The Green Data Center topic has ridden the wave of overall data center coverage by the media.

In 2006 is when I started researching the green data center topic, then in Oct 2007 is when I published an article in Microsoft’s TechNet magazine on green data centers.

I wasn’t able to attend the event (I’ll get to Zurich some day!), but I interviewed two Google execs the day before the conference, and have been reading some of the coverage of the talks. James Hamilton, VP Engineer for Amazon Web Services, attended Google’s summit and took notes on the morning keynote by Google Senior VP Urs Hoelzle. According to Hamilton’s notes, Hoelzle pointed out some interesting and counter intuitive metrics about data center power consumption.

Hoelzle said that the widely-cited metric that 2 percent of U.S. energy consumption goes to data centers is widely misunderstood, and the actual data point is that 2 percent of the U.S. energy budget is spent on IT, and most of that energy is actually consumed by the client side of IT (devices, computers, etc.). The actual breakdown of IT and the energy budget in the U.S.: Client devices consume 50 percent of the IT energy budget, telecom networks and systems consume 37 percent, and data centers consume 14 percent. So at the end of the day, data centers consume 0.28 percent of the U.S. power budget (note, this is all from Hamilton’s blog).

Despite the number being a lot smaller-sounding than the widely-cited metric that data centers consume 2 percent of U.S. power, Google still thinks it’s an increasingly growing problem. That’s the whole point to the day-long Google summit. Hoelzle also dug a little deeper into that 0.28 percent of power consumption and segmented it: Large data centers consume 28 percent of that energy, medium-sized data centers consume 31 percent, and small data centers consume 41 percent. The important part to note of that, said Hoelzle, is that small- and medium-sized data centers, which often lack the resources of the massive new cutting edge data centers, make up 72 percent of the data center energy consumption.

As a result, Google is pushing the so-called “low hanging fruit,” and spent the day laying out the best practices that any IT manager can do on a reasonable budget, such as maintaining hot and cool aisles, managing airflow, measuring the energy consumption in the facility, using outside air whenever available, running the data center at a higher temperature like 80 degrees, and optimizing power distribution. Google laid out all these points in this set of videos, and Google’s Joe Kava went over similar points with me in an interview. Just stick to the basics, and a low PUE (data center efficiency metric) of 1.5 or lower can be achieved.

The exclusive event to be held at Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi on January 27, 2010  is being tagged as a must attend for all whose core interest is establishing or maintaining the lead in the field of data center investment, ownership, management, operation and services.

The conference will feature several key lectures by industry experts focusing on issues ranging from new trends and innovations within the industry, to standards, compliances, best practices and totally green solutions for data centers.

Mr. Mehdi Paryavi, President of TechXact, said:  “Our objective is to assist organizations in bridging the gap between the system generally being followed and the latest technological advancement and to achieve industry’s best practices and familiarize them with new trends that can actually enhance ROI and TCO. Participants can observe, hear and interact with the world’s leading data center manufacturers, technology suppliers, and service providers.”

The Green Grid has launched a new free online tool and maps designed to help European data center and facilities managers easily the amount of time that free cooling is available for their data centers. The group offered similar tools to U.S. data center operators last year. The updates extend coverage of the tool and maps to 33 European countries.

“Data centers with increasing IT loads require more power to cool them, so finding cooling options that use less power is critical not only for organizations that don’t have resources to build new facilities but also for those that want to save money,” said Vic Smith, Dell representative and EMEA technical work group chair of The Green Grid. “For much of the year, the air outside data centers can be cooler than the air inside. This tool that The Green Grid has developed will help determine how much free cooling a specific data center can leverage.”

Members of The Green Grid will have access to a high resolution graphical map of the estimated hours of air-side and water-side economization possible for Europe and many specific countries. Lower resolution maps of European free cooling estimates are available to non-members.

The tool is available for the following European countries: Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, and United Kingdom.

* Getting to work: We’ve got a shuttle service that brings employees from around the Bay Area to the Googleplex every day. These shuttles are outfitted with wi-fi and fueled by B20 biodiesel. And employees who bike, walk, skip, hop or otherwise self-power to work can earn points that translate into a donation from Google to their charity of choice.

* Turning on the lights: The rooftops at our headquarters are covered in 9,212 photovoltaic solar panels that produce 1.6 MW of electricity — enough energy to power about 1,000 California homes.

* Healthy buildings: The facilities at our main campus use sustainable building materials that are environmentally friendly and healthier, such as “cradle-to-cradle” certified products designed to never end up in landfills, fresh air ventilation, daylighting, and whenever possible, PVC- and formaldehyde-free materials.

* No, we’re not kidding: We’ve been known to use goats instead of lawn mowers to graze the fields surrounding our campus.

* Getting around town: We have a fleet of 8 plug-in vehicles that Google employees can use free of charge to run errands during the day. (In the summer of 2008 our Google.org RechargeIT initiative launched a controlled driving experiment, and our plug-in hybrids achieved more than 90 MPG!) Shared bicycles are also scattered among our buildings for Googlers to use for short trips around campus, reducing the need for cars during the work day.

* Waste not, want not: Waste from our Mountain View cafes is separated and the organic component is composted. As a result, we’ve reduced waste sent to landfills, reduced greenhouse gases and recycled nutrients leading to improved soil quality without chemicals. And any disposable plateware and cutlery we continue to use in the cafés is now compostable.

What I propose is a more accurate description of what data centers are in this economy.  The Data Center is an information factory, a building that makes information suitable for use with information machinery – servers, storage, and networking hardware. Information is the raw material input into the factory. Software running on the hardware processes information increasing the value. Like any other manufacturing process electricity is used to power and cool the machinery.  How much power is used to run these information factories, in 2006 1.5% of the US electricity production was in data centers, doubling 2000 consumption, growing at a 12% annual rate.

The above is an image Google uses to illustrate its green Information Factory (aka data center).

So the choices to green the data center are now how do you green your information factory.  Making factories energy efficient is a concept many are familiar with.  Applied to the information factory how do you consume less energy and/or greener energy while increasing the value of information? Making power delivery more efficient applies to all parts of the data center. Cooling systems is a whole topic specialists who can figure out the most efficient way to remove the heat from the IT equipment.  More efficient servers are another choice. And of course there is virtualization.  Not too long ago, for every watt of power supplied to a server, there was another watt used by the power and cooling systems.  Now companies like Google consume only 0.21 watts for power and cooling for every watt used by their information factory hardware which by the way consume less power than what is commonly used by the industry.

Where do you start? Most companies start where they have budget to spend. Huh? Sound silly. Well that is what happens in most companies as the IT organizations within a company are in silos of separation. Imagine if you wanted improve a car’s MPG and approached the problem based on which department had the budget available to make changes to the car.What is needed is an information engineer whose job it is to figure out how to improve the performance per watt in the whole system and prioritize the areas to address.

Companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay have addressed this problem by creating groups who have responsibilities to engineer their information factories.

Is your company running centers of data or information factories? The ones who think like information factories are driving to new levels of performance per watt.  Breaking down silos, to get groups to work together. You can Green the data center by looking at how much energy gets consumed by your information factories to create higher value information. Another choice is where data centers get their power from and the carbon impact.  Using 1.5% of the US electricity consumption data centers have the opportunity to locate near places with renewable energy and is commonly discussed by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

The Wikipedia site is hosted on about 300 servers in a primary data center in Tampa, Fla. The 50 servers at the EvoSwitch data center in Amsterdam will provide content storage and delivery. Amsterdam is one of the world’s most important network hubs, with hundreds of European networks exchanging traffic in the city’s data centers.

“We’re very pleased with EvoSwitch’s professional and well secured data center environment, which includes a highly cost-efficient infrastructure in a location that is of great strategic importance to us,” said Brion Vibber, Chief Technology Officer for the Foundation. “We will be using the Amsterdam site for caching in particular, aiming to reduce the response time of our project websites in Europe. EvoSwitch will also be a good location for backing up content that is stored at our Florida data center. Finally, we will be relocating European publishing projects to EvoSwitch, such as Toolserver.org – a project of the German Wikimedia chapter.

“The Amsterdam servers will both retrieve the content from the servers in Florida, as well as store it,” Vibber added. “Web pages can then be displayed to Internet users directly from Amsterdam, which will improve the speed and accessibility of the web pages in Europe significantly. I expect that we will further increase our capacity at EvoSwitch in the near future due to the required storage capacity and new European publishing projects.”

EvoSwitch is a 100,000 square foot data center supported by 20 megawatts of power capacity that is generated entirely from sustainable energy sources including, solar, wind and biomass. The facility uses free cooling (fresh air economization) to reduce its use of energy for air conditioning. Vibber says this was a factor in Wikimedia’s selection of EvoSwitch.

“As operators of one of the most heavily accessed web property on the web, we are aware of the impact that the Internet and its energy consumption have on the environment,” said Vibber. “EvoSwitch’s energy-saving measures, combined with their use of green energy and CO2 compensation are very attractive to us.”

“We are strong supporters of Wikimedia and their Wikipedia publishing project in particular,” said Eric Boonstra, EvoSwitch’s Commercial Director. “The Foundation’s operations coincide with the objectives of our own organization, to keep the Internet ‘open’ and stimulate freedom of expression and the transmission of knowledge via the Internet. This partnership is all the more special to us because of Wikimedia’s faith in EvoSwitch.”

A Texas startup . Baryonyx Corp.has been awarded three wind energy leases for 8,000 acres onshore in Dallam County, Texas and another 38,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico, the company said. Baryonyx has also acquired 8 acres of land in Stratford, Texas for its data center project.

Baryonyx was formed in May to build data center projects powered by renewable energy resources. Its primary focus will be wind energy, but the company is also developing plans to eventually use hydrogen fuel cells and solar power to support its facilities when  wind generation ebbs due to weather conditions.

The project is the most ambitious effort yet to harness wind power to provide electricity for data centers. Green House Data has built a 10,000 square foot facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming that runs primarily on wind energy, while Microsoft has demonstrated wind-powered containers packed with servers.

100 Turbines for Data Center
Baryonyx plans to build a 28,000 square foot data center in Stratford, which will be powered by 100 wind turbines built on the adjacent land that will generate up to 150 megawatts of power. Each of the turbines will be able to generate up to 3.3 megawatts of power. Capacity not needed by the data center will be sold to local utilities. Baryonyx said it will take about 3 years to reach the operational phase for the wind-powered data center.

The second phase is the offshore wind farms, which will feature up to 450 wind turbines, which are each 300 feet tall and capable of generating 6 megawatts of power. Baryonyx was the high bidder in a July 14 lease sale by the Texas General Land Office. Baryonyx will pay a “nominal fee” to lease the two offshore areas for wind development.

“The biggest part of our carbon footprint is the amount of electricity used to power the IT equipment in our data centers,” said Christina Page, the Director of Climate and Energy Strategy at Yahoo. “All electrons are not created equal.”

Companies like Yahoo are seeking to use less power and buy a larger percentage of their energy from renewable sources such as hydro, wind and solar power. In most cases, that means building or leasing data centers in locations where utility providers offer renewables in sourcing their electricity.

The Bully Green Pulpit
The issue is coming into focus for data center operators as the President Barack Obama has used a series of media events – including a visit of MIT last week and this week’s tour of a Florida solar power facility – to ramp up discussion of his cap-and-trade plan for regulating carbon emissions in the U.S.

Regulation will likely introduce new financial considerations around renewable energy, and reinforce the existing focus on data center efficiency, according to panelists at this month’s Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit hosted by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG).

“We look at this potential for regulation as opportunity rather than a harbinger of doom,” said Mark Thiele, director of business operations for R&D at VMware. “Carbon right now is at the top of the hype cycle. The reality is about efficiency, and saving our companies money. Those of us who care about the environment now have a stick to wield.”

Energy Efficiency: Job One
The immediate opportunity is in funding efficiency projects, or as Thiele puts it, ”how we own what we already have.” There is evidence that efforts to improve the energy efficiency of data centers are extending beyond the largest providers, whose huge power bills have made efficiency a business imperative.

Yesterday the data center trade group AFCOM reported that 71 percent of its members are pursuing energy efficiency projects. But barriers remain. “I really surprised that 22 percent tof our members reported that they haven’t gotten a commitment (on energy efficiency projects) from senior management,” said Jill Eckhaus, the president of AFCOM. “The data center sucks a lot of energy, so it’s being looked at in a big way.”

Hydro, Solar Implementations
VMware and Yahoo are among the companies that have built data centers in central Washington, where the local utility power is almost exclusively hydro power from dams on the nearby Columbia River. Hydro is desirable because it is both green and affordable.

In other parts of the country, i/o Data Centers, AISO and Emerson Network Power are integrating solar power into their new data centers. But the price and scalability of renewable power presents challenges to on-site generation of renewable power by data center operators.

As innovation is gradually whittling down the cost of renewable energy, the disparity between renewables and coal may also be altered by regulation. The EPA’s Ben Machol said pending legislation will not just boost renewable energy sources, but could also have cost implications for utilities that relay heavily on coal in their power generation.

Higher Pricing for Coal?
“Coal plants would need to put in controls for greenhouse gases,” he said. “What that will mean for data centers is primarily prices going up. In an environment of rising power prices, energy efficiency will pay back very quickly. It’s a no brainer.”

While some attendees at the SVLG event were critical of the potential for regulation to increase the cost of coal-based power, others said the industry needs to consider a broader context for the issue. ”Dirty electricity is already expensive,” said John Stanley of the Uptime Institute. “It only looks cheap.”

Google said Oct. 2 that its six company-built facilities have an average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.21, and that one facility had reached a PUE of 1.13. Erik Teetzel, an Energy Program Manager at Google, told Data Center Knowledge that at least one of the six Google-built data centers “could in fact be a container data center.”

Google has never publicly discussed its data center container project. Last October Google was awarded a patent on a portable data centerin a shipping container, confirming a 2005 report from PBS columnist Robert Cringley that the company was building prototypes of container-based data centers in a garage in Mountain View. Containers also featured prominently in Google’s recently-disclosed patent filing for a floating data center that generates its own electricity using wave energy.

Teetzel’s comment suggests that Google has not only deployed its data center containers, but has done so ahead of Microsoft, which is currently putting the finishing touches on a huge new data center near Chicago. The bottom floor of the $550 million facility will house at least 150 data center containers packed with servers.

At a time when the industry is focused on green data centers, Microsoft says the data center containers are exceptionally efficient, and can generate very efficient PUE numbers. “On the proof-of-concept we ran we saw PUE numbers come in at 1.3, and if you compare that with historical data centers, it’s very, very low,” Daniel Costello, Microsoft’s Director of Data Center Research, said in a presentation at Structure 08. “Most data centers around the world would be 1.6 to 2.0.”

Google’s use of a data center “container farm” might explain several industry critiques of the PUE data released last week. Dan Golding of Tier1 Research, in a comment at GigaOm, noted that one data center on the Google PUE data seemed to be “out of band” with the others:

Some of Google’s numbers are suspect. While many are believable, their data for facility “B” is outside the envelope of current engineering. … PUEs of 1.2 in a very large facility with lots of sensors, in the right locations: possible. PUE’s of 1.15 or below? Not with our current cooling technology.

Microsoft’s James Hamilton notes Google’s description of its cooling towers, and mentions that “the 1.15 PUE with pure air-side economization in the right climate looks quite reasonable, but powering a conventional, high-scale, air and water, multi-conversion cooling system at this efficiency looks considerably harder to me.” Unless, perhaps, that center is a non-conventional facility using containers.

Data center containers have been used for years by the U.S. military. The first commercial product, Sun’s Project Blackbox, was announced in 2006. We noted at the time that the Blackbox “extends the boundaries of the data center universe, and gives additional options to managers of fast-growing enterprises.” Now they are shaping up as ammunition in the data center arms race between Microsoft and Google.

A presentation by Microsoft’s James Hamilton (who has written early and often about containers) referenced the Google container effort as the “WillPower” project, apparently a reference to Will Whitted, nne of the inventors listed on the Google patent. In a newspaper interview last year, Whitted said that the portable data center project had been canceled.