The Future Looks Green
18 Feb 2008
by Alex Cameron, EDSTaming IT Energy Usage Toward Future Environmental Sustainability Has Become a Global Imperative
From synnovation issue 7: The Green Issue, EDS Agility Alliance Quarterly Publication.
We reached a watershed of sorts in 2006. This was the year that evidence supporting the necessity for environmental sustainability was presented in a way that was accessible to the public at large. The documentary An inconvenient Truth took science out of the laboratory, economics out of academia, and delivered a timely and resounding message to the world. In terms of its impact, the argument hit most of us like a tsunami. The message was clear: Changes are occurring in the earth's atmosphere that can be linked to byproducts of fossil fuels used to satisfy the energy demands of a hungry economy. Whether the exact predictions are right or wrong does not seem to be worth debating anymore. The issue now is, what can we do about it?
The “green” imperative has become a global imperative, impacting all consumers of energy on the planet. It is energy that delivers technology, and it is energy that fuels the engines of our digital economy, the data centers – those mammoth repositories where all our financial records, our favorite images, and the massive search databases we rely upon are among the almost infinite lists of items stored. Data centers are also home base for global commerce. They grow with the economy and the Internet, and as a result, they are now seen as major contributors to carbon emissions.
Understanding the Basics
Most of the energy in the world today is generated by fuels that have a carbon base. As this energy is consumed, it releases carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases, thus creating an imbalance in the normal makeup of our protective, life-sustaining atmosphere. The problem is, coal-fired energy plants are springing up all over the planet in an attempt to meet the exponentially increasing demands of technology. It's been estimated that about 40 percent of CO2 emissions stem from the burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity. CO2 emissions associated with human activities account for approximately 27 billion tons per year.
There's no other mechanism in the natural world (not even the largest volcano) able to generate CO2 at this rate. The good news is that there are now combined efforts to halt those trends; however, even with immediate action, the current trajectory will not stop us overshooting the level of CO2 emissions that are considered sustainable.
Of all the greenhouse gases (GHG), CO2, despite its low global warming potential, has the most damaging long-term impact. Not only does it constitute more than three-quarters of all GHG emissions, but it has a 5- to 250-year lifetime in the atmosphere. The worst effects of CO2 can be substantially reduced if atmospheric levels are stabilized between 380 and 400 ppm (parts per million). The present level is about 385, and it's growing at a rate of around 2 ppm every year. Therefore, in order to just begin to turn the corner, emissions would have to be reduced to 25 percent of present levels by 2050.
Carbon concentrations in the atmosphere have been high before, but since the Industrial Revolution, they've been growing at a rate commensurate with global prosperity and cannot be allowed to continue unchecked. This is the core issue.
Energy Demands in Our Own Backyard
In any survey of industries associated with heavy energy demand, it's unlikely that information technology would be perceived as a significant contributor to greenhouse emissions. But just as millions of people own cars, millions of people around the world also own or use computers and related equipment. The utility and ubiquity of the modern computing platform has masked a compounding increase in energy consumption. An enormous proliferation of underutilized computers and storage devices has subsequently occurred, and with this has come a large inheritance of data center architectures that are rigid and almost impervious to timely rejuvenation.
Another important factor is “energy waste,” or poor efficiency of the very energy the data centers demand. Even though the efficiency with which we generate energy is slowly increasing – from a figure of around 3 percent in 1900 to a present value of about 16 percent – it's still too slow and, when combined with current server utilizations of some 20 percent, results in an overall efficiency at the processor of around 4 percent (whether it's idle or not).
So for every unit of fossil fuel converted to energy, only a small percentage is actually used. Industry journalist Timothy Prickett Morgan estimates that of the $250 billion in annual energy costs to run all computers worldwide, some $213 billion is “absolutely wasted.” For perspective, consider that there are now some 28 million servers in existence, and the count is expected to rise to 43 million by 2010. Less than 10 years ago, there were only 6 million servers.
The impact is starting to hit home, and for many CIOs, the challenge comes when a data center can no longer draw on the power and/or cooling capacity it needs, and an expensive site investment is required to increase capacity. Indeed, a recent IDC survey shows energy consumption as one of the top five concerns of CIOs and CEOs, and it now represents more than 10 percent of the overall IT budget. Considering this issue is caused by inefficiency and waste, it's clear that current IT practices are unsustainable and that the future will demand new and sustainable designs – IT architectures controlled with state-of-the-art energy management systems. The economic and environmental advantages of such an innovation will be far reaching.
Increasing Efficiency
The key to sustainability is to reduce demand through efficiency and energy management. This also improves the financial viability of more emerging alternative sustainable energy solutions and, therefore, translates into fewer carbon emissions. Importantly, it also allows us to continue to grow while buying precious time to develop future generation energy systems that will deliver sustainable levels of carbon and greenhouse gas emissions.
To reduce the demand for energy in the data center, consider everything that draws power from the grid – lighting, server configurations, microprocessor architectures, power distribution, and cooling. One immediate solution to boost efficiency is to use a direct current (DC) power backbone. DC power systems and grids are not only efficient but also offer up a sizeable opportunity to introduce sustainable energy, along with the benefits of enhanced reliability.
The present conversion from different levels of AC to DC is an inherently inefficient and unreliable process, and is further complicated by the number of conversions needed to achieve required DC levels within a typical data center. DC-to-DC conversion is not only more reliable, but it is also more efficient. In a typical data center, there are generally twice as many conversions as there would be in a DC system. As a result, adopting a fully DC system would extend the average time between failure from a short 10 to 20 years to a sustainable 50 to 80 years.
Converting to DC would increase the efficiency of a typical server some 29 percent, making it more reliable for less expense. A significant additional benefit is that it works well with sustainable energy generation and storage devices such as photovoltaic solar-power cells, fuel cells, and supercapacitors. The bottom line is that DC is good for reducing energy costs and, ultimately, the overall carbon footprint.
Another method to increase data center efficiency is virtualization and multi-core chip processor organization. This is a significant mechanism for reducing power while still maintaining overall performance. By keeping the processor clock speeds at compatible levels, chip makers have not only been able to minimize energy requirements (wasted heat) but also to enhance potential performance. This architecture is very well suited to virtual environments where many application images can be loaded onto a single server operating system supporting multi-threaded, multi-core processors.
Lastly, another area that's seeing significant improvement is cooling delivered directly to the processor or server for maximum efficiency. Dynamic cooling will eventually be connected to the application architecture to achieve an overall symbiotic and efficient data center “ecosystem.”
Tomorrow's Solutions
To meet business needs of today and tomorrow, IT application architectures are evolving toward becoming loosely connected, event driven, and agile. This trend needs to be extended down to data center infrastructure so that energy is distributed and used only when there's a demand. That will lead toward adoption of sustainable and renewable energy sources that will, in turn, increase distribution through localized or on-site energy systems. These “microgrids” will support DC-based data centers in the future.
Currently available and future technologies for this on-site power are diverse and include static fuel cells, microturbines, photovoltaic solar-power cells, wind turbines connected to energy storage devices such as supercapacitors, high-speed flywheels, and osmosis battery stacks. No single technology should be seen as solving a particular distributed energy demand, but a combination can remove the key problem – designing for peak demand. Peak demand is the primary cause of excess carbon generation and the area ripest for innovation in the future.
Another sign of future progress will be the adoption of discretionary energy. What is discretionary energy? When we think of a data center and a computer, we think of a permanent and completely dedicated connection to the power grid with sufficient energy always available to meet peak demand. In reality, this is a very inefficient way to provide energy services. A far more clever and efficient method is to develop systems that can support discretionary loads or be responsive to energy availability. Consider a data center chiller that refrigerates water in insulated reservoirs for drawing on during normal operations. (These systems presently exist.) Provided we had efficient data centers, these chillers would only need to be topped off when power is available on the public grid or microgrid, leading to very large energy savings and opening up other potentially exciting innovations.
Once a site has the technology in place to become independent of the public supply grid, it becomes part of a network of microgrids that support the implementation and management of an enterprise wide energy management architecture founded on the use of discretionary power. Although a microgrid will initially be more expensive, the return on investment will ultimately be realized by having systems that are inherently more reliable and more efficient.
Ultimately, we will see discretionary energy solutions that integrate microgrids, DC energy distribution, dynamic cooling, and virtualization driven by a green control language. A data center operating on DC power with local generation will be nearly 100 percent self-reliant, using renewable and sustainable energy. We will also see data centers able to dynamically move processing according to energy or cooling demands – if the processing demand out-strips the capacity, or the energy market signals indicate lower cost energy elsewhere, then a sequence of balancing actions would be initiated. This would entail shedding the processing load through moving images (virtualization) to another data center anywhere in the world where there was both available capacity and sustainable energy.
Investing in the Future
Reducing energy consumption is not only sociably responsible but also carries with it some incredible technology and business advantages. For example, reduction in cooling alone can result in annual savings of more than $1 million for a 15-megawatt data center. Added benefits of increased reliability enrich the overall savings. And paying for it all will also be easier in the future, as the market will support these initiatives for clean and sustainable energy.
Energy management in the future will become an integral and ethical component of business, directly linked to the corporation's profitability. If the obligation is not performed responsibly, investment dollars will likely be at risk. The same can be said for staffing as future employees choose to work for companies committed to environmental responsibility.
Paradoxically, it will be technology that unlocks this potential. The future will see dynamic, worldwide balancing of transactions in real time, with processing going to those global centers with the best energy credentials.
The world will revolve around all things that achieve lowest cost to the environment. That's the future that looks green.
About the Author
Alex Cameron is an EDS Fellow and chief technology executive for EDS Defense Services in Australia.