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You’ve probably heard it many times before: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” The benefits of monitoring energy usage in the data center are well-established, and have been highlighted at virtually every industry event for the past two years. So why are so many companies still not monitoring their facilities and using one of the emerging data center metrics to track their progress?

Christian Belady of Microsoft discusses this question today at the MS DataCenters blog, picking up on some Gartner data we reported last week. Christian has been actively involved in industry conversations on efficiency, and has some thoughts about the low numbers for adoption of data center metrics.

“Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that maybe the respondents should have been weighted by their relative data center sizes,” he writes. “I would argue that any company where a bulk of their costs are driven by their IT operations (which by the way are likely to be huge operations such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Google, etc.) are further to the left on the graph because it has such a large impact on profitability. Similarly, those who have either small operations or their IT costs are low relative to other costs are further to the right. So in essence, we have a polarization of the data center industry: the Leftists and the Rightists.”

Will this split continue if carbon regulation alters the price of energy and the cost of inefficiency? Read The Polarization of the Data Center Industry for more.

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A Tale of Two Data Center Industries?

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At the Gartner Data Center Conference we spoke with Pete Van Deventer, the president and CEO of SynapSense Corp., which makes wireless monitoring products that help data center operators measure the environment and optimize their facilities for energy efficiency. Van Deventer discusses the market for wireless monitoring, how it may be impacted by new carbon regulations, and SynapSense’s development of technology to use monitoring tools to automate the management of data center cooling. This video runs about 7 minutes, 45 seconds.

For more coverage of information about energy efficiency, check out our Green Data Centers Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

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SynapSense CEO on Wireless Monitoring

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Mission West Properties, a major player in Silicon Valley real estate, is planning two major data center projects in Oregon, citing the state as one of the country’s most attractive areas for data center development. Mission West (MSW) is a major public real estate investment trust (REIT) headed by billionaire investor Carl Berg, who said he believes the data sector is poised for major growth.

“As a result of cloud computing, we believe the demand for Web hosting will increase dramatically in the next two to three years,” Berg recently told The Registry.

One of the properties is in Ontario, Oregon, where CDH Consulting is seeking to buy 66 acres of land to build a major data center. CDH, which is headed by industry veteran Chris Hardin, is partnering with Mission West on the project. The Ontario City Council is expected to vote tonight on the proposed $1.3 million land sale, according to local media.

The second site has not been publicly identified. One possibility: Local officials in Prineville, Oregon have been in discussions with a site selection company representing a ”well known, well funded company” planning a major data center.

CDH has been scouting Oregon data center sites for several years. In early 2008 it leased vacant land within the Port of Morrow in Heppner, Ore. for evaluation as a data center site.

Mission West owns more than 100 properties totaling almost 8 million square feet, with major tenants including Apple and Microsoft. Berg told The Registry that the company’s plans call for two 200,000 square foot data centers. The projects were sparked by interest from a “former tenant who is an expert on web hosting.”

Hardin told the Argus Observer that the search for a tenant for the Ontario project has already begun, but could take nine months to a year. Ontario City Manager Henry Lawrence, who flew to California to tour one of Berg’s facilities, told the paper that the city’s economic development team have been working on this deal for about six months.

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Mission West Targets Oregon for Data Centers

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IBM and Syracuse University today celebrated the construction of a new Green Data Center (GDC) designed to showcase multiple energy-saving technologies. The $12.4 million, 12,000-square-foot data center will feature on-site power generation, DC power distribution, chillers and cabinets equipped with water-cooled rear-door heat exchangers. Syracuse University will use the data center for its IT equipment, and also provide detailed analysis of its energy efficiency. IBM has supplied $5 million in electrical co-generation equipment and servers, and use the facility to showcase its “green” data center technology. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) is contributing $2 million to the project. This video tour is guided by Chris Sedore, VP IT & CIO, Syracuse University and Ez Khalifa, Professor of Engineering, Syracuse University.

For more coverage of information about energy efficiency, check out our Green Data Centers Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

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Video Tour: IBM’s Green Syracuse Data Center

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1201 Comstock is one of the Digital Realty data centers in Santa Clara, Calif. that has received a LEED Platinum certification.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – An unassuming industrial park near San Jose Airport is hardly where you’d expect to find some the greenest acres in the data center industry. The Santa Clara, Calif., campus operated by Digital Realty Trust is home to three data centers with a Platinum or Gold rating under the LEED standard for energy efficient buildings.

Digital Realty, the largest data center operator in the U.S., has used its Santa Clara operation to refine an energy efficient design using fresh-air cooling, which has made the site a magnet for some of the fastest-growing companies in the digital economy.

Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo all have their servers housed here. NVIDIA, which is seeking to harness its GPU technology to power cloud and high performance computing, has leased an entire data center here as well.

Clients Like LEED Data Centers
The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard is not designed with data centers in mind, and is just one of several indicators of the energy efficiency of a data center, along with Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). But there are signs that the LEED designation is growing in importance for data center tenants, who like the standard as a benchmark for corporate social responsibility.

Where LEED certification was once seen as a difficult hurdle for mission-critical sites, companies like Digital Realty are demonstrating the ability to build data centers to the very highest levels of the specification, and do so with remarkable speed. The two LEED Platinum facilities at the Santa Clara campus were completed in less than eight months, far less than the 18 to 24 months typically required for an enterprise data center project.

The campus is anchored by the carrier hotel at 1100 Space Park Drive, which was Digital’s first acquisition at the site and has tenants including AT&T, Verizon and Tata Communications. The operation has grown from there to include three other buildings:

• In 2007 Digital Realty bought an interest in an adjacent building at 1500 Space Park Drive, which it retrofitted to focus on the use of free cooling. In June, 1500 Space Park received a Gold certification under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).
• In 2008 Digital Realty acquired 1201 Comstock Street, a former furniture store which borders 1100 Space Park. It gutted the structure, leaving only the walls standing, and converted the building into a finished data center in just 26 weeks. This fully-leased site recently earned LEED Platinum certification, the highest tier available, and achieved a peak power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.31 during the commissioning process.
• Next up was 1525 Comstock, which Digital Realty demolished and rebuilt from the ground up as a “greenfield” data center project, which was completed in 31 weeks. The site is fully leased to two brand name tenants. Digital Realty has submitted the site for LEED certification with enough points for a Platinum rating.

The energy efficiency of Digital Realty’s Santa Clara properties is driven by a design optimized to use fresh air in its cooling system, rather than relying on energy-intensive chillers and refrigerated water. This “free cooling” (also known as air economization) can be used for about 65 percent of the year in Silicon Valley. 

Side Plenums and Raised Floor
Each data center has air handlers located on its rooftop, which draw in outside air. The air handlers move the air through side plenums wrapping around the side of each server room, and under the raised floor area. The air then enters the cold aisles through perforated floor tiles, where it can cool tenant equipment, and exits through the ceiling.

Digital Realty employs a Turn-Key Datacenter design offering customer data center pods available in units of 1.125 megawatts. The company, which operates 13 million square feet of data center space, has been able to reduce costs and streamline construction using standard components and repeatable design concepts and leveraging its buying power with suppliers.  

Still Expanding in Santa Clara
It’s not done expanding in Santa Clara, either. Digital Realty has also bought the property next to 1500 Space Park and demolished the existing structure. It is currently marketing the site, which will be known as 1550 Space Park Drive, as a build-to-suit opportunity for a 6 megawatt data center.

The company has also deeded a tract of land between 1100 and 1500 Space Park Drive to the municipal utility, Silicon Valley Power, for a new substation to expand the power capacity for the campus.

Eaerlier this month Digital Realty spent $90 million to acquire two data center facilities on nearby properties. The facilities at 1350 Duane Avenue, and 3080 Raymond Street are both fully-leased to Internet service providers.

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In Santa Clara, ‘Green’ Speeds Toward Platinum

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This farmland near Lockerbie, Scotland could become one of the world's largest data center developments. Construction is slated to begin next year on a $1.5 billion project by Lockerbie Data Centres.

A massive $1.5 billion data center project near Lockerbie, Scotland is a step closer to reality after receiving the blessing of local planning officials. Lockerbie Data Centres Ltd. proposed building the £950 million project, which it says may generate a total of £3.5 billion in investment in the region. 

Planning officials at the local Dumfries and Galloway Council have recommended the company’s application be approved by the town council, which will meet Nov. 25 to discuss the project. The developers hope this will lay the groundwork for construction to begin in mid-2010 and opening for business in late 2011.

Lockerbie Data Centres plans to build 250,000 square meters (about 2.6 million square feet) of data center space at the Peelhouses farm property, which is adjacent to the Steven’s Croft biomass power facility. There is also a wind farm within 8 kilometers of the site, and the developers hope to have these renewable sources provide approximately half the energy used by the facility. Waste heat from the Lockerbie data centers will be reused in other facilities on the campus, and the cool Scottish climate will support using fresh air “free cooling” throughout the year.  

The development will include a new business park providing around 18,000 square meters (about 195,000 square feet) of hi-tech office space, as well as a horticultural research and commercial greenhouses park that will bring additional jobs. The data centre itself will create 50 jobs with another 10 jobs for estate management.

The master development plan (PDF, 33 MB) calls for a series of modular one-story data centers that will be partially built into the landscape the facilitate “green roofs” to make the design more appealing in its aesthetics and sustainability. The data center will be developed in phases as dictated by market demand.

“We are delighted that planning officers have recommended for approval one of the most exciting projects currently taking place in Scotland,” said David King, Project Director of Lockerbie Data Centres Ltd. “This is a major enterprise program that will be of considerable benefit, not only to Dumfries and Galloway, but to the whole of Scotland, creating thousands of jobs.

“Feedback from the local community has been extremely positive and this development will put Dumfries and Galloway firmly on the map as world leaders in data centre provision,” King added.

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Progress on $1.5 Billion Scotland Data Center

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Today, policy and business leaders are reaching a consensus that industry must address rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, particularly in the data center. Leading enterprises are now turning to the practical challenge of determining how, how much, and at what cost to reduce emissions. In a recent white paper from IDC many companies are learning that their data center offers a means to both abate GHG and reduce costs with the right incremental capital investments.

The process of improving information technology and data center efficiency not only reduces GHG emissions but also reduces cost for the enterprise. This means that the savings or business value derived from improvements far outstrips the incremental capital costs of “greening” the datacenter. Green IT means business improvement. Firms that rank highest among the “Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World,” such as Amazon, Toyota, and Nike, have realized that focusing on limiting energy calories in the datacenter and elsewhere pays profitability dividends on the financial side. IDC research indicates that companies reducing their metric tons of carbon per datacenter workload by a factor of 55% also incurred 35% less cost per user session on a server.

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The Business Value of Green Data Centers

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The new Red Sky supercomputer as Sandia National Laboratories just debuted as the 10th fastest supercomputer on the Top500 list, with a sustained performance of 429.9 teraflops. Red Sky consists of 68 cabinets of Sun Constellation gear, with up to 96 nodes and 678 cores per rack. Each cabinet  can each require up to 32 kilowatts of energy at full load.

But the system is notable not just for its power, but for its energy efficiency. Red Sky has an estimated Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.035. That’s not a typo - a claimed PUE of 1.035. How is this possible? Red Sky uses the Sun Cooling Door (also known as Project Glacier) designed jointly by Sun Microsystems and Emerson Network Power, which was demonstrated at the SC08 show. The Sun Cooling Door 5600 attaches to the back of cabinets and uses an inert refrigerant gas called R134. The unit is supported by a Liebert XD pumping unit. The passive design that doesn’t require additional fans to circulate air, saving on energy used to power the fans.

Here’s a time-lapse video of the assembly of Red Sky (link via Marc Hamilton). This video runs about 5 minutes.

For more coverage of information about supercomputing, check out our High Performance Computing Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

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Red Sky: Supercomputing and Efficiency Meet

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A depiction of the server room design for the Sonoma Mountain Data Center in California, including projections on the amount of free cooling enabled by the design.

The “cash for clunkers” program has allowed thousands of Americans to help the environment by driving energy efficient cars. Now some old clunkers can help make a data center more efficient. 

The Sonoma Mountain Data Center will use metal from recycled automobiles in a sophisticated new cooling system for its server rooms, according to Tod Stebbins, the project manager for the new facility, which is part of the Sonoma Mountain Village sustainable community in Rohnert Park, Calif., about 40 miles north of San Francisco. 

The recycled light steel is manufactured at the Sonoma Mountain site, where community developer Codding Industries makes its own green building materials using technology from Genesis Worldwide. Old car parts are crushed and flattened into metal sheets that can be used in commercial building products.

Recycled Steel in Containment System 
The Sonoma data center is using the recycled metal in heat containment systems that will manage the airflow and temperature in high-density server cabinets. The facility is designed as a ”less than zero carbon” facility, combining high efficiency and on-site power generation. 

Sonoma Mountain Village is being developed as one of the world’s greenest communites, with sustainable design permeating nearly every facet of the mixed-use community of offices, retail and housing. That’s reflected in the 1 megawatt solar array that will help power the data center for up to 270 days a year.

Stebbins’ mandate was to extend that end-to-end emphasis on sustainability into the data center, which has its mechanical and electrical infrastructure in place and is being offered as shell space. “Of the air distribution designs we looked at when benchmarking ours, we never really found a method that was load-following or that operated without any oversupply of cold air, what we refer to as ‘zero waste’ cooling,” said Stebbins.

Custom Cooling Design
So the Sonoma team came up with its own approach. The resulting design uses industry best practices such as fresh air cooling, isolating waste heat from servers, and operating at a higher temperature in the cold aisle. 

The Sonoma server rooms feature a slab design rather than a raised floor, with computer room air handlers (CRAHs) housed in an adjacent galley. The cooling system, which Stebbins calls an “OnDemand Cooling Circuit,” physically separates warm and cold air throughout the facility. 

‘Smart Chimneys’ Manage Airflow
The lynchpin of the cooling design is the rack-top heat containment chimneys, which contain sophisticated pressure sensor systems from Opengate Data Systems that also monitor the IT load within each rack. The chimneys, which are made of the recycled metal, move air from the cabinet into a ceiling plenum, which then returns the waste air to the CRAH units.

Stebbins said the Sonoma data center is being designed to operate at 78 to 80 degrees F, at the upper end of the range recommended by industry groups. This will allow it to save money by using fresh air to cool server rooms, rather than relying upon refrigeration chillers that use large amounts of energy. In most climates, a warmer data center can use free cooling for more days each year.  

But warmer temperatures can also prompt increased activity by server fans, which kick on as the temperature rises, nullifying gains from a warmer server room. The Opengate system detects fan activity and adjusts the air flow and pressure to compensate (see our video demo of Opengate’s technology). 

“The Opengate system is so tight with the way it controls the air that you bring in only what the data center demands,” said Stebbins.

Recirculation Within Cabinets
Fan activity isn’t the only challenge presented by air flow issues within the cabinet. The ASHRAE Journal recently highlighted research by Syska Hennessy Group on the recirculation of hot air within cabinets, which found that pressure buildup behind servers can cause hot air to route around the outside or even the bottom of the cabinet, allowing it to mix with cool air at the server inlet. This problem becomes more acute as the power density of a cabinet increases.     

Stebbins said Opengate’s pressure-centric approach can address this challenge, and be customized at the rack-top level, allowing cabinets with different power densities to be adjacent to one another, rather than zoning the data center by power density.

Former HP Site
The Sonoma Mountain data center is a former HP/Agilent facility with two stories featuring about 60,000 square feet of space. Developer Codding Enterprises says it can convert the current shell space into a turn-key data center pods of 3,000 to 4,000 square feet in about four months. The facility hopes to gain Platinum certification under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), the rating system for energy efficient buildings overseen by the US Green Building Council.

Stebbins hopes Sonoma’s use of recycled metal from old cars will help fill its data center with environmentally-conscious tenants. But once that task is complete, he believes the approach could prove appealing to other data centers. “Without trying, it could turn into a product,” he said.

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Recycled Cars Drive Data Center Cooling

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The Fortune Data Centers facility in San Jose, Calif. has earned LEED Gold status.

Fortune Data Centers has earned Gold certification for its San Jose, Calif. data center under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program for energy-efficient buildings. The facility is among a handful of LEED Gold data centers, and Fortune believes it is the first multi-tenant data center to receive Gold Certification for all of its usable tenant space.

“With data centers expending enormous amounts of energy to power and cool servers and IT infrastructure, we’re challenging the industry to move faster and reach further than before in designing, constructing and operating facilities in a more energy-efficient manner,” said Rick Fedrizzi, President, CEO & Founding Chair, U.S. Green Building Council, which operates the LEED program. “We commend Fortune Data Centers for being leaders in the data center industry by earning LEED Gold Certification and realizing the economic and environmental benefits of green building.”

Recycling Focus for Construction
Fortune’s facility has a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.37 at full load, well below the industry average data center PUE of 2.0. Ninety six percent of construction waste was diverted from landfill, according to DPR Construction, meaning 1,137 tons of material were either recycled or re-used on site.

Fortune Data Centers’ energy efficiency features include a design that uses a slab floor and drops cool air into the data center from above, taking advantage of the natural tendency for denser cool air to fall while warm air rises.

Fortune also separated the hot and cold air with vinyl curtains between the top of the racks and the ceiling, preventing warm air from mixing back in with cool air for the servers. The facility employs water-side economization and highly-efficient cooling towers, as well as an advanced building management system to monitor and manage environmental conditions.

“We’re structuring our business so that customers can enjoy the benefits of LEED-certified data center space without paying a premium for it,” said John Sheputis, CEO of Fortune Data Centers. “We believe companies shouldn’t have to pay extra for energy efficiency, rather they should realize a reduction in costs. Fortune and our tenants are collaborating to maximize efficiencies, and our tenants receive 100 percent of the cost savings that result from saving energy.”

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Fortune Gets LEED Gold in San Jose

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