HP Says New Data Center Architecture Offers Huge Energy Savings

While it appears to be more of a proof of concept for now, Hewlett-Packard's new sustainable data center architecture will be among the offerings showcased at its client event, HP Discover, next week in Las Vegas. HP Net-Zero Energy Data Center will reportedly cut total power usage by 30%, and utility and power costs by more than 80%.

Net-Zero is intended to operate without requiring net energy from traditional power grids, which opens the possibility of putting data centers anywhere, according to the vendor. In a prepared statement, Cullen Bash, distinguished technologist at HP and interim director of the sustainable ecosystems research Group at HP Labs, said there are two primary benefits to the approach: It minimizes the environmental impact of computing and reduces data center energy costs.

HP says the architecture integrates energy and cooling resources with IT workload planning with the use of four modules:

According to the vendor's white paper, "Towards the Design and Operation of Net-Zero Energy Data Centers," while the initial results from Net-Zero are very encouraging, additional research is required to meet the overall goal of achieving net-zero energy over a data center's life cycle. "Future work will involve adding embedded energy cost to our architecture and scaling out our solution. We are also actively investigating how to co-locate critical and non-critical workloads simultaneously on a minimal set of IT equipment ... an important next step in achieving a cost effective net-zero energy data center."

Next: Net-Zero Data Center the Latest Green IT Push for HPRob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, is familiar with the physical trial. "It uses a combination of green technologies, including methane gas recovery from cows, to get to its ultimate state. Ideally--due to the cow part--this would be for rural or developing areas that have very limited and often unreliable power, allowing the data center to be largely grid free and vastly cheaper to operate than a typical grid primary with generator backup system," he says.

Every vendor has a niche, he adds--HP's is being aggressively green, with its long-term strategy to instrument virtually everything so that energy conservation can be maximized at every aspect of creating goods or services. "This is one example of their massive effort to lead in conservation," he says.

Availability and cost issues aside, the initiative seems like it should work, says Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. "As I understand it, Zero Net facilities will leverage on-site renewable energy sources and analytics processes to maximize computing processes at the time the renewables are driving the highest volumes of power." For example, if a facility had solar arrays on premises, heavy workloads would be scheduled during daylight hours, he says.

It's too soon to predict what impact this will have on the data center market when it finally ships, but King notes that past "green" data center technologies have tended to run into roadblocks related to higher-than-typical acquisition costs, and the inclusion of on-site renewables will almost assuredly raise capex costs for these facilities (even taking into account government/tax rebates on those investments). "Bottom line: Even if many companies think HP's Net-Zero solutions are the right thing to do, I expect fewer will decide that they're the right thing to invest in. At the end of the day, public companies are beholden to their shareholders, not their best instincts."

HP has been very active in pushing data center efficiency. It just reported considerable progress in improving energy efficiency as measured by the power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating. According to the Uptime Institute, the average PUE for data centers surveyed in 2011 was 1.83, which means overhead energy costs were 83% of the cost of electricity for computing equipment. The PUE at HP's Fort Collins facility averages 1.35, versus the corporate average for all HP data centers of 1.55. The company operates another data center in Wynyard, England, the shore of the North Sea. Drawing in cool sea air gives the Wynyard data center a PUE of just 1.19.

In March, HP officially unveiled the initial seven models of the ProLiant Generation 8, the latest version of its x86-based servers. The first set of products from the company's Project Voyager initiative--a $300 million investment, with two years of R&D and more than 900 patents--the servers incorporate a number of new features and capabilities that are intended to "redefine the expectations and economics of the data center," including tripling administrator productivity and delivering a return on investment in as little as five months.

Generation 8 servers are built on HP ProActive Insight architecture, which provides continuous intelligence on various server diagnostics, including server health and power usage. According to HP, this means online systems can be deployed three times faster and downtime can be reduced by as much as 93%.

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