The new data center design is expected to ensure that AAA NCNU meets its present computing needs, with the ability to scale to accomodate its future business needs. Under the agreement terms, IBM will deploy the data center consolidation with the end goals of reducing energy consumption as well as reducing cost, space and IT maintenance, while enhancing the efficiency and capacity of its data center facilities. IBM has supposedly been a leading advocate of green data center practices.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Green Hosting Company Planting Trees to Help Restore Forests Damaged by California Wildfires
Los Angeles, CA, September 04, 2009 -- Last month, CR8Change.org (“CR8”), a mission driven carbon neutral web hosting company, launched its Green Hosting Tree Planting program which is planting a new tree every month on behalf of every active web hosting account.
CR8Change in affiliation with American Forest’s Global ReLeaf program is working to help plant 3.2 million trees in 2009 to aid forest restoration in areas severely damaged by wildfires throughout California with additional wildfire projects in Montana, Colorado, Arizona and Minnesota. Species to be planted include giant sequoia and ponderosa pine in California, Sitka spruce in Alaska, longleaf pine in Florida and the Carolinas, red spruce in Maryland’s Appalachian Mountains, and hardwoods in Arkansas.
A mission driven company, in addition to providing affordable carbon neutral web hosting, CR8Change donates upwards of 14% of revenues to qualified reforestation and urban tree planting projects.
“CR8Change is committed to planting native trees in forest restoration projects for the range of benefits that trees and forests provide, including clean water and air, cooling shade, wildlife habitat, and the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to slow climate change,” commented James Arthur Smith, CR8Change’ Executive Director. “Thanks in part to cost savings afforded by recent innovation in server technologies and the forward thinking eco-conscious businesses who have made the switch to our carbon neutral hosting program, we are able to help fund these tree reforestation projects entirely from the revenues of our green hosting business.”
A recent report by industry analysts, Gartner, found that the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines – about 2% of global CO2 emissions. Traditional banks of data servers storing billions of web pages require significant power. “Data centers are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. However the advent of virtualization technologies and cloud computing has helped forward thinking web hosting companies like CR8Change to significantly improve data center efficiency and reduce the total coast of ownership for server facilities. Such technological advances have helped to facilitate profitable carbon neutral green hosting at affordable prices.
With green hosting accounts starting at $7.00 per month, which includes free migration to their state of the art web servers, 150GB of disk storage; 1500GB of monthly bandwidth and the ability to host unlimited add on and sub domains; CR8Change carbon neutral web hosting accounts are cost competitive and in many cases less expensive than their non-green industry peers. However CR8Change web hosting accounts are carbon neutral and proactively helping plant millions of trees in areas desperately in need of reforestation.
Actress, model and recently new client of CR8Change.org, Naureen Zaim (www.naureenzaim.com) of Los Angles, CA. commented: “Switching my website to CR8Change.org’s green hosting program was an easy, seamless process. Knowing that my web site is no longer contributing to global warming and now actively helping reforestation projects is invaluable to me.”
Another CR8Change.org client, Sean Davey (www.seandavey.com), a fine art ocean photographer based out of Sunset Beach, Hawaii also commented: “For as little as $7.00 per month, there is no reason every website shouldn’t go green and be proactively helping create positive change!”
About CR8Change
CR8Change is a green energy wind powered hosting company that does not pollute or contribute to global warming to power its web servers. CR8Change is an Internet Hosting company offering first rate technology without gouging customers with unnecessary fees. Cr8Change donates upwards of 14% of revenues to planting a new tree every month on behalf of every active web hosting account. For additional information please visit: http://www.cr8change.org
Contact Information:
James Arthur Smith, Founder and Executive Director
Phone: 858.926.5527
Email: info@cr8change.org
Web: http://www.cr8change.org
CR8Change in affiliation with American Forest’s Global ReLeaf program is working to help plant 3.2 million trees in 2009 to aid forest restoration in areas severely damaged by wildfires throughout California with additional wildfire projects in Montana, Colorado, Arizona and Minnesota. Species to be planted include giant sequoia and ponderosa pine in California, Sitka spruce in Alaska, longleaf pine in Florida and the Carolinas, red spruce in Maryland’s Appalachian Mountains, and hardwoods in Arkansas.
A mission driven company, in addition to providing affordable carbon neutral web hosting, CR8Change donates upwards of 14% of revenues to qualified reforestation and urban tree planting projects.
“CR8Change is committed to planting native trees in forest restoration projects for the range of benefits that trees and forests provide, including clean water and air, cooling shade, wildlife habitat, and the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to slow climate change,” commented James Arthur Smith, CR8Change’ Executive Director. “Thanks in part to cost savings afforded by recent innovation in server technologies and the forward thinking eco-conscious businesses who have made the switch to our carbon neutral hosting program, we are able to help fund these tree reforestation projects entirely from the revenues of our green hosting business.”
A recent report by industry analysts, Gartner, found that the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines – about 2% of global CO2 emissions. Traditional banks of data servers storing billions of web pages require significant power. “Data centers are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. However the advent of virtualization technologies and cloud computing has helped forward thinking web hosting companies like CR8Change to significantly improve data center efficiency and reduce the total coast of ownership for server facilities. Such technological advances have helped to facilitate profitable carbon neutral green hosting at affordable prices.
With green hosting accounts starting at $7.00 per month, which includes free migration to their state of the art web servers, 150GB of disk storage; 1500GB of monthly bandwidth and the ability to host unlimited add on and sub domains; CR8Change carbon neutral web hosting accounts are cost competitive and in many cases less expensive than their non-green industry peers. However CR8Change web hosting accounts are carbon neutral and proactively helping plant millions of trees in areas desperately in need of reforestation.
Actress, model and recently new client of CR8Change.org, Naureen Zaim (www.naureenzaim.com) of Los Angles, CA. commented: “Switching my website to CR8Change.org’s green hosting program was an easy, seamless process. Knowing that my web site is no longer contributing to global warming and now actively helping reforestation projects is invaluable to me.”
Another CR8Change.org client, Sean Davey (www.seandavey.com), a fine art ocean photographer based out of Sunset Beach, Hawaii also commented: “For as little as $7.00 per month, there is no reason every website shouldn’t go green and be proactively helping create positive change!”
About CR8Change
CR8Change is a green energy wind powered hosting company that does not pollute or contribute to global warming to power its web servers. CR8Change is an Internet Hosting company offering first rate technology without gouging customers with unnecessary fees. Cr8Change donates upwards of 14% of revenues to planting a new tree every month on behalf of every active web hosting account. For additional information please visit: http://www.cr8change.org
Contact Information:
James Arthur Smith, Founder and Executive Director
Phone: 858.926.5527
Email: info@cr8change.org
Web: http://www.cr8change.org
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
The costs of a too-warm data center
The tradition is to keep data centers at 68 degrees (Fahrenheit). Supposedly it keeps the machines in good working order because heat can damage the circuits. Another supposed truth is that allowing the temperature to vary through the day (the natural world goes through a normal heating and cooling cycle) also damages equipment. A large part of the cost in running a data center goes into running the air conditioners that keep everything cool.
ASHRAE recently published a revised recommended environmental range for data center temperature and humidity levels. They claim temperature can reliably vary between 27C (80F) to 18C (64F). This means data center operators can readily go light on the air conditioning, reducing their energy use, and reducing the environmental impact from data center operations.
A recent study: ENERGY-EFFICIENCY THROUGH THE INTEGRATION OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT AND FACILITIES CONTROLS goes into whether this is truly required, or not.
ASHRAE recently published a revised recommended environmental range for data center temperature and humidity levels. They claim temperature can reliably vary between 27C (80F) to 18C (64F). This means data center operators can readily go light on the air conditioning, reducing their energy use, and reducing the environmental impact from data center operations.
Sources:
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
How green are Google's services like gmail?
Several articles have gone around this year trying to guesstimate the cost of a web search using Google. Of course the question should be focusing on the cost of running the Internet, the cost of each web site, etc. In this case 'the cost' must be including not just the money to pay for machines and bandwidth and data centers but the environmental cost. The carbon footprint as well as the impact of mining the metals and other stuff that go into building the machines. It costs a lot of resources to build the Internet, and those resource costs can and are contributing to the environmental problems.
A recent blog (Gmail Actually Stands for Green(er) Mail) tries and largely fails to adequately make the case that gmail is greener than other forms of email. They cite a study that over half of some random set of people reading some specific random blog prefer to manage their email via an online service (like gmail) rather than on their own machine. It's hardly a good measure of a trustworthy survey result that it is based on the readership of a single blog. That is, the survey result should not be taken as a comprehensive indication of any kind of truth. Do a majority of all Internet users prefer an online email service?
In any case the 'green web' observation here is that using a web application like gmail uses more resources to read email than would an IMAP based email client.
In a way it doesn't matter how good Google is at greening their data center resource impact. Their very act of pushing us towards cloud services causes a greater increase in network traffic and infrastructure requirements.
If nothing else Google is having to buy more servers to host the gmail infrastructure. Those servers would not exist if Google weren't running gmail. On the other hand the servers at various internet service providers would be handling that email traffic, instead, and who knows how good a job they'd do in greening their infrastructure.
This revolves around the difference between Google hosting gmail and an internet service provider hosting an IMAP service. It requires more internet traffic to host the gmail service, hence the internet backbone has to have larger capacity to handle the gmail service.
On the other hand if Google is greener enough than the internet service providers, the actual impact will be less.
Maybe. It's rather fuzzy isn't it?
Monday, April 20, 2009
Are Linux server's "green"?
Ten ways Linux can turn you green suggests that, yes they are, but I don't quite follow all the reasoning. Most green web hosting providers do offer their services on Linux so it is worth pondering what role Linux would play in this quest.
First, the article considers other aspects than power consumption. Reduced landfill: There was a study in 2004 stating that IT shops with Windows servers tend to replace their equipment more often than do Linux shops. Well, 2004 was in the dark ages so maybe that was true, but one concern in that era was a push by Microsoft for Windows NT v4 shops to "upgrade" to Windows XP. Microsoft has a huge incentive (their income) to push IT shops to "upgrade" whereas Linux shops don't have the same incentive. This may cause Microsoft to force an IT shop to upgrade before the system truly deserves to be upgraded.
In any case the point here is that each server computer represents a quantity of physical stuff and energy used to manufacture that server, and when the server is retired they're typically not recyclable. That by itself is a sustainability issue, the nonrecyclability of computer equipment and all the toxic metals embedded in them.
Some of the points in the article are power savings in laptops. While that's important the scope of this blog is greening web servers, not notebooks.
One main point of distinction between a Windows and Linux server is that, being an open source operating system, a Linux server can be more easily modified for your needs. A Windows server, being closed source, is harder to modify for your needs and the range of modifications you can perform are controlled by the vendor. Linux lets you recompile the kernel as you desire, add features, etc, and there are a large range of people who focus on modifying and tweaking Linux based on their own desires. Windows does not offer the same degree of freedom that Linux offers.
On the other hand a green web hosting provider does not let you, the renter of their service, to do these kinds of tweaks. You're at the mercy of whatever service they offer. The green web hosting provider may or may not take steps to optimize the power consumption of their server, and rely only on the renewable energy credits they buy to call themselves "green".
First, the article considers other aspects than power consumption. Reduced landfill: There was a study in 2004 stating that IT shops with Windows servers tend to replace their equipment more often than do Linux shops. Well, 2004 was in the dark ages so maybe that was true, but one concern in that era was a push by Microsoft for Windows NT v4 shops to "upgrade" to Windows XP. Microsoft has a huge incentive (their income) to push IT shops to "upgrade" whereas Linux shops don't have the same incentive. This may cause Microsoft to force an IT shop to upgrade before the system truly deserves to be upgraded.
In any case the point here is that each server computer represents a quantity of physical stuff and energy used to manufacture that server, and when the server is retired they're typically not recyclable. That by itself is a sustainability issue, the nonrecyclability of computer equipment and all the toxic metals embedded in them.
Some of the points in the article are power savings in laptops. While that's important the scope of this blog is greening web servers, not notebooks.
One main point of distinction between a Windows and Linux server is that, being an open source operating system, a Linux server can be more easily modified for your needs. A Windows server, being closed source, is harder to modify for your needs and the range of modifications you can perform are controlled by the vendor. Linux lets you recompile the kernel as you desire, add features, etc, and there are a large range of people who focus on modifying and tweaking Linux based on their own desires. Windows does not offer the same degree of freedom that Linux offers.
On the other hand a green web hosting provider does not let you, the renter of their service, to do these kinds of tweaks. You're at the mercy of whatever service they offer. The green web hosting provider may or may not take steps to optimize the power consumption of their server, and rely only on the renewable energy credits they buy to call themselves "green".
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
The Whys and Hows of Measuring Power in your Data Center
The simple premise that "you can't manage what you can't measure" means data center operators have to take steps to measure device-level power consumption. Green web hosting operations have to understand their power use before they can credibly become a green web hosting operation.
The first step is to count up basic energy consumption. This will become the base from which future improvements are calculated.
Efficiency Metrics
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE): the ratio of the total energy used by a data center, including IT equipment, and the energy consumed by the IT equipment only. A higher PUE means the power used in the data center primarily goes to running the IT equipment. The total energy use includes other things like lighting and air conditioning, while the "IT Equipment" is purely the server computers and routers and whatnot.
Corporate Average Data Center Efficiency (CADE): is the energy efficiency of facilities, their utilization rates and the level of utilization of servers.
Source: The Whys and Hows of Measuring Power in your Data Center
The first step is to count up basic energy consumption. This will become the base from which future improvements are calculated.
Efficiency Metrics
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE): the ratio of the total energy used by a data center, including IT equipment, and the energy consumed by the IT equipment only. A higher PUE means the power used in the data center primarily goes to running the IT equipment. The total energy use includes other things like lighting and air conditioning, while the "IT Equipment" is purely the server computers and routers and whatnot.
Corporate Average Data Center Efficiency (CADE): is the energy efficiency of facilities, their utilization rates and the level of utilization of servers.
Source: The Whys and Hows of Measuring Power in your Data Center
Monday, April 13, 2009
Looking at: PowerNap: Eliminating Server Idle Power
Having taken a look at some journalistic analysis of PowerNap it looks like a useful possibility for greening web hosting infrastructure. I think the next step is to study the paper itself.
Source: PowerNap: Eliminating Server Idle Power (PDF)
By 2011, U.S. data centers will consume 100 billion kWh at a cost of $7.4 billion per year (U.S. EPA, “Report to congress on server and data center energy efficiency,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Tech. Rep., Aug. 2007.). Oofda.
At idle, current servers still draw about 60% of peak power. (L. Barroso and U. H ¨
olzle, “The case for energy-proportional computing,” IEEE Computer, Jan 2007.) (X. Fan, W.-D. Weber, and L. A. Barroso, “Power provisioning for a warehouse-sized computer,” in Proc. of the 34th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, 2007.) and (C. Lefurgy, X. Wang, and M. Ware, “Server-level power control,” in Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing, Jan 2007.)
In other words this is an area of inefficiency that's ripe for improvement and with the right technology you can capture some value out of improving efficiency. Energy that isn't required to be consumed, does not have to be produced. Avory Lovins popularized this idea with the term "Negawatts" which are the Megawatts that do not have to be produced. Energy that isn't produced does not cause natural gas or coal to be burned.
Ideally they want to simply turn off idle systems. However their analysis shows that with typical server loads idle periods are less than a second. With current systems it's impractical to for a system to sleep in such short intervals.
Data center operators must provision their systems for peak loads rather than average loads. That means there will always be excess server capacity.
An existing technique is dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) which almost entirely eliminates CPU power usage during idle periods. However the CPU has a small part of total server energy consumption (other components like memory or disks etc also consume power). Improving DVFS algorithms is an area of active research.
One idea is 'Energy proportional computing' which would extend DVFS to the entire system. However not every component can be redesigned to vary their power consumption to match utilization.
PowerNap is simpler because it requires components to only implement two modes: active, and napping (with minimized power use)
Transition speed between napping and active modes is the dominant factor in determining the power savings potential and response time impact of PowerNap. The response time is a key factor in server systems as customers of the service run on the server demand appropriate response time. Think of a web server and the concept of "slow" which really means it took the page too long to render. The customer of a web site doesn't care if a napping server causes slow response time, they want to see the web page now.
Hardware mechanisms they depend on are:
Current server power systems lead to wasted energy. A new system, RAILS, is proposed to decrease that waste. The idea is to use multiple small power supplies, the small power supplies each are built to operate efficiently at low power levels, and the small power supplies are dynamically turned on and off as required. The individual power supplies are each attached to a common power bus, and each server is also attached to the same power bus. The power supplies have to be sized so each power supply gives enough power for one server blade's power requirements.
]
Source: PowerNap: Eliminating Server Idle Power (PDF)
By 2011, U.S. data centers will consume 100 billion kWh at a cost of $7.4 billion per year (U.S. EPA, “Report to congress on server and data center energy efficiency,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Tech. Rep., Aug. 2007.). Oofda.
At idle, current servers still draw about 60% of peak power. (L. Barroso and U. H ¨
olzle, “The case for energy-proportional computing,” IEEE Computer, Jan 2007.) (X. Fan, W.-D. Weber, and L. A. Barroso, “Power provisioning for a warehouse-sized computer,” in Proc. of the 34th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, 2007.) and (C. Lefurgy, X. Wang, and M. Ware, “Server-level power control,” in Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing, Jan 2007.)
In other words this is an area of inefficiency that's ripe for improvement and with the right technology you can capture some value out of improving efficiency. Energy that isn't required to be consumed, does not have to be produced. Avory Lovins popularized this idea with the term "Negawatts" which are the Megawatts that do not have to be produced. Energy that isn't produced does not cause natural gas or coal to be burned.
Ideally they want to simply turn off idle systems. However their analysis shows that with typical server loads idle periods are less than a second. With current systems it's impractical to for a system to sleep in such short intervals.
Data center operators must provision their systems for peak loads rather than average loads. That means there will always be excess server capacity.
An existing technique is dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) which almost entirely eliminates CPU power usage during idle periods. However the CPU has a small part of total server energy consumption (other components like memory or disks etc also consume power). Improving DVFS algorithms is an area of active research.
One idea is 'Energy proportional computing' which would extend DVFS to the entire system. However not every component can be redesigned to vary their power consumption to match utilization.
PowerNap is simpler because it requires components to only implement two modes: active, and napping (with minimized power use)
Transition speed between napping and active modes is the dominant factor in determining the power savings potential and response time impact of PowerNap. The response time is a key factor in server systems as customers of the service run on the server demand appropriate response time. Think of a web server and the concept of "slow" which really means it took the page too long to render. The customer of a web site doesn't care if a napping server causes slow response time, they want to see the web page now.
Hardware mechanisms they depend on are:
- ACPI S3 "sleep" state
- DRAM Self-refresh which can make cut power requirements during napping periods to 4% of power requirements during active periods.
- Solid State Disks.. consume miniscule amounts of power when idle and do not need to transition to a sleep state.
- Wake-on-LAN causes the system to turn on when a packet arrives on the network port.
- Environmental monitoring and service processors
- Variable speed fans that can turn themselves down (or off) when required
- Power provisioning (RAILS) explained further on
Current server power systems lead to wasted energy. A new system, RAILS, is proposed to decrease that waste. The idea is to use multiple small power supplies, the small power supplies each are built to operate efficiently at low power levels, and the small power supplies are dynamically turned on and off as required. The individual power supplies are each attached to a common power bus, and each server is also attached to the same power bus. The power supplies have to be sized so each power supply gives enough power for one server blade's power requirements.
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