As the credit crunch bites corporate sustainability seems to be taking a back seat both in the media and in our IT strategies. BUT ITS STILL REALLY IMPORTANT !!!!

The question I have for you is this ...
Can a data center be Green, especially if you also take into account the effect on the environment of the devices that the data canter serves?

For example, a telco could create a new headend that has a zero carbon foot print, but the creation of the headend could facilitate another million STB's to be deployed which inturn would burn manny giga watts of power,

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Hi Simon,

It is a good question. We already see that "green" has become a marketing label, no longer related to sustainable economics, but used to sell consumer products and corporate images. I like the idea of charging a resource impact tax on producers. This means that companies producing a product or service will be charged for the impact of the use of their product on the environment. If companies were charged for the disposal of the product packaging, for example, it would be in their interest to minimise the packaging etc.

As regards Data Centres, I guess it depends on the total impact. Some of the designs I have worked on in the last years have been focussed on lowering the total energy usage of the data centre, but they were internal DCs focused on one comapnies requirements. Your example is related to DCs used as part of a utility service and the impact of increasing supply through "green" facilities.

Using our current open market model, the supplying company only needs to account for its own resource consumption and can declare itself to have a zero carbon footprint, because it is not responsible for the resources used by its customers. Unfortunately, the Earth is not an open system. In practical terms it is a closed system. Ideally, any claim to reduced carbon emissions, should use a Closed System Economic basis and reflect the total resource impact of the facility. This kind of approach would give consumers more transparent information about products and encourage industry members to collaborate to reduce the overall resource impact of a product/service.

Cheers

Stephen
Hi Simon

Very good question!

A lot of companies out there would like us to believe that data centres can somehow be green. But the truth is that anyone who claims they have a green data centre is lying. I see so many operators claiming to be 'green' or to have a 'zero carbon footprint', but this is just 'greenwash'. Data centres are just inherently unsustainable places, they cannot be designed to be green, they cannot be built to be green and they cannot be operated to be green. What they can be is 'greener' and this is what they should aim to be.

A report from the US Environmental Protection Agency states that in the USA in 2006, 1.5 percent of national electricity demand came from energy consumption in data centres. That is a massive amount of energy!

According to Harvard University academic, Alex Wissner-Gross, a Google search produces about 7g (0.25oz) of carbon dioxide, two searches produce about the same as boiling a kettle. When you consider the amount of internet searching that is done today, the vast majority being in data centres, then the question of whether a data centre can be green is quite obviously no!

If you then place this in context with the carbon footprint of manufacture of the devices in the data centre, the picture becomes even worse. Hardware manufacturers are forever trying to persuade us to buy their newest, latest, greatest, 'greenest', server or storage etc., but what about the carbon footprint of the manufacture, packing, shipping and disposal of the old? They tend not to take this into consideration. At one industry conference last year (called the Green Data Centre Conference), I actually heard a speaker from one of the major chip manufacturers tell the assembled audience that the best way to be green is to throw away your entire hardware estate and replace with new every three years! Unfortunately for him, I followed him to speak next!

There are things that can be done to make a data centre 'greener'. There are technologies that can improve the environmental impact. But a data centre cannot be green and no-one should every claim to be so. So, to answer your question:

Can a data center be Green, especially if you also take into account the effect on the environment of the devices that the data canter serves?

Absolutely not! A data centre can never be green, but there are many things that can be done to improve the environmental impact.

Cheers
Alex
Wow!

Those are really intelligent responses, and have made me think about the topic in a completely different way.
The comments that you have both made fit together really well,
so
if a data center (and the economic model that it services) is an inheriently ungreen thing, and the earth is a closed system then we have a problem. A data center can only be consiered green if it and the products it service have a zero or positive effect on the environment.

For example if a polluting data center enables better communications between two companies
and helps to increase profits and cut down flights (more than it pollutes) then its ok.
But if the companies are both manufactures of bottled water (which is an ecological disaster) ..... then its not okay.

Which leads me to ask ..
Can we rely on the economists to create a currency (carbon?) to reflect the closed nature of the earth that accounts for both data centers, production cost and impact of usage?
While we all understand Data Centers are huge energy users and they can be made more efficient there is another piece to the puzzle.

For many industries and market segments the web and IT has the Potential to lower other energy usage through the use of Data Centers. The obvious examples are e-commerce and telecommuting which reduce the need for auto travel. Other examples are not having to drive to the library, online video rentals, teleconferencing, engineering modeling, transportation scheduling, recycling otherwise discarded items on e-bay and craigslist etc.

I don't believe today we are at anything close to parity for the entire economy and it can be argued that some new applications are completely wasteful in terms of both energy and time. However there are certainly a small and growing number of Data Centers supporting applications that could be considered green or even carbon neutral when taking into account all the external factors.

Wally Phelps
www.adaptivcool.com
I was at a meeting on Friday where the UK Member of Parliament, Alan Whitehead presented. He was championing the Carbon Emission Act 2008. I surprised when he suddenly pulled it out, as it was huge. Like a big white Telephone Directory. In no sense could the physical object be carbon neutral. Irony apart, he then went on to scare us all with the description of its impact. Basically this is the most influential piece of legislation issued in the history of the UK. It is the only legislation that forces the country to deliver. He says in the world it is the biggest single body of rules to control the carbon emission levels. Every part of economic life will be impacted by the Act. It is the single most influential act ever. No other legislation comes close. Even the invention of income tax and corporation tax looks insignificant. This set of laws will have an impact that is very very broad and very very deep. The target is massive and the Act make the achievement of the target of huge importance, and the interim steps make it an urgent urgent urgent priority. And the 3rd runway at Heathrow Airport has just punched a big hole in the opening plan. The result will be changes that will be bigger and harder later. Alan says this one will not fizzle out and go away regardless of changes of the political party in power. Is this true? Well BICSI had a conference this year and it was all about green issues. It sounds terrible as a prospect, but I am sure it will be good: that long term I think the changes will be for the better in terms of stability, and eventually cost reduction. We can make it happen. Parts of the change will have to be non market led changes. If we can prop up a bank, and find the money to do that overnight, we know that it is possible to buck the market, and sometimes that is ok to do. The secret is out. We have broken the seal.

Information Technology was our wasteful little secret of the last decade. It is not a secret now, this secret is out; and the scene is set. We might see society attacking our wastefulness like a mother attacking a drunken driver in school playground. Scared? Don't be. Some open thinking will see us through. Smiling won't do any harm either.
I am pleased to share with you the news about the launch of my new book, "The Green and Virtual Data Center", which is being released today by CRC-Press.

The "The Green and Virtual Data Center" is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, CRC Press, and other venues around the world.

The book focuses on the idea that IT infrastructure resources configured and deployed in a highly virtualized manner can be combined with other techniques and technologies to achieve a simplified and cost-effective delivery of IT services in a clean, green, and profitable manner.

“The Green and Virtual Data Center” covers these technologies and techniques that todays data centers should be considering while trying to maximize resources, such as power, cooling, floor space, storage, server performance, and network capacity.

Learn more at www.thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com/book2.html and at my blog www.storageioblog.com.

Cheers
greg schulz
Now added to the member bookstore. Hope it does well Greg.
yes a big question and so is - how do you eat an elephant ? ........... take small bites at a time.

ICT is very wasteful of money, time and energy. Today ICT is a cost of doing business and provides no competitive advantage.

lets take little bites at a time :

why use access floors in data centres?

the first bite.....en route to the optimal data centre....it took over 100 years of evolution to optimise telephone exchanges .....for the next bites study what can be learnt from this
Stimulated by your "green" question, and recent conferences and seminars I have attended, has led me to commission research at the university of cambridge engineering department on ITS (Information Transport Systems) and ICE ( Inventory of Carbon & Energy ).

The marketing hype and lack of science I have seen in the ICT business on green issues must be addressed and we need some real ICE figures since afterall for the UK to stand any chance of achieving the 80% reduction in CO2 by 2050 required in the climate change act we must understand the numbers. i.e. expressing in tonnes of CO2.

I hope to make the draft "ITS on ICE" white paper available for general release at the end of March 2009.
How much detail are you looking for, with regards to Green Data center technologies?

The biggest key, in my day to day experience with clients, is the price tag. Having your data center optimized with appropriate humidity and cooling controls, monitoring thermal imaging studies to find hot spots, purchasing energy efficient UPS systems with a good power factor, maintaining the batteries on those systems, etc., are all pricey propositions, and many SMB IT administrators tend to feel that they can skip these costs. Unfortunately, this typically results in a very inefficient data center, helping to create many potential areas which grow increasingly more inefficient, and could lead to down time. For example, if an AC system is not set properly, it can cycle more frequently than necessary.

This leads to increased power consumption, and to mechanical wear on the unit, increasing total cost of ownership. A single visit by a technician can resolve this issue. Though there is an expense associated with that service, the lifetime savings measure in the high tens of thousands of dollars, per unit. If you are attempting to correlate money invested with efficiency and power out + reliability, then maintenance is an essential factor.

We manufacture the most 'green' power and cooling products available for data centers, and have been doing so for a long time. We also maintain the world's largest support team for data center equipment, operating in more than 278 countries. So, we encounter many requests for green assessments and advice. But, even the best equipment, with the smallest power loss, will prove ineffective if many other environmental and product care factors are not considered.


I understand that this response may seem like a bit of fluff - however, most real world smaller data spaces are unique, and each requires a specific approach to increase it's efficiency and footprint, so it is difficult to present a one-size-fits-all solution.

I am very happy to discuss this matter in all of it's gory technical detail, for anyone interested.
More gory detail please sir. John
TOXIC>>>>>>
No More than three presents per person this xmas please.
None for me. If you want to give me a present give me a neck massage or sweep up rubbish in the front garden.

I would like to see an energy efficient rating that all data centre would publish. Anybody could see if it is over weight with its carbon. E.g. If your DC has a BMI of 164 this makes you FAT. And 61 LEAN. The units would be Tonnes per Year per Giga byte for example.

The closed system is very important and the trading in carbon makes it harder to analyse what it means in the closed system. It sounds too familiar. Toxic Carbon Debts - I can see the headlines, sheesh.

john

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