Data Center Energy Efficiency Needs To Include Software And Networking, Expert Says

Enterprises have made great strides in improving the energy efficiency of processors, servers and storage technology, but an expert on eco-friendly IT says that attention also has to be paid to networking equipment and the addition of power management features to software. Lori Wigle, president of the IT industry-led Climate Savers Computing Initiative, spoke at a CIO conference on data center efficiency and cloud computing held last week near San Francisco.

The initiative was co-founded by Intel and Google, and includes tech industry giants such as Microsoft, VMware and Cisco Systems, as well as Dell and Samsung, which were co-sponsors of the conference. The group's goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions attributed to data center operations by 54 million tons a year. So far, the 4-year-old organization has reduced them by 32 million tons, says Wigle, who is also general manager of eco-technology at Intel.

The initiative’s mission is to address power delivery to data centers and introduce power management to software, she says. The group pushes vendors to make more energy-efficient products and gets buyers to pledge to purchase IT based on its energy efficiency.

"We haven’t done a good enough job of working with the application vendors, whether they're the big ISVs [independent software vendors] or even the software that you develop internally for your businesses," she says. "We’ve started reaching out to software developers as another audience to educate them on what it means to have energy-smart software."

While significant improvements in server energy efficiency have been realized, primarily through the adoption of virtualization and the development of energy-efficient processors, networking equipment needs to improve, too, Wigle says. Networking equipment "hasn’t had as much focus historically," she says, adding that a group within the initiative, including Cisco and Juniper Networks, is focusing on that issue.

"These are arch-rivals working together," she notes. HP, which increased its competitive pressure on market leader Cisco in networking, is not in the network equipment group, but is a member of the initiative, she says.

Energy efficiency is also important for reducing the waste in IT from electricity that comes into the data center but doesn’t actually power any computing. Electrical efficiency is measured by a Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) rating. The ideal is to achieve a rating of 1.0, which means each watt of electricity equals 1 watt of computing. The higher the PUE, the less efficient a server, desktop computer or electrical converter is.

Bill Weihl, Google’s energy czar, said at the conference that by improving energy efficiency at five of its data centers, the company reduced its PUE rating to 1.5 from 2.4. Samsung touts the energy-efficiency improvements in its dynamic RAM (DRAM) and solid state disk (SSD) storage products.

An older-model DDR2 memory device consumed 102 watts of power, but a new DDR3 introduced in 2010 consumes only 14 watts, an 86% reduction, says Jim Elliott, VP of marketing at Samsung. Also, Samsung sold its hard disk drive (HDD) business to Seagate Technology earlier this year to focus on SSDs, which, while more expensive than HDDs, are significantly more energy efficient, says Elliott.

SSDs, based on flash memory technology, use 75% fewer watts than an HDD in active mode and 87% fewer watts when the disks are in idle mode. "No moving parts means lower power and heat," he notes.

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