- Tuesday, 1 December 2009
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You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone - Al Capone
Green datacentre is all hot air
THE GREEN IT debate sometimes often seems a bit one-sided with lots of headlines about the latest new tech to solve the problems of overheating datacentres, gazillion-pound energy bills and the whatchamacallit with the ice caps. But at least one datacentre designer is taking a contrarian stance.
“There’s a tremendous amount of hype with people talking about the green this, the green that and the green datacentre, and it’s all rubbish,” says Alex Rabbetts, managing director of Migration Solutions.
Come on, Alex, speak your mind.
“The chip manufacturers are saying, ‘we’re producing more powerful chips that use less power', but there’s still a net increase in the power requirement. They’re producing something that’s inherently not green. We hear a lot about green plant equipment but the requirement for power is going up, not going down, unless you’re building a new datacentre and can look at everything afresh.”
According to Rabbetts, a lot of people are talking a good game but not following through.
“The datacentres in the City [of London] are creating tremendous amounts of heat and there isn’t the will to do anything about it. There’s no carrot or stick. The datacentres can’t become more environmentally friendly because the investment in renewable power and cooling just isn’t there. Before we had an inefficient system but not so many systems, but today, servers require more power and we need exponentially more storage space because of things like Sarbanes-Oxley and Mifid.”
Rabbetts says marketers have got a hold of the green datacentre myth and made a lot of news but it’s just fashion and “green is the new black”.
OK, but surely we can do something real? Rabbetts has a few ideas.
One, “switch the bloody lights out” because with remote admin “datacentres are places people don’t need to go, they should be dark sites”.
Two, switch off test/dev servers “because they’re on 24x7 but only get used every four months”.
Three, build new datacentres in the cooler, northern end of this green and sceptr’d isle and use wave, wind and solar power.
Four, government should have big rebate carrots and or a big tax stick (work out for yourself which is more likely to happen) to make number three possible.
“I’m not Swampy but these claims that everything is greener are laughable,” Rabbetts concludes.
Strong words but ones that needed to be said. µ
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There was no mention of virtualisation here. Of all of the so called green initiatives in the datacentre it is the only one that I have seen working. 
Reducing the number of servers and increasing the utilisation of the remaining hardware is a surefire way to reduce power consumption.
I am a service engineer and wind up going to data centres at all times of the day and night ... almost all of them DO turn off the lights or at least have them on timers/infrared sensors.
How much is that saving them? probably the cost of running one server or most likely less.

The reason people have their datacentres in the same building in the city is they can still do business when the proverbial idiot in a jcb digs up the fibre outside the door. Moving the trading floors of the city of london to Glasgow isnt going to happen any time soon no matter what carrots are up there.
Lots of the bigger banks have a few datacentres sprinkled around the city and then disaster recovery sites outside the centre (East India Dock/Isle of Dogs being the most popular)
Why did the "expert" not say anything about efficiency. I'm no expert on the matter, but power consumption by processors has gone up two fold at most while processing power is infinitely better. Memory continues to draw less and less power with better performance. Alright the centers use more power, but thats because they are more capable. The "expert" seems to have just forgotten efficiency completely. I don't care about how the chip companies make out, but they certainly seem right about power efficiency and therefore are more "green."
Mr Rabbett should check out the data center in Quincy, Washington. Kudos to the vole for getting the new turbine refit in grand coulee pushed through. Too bad about Vista.

This guy obviously has never seen or worked in a data center. You can't change a bad fan or hard disk or do a bunch of other things by remote admin.

Test dev servers don't get used 24/7 ? Developers live all over the world, which last time I checked, has more than one time zone.
I've recently come back from my honeymoon in Iceland. I met some guys there that claimed that both Google and Microsoft were looking to make new, huge datacentres there.

There are very good reasons for putting data centres in Iceland: -

Firstly, energy is billed at 2c / kWh and comes from either Geothermal or Hydro renewables. 

2ndly the mean year round temperature is stupid cold for humans - but great for computers - thus negating air conditioning bills.

The green light will be when some fat cables have been laid to the NA continent.

3DBob
Wow... Tough being an expert these days :-)

Probably some of his ideas got out of context due to lack of article space .......

But I must add a comment about turning dev/test servers off.

My experience tells me that a large complex application, and an important one, will be more heavy regarding test/dev. So even if it requires a mission critical plattform running metro/campus cluster the test servers will both outnumber it and probably be a lot more utilized...

My suggestion... Why cant the excessive heat be used for heating the office space instead. Or sold to nearby building??

I have heard a customer that "gave away" the heat to a indoor swimming facility for the exchange of some commercial ads....

1. Quite often, test/dev servers are more loaded than production servers on average. True, production servers are sometimes more powerful and have some performance margin.

2. turning off servers is complete bollocks for all but most simple environments or very specific situations (i.e. disaster recovery tests). There usually are some complications potentially disrupting business as this is usually a very complex task within bigger companies. 

3. virtualization is expensive and complex and is not suitable for all scenarios - consider systems with peak loads at the same time. It is great technology, no doubt, but it has its limits.

4. software is more and more complex and less efficient, thus requiring more CPU power for the same capability. This trend will continue no matter what. Creating more effective software is prohibitively expensive and requires far more energy to create and debug (not mentioning other resources). Combine this with the fact that businesses today need to evolve and change fast in order to remain competitive.

IT is not green, IT will not be green. Green IT is only mindfsck for the uninformed.
"switch off test/dev servers 'because they’re on 24x7 but only get used every four months'"

Oh, so I get paid four times as much as I work then ? Yeah, right.
I'm a developer, and you had better have that dev server running every day of the week because if it's not I'll be raising hell. I use my dev server every day. You think I develop in production ? What kind of moron does that ?
Break the production server and you're going to see the CEO in front of your desk before you finish turning around to see what happened.
No developer worth an ounce of respect does development on a live production server, not unless it's absolutely critical to do so. Every time you bang untested code in production, there is ALWAYS additional problems. It's unavoidable.
So you code on the dev server, you test and test again, and once you're finished you get your code validated, push it to production, and then someone phones in the next half hour to alert you to a bug that STILL managed to slip through.
It's the Law of Unintended Consequences.
So you leave that dev server ON, ya hear ?!