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/
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