Solutions That Improve Your Network And Are Energy Efficient—It’s Not A Dream

- Mark Alrutz, director of technical sales, services and training for CommScope (www.commscope.com), says:

Expanding service offerings are important for MSOs because they must evolve their networks to keep up with the competition. While they do that, they are also investigating ways to reduce power and fossil fuel consumption, greenhouse emissions and operating costs. Not only do they need the right solutions to maximize and improve their network’s technology, but also reduce their energy costs and improve network efficiency. 

MSOs now have several options to reduce their energy cost, and they can accomplish that partnering with CommScope to implement the right solution for their specific needs. We’ve demonstrated how our energy conservation and alternative energy solutions can help operators:

§  provide reliable backup power using “green” technology

§  improve reliability and reduce energy consumption by reducing active electronics in the network

§  reduce energy consumption in the headend and hut locations

§  lower overall operating expenditures

By deploying a hydrogen fuel cell power solution, operators can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption at hub sites. Unlike diesel generators that emit greenhouse gases, the only by-products of hydrogen fuel cells are heat and water. The Society of Cable Telecommunication Engineers installed a hydrogen fuel cell at its corporate headquarters in Pennsylvania in June 2011. It was called into service when the building lost power during Hurricane Irene last summer, keeping its network online and functioning until power was restored.

Installations of free-air cooling solutions in the wireless industry have shown a reduction of approximately 25 percent (estimated $2,000 annually per site in energy savings) in overall power consumption in a variety of climates. By deploying a proper free-air cooling system for a shelter, operators can choose fan configurations and define filter specifications that meet their desired standard for air quality.

By adopting the OneBase InSite® Connect solution, operators now have the visibility and flexibility to more effectively control a number of operational parameters. This simple change to a company’s day-to-day operations can also save money on truck rolls and fuel costs, reduce carbon dioxide emissions and improve security at unmanned locations.

Not only is an all-digital, carrier grade wideband edge QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) vital to supporting additional advanced and next-generation services over HFC networks, but thisinnovative technology is also designed to lower power consumption in headend/hub environments through consolidation of equipment (requires less power for equipment and for HVAC). By deploying the award-winning Universal Wideband Edge QAM solution, this technology’s increased density provides cable operators with the ability to reduce capital and operating expenses by significantly lowering the price per QAM. With a low 0.5 watt per QAM power consumption, operators can now benefit from a dramatic reduction in power and cooling costs.

BrightPath® Optical Solutions (BOS™) provides operators with the ability to  FTTx solution that meets their needs of today while providing a migration path to the technology of tomorrow. It also helps reduce power consumption in the outside plant by eliminating or reducing active components. BOS customers can cost effectively continue to deliver competitive high bandwidth services and fully leverage all of their existing infrastructures, while saving approximately $1,000 per mile, per year, on energy costs using an RFoG network.

By deploying an Intelligent Addressable Tap Solution, operators have the ability to remotely control taps from the system office, headend or technical center. The ability to remotely control individual tap ports yields maximum benefits to operators in vacation areas, campus environments, MDUs and other high churn areas. This flexibility allows operators to reduce truck rolls, thus reducing fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. 

 Are you ready to deploy energy conservation and management solutions?

Deliver ROI through Best Practices in Energy Efficiency

- Ben Stewart, SVP of facility engineering at Terremark (www.terremark.com), says:

Data centers strive to reduce energy consumption for two reasons.  First, there is the “green” component and all corporations have a responsibility to the environment and the community to be good stewards of energy.  Second, energy is often the highest cost for many data centers and energy reduction serves to reduce that cost.  Data centers that are highly energy efficient will have a lower overall cost of operation and will be more competitive than those data centers ignoring energy consumption.  Data centers that are not energy efficient will be determined obsolete and removed from service due to their associated high operational expenses.

The greatest opportunity to reduce data center energy consumption is in the cooling system and there are many methods employed to achieve those reductions.  Within the data center, means to segregate the cold air delivered to cool the equipment from the exhausted hot air is critical.  Energy is expended to create the cold air and it must be directed only to the equipment and not lost to mixing with the exhausted hot air.  Equipment aisles are aligned in hot aisle and cold aisle configurations with blanking panels in the cabinets preventing hot air from leaking into the cold aisle.  The cold aisle can be contained with doors and clear covers to prevent the hot air from getting into the cold aisle.  The hot aisle can be contained directing the hot exhaust directly back to the air handler preventing any mixing with the cold air.  

In each case, prohibiting cold air from mixing with the hot air, also referred to as bypass air, serves to ensure the air returned to the handlers is very hot.  Many data centers still control their air handler chill water valves on Return Air Temperature (RAT).  At these sites, the elimination of bypass air causes the RAT to rise and the air handler reacts by increasing the amount of chill water delivered to the coil to bring the RAT back to set point reducing cold aisle temperatures.  This represents an increase in energy consumed as more chill water is required.  Supply Air Temperature (SAT) control should be established prior to any attempt to reduce bypass air so that energy savings can be realized.

Another way to lower energy consumption is to reduce the shaft speed of the motors employed to cool the data center.  Motors are used to pump chill water and move the air.  Motor shaft speed and energy consumption vary as a cubic relationship.  This means that a 40% reduction in shaft speed can result in an 80% reduction in energy consumed by that motor.  Careful control of the amount of cold air delivered to the data center floor allows both chill water and air flow to be minimized.  Respective motor shaft speeds can be reduced resulting in significant energy reductions, so long as the motors are speed controllable.

Both the elimination of bypass air and motor shaft speed reductions can be achieved in any data center regardless of geographic location limiting energy consumption, reducing costs, and meeting corporate social responsibility goals.

Energy Efficiency: The Perfect Marriage of Innovation and Experience

- Tim Angus, president & CEO of REGEN Energy (www.regenenergy.com), says:

REGEN Energy is a technology company, founded on the basis of biomimicry, with an innovative and sophisticated take on energy efficiency. REGEN’s founders were inspired by the communication patterns of honeybees, and in 2005 they began to develop what would become known as the Swarm Energy Management system: a wireless energy management solution that can be quickly installed onto any discretionary electrical load. The system employs swarm logic to allow loads in buildings, such as HVAC units, to communicate with one another and reduce the number of loads running concurrently, thereby reducing peak electrical demand by up to 30% commercial and industrial facilities.

While REGEN’s product is certainly unique, the problem it is solving is not. Buildings are a key source of peak energy demand and in general, buildings account for about 39% of total U.S. energy use. The contribution of buildings to peak energy demand is even greater, mostly due to cooling needs of buildings during the hottest parts of summer days. The electricity grid struggles to accommodate this high level of energy demand, often needing to resort to using “peaker plants” to supply additional energy. This means the use of lower-grade, dirtier fuels, without the advanced scrubbing mechanisms that newer plants use to reduce pollution. Reducing peak loads benefits both the stability of the electricity grid and the wallets of energy consumers.

This brings us to the perfect marriage of innovation and experience. Robert M. Chiste is an individual who has spent his entire career in the energy and cleantech industries. He has dedicated much of his time to addressing the above issues by focusing on the clean-technology sector, alternative energy sources, and smart grid. Mr. Chiste is a pioneer in the energy efficiency world and is largely recognized as co-creator of the outsourced residential Demand Management programs known as Virtual Peaking Capacity, which enable utilities to use clean capacity in times of peak energy demand in lieu of conventional alternatives like peaker plants. Mr. Chiste’s most recent role was as Chairman, Founding CEO and President of Comverge, Inc., where he led the company’s rapid growth from 2001, including a highly successful IPO in 2007. 

REGEN Energy has taken a large step towards growth acceleration by appointing Mr. Chiste as its new Chairman. Mr. Chiste is a tremendous addition to the REGEN team as he brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to the table. His background will help REGEN to expand its patented Swarm Energy Management™ platform for electrical Demand Side Management and automation of Demand Response for the benefit of customers across North America. This is true synergy, and it spells exciting times for REGEN Energy and the world of clean technology.

You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure in Enterprise Data Centers

- John Consoli, vice president of sales and marketing at FieldView Solutions (www.fieldviewsolutions.com) says:

Accessing real-time energy data is vital for the successful operation of today’s enterprise data centers. The adage “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” has never been more relevant to what we do. The data center’s critical resources are space, power, cooling and connectivity. Most enterprise data center managers can tell you exactly how many data ports and circuits they have available, but, at best have “guesstimates” when it comes to usable space, power and cooling. The vast majority implement safety buffers and over provision to ward off catastrophic failure. The tradeoff is catastrophic WASTE that goes right to the bottom line.

Managing today’s complex, high density data centers without real-time monitoring is like trying to fly a Jumbo airliner without an instrument panel. The value proposition for implanting a real time energy management tool literally writes itself. The ability to increase utilization of available resources by 20, 30 or 40 percent has a HUGE impact on both operating expenses and capital expenditures.

How much energy can be saved by raising data center temperatures 2-3 degrees Fahrenheit? What if you could delay or totally avoid new construction because you find that there is 30% more available power than you thought? Real-time energy monitoring can deliver both of these things, and more! We see it happen for our clients every month!!

As mentioned before how important is the instrument panel to a jumbo jetliner? FAA reports that the most advanced commercial jet monitors up to 800 data points per minute. A 5000 square foot, Tier 3 data center with a load of 5kW per rack has potentially 100 times more than that!

The biggest challenge with regard to implementing real-time energy management is two-fold"

1) People are resistant to change
2) Organizations have not developed a cohesive action plan for the data once it is collected

Data center and IT managers need to have a plan! Failure to plan is planning to fail!

The plan should be detailed and documented and involve stakeholders from IT, facilities, senior management and lines of business. It is often worth the investment to:
• Bring a professional, third party consulting firm to manage the project.
• Implement a plan for selecting the right tool, based upon the needs and goals of the organization.
• Consider vendor evaluation as a critical success factor.
• Create a documented plan for how data will be used and what the positive impact will be on corporate goals.

Implementation of real-time energy management should be important enough to be included in the company’s annual report and should be on everyone’s radar screen, up to and including the CEO.

Insist your vendors “put up or shut up.” Don’t be the first one on your block to implement their solution. Do not settle for smoke and mirror presentations. Your selection process MUST include a Proof of Concept (POC) installation at one of your sites!! The POC should have a clear, written scope that includes documentation of all acceptance criteria.

Don’t be afraid to invest resources (money, time, personnel) in the POC effort. Make this, part of your project budget from day one.

John Consoli is VP of Sales and Marketing at FieldView Solutions, the industry-leading Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) provider, which recently unveiled FieldView 5.0 IT power management tailored with Microsoft® Business Intelligence (BI) tool sets, providing access to structured data through an Open Database Connection (ODBC), with colocation support enabling application assets to be provisioned and easily maintained.

Data Center Efficiency: It’s Time We Noticed The Elephant In The Room

- Liam Newcombe, CTO of Romonet (www.romonet.com), says:

At the moment, regulators across the world are struggling to find ways to measure how energy efficient a data center is by measuring how the ‘useful work’ it delivers compares with the energy consumed. The idea being that data centers can then be given a ‘score’ which says how energy efficient they are – or are not – and the regulators can then influence the market.

Whilst I agree that data centers need to become more energy efficient, I think that in the quest to find one, all-encompassing energy efficiency metric, we’re being side tracked from the main issue and ignoring the big opportunity. For me, the elephant in the room is that data center environments have traditionally been designed, developed and managed as if their workload is static – and that is what we should be concentrating on first before we start imposing a metric.

To explain this, let’s draw a comparison between how a desktop PC or laptop uses power and how a data center uses energy. In recent years, chip vendors have worked hard to make laptops and PCs smarter in the way they use power – laptops and tablets in particular need a long battery life otherwise they won’t sell. This means that if you’re doing something quite complex on your PC – like editing a video or watching a movie – the PC draws more power than if you’re just browsing the web or working on a word document – and in standby mode, a PC hardly uses any power at all. Unfortunately, data centers don’t work like this.

Let’s say we have a corporate data center which hosts a customer contact platform with a web presence and a few thousand call center operators. On a Monday morning, it might be handling 50,000 calls and 100,000 web users every hour. It might be using a lot of power – but it’s doing a lot of work. However, if we return and measure energy consumption at 4am on a Sunday when there are no phone customers and only a few web users – it will be drawing almost the same amount of power.

To use an analogy, if a data center was a car we would not be able to turn the engine off and it would use almost the same amount of fuel idling on your driveway as if it were carrying five people, speeding along the motorway at 70 MPH. To continue the analogy, if you were concerned about your car’s fuel consumption – which you really should be – you’d probably ask why you couldn’t turn the engine off and why your car needed all that fuel when it was stationary. You wouldn’t ask the garage to tweak the engine to make it run more efficiently at 70 MPH – but this is the equivalent approach our regulators are taking in searching for a metric to measure how efficiently data centers run at maximum load.

For me, it is less important how efficiently a data center operates when working hard on a Monday morning. I am far more concerned that we understand how inefficient it is when it’s doing nothing – and that we then minimize this inefficiency. However, to date, the data center industry has a poor record of coming together to address this challenge.

Whilst some companies have recognized this issue and started making more energy efficient servers, much of the equipment in a data center still draws close to full power all of the time. There’s no one single piece of equipment that’s going to solve this issue and no one vendor or department that is solely responsible – there’s no magic bullet. To address this issue we need a paradigm shift in the way that we as an industry think about the design and deployment of data centers. From the mechanical engineering to writing our software, we need to ask: “how much power, data center capacity and cost will this waste to do nothing?” And as we ensure every device is tuned to manage its energy consumption at a lower load, we’re also going to see data centers becoming cheaper to run and more efficient at full load.

But to spur the industry into action, we need to create an informed market. We need to make the issue of waste energy and cost clear to the business. Every finance chief needs to know how much energy each data center service is using when it’s working at full capacity as opposed to when it’s idling for them to be able to make a decision which service is worth the cost – and which isn’t. Only then can they make an informed choice about which data center services they are happy to spend the money on, which ones they might want to spend less on and which can be turned off altogether. And it’s only when this happens that the market will start to change.

PDUs in the Enterprise: How Data Centers and IT Managers Can Benefit From Them

- Mark Harris, vice president of marketing at Racktivity (www.racktivity.com), says:

PDUs are required for every rack to deliver multiple outlet power ports. Every Rack in a data center must have PDU devices. The number of outlets is based on the number of servers and switches and similar devices installed in each rack. Typically this is 16-24 devices, so the most common PDU sizing is 24 outlet ports. The topic of interest recently regarding these power distribution devices is the level of intelligence required for each given customer. Some customers treat these as mechanical devices only, others expect these power devices to establish monitoring and control points at the device level. With the industry in turmoil due to the increasing cost for energy, the majority of data center operators are looking for a much more intelligent power distribution device, with deeper insight into exactly how and where energy is being used. The higher the intelligence of a rack level PDU, the more granular a data center operator can be when analyzing their overall costs, and establishing their unique optimization initiatives. All operators are looking for ways to trim costs. Energy is a huge portion of their total costs, perhaps 40% or more today. The opportunity to trim energy costs requires a deep understanding about current usage and trends, at a very granular level.

Since energy in the data center consumes at least 40% of the overall data center costs, everything that provides an opportunity to actively manage these costs should be prioritized at the TOP of the list. Power costs will continue to rise, and anyone not actively looking for visibility and control of power is missing their opportunity and negatively impacting their future.

There are so many choices and price ranges. For years these were treated as commodity insignificant devices, so the culture to look for advanced rack-based PDUs has not existed for very long. There are tremendous choices for highly intelligent PDUs, and these come with higher costs than their much less capable siblings, but the higher cost devices are the ONLY way to obtain a granular working knowledge of energy consumption in the data center. Highly intelligent PDUs are available today that combine quality and intelligence at relatively low prices when considering the total cost of a rack and it’s included active devices. The bottom line is that full racks may have a total cost for all components exceeding $100,000 or more, and the difference between a poorly made PDU device and a highly quality, highly intelligent PDU device will be less than $1000! Why risk power issues and limit power visibility to save what amounts to 1% or less?

Include higher performance PDUs in all future planning cycles. The budgets must be allocated to allow intelligent high quality devices. Look for high quality vendors of PDUs who have technical differentiation and understanding about data center power. IT managers should raise their personal awareness to the energy challenge presenting itself over the past several years to become just as versant in power as they have traditionally been in servers, storage and networks. Ask for help from PDU manufacturers. There is a wealth of knowledge available about power and power monitoring. IT managers can increase their personal understanding, and then implement new approaches to power distribution and analysis within the data center when coupled with the proper tools.

Data Center operators are looking for ways to manage energy in support of their higher-level business management goals; Where abandoned servers are located so they can be decommissioned, predicting critical resource devices that are going to fail in the future which are going to affect availability and uptime, etc. These type of predicative analytics are ONLY available using Racktivity’s Genius PDU devices.

Consider bringing all of their power distribution devices into a single manageable domain. Look for ways to combine the energy performance, metrics and KPIs from ALL portions of their enterprise and then actively compare and contrast the operational excellence across physical and logical domains. Looks for improvements that have been deployed in some places but not others, etc.

Data Center Energy Efficiency: The OptoEMU Sensor

David Crump, Marketing Communications Manager at Opto 22 (www.opto22.com), says:

Data centers are large facilities that include a huge assortment of servers and other computer hardware. Keeping this equipment operating and the facility up and running 24/7 is certainly of the utmost importance, but meeting the power requirements to accomplish this can be incredibly expensive.

OPTO 22's OptoEMU Sensor is designed for maintenance engineers, facilities managers, business owners, energy consultants, and others looking for ways to better understand and reduce energy consumption. The Sensor can be implemented in these data centers to offer far more than a simple snapshot of the data center's total power usage presented on a local PC or operator interface terminal. Instead, the Sensor is able to identify the individual power draw of the specific loads of specific equipment, then communicate this data over standard IP-based networks where it can be easily accessed and viewed in both tabular and graphical formats either locally, or over the web via third party applications like Google PowerMeter and Pulse Energy's Pulse.

After studying their energy data, data center managers will have the information they need to enact procedural and operational changes that lower utility bills. They also have the option to easily expand the OptoEMU Sensor's capabilities to add equipment management and control functions.

Nutshell.
Opto 22's OptoEMU Sensor is an energy monitoring and data acquisition hardware appliance that lets commercial and industrial customers acquire real time power consumption data from facility systems, machines, equipment and metering devices in real time and with minimal configuration. The Sensor also provides the interfaces needed to quickly and easily view and share this data over standard wired and wireless networks and the internet so it can be archived, presented, analyzed, and used to develop effective energy management strategies that reduce costs.

Unique.
Opto 22's philosophy of "open-ness" makes the company unique. All Opto 22 products (including the OptoEMU Sensor) are built on open, standard, ubiquitous, and well-understood information and communications technologies and protocols, such as IP; analog, digital, and serial signal processing; and serial, Ethernet, wireless LAN, and cellular communication. This standards-based approach allows Opto 22 products to exist in a wide variety of industrial and business architectures and perform with the power and reliability Opto 22 components are known for industry-wide. Opto is perhaps best known for the incredible reliability and durability of its products, which are used by automation end-users, OEMs, and information technology and operations personnel in over 10,000 installations worldwide.

Servers: Big on Energy

- Peter Sacco, president of PTS Data Center Solutions (www.PTSdcs.com), says:

Servers are the largest energy consumer in the computer room and are just ahead of cooling as the single highest cost within the data center. They have the most potential to affect energy consumption in the data center. You can think of heat dissipation as an inverted pyramid, with the CPU, chipset, and server at the tip (actually on the bottom of the pyramid), followed by racks and rows in the middle, and finally the data center facility and infrastructure at the top of the pyramid (actually the bottom). In this scenario, the every reduction we can make at the server level will propagate upward, resulting in greater savings at the facility level.

The trick is to track power utilization against the supporting infrastructure's redundant capacity, such that facility improvements can be forecasted in a reasonable manner. This is important since the rate of change of IT is high, while the ability of the facility to react is very slow. However, regardless of the rate of change, it is important to understand the peak energy demands for the facility and to maintain an appropriate extra capacity buffer between 15-20 percent above this peak to accommodate swings in demand.

Data center operators have to stop thinking about power and cooling as separate from IT performance. At PTS, we ‘walk-the-walk’, as well as ‘talk-the-talk’. We are one of the very few data center solutions providers that have facility engineers and architects sitting right next to our server, storage, and network engineers and architects. We think of data center solutions from a holistic approach.

Data Center Metrics: PUE and Energy Consumption

- W. Pitt Turner, Executive Director of the Uptime Institute (www.uptimeinstitute.org), says:

The PUE (power usage effectiveness), which is the ratio of total data center energy consumption divided by IT energy consumption, demonstrates the portion of energy at a data center required to support power, cooling, and other non-IT loads at the site. This is a measure of the ‘overhead’ required to support IT.

PUE is useful when the total energy for the data center can be easily identified. It becomes more complicated when a data center is in an office building or when the meters necessary to identify the energy consumption are not available.

The number of racks receiving cooling air outside of the ASHRAE (www.ashrae.org) temperature range for maximum reliable cooling is an easy and powerful metric that establishes the need to take action to resolve cooling issues. This data can be gathered with a hand held infrared temperature meter, with wired or wireless thermometers, or even taken from the IT device data stream. The energy used in cooling data centers is the largest component in a typical data center after the IT energy consumption. Research has found that the cooling energy can be dramatically reduced by properly managing the cooling air flow.

The primary opportunity to reduce energy consumption in a data center lies in the area of IT utilization. Some management teams measure this, most do not. If a company is serious about reducing energy consumption at a data center, looking into IT consumption is essential. Utilizations of 5-10% are common. Often the energy consumption at a data center can be reduced by 15% just be removing IT devices that were replaced in a technology refresh, but were never unplugged.

Data Center Metrics

- Daniel Kharitonov, Senior Staff Engineer at Juniper Networks (www.juniper.net), says:

There is obviously no point to compare the efficiency of power plant to that of a server or an Ethernet switch. However, it might make sense to fine-tune the metric within the equipment class. Let me give you an example.

When comparing network fabric, the main criteria is the efficiency of throughput, measured in Watts/Gbps. However, it helps to know the topology of traffic within DC - full-mesh connectivity may require a different class of network interconnect compared to aggregation (north-south) topology. Of course, the comparison will only be valid within a given class of devices. Ideally, the chosen element-level metric should reflect the primary mode of use in a live application. For instance, if a server performs well under specPower test (with many Java in-memory transactions, but very limited I/O and network operations), such server may coincidentally be inefficient for data mining. Knowing this, an additional metric may be needed to evaluate energy performance. It really does not matter if such tests are be done by vendors, 3rd party labs or customers - the only prerequisites are to maintain the integrity of test conditions and produce repeatable results.

Energy efficiency metrics add new criteria to supplier chain control. Ineffective products can be eliminated from the RFP altogether, or force the vendors to renegotiate contract terms. In both cases, the enterprise wins.

There are two main aspects to energy efficiency - operational cost and business image. Everyone can see a light bulb in a room, and many people have a habit to turn lights off at the end of their day. However, even small data centers are really "power lakes" compared to a lightbulb - which shows on electric bills. Improved operational efficiencies are the material savings that come at a relatively low cost - once in place, a datacenter stays up 24x7 for several years.

Another interesting aspect is how your company looks to the world. At this time and age, no one (not even the US army) can brag about careless spending of non-renewable resources. The world is getting smaller and many people realize we are in a same boat. This is why public, clear and well-thought energy strategy not only positions a company for long-term benefits, but also (indirectly) wins trust of clients and their families.

If someone reads an article about energy efficiency and thinks the authors know by heart what they talking about, this feeling can be projected to business relations.

The topic of energy effciency can be polarizing - some think it is very simple, while others say it is not sufficiently important, mature or standardized. But if you could read the article to this very point, you are already qualified to make powerful and informed decisions on what the future of IT is going to be. The time to act is now.