A recent NY Times series
titled “The Cloud Factories” has stirred up some controversy (over 300
comments- mostly negative).
That’s a good thing.
Data Center energy
consumption is a critical challenge to be understood and dealt with – in
context.
While the Times article
has brought some fresh scrutiny, it is being justifiably criticized for lack of
completeness by offering half-truths and dated information that doesn’t account
for progress made over the last six years.
Sounds like a
presidential debate you say?
(Most embarrassing
perhaps is that the author clearly doesn’t understand a topic he just spent a
year researching. And he pays a disproportionate attention to diesel generators.)
Five or six years ago,
“green IT” was a big deal – and not just from a marketing standpoint.
Every IT company large or small was paying attention. Some called
it “greenwashing” but it had a number of important impacts.
In August of 2007 I began writing about it in my "Energy Matters" blog.
What drove that were two
important factors: customers were complaining about excessive IT energy
consumption and competitors were staking claims of greener-than-green
technology.
Since that time, much has
changed - cloud for example.
It may seem that it’s
always been there but cloud computing is a relatively new concept. Chuck
Hollis made the first mention I am aware of in a blog, Is There A Cloud
In Your Future? posted October 31, 2007. I don’t know if
Chuck coined the term but he was certainly one of the early proponents.
The Times article is also
confused in implying that the cloud is just a set of big data centers
inefficiently sucking energy. There’s no hint of the concept that this is
shared infrastructure that provides access to sophisticated on-demand
capabilities while avoiding massive duplication of proprietary facilities.
Most importantly, today’s more efficient
data centers address a central concern that caused all of that attention to
green IT in 2006 - customer complaints, competition, energy cost increases, the
push for sustainability and greener energy sources – all producing new
awareness, better efficiencies, improved practices and economic benefits.
And cloud.
Missing the point
So, what did “The Cloud
Factories” article miss in the data center forest?
Trees.
Start with the
biggest. Virtualization gets hardly a nod. Across the industry,
efficiency gains from virtualization have been huge. We’ve seen repeated
examples of servers virtualized at the rate of 85%+ with 35%+ improvements in
energy efficiency and hundreds of tons less CO2 emissions.
The point is that there
are thousands of small efficiency gains that have already added up to huge
energy efficiency and sustainability improvements. More must be done and wider adoption is essential. But every bit contributes
to the whole, from flywheel UPS systems, to efficient power supplies, to data
compression, automated tiering and solid state storage.
Most of these have come
into play since 2006, which is the time warp this article appears to occupy.
At it’s most fundamental,
the best practice advice now widely practiced is: consolidate, optimize, and
automate. Sometimes that means create your own cloud. Sometimes
a public cloud. Often, both.
These principles aren’t
new. We just have more compelling reasons to adhere to them and we have the
added benefit that new technologies – some in just the last year or so –
generate much higher payback from taking these steps.
Consolidate means consolidate everything. Data Centers. Storage.
Servers. Networks. Applications. That, and provide for multi-tenancy so
more users can share the same efficient infrastructure. For example, a
2:1 payback can be expected just from the consolidation of storage.
Consolidation of servers through virtualization is much bigger 10:1, 15:1 or
even higher.
Optimization brings even greater payback once all of that
consolidation has taken place. Automated tiering of data can and applications
can decrease total cost of ownership by 25%. Robust disaster recovery and
business continuity is better enabled – optimized - by virtualization.
Automation of
software and business process can decrease operating costs by 30% or more. Improvements
from data deduplication, for example, are off the charts.
All of these steps save
energy in the data center but there is one more compelling consideration in the
IT mix. The most compelling really. I think of it as the Rumpelstiltskin effect. IT turning straw to
gold.
“ICT has
the capacity to deliver carbon savings 5x or greater than the sector’s own
emissions – equivalent to 15- 25% reduction in global emissions.”
United Nations Broadband Commission Report, April 2, 2012 http://www.broadbandcommission.org
Another
seminal study from the American Council
for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) pointed to productivity
gains resulting from ICT as a major force in overall energy efficiency
advances. Their analysis was that:
"For
every extra kilowatt-hour of electricity that has been demanded by ICT, the US
economy increased its overall energy savings by a factor of about 10”
“Huge cost
reductions and important ICT innovations have worked together to drive the
expansion and diffusion of new applications that have subsequently enabled the
development of additional high-tech products and services, new investments, and
new ways of doing things. In other words, the positive economic feedback
generated by most ICT innovations has stimulated higher levels of economic
productivity and driven net gains in cost-effective energy savings throughout
the U.S. economy.”
And finally, a Pike Research study titled "Cloud Computing Energy Efficiency" reinforces the economic and environmental benefits from the expansion of cloud computing:
"Growth in cloud computing has some important consequences for both greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and sustainability. Thanks to massive investments in new data center technologies, computing clouds in general and public clouds in particular are able to achieve industry-leading rates of efficiency. Simply put, clouds are better utilized and less expensive to operate than traditional data centers."
Said
another way, Information Technology – Cloud - saves energy.
Note: Quite a few responses were stirred by the article. Here are a few links:
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/09/23/the-new-york-times-blasts-cloud-factories-on-energy-use/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57518536-92/nyt-story-on-data-center-waste-scares-some-frustrates-others/
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/NY-Times-Data-Centers-Are-Polluting-Energy-Pigs-121400
http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/09/ny-times-data-center-energy-story-shows-fossil-fuels-history/
http://gigaom.com/cleantech/nyts-data-center-power-article-reports-from-a-time-machine-back-to-2006/
http://investorplace.com/2012/10/data-centers-a-surprising-nest-for-burgeoning-energy-plays/