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Why green is not just about renewables

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: The US has a concept called renewable energy credits where data centre operators buy renewable energy for credit from one company which has several renewables, - wind, water etc. Also prevalent there is energy trading, which is yet to come to India.

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Dale Sartor, applications team leader, Building Technologies Department, Lawrence Berkeley National LaboratoryDespite giant leaps in the energy sector, India is still new to many green practices. Talking about the future, Dale Sartor, applications team leader, Building Technologies Department, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Aniket Patange, director, professional services, Schneider Electric India, in an interaction with  Srinivas Rasoor and Deepa Damodaran of CIOL, say that in future, data centres might run very warm, perhaps without any mechanical cooling like chillers or air conditioners.

Excerpts:

CIOL: Greenpeace in its recent report chastised companies like Facebook, Google, Apple for using non-renewable source of energy in data centres. Your take on that.

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Dale Sartor: Greenpeace's objection was with regard to the usage of cheap and dirty power sources. Although they were using coal, these data centres were very efficient.

In a small facility you can sustain with renewables, however in a large facility, you need to look at other cheap alternative sources of energy, in order to sustain efficiency.

Green is much more than just renewables. Just by solving problems on the supply side, we will only end up buying additional solar panels and hardware. And, compared to an electric system, a solar system has 20 years of payback, which only a few businesses would like to invest in.

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What we can do is work on the data centre energy efficiency aspect. It might cost a little bit upfront, but the total cost of ownership will be lower and the potential for energy saving will be very high.

Thus, green is the combination of efficiency and renewables. From a green perspective, it is productive to save a kilo watt of power, than producing one. Thus, you can save two kilo watt with the same money used to produce 1 kilo watt energy.

In the US, we have a concept called renewable energy credits, where data centre operators buy renewable energy for credit from one company which has a facility in a location that has several renewables, - wind, water etc - available at one spot.

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Aniket Patange: We have acquired a company called Summit Energy in the US, which specializes in energy trading. While this is prevalent in USA, it is yet to come to India because neither we have any regulations or incentives for such concepts, nor do we have such location where several such sources of power are available at the same spot.

CIOL: Is it possible to run a data centre using air from outside, in a much warmer environment?

Dale Sartor: The current server technology can support environmental conditions that far exceed our comfort zone.

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All server manufacturers allow the temperature to go up to 27 degrees Celsius inside servers. As per a new guidance, server manufacturers are introducing products which can even go up to 45 degrees Celsius.

However, today they are wrapped up cold since we designed data centres for cold technology.

Number of years back when computers were using cards, there were papers inside data centres, and  servers used to have dozens of computers. Those computers lasted for a long time, longer than most servers that you expect to last in a data centre today. Data centres back then used to operate in a very extreme condition, which used to be very dusty, and noisy.

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However, this does not mean that today you can just ask a data centre manager to raise the temperature, because data centres maintain cold temperature in order to manage hot and cold spots inside, which are caused due to poor air management.

So, the first step is to improve air management inside data centres. If you can manage the hot and cold spots, then the load on cooling will be reduced. Gradually the air conditioning system will become more efficient and servers will also operate efficiently. Once air management is effective, then we can raise temperature quite significantly and this will open up the opportunity to use free cooling from outside air.

If not directly the air outside, we can use cooling towers that can cool the water collected from outside and use it to cool the air inside data centre.

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CIOL: Are data centre managers ready to experiment hot temperature inside their facility?

Dale Sartor: No. There are still a lot of conservatism regarding this. One argument is that they would like to keep it cold so that if at all some problem arises with the air conditioner, they have enough time to rectify it.

This would have been true ten years ago, when rack power usage used to be less than a kilo watt. Today, racks use 20 kilo watts and even if you have temperatures at 20 degrees Celsius, when your cooling system shuts down data centre will overheat within a few minutes. So one has to design a data centre that is not going to lose its cooling system.

Today, only a very few are looking at using renewable energy because of several reasons. One is the space required. A data centre is a highly energy intensive facility unlike a house or office building. So you end up buying a lot of solar panels, adding to the cost upfront.

CIOL: What are the painponts that enterprises face in data centres?

Aniket Patange: There is a lack of skilled resources in the country. Day to day activities, such as how to run an IT equipment or what are the operating procedures for an equipment, are today left to ordinary technicians.

Data centre managers are not able to visualize the implications of moving a rack, or of adding  more capacity to a rack, or how it will affect power and cooling.

So they take decisions purely on gut feelings and use excel sheets to capture the change. There is a big disconnect between IT and facility teams. Often, a person in the second shift does not know what has happened in the first shift.

Another challenge is that these data centres were built a few years ago and have come of age. Today they are facing problems like increase in cost of operation, high energy expenditure and inefficiency of managing it from a people perspective.

Dale Sartor: Escalating operations cost in an increasingly competitive environment is a challenge today. They are finding it difficult to manage capacity and reliability inside data centre. With disasters like tsunami, no matter how many sources of power you have, data centre will be affected.

On the reliability front, instead of spending money to increase redundancy of a data centre, by adding more generators and chillers, we should work on increasing redundancy at the network level.

Technologies such as virtualization allow us today to move applications within data centres or even to another centre located in remote part of the world, in real time.

With regards to capacity, instead of adding more IT equipment to the existing infrastructure and thus putting extra pressure on cooling and ending up buying more power supplies and UPS, which are very expensive, we should focus on increasing energy efficiency that will free up capacity.

If we can reduce even 25 per cent of the capacity through energy management, we can have that much more capacity to expand and thus reduce operations cost.

CIOL: How will the future data centre look like?

Dale Sartor: In future, data centres will run very warm, perhaps without any mechanical cooling like chillers or air conditioners, other than fans and pumps.

Raised floors might disappear. Such floors were designed for a static system and work well when the load is flat.

However, today with virtualization, we have better control on servers and power consumption, however, the IT load is no longer flat today.

Cloud computing is happening and is bringing higher efficiencies inside data centres because cloud providers are very cost conscious and in order for them the sustain in the business they have to be the low cost producers.

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