PUE

The green PUE monster

Posted Sat, 03/30/2013 - 09:41 by jan.wiersma

green-monster_thumb

My fellow Datacenter Pulse (DCP) colleague Mark Thiele wrote a good article on the use of PUE in the datacenter industry. He basically argues that you should look at the TCO of the datacenter and have a holistic view (like we promote with the DCP stack)

He opens with the ‘my PUE is better than yours remark’ we see going around in the industry. This is mentioned before by the Green Grid; the misuse of PUE. (I have written several articles about this issue on my Dutch datacenter blog)

Well guess what… we kinda created this monster ourselves;

It's Time to Collaborate

Posted Fri, 03/02/2012 - 17:32 by geekism

In December of 2011 we hosted an exclusive Data Center Pulse collaboration session one day before we held the opening of the eBay Data Center, Project Mercury. The goal of this collaboration session was to bring 50 of our Data Center peers together to deep dive into the project, the lessons learned and discuss/debate the relevance of these concepts being applied to their data centers. We also did something new in this session - we allowed 5 vendors to participate. Wait, before you cry foul and question why we would go against our charter, I need to lay out some context. We invited the design and construction teams (EDI Ltd, AHA Consulting Engineers, Winterstreet Architects & DPR) to participate in the closed door session with members. These were the engineers that did the actual work, not sales, marketing, etc. They had very relevant insight and learnings into the challenges and lesson learned. That session went very well with lots of people discussing and debating the implementation and practicality to application in their environment. Once we finished that session, we had parallel deep dives with the Dell and HP technologists who were directly responsible for the Container, Server and Storage designs and implementations in Project Mercury. It was engineers talking to engineers.

This collaboration session turned out be one of the most productive we've had to date. Below is a video with footage from the event, a quick tour of the Project Mercury Data Center and Interviews with some of the attendees.

 

We are hosting our next DCP Summit on Monday, March 5, 2012 in San Jose. You can email membership@datacenterpulse.org to receive the password to register. View the summit details here. One of the topics at the summit will be the Project Mercury Case Study published by the Green Grid on February 27, 2012.

 

 

Data Center Pulse 2012 Summit

Data Center Pulse 2012 Summit

Data Center Pulse 2012 Summit

 

Data Center Pulse 2011 Summit

 

Welcome to the Third Annual DCP Collaboration Session

February 28, 2011


summitWhat are the latest issues, concerns, trends and requests from data center owners and operators? Data Center Pulse, a non-profit group of data center owners and operators with a membership spanning 68 countries, will be hosting their annual summit on February 28, 2011. The DCP summit is being held in conjunction with The Green Grid Technical Forum in Santa Clara, CA. It will take place the day prior to the Technical Forum. This 3rd annual working session will focus on creating real time output around top categories on the mind of Data Center users. The output of the summit will be an update to the DCP Top Ten list that will be presented and discussed at The Green Grid Technical Forum. Attendees will select from the list of topics below. The top 3-5 topics will then be focused breakout sessions with presentations that will be recorded and shared through the DCP YouTube Channel. The goal of this summit is to bring the end user community together to collaborate on the challenges they face and then share those findings with the industry. This summit is exclusively for DCP members. To see the requirements to qualify for membership, please see this link.

Please email membership@datacenterpulse.org to be approved and receive the registration password. Please note that the DCP summit is a free event, but you must be a DCP member to attend. Please also note that DCP members receive a 10% discount on the registration fee for The Green Grid Technical Forum - March 1-2. Please email membership@datacenterpulse.org for the discount code.

We look forward to collaborating with our members to continue to influence the industry. Our primary output from this session will be to update the DCP Top 10 and produce summit summary videos of the priority topics selected and led by the DCP attendees. The topics and descriptions are listed below.

 

Summit Categories

101-TOP 10
102-STACK FRAMEWORK
103-MODULAR DATA CENTER DESIGN
104-HIGH TEMP COMPUTING (AIR/LIQUID)
105-IT ASSET LIFECYCLE & LOGISTICS
106-OPERATIONS CHALLENGES - WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT?
107-RACK DENSITY - THE OPPORTUNITY AND IMPACT
108-THE GREEN GRID DATA CENTER DESIGN GUIDE REVIEW
109-THE GREEN GRID CUE/WUE METRICS
110-THE GREEN GRID ADVISORY COUNCIL SITE SELECTION PAPER REVIEW

Data Center By Surprise - Data Center Cost of Ownership and Budget Planning

Posted Sun, 06/21/2009 - 09:12 by mark.thiele

I don't have an easy answer to the "data center by surprise' problem and unfortunately I believe this is true for most organizations. In lieu of having all the budget & resource utilization information required to get a complete picture of the cost of our data centers we've started using a very simple model that gets us close.

Holy Battery Backup Batman!

Posted Wed, 04/01/2009 - 14:04 by geekism

 

Today I attended Google's Efficient Data Centers Summit at their Mountain View, CA Campus.  They unveiled how they achieved their average PUE of 1.21 across their six large datacenters.  It was great that they were sharing information with the public around how they measured and the innovations they have.  For cooling it was pretty simple.  Closely coupled cooling, raising the temperatures in the datacenters and utilizing economizers.

What jumped out the most was how they were able to achieve 99.9% efficiency in their UPS.  Talk about a different approach.  Instead of trying to raise the voltage and eliminate transformers or using DC power, or other methods, they solved the problem in server itself.  As many of you may be aware, google manufactures their own servers.  What they decided to do was remove the UPS all together.  They simplified the motherboard design to deliver only one 12V line to the monther board and then let the mother board distribute the power out the hard drives. Then, they put a simple battery on the server itself.  Consider it like adding a car battery to the server, just like a laptop.  Since this is only requiring 12V, it can be small.  Now, if there is a brownout or a spike the in-server battery takes over while the facility switches to the Generator. Simple.  Very simple.

The Role of Modularity in Datacenter Design

Posted Tue, 06/10/2008 - 00:00 by geekism

In June of 2006 we presented our proposal to Jonathan Schwartz's staff for the largest, most complex and aggressive datacenter consolidation in Sun's history.  We had just completed a years worth of great datacenter projects in Czech Republic, China, UK, and Norway and we were raring to go. The proposal said that in just 12 months we would consolidate 202,000 square feet of datacenter space from of our Newark & Sunnyvale, CA campuses into less than 80,000 square feet of new datacenter space in our Santa Clara, CA campus. At the end of that meeting we received the approval for the project and Jonathan asked one final question, "Where's the book that I can hand out to customers?".  Needless to say, we had our hands full with the California consolidation and the new acquisition of StorageTek.

I'll show you mine...

Posted Mon, 04/21/2008 - 02:46 by geekism

So, how efficient is your datacenter?

 

Last month I received some pretty cool news.  The Chill-Off we have been hosting for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) in their datacenter demonstration project, was completed.  This was a head to head test against APC In-Row, Liebert XDV, Spraycool, Rittal Liquid Racks and IBM Rear Door Heat Exchanger. Sun was the host that provided the datacenter, plant, compute equipment, and support.  Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBNL) was the group conducting the test on behalf of the California Energy Commission (CEC)  The results from this test will be published in a report in June of this year and we will be hosting the event.

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