FOCUS ENERGY MANAGEMENT
Issue 5, Aug/Sep 2009
DRILLING DOWN INTO ENERGY MANAGEMENT
Interview: Neil Rasmussen, senior vice president of engineering at APC by Schneider Electric, talked to DatacenterDynamics FOCUS about the problems of integrating data center and building management systems, the issues with IT effi ciency claims, why regulation is good and the current shortcomings with metrics
Schneider Electric is an energy management company. The French-owned global firm is undergoing an integration of its many separate businesses. One of its largest and most high-profile acquisitions in the data center market was that of APC.
DatacenterDynamics FOCUS: How does APC work within Schneider Electric?
Neil Rasmussen: A lot of the problems we see in data centers are connected to their relationship with the building. The vast majority of data centers are located in multiple-use buildings, so the systems are shared. It makes it hard to measure data center efficiency when operations occur inside a multi-purpose building. You cannot solve the data center
efficiency problem without integrating with the building systems. This has to be done logically or you will lose out on efficiency. We soon discovered that it did not make sense for the different parts of Schneider Electric to work separately on integrating with the building – data center and building problems need to be fixed at the same time to gain maximum efficiency. And so the process was a much more involved one than we first anticipated. We needed a much bigger plan and we needed to think harder about how we were going to put it all together. We realised that we couldn’t work with all the building system suppliers at the same time, but we didn’t have an idea of how to integrate with them all, either. The building’s automation and controls have been mired in a complicated set of incompatible standards for many years, and the IT side of things was light-years ahead. Our acquisition opened a bridge from the building automation to the IT. We decided to take a lot of the technologies used in software management of the IT systems and get that thinking into the building automation side.
DCDF: What about the energy saving developments within IT?
NR: You buy a watt from the utility company and only half of that makes it to the IT equipment, so already we have 50% of the
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energy use problem to solve. It is difficult to ascertain whether the improvement of efficiency of IT devices translates to a plateau or a decrease in the total installed wattage of IT because there is a lot of elasticity in that business. The increased efficiency will be captured by more use; storage is ramping up use, as is video communications. There is huge growth. If IT demand is flat, power use would reduce. But if IT service demand is rising as efficiency is increasing, what does that say about the future of IT power? The first time I used AutoCAD to design products was on a 4MHz PC. Now I use the program on 2GHz machine. However, in that change all I got in performance terms was an improvement by a factor of two – and the speed of my Windows boot is still the same as it was 20 years ago. So it is hard to say. Certainly improvements have been made to technology over the years, but we must take manufacturers’ energy reduction claims with a pinch of salt.
Dramatic improvements are needed in
energy management in devices such as servers, but these will take time. There are currently no huge technology shifts that are radically decreasing the energy consumption of these devices, it is all incremental work and we should all be very glad they are being worked on. There are no fast solutions to cutting
energy use but the commitment apparent now was not there 10 years ago, and this will make the difference. Commitment is there from every vendor on the hardware and software side and it is welcome. The question is will this be enough to drive down the total wattage use of data centers? Only if the demand for computer capacity remains flat – and we don’t think that is going to happen.
So it is just a question of balance. There are many older data centers where demand for wattage remains the same, but with ongoing consolidation will reduce use. So not all wattage is distributed where it once was. There is a lot of change needed to build better data centers and to improve the efficiency of those that have life left in them.
DCDF: How can you address the over- provisioning and over-specification of data centers?
Rasmussen: Wants metrics to be more useful
NR: We wrote white papers on this six years ago. Over-specified data centers are all wasting energy – they were commissioned correctly to meet the needs of five to six years from now, and are over-provisioned for the present as a result. So why did we build all at once – why not build to track the need? There may have been value in capital and cost at the time, but from an energy perspective it didn’t make sense. Historically, the goal was to build everything big designed for a 3MW level of operation, say, and hope that you will simply grow into it in time. It is embarrassing how many stories there are where that didn’t happen and many data centers are running at a fraction of their capacity – you don’t see those ones written about.
When people talk about wanting efficient data centers they must be built on a modular, scalable basis. We have been saying that for years. We even put our engineering resources forward to bring that to the data center sector.
DCDF: What about the suspicion towards Pods and the modular approach?
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