FOCUS DCD IN SAN FRANCISCO
Issue 5, Aug/Sep 2009
MONEY SAVED, KNOWLEDGE GAINED DatacenterDynamics San Francisco 2009 attracts the top West Coast data center players E
ach of the 700-plus guests came looking for something different at the DatacenterDynamics conference in San Francisco in July, but there
was one common reaction from everyone in the event’s aftermath: recognition of its undeniable value by all involved – be they delegates, sponsors or presenters.
Girish Ghatikar is a business analyst at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s environmental energy technologies division. In the building technologies department, he is focused on the demand response space and to him data centers are useful study subjects for development of demand response strategies. It is a crucial field today because “peak load is becoming very expensive and the grid is getting constrained”, he said.
To Ghatikar, the value of the event lay in staying abreast of developments in the data center industry.
“Although (researchers) are very technically oriented and we do a lot of applied work, it is important to understand what the industry is doing,” he said. “This will lead us to better research … and direct our research in the areas more accepting by the industry.”
Ghatikar’s LBNL colleagues were also at the event to present the Data Center Certified Energy Practitioners programme, a collaboration between the US Department of Energy and data center industry leaders in which LBNL is heavily involved. The department is developing a standardised certification process for practitioners to evaluate energy use in mission-critical facilities and to make recommendations to increase efficiency.
A member of a national laboratory system supported by the Department of Energy, LBNL conducts unclassified research across multiple disciplines. Since it was founded in 1931 by a Noble Prize-winning University of California, Berkeley, physicist Ernest Lawrence, the laboratory has either trained or collaborated with 11 more Nobel Prize winners and 55 Nobel laureates.
IDC Architects, based in Portland, Oregon which has provided engineering services to the likes of Equinix, sent several of its employees to the San Francisco event. IDC’s senior electrical engineer Paul Walker
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said the event gave him reassurance that he was on the same page as the rest of the industry with regards to the often misrepresented purpose of the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) metric for data centers.
Many companies have and still use PUE figures of their data centers for marketing or PR, making it seem as though the metric can be used to indicate one data center’s energy efficiency superiority over another.
“I don’t think it was ever intended to be a PR thing,” said Walker. “It is a contest and it shouldn’t be. Every data center is not the same data center. Every PUE is not the same PUE. Every approach to getting the PUE is not the same approach for everyone. For your own facility, it’s a reasonable benchmark.”
IDC’s portfolio includes projects such as designing full generator back-up for servers and facility support systems in one of Equinix’s data centers in Chicago, Illinois, custom RAH units with overhead supply system for server- floor cooling, as well as interior and exterior lighting systems. The facility has been used by the likes of General Electric, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Sony Online and Yahoo!
The firm also designs research laboratories and corporate offices in the US and Europe.
Of course, the need for perpetually accessible data storage and processing on a massive scale is not limited to the private sector. Forward-looking government employees are well aware of progress being made in the area of data center efficiency and of cost-cutting opportunities.
The information gleaned by government IT department heads at such an event may arm them better for getting the ears of their finance directors in budget sessions.
Vernon Young is operations manager for the IT department at Contra Costa County, California. He is looking to refresh and
consolidate the county’s sprawling and outdated IT infrastructure.
“We are wasting a lot of money,” he said. “There is money to be saved if we centralise and make it so that everyone is under one umbrella.”
He came to the DCD conference looking for ways to patch up holes in his data center. That day he focused on the essentials.
“I learned a lot about how we can set up our UPS, our generators and save money.”
FURTHER READING See page 48 Consolidation in Contra Costa County
DATACENTERDYNAMICS SAN FRANCISCO 2009 – ONLINE
All presentations, exclusive video interviews and slide decks are available for viewing online by all DatacenterDynamics conference attendees. Register now at
www.datacenterdynamics.com
If you have not attended a Datacenter- Dynamics event in the past 12 months go online to register for your nearest conference and to see selected interviews and conference highlights.
www.datacenterdynamics.com Go online for up-to-the-minute news, articles, analyses, features and white papers covering every aspect of data center design, build and operation.
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