In data centres, Hearnden says, smaller facilities with say 10 or 20 racks, serving an enterprise or large hospital, the drive towards more power efficiency is not a great case for investment. “The total is just not significant enough in its context, say compared to other electrical equipment, and that is true of ICT in many sectors and locations. There are actually some quick wins in any small data centre, like blanking panels costing a few euros to reduce circulating air flow. That’s a quick payback.”
Making the hardware smaller has been a major focus, but from the energy point of view that has just driven a bigger power envelope into a smaller space footprint. This is becoming a significant engineering design focus in both compute and storage, because the demands of Big Data, real time operations and are constantly driving up performance requirements, Stephen Kelly, IBM
Cold fever
“Most data centres are still being run too cold,” Hearnden says. “We still see 19/19 degrees C when modern hardware is optimised at 25-27 degrees. In Ireland, for example, fresh air cooling becomes a lot simpler. Although you do have to filter, because pollution can be a threat, typically from a fire somewhere locally, and you have to have a fall-back. But again, taking properly engineered advantage of that is probably more economical for larger scale data centres. It is certainly a significant feature today in commercial data centres, however.”
A feature of power consumption by ICT over its evolution into the centre of corporate life is that historically, IT did not pay for electricity. “Very often it still does not, at least directly — that lies with Facilities,” points out Stephen Kelly, head of the Systems Group in IBM Ireland. “There is still a lot of the corporate culture that sees IT as a cost centre rather than an enabler and anyway the structure of responsibilities is traditional. Even in smart modern enterprises, the ICT focus is more on adding revenue rather than cost reduction.”
All vendors have been investing to varying degrees in relevant R&D, Kelly says, from lower energy chips to smarter buildings. “Making the hardware smaller has been a major focus, but from the energy point of view that has just driven a bigger power envelope into a smaller space footprint. This is becoming a significant engineering design focus in both compute and storage, because the demands of Big Data, real time operations and are constantly driving up performance requirements.
“The challenge is to make a meaningful difference in power consumption,” Kelly says. “We have made clever design advances like diverting air flow, AC/DC conversion within the server and power throttling, all to drive down the energy requirement. There is also a big area of better overall utilisation of resources, maybe by 20% to as much as 40%, designed to carry more workloads in the same footprint, especially on our Linux servers.”
At the storage layer, Kelly says that IBM is number one in software-defined storage and Flash, both very important in the context of more efficient power usage. “On the software defined front, we offer real time data compression that would, for example, run 100TBs of data on perhaps 60TB of capacity with guaranteed performance. The real power draw in storage is spinning disks, of course.
“You can use bigger capacity disks on the same wattage but you can also use smart software to tier your data and hold and run it on a lower overall capacity than traditional architecture. You are simply using less disks — or other media — and so less power. There is a balance, but the software-defined approach can make more significant savings than the advances in engineering efficiency at the hardware level.”
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