of their processing capacity and yet still need 100% electrical power.
“You’ve just immediately halved the power demand that I used to have and we can create white space in the date centre, we don’t have to build another, maybe we’ll wait a year.
Well, a year and a half later, now it looks like we can wait ten years or fifteen years, maybe indefinitely”
Dane Parker Global Facilities Lead at Dell
The average server utilisation is between 12 and 18 percent of its processing capacity.
Through the use of virtualisation and compression for the data center, Dells server usage rate has been driven to 42% and is still climbing.
Dell say that they’ve doubled their servers’ workload with no extra power and no extra servers.
As a result, Dell decided not to build any more data centers.
A decent sized data center would cost over a hundred million dollars, much of which would be for providing power: of the company’s total global utility bill, around 40% goes to IT.
In central Texas, Dell has 17,000 employees and two data centers, and the data centers account for half of the total power consumption. Based on that, Dell decided that they needed to get more capacity from existing data centers in order to become more efficient.
Dell introduced an initiative to double or triple the utilisation of their existing data center resources. This has halved the previous power demand and created empty space in the data center, meaning that they don’t have to build another one for at least a year.
18 months on, it looks as if they can wait 10 to 15 years, or maybe indefinitely, before having to build another data center.
The video is of a session at the Fortune Brainstorm Green 2010 Virtual Conference called:
The greenest Data Center is the one you do not build
The speakers at this session (held in April 2010 in California) are:
Robin Johnson, Chief Information Officer, Dell Inc.
Dane Parker Global Facilities Lead, Dell Inc.
The Moderator is:
Brian O’Keefe, Assistant Managing Editor, Fortune
The emergence of cloud computing can also lead to increase in carbon emissions.
As is also described in this article
http://www.serverwatch.com/news/article.php/3874251/Greenpeace-Warns-of-Data-Center-Emissions-in-Cloud-Computing-Set-Ups.htm
“The cloud is growing at a time when climate change and reducing emissions from energy use is of paramount concern,” the group said in its report. “For all of this content to be delivered to us in real time, virtual mountains of video, pictures and other data must be stored somewhere and be available for almost instantaneous access. That ‘somewhere’ is datacenters — massive storage facilities that consume incredible amounts of energy.”
But considering how the cloud computing is growing today, there is a need to look for measures to cut carbon emissions.
Looking for ways to cut down CO2 emissions in data centers, I found this article where Rob Bernard, Chief Environmental Strategist for Microsoft talks about best practices for creating and running efficient data centers.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/02/microsoft-shares-best-practices-for-green-datacenters.php
“Some of the innovative things Microsoft has been doing is revolutionizing how data centers are housed. The company has been experimenting with housing data centers in shipping containers, and is looking into using fresh air to cool them so cooling systems can be reduced or eliminated. Also, this cuts down on the need to build large facilities – cutting the carbon footprint way back.”
Hope more IT companies are doing something to cut their carbon emissions.
Spot on Malini. With today’s expand of internet, amount of information and media shared worldwide via net, energy needs will be mounting, growing as a snowball on a winter slope.
Dell’s actions might be an answer to these problems. Would be enough though? I’m afraid not really, but every little helps.
“Going green” is not always something that speaks to everybody. Money does.
If you still not sure whether to invest into energy efficient servers, check the calculation from this article:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3817/low-power-server-cpus-the-energy-saving-choice
“But instead of reiterating the clichés again, let us take a simple example. Let us say that you need a humble setup of 4 servers to run your services on the internet. Each server consuming 250W when running at a high load (CPU at 60% or so). If you are based in the US, that means that you need about 10-11 amps: 1000W divided by 110V plus a safety margin. In Europe, you’ll need about 5 amps (Voltage = 230V). In Europe you’ll pay up to $100 per month per amp that you need. The US prices vary typically between $15 and $30 per amp per month. So depending on where you live, it is not uncommon to pay something like $300 to $500 per month just to feed electricity to your servers. In the worst case, you are paying up to $6000 per year ($100 x 5 x 12 months) to keep a very basic setup up and running. That is $24000 in four years. If you buy new servers every 4 years, you probably end up spending more on power than on the hardware!
Keeping an eye on power when choosing the hardware and software components is thus much more than naively following the hype of “green IT”. It is simply the smart thing to do.”
Surely, those numbers speak for themselves. And new, better CPUs are getting cheaper after months from introduction on the market, helping to run more energy efficient data centers. Will look for any graphs, showing how prices of new CPUs change, and share them with you.
Found one that sums it up nicely – release of new CPU, cuts the price down on previous one really nice. Just like the table from this article shows it:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/processor-price-cut-drop-reduction,10902.html
“With the 82W Core i7-870s coming in, the older 95W Core i7-870 gets a considerable price cut, falling by almost half, from $562 to $294.”
Surely, with new CPUs being released every year, energy efficient data centers are there to buy for good price.
That’s true. At the rate the price are falling, you can get better hardware for the same price comparing to say, just six months earlier.
Exactly Malini, it is not only better, but in many cases – more energy efficient when compared to predecessors.
It’s a win-win situation for customers and our lovely planet.
While we want the big companies to cut emissions & go greener, we should also do our bit to reduce activity that causes carbon emissions.
Sure we should – and I think many people actually do. Problem is that many of the energy efficient devices cost more, compared to standard ones. This might be a problem for many people.
Some government programs to subside some of the costs of buying energy efficient devices would be surely welcomed by many people.
Here are some simple tips one can follow to do his bit to cut carbon emissions
http://www.carbonify.com/articles/carbon-dioxide-reduction-tips.htm
And they are very easy to follow as well.
Thumbs up for Dell’s actions, hope other companies will follow.
That’s the thing with huge companies – the possibilities are there, but not used until somebody actually looks at it. Surely, more of this kind of actions can be taken to make other things work better within the company, the problem is with the will and idea to do so.
Considering the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the electricity consumed by data centers, not building one can be the greenest thing to do.
Kudos Dell!
I just found this one. This site helps to see the most current CO2 level and what it means.
http://co2now.org/
It gives current data for atmospheric CO2, data on global carbon emissions. It also shows what needs to be done, and concrete examples of what people are doing to turn things around.