Green Exam Flashcards
What is DCIM?
Data Center Infrastructure Monitoring
Statistics on ICT impacts - global, local, data center operations, PC devices, etc.
2011 US data centre energy bill
= $7.4 billion equivalent to 9.5 million households.
Statistics on ICT impacts
In 2011 the electricity consumption of all European data centres was equivalent to that of Portugal. By 2020 approx 25% of Europe’s electricity will be supplying I.T.
Statistics on ICT impacts
In 2012 $36 Billion was spent on powering and cooling the global installed server base.
Statistics on ICT impacts
Worldwide Energy consumption in data centres is growing at 12% CAGR.
Statistics on ICT impacts
A 1 MW data centre has a hydro-footprint of 66 million litres of water/annum
Statistic on ICT impacts
- 82.5% of data centre failures caused by power outages
- 48% of the major data centre problems are due to power
What is a primary function of any DCIM?
<strong>Data Center Management & Control</strong>
<ul>
<li>Advanced Asset Information</li>
<li>Granular energy analysis at CRAC, PDU, Rack and server level.</li>
<li>Detailed reporting – Dashboards should be capable of providing different views for different stakeholders.</li>
<li>Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) – Today’s data centres are prone to overheating, and CFD enables analysis of air flows to be made and for this analysis to show where hotspots are likely to occur. </li>
<li>2D and 3D data centre schematics –These schematics show floor plans and the 3-D architectural structure of the data centre. </li>
<li>Structured cabling management Information – many data centres, particularly those with raised floors, rapidly lose any structure to their cabling, as long cables are used where shorter ones would do, and any extra length is either looped or just pushed out of the way. Such lack of structure is not just messy, but it also impedes air flow.</li>
<li>Environmental sensor management.</li>
<li>Event management – A DCIM system in response to anomalous or threatening events such as excessive rack power demand can alarm the event and notify staff and possibly trigger a corrective response.</li>
</ul>
What are the components of a DCIM?
<ol> <li>Planning</li> <li>Design</li> <li>Operations</li> <li>Monitoring</li> <li>Predictive Analysis</li> </ol>
<ol>
<li>Planning: Translate business needs into requirements</li>
<li>Design: Design infrastructure to meet data centre requirements</li>
<li>Operations: Enforce standard procedures
and processes</li>
<li>Monitoring: Real-time and historic data
to alert management of potential failures or risks</li>
<li>Predictive Analysis: Analyse key performance indicators (KPI’s) and future trends</li>
</ol>
How can you assess/justify the commercial value of a DCIM?
Quocirca have devised a 4-part methodology that produces a Total Value Proposition (TVP), a concept for establishing a business case and value proposition.
<ul>
<li>Stakeholders/Users:</li>
<li>Organisation:</li>
<li>Competitive Advantage:</li>
<li>Return on Investment/ Scorecards</li>
</ul>
Uptime Institute Survey in 2012, interviewed senior management in several hundred data centres to ascertain the main motives behind their initiatives to install DCIM platforms.What were the biggest reasons in order of biggest?
1) Power, Cooling and Capacity Issues.
2) Data centre consolidation:
3) Provisioning for new data centres:
4) Technical and architectural changes:
5) Environment and sustainability agenda:
The Uptime Institute survey investigated the reasons and perceived obstacles by the data centre community for their reluctance to adopt DCIM systems. What was mentioned?
Too expensive Too difficult to integrate Too complex Difficult populating assets database Existing tools seen as sufficient
In 2012, the Data Centre Journal investigated a number of “failed” DCIM systems and found that there were five main reasons for the failures and gave the following recommendations to avoid them:
Lack of Planning
Misrepresentation by the Vendor
Ownership of the Process
Misconceptions of Upkeep Costs
What is the Data Center Maturity Model? (dcmm)
The Green Grid has developed the Data Centre Maturity Model (DCMM), which provides a road-map through incremental steps for improving energy efficiency and sustainability across all aspects of the data centre.DCIM tools are used in implementing and monitoring the various actions for each step.
Level 0: Minimal/No progress. Level 1: Partial Best Practice. Level 2: Best Practice. Level 3 & 4: Trending toward Visionary. Level 5: Visionary
There are three categories of real-time monitoring systems that have particular importance for DCIM platforms. They are:
Building Management System (BMS)
Network Management System (NMS)
Data Centre Monitoring System (DCMS)
DCIM tools and platforms available today(2013) can be classified into categories according to their level of maturity expressed in terms of their functionality.
Level 1 Basic: Basic monitoring mainly supplied with equipment. Some rudimentary asset and energy analysis with point tools.
Level 2 Reactive: Some degree of integration between environmental monitoring and control of cooling.
Level 3 Proactive: Extensive asset tracking and change management systems. More advanced monitoring systems can identify areas for greater power and space efficiencies.
Level 4 Optimising: Extensive range of integrated IT and infrastructure tools leading to enhanced service management, predictive server workload analysis and elementary real-time optimisation of the servers.
Level 5 Automated, Self Optimising: The DCIM system automatically adjusts in real-time the operation of the data centre according to rules, data loading and SLAs in order to maintain optimal performance.
Google processes more than how many betabytes per year?
24
How many hours of video is uploaded every second to youtube.
The 800 million users of YouTube upload over 1 hour of video per second.
How much electricity do Server Farms consume in the US?
In 2005, 1.5% of the U.S electricity was consumed by server farms and data centres. This amounted to $4.5 billion worth of electricity, or roughly 61 billion kW hours, the
equivalent of 5.8 million US households. In 2011, the total U.S data centre energy bill
was $7.4 Billion.
Some Data Center facts?
Data centre energy consumption worldwide has doubled since 2000. There are now 35
million servers worldwide.
How much electricity do datacenters use in Europe?
The electricity consumption in 2011 of all European data centres was equivalent
to that of Portugal and is expected to double by 2020.
What will be the carbon footprint of datacenters be in 2020?
By 2020, it is predicted that the Carbon footprint of the EU data centre
community will constitute 15-20% of Europe’s total CO2 emissions.
Discuss theThe Ponemon Institute study of 400 U.S data centres
The typical U.S data centre on average had 2 downtime events over a 2 year period
due mainly to power and cooling problems, and that the average cost to the centre
was $505,000 and the recovery time was 134 minutes.
62% of senior management believed such events only happened rarely [3].
Discuss the 2012 survey of 2000 data centres conducted by the Uptime Institute,
32% of data centre 2012 budgets are at least 10% greater than 2011. Data centres are still
spending despite the global recession.
30% of data centre facilities will run out of power, cooling and/or space in 2012. This has
been a recurrent trend.
Reducing data centre energy consumption is very important in 71% of data centres.
The top driver for pursuing energy efficiency is financial.
The average PUE (Power Utilisation Efficiency) metric, a measure of the efficient use in data
centres is 1.8 to 1.89. This implies that energy overheads are still very high, 90% relative to
the direct energy consumed. There is plenty of scope for energy reductions
What is oversizing?
where the manufacturer’s “Name-plate” energy rating is used in provisioning adequate PDU power, leads to one of the largest operational inefficiencies in the data centre. Typically, the manufacturer deliberately over-estimates the power requirements of their servers, so that the data centre makes sufficient allowance in their power allocation .
Unfortunately, the manufacturer ratings can be50% or more than the server’s actual maximum power consumption
Right-sizing the energy demands of a data centre can save up to 30% of energy costs and substantially reduce the cost of actual real-estate that is provisioned. The cost of building a data centre (2011) per m2 of data centre space in the U.S ranges between $5,000 (Tier 1) to in excess of $13,000 (Tier 4), this figure can be used to estimate the savings by reducing rack space.
Some ways to improve efficiency in data centers
Making greater use of outside air or other outside cooling resources to minimize the load
on the Computer Room A/C system and chiller plants.
Adopting a hot/cold aisle configuration, which may involve rearranging how equipment
is placed in rows and even within individual racks.
Making greater use of variable cooling by adjusting fan speed on the air handler, and
water flow to the individual CRAC/CRAH units.
Increasing cold aisle server inlet temperatures to 80.6°F (27°C) as recommended by the
American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE).
This uses less electricity in the cooling process
Metrics for Cooling and Air Conditioning Efficiency
Air Conditioning Airflow Efficiency (ACAE) is defined as the amount of heat that can be removed per standard cubic foot/min (SCFM) of cooling air (Wattscooling/SCFM). The higher the value, the more efficient the system.
Cooling Tonnage: This refers to the cooling capacity of the air-conditioner. 1 ton is equivalent to 12,000 British Thermal Units (BTUs). 1 kW is equivalent to 3412 BTUs.
Two IT market analysis companies Gartner and McKinsey recognising the shortcomings of a simple PUE analysis have proposed a metric which is correlated to improvements in energy efficiencies in the IT sector of the centre. They have defined the entity Corporate Average Datacentre Efficiency (CADE) as:
CADE = Facility Efficiency X IT Asset Efficiency
= (FAC UTIL X FAC EE) X (IT UTIL X IT EE)
Where FAC UTIL (Facility Utilisation) = Total Actual Facility Power (External Utility feed)
Total Facility Power Capacity
FAC EE (Facility Energy Efficiency) = Total Actual IT Power
Total Actual Facility Power
FAC EE is the same as DCIE.
IT UTIL (IT Utilisation) = Total Actual IT Power
Total IT Power Capacity
IT EE (IT Energy Efficiency) = Total Actual IT Power – Idle Power of all IT Equipment
Total Actual IT Power
CADE = 1 , if the utility supply matches exactly the facility power requirement (FAC UTIL =1), all the facility power is solely consumed by the IT equipment (FAC EE =1), all IT equipment is being used (IT UTIL = 1) and all IT equipment consumes zero energy when idle (IT EE = 1).
Server Redundancy
Up to 30% of servers housed are functionally dead (i.e.
In a server population of 1000 servers, approximately 300 are redundant.
Assuming that energy management system can identify and assist in the consolidation of these servers such that 25% are liberated and taken off-line for future use, this would take 75 servers out of production.
What temp range does ASHRAE reccommend?
“Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments” (2012) recommends a temperature range of 18–27°C (64–81°F), a dew point range of 5–15°C (41–59°F), and a maximum relative humidity of 60% for data centre environments.
What are economizers
Economisers are mechanical devices used in data centres to support or replace the CRAC and chiller systems by using the cooler ambient air. This potentially can reduce the centre’s energy consumption by up to 60%. Since it is dependent on an external air stream that is quite cooler than the centre’s computer room temperature, economisers are only useful in cool climates such as Ireland, UK and Scandinavia. Economizers recycle energy produced within a system or leverage environmental temperature differences to achieve efficiency improvements. The outside air must be filtered to remove any pollutants or particulates and its relative humidity must be restricted to between 40% and 55%.
What are the two types of economizers?
Airside economizers pull cooler outside air directly into a facility which is subsequently heated by the equipment and expelled.
Water-side economizers use cold air to cool an exterior water tower. The chilled water from the tower is then used in the air conditioners inside the data centre instead of mechanically-chilled water, reducing energy costs. Water-side economizers often operate during night-time to take advantage of cooler ambient temperatures.
Give some statistics on rising energy costs
Electricity used by servers doubled between 2000 and 2005, from 12
billion to 23 billion kilowatt hours.
Before the year 2000, servers on average drew about 50 watts of
electricity. By 2008, they were averaging up to 250 watts.
How much electricity turns into heat?
Over 95% of the electrical energy that goes into a computer gets turned into heat.
NGOs monitoring data centers
Greenpeace
Big Data, how much data is expected to be generated annually by 2020?
35 zettabytes (1 zettabyte = 1 trillion Gb)
Big Data - over how long was most (90%) of this data generated?
Last 2 years
What is the problem with servers that are older than 7 years?
Considered ‘out of date’ efficiency-wise
What are the 3 big issues with data center?
- Energy use - On average, the world’s DCs use 30 billion watts of electricity, the output of 30 nuclear plants, and most servers generally, though underutilized, run at maximal capacity, thus wasting 90% of their energy
- Land coverage - DCs are growing in servers and in size that cover 100s of acres of land - the liquid and solid waste they produce makes up a considerable amount of local waste
- Cooling Systems - most DCs cooled with energy using the burning of fossil fuels
What is Google doing to reduce emissions?
13 global DC locations - 34% of Google’s data centers now operate on renewable energy - $1billion invested in renewable energy
What is Microsoft doing to advance green initiatives?
7 global DC locations - recycles 99% waste produced by European DCs; Uses efficient, non-polluting water cooling systems
What is Facebook doing to contribute to the green and sustainability agenda?
5 global data centers - building new DCs with the capability to run on wind energy alone; old data centers shifted to hydroelectric power; new hardware designs to eliminate the use of unnecessary metals and plastics to cut down on solid waste
What % of global electricity do DCs consume?
1.5-2%
At what rate is power consumption of DCs growing at?
12% per year
What % of DCs are powered by the dirty coal power of the past?
50-80%
Company that is top of the class for transparency in green?
Akamai
Company with strongest infrastructure siting policy
Yahoo!
Companies with most comprehensive approach to reduce carbon footprint?
Google, IBM
