Modius Data Center Blog

Imagine a computer processing chip that could run at any speed, without any cooling. Imagine that this processor could be mass produced using existing technologies, and using off-the-shelf substrate materials. Well, this is not fantasy and I was reminded the other day about the work NASA has been doing for a few years...

It is true! Nasa has been demonstrating a set of chip technologies that have been able to operate at over 1000-degrees F for extended periods of time. While this is remarkable for NASA, now adjust your focal point to the usage of this technology for standard IT purposes. Cooling as we know it today would be a thing of the past. We might have cooling just for the human occupied areas, and perhaps some filtering still required, but here we'd see data centers running happily at over 100 degrees F.

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/09/nasa-designs-new-ultra-high-temperature-chips.ars

Finally PUE of 1.00! Curious reading to be sure...

Understanding the power consumption of any given discrete device in the data center may be accomplished in a number of ways including measurement and modeling technologies. While many approaches have been tried over the years, today there are four main ways to determine the power being consumed.

• Faceplate Values. Each manufacturer places a service value ‘plate’ which identifies things like model and serial numbers, manufacturer’s contact information, safety certifications and power requirements. The power requirements are usually listed as the voltage range acceptable for the included power supplies, as well as the maximum current to be drawn by any configuration and working condition of the device. For a complex device, this faceplate power consumption value is listed as the maximum possible and may be 4 or 5 times the actual power being drawn in normal operating conditions. Since this is printed information required on every device, it essentially has no additive administrative no-cost.
  
  
• iPDU Monitoring per outlet. Newer environments have begun to deploy measured or metered power distribution devices within each rack. These iPDU have enough intelligence to allow network inquiries to be made of the iPDU itself, with the most granular of these devices offering discrete values for the power being consumed PER-OUTLET. These PER-OUTLET iPDUs make ideal sources of raw power consumption values, although they tend to be costly to do so.
  
  
• Monitoring via operating system service. Most modern hardware telco, server and switch designs and their associated operating systems include what is known as ‘System Services’ or ‘Daemons’ which are intended to allow access to granular operating information. In most modern cases, device drivers are included in the standard software builds which enable power consumption metrics to be read from the actual power supply unit, assuming that the power supply was instrumented in hardware when the device was manufactured. In cases where this hardware instrumentation exists, there are no additive costs to gaining access to the power consumption for these devices across an IT infrastructure.
  
  
• Modeling the device. It could be argued that a tremendous portion of the installed IT equipment that was purchased more than 3 years ago has little or no instrumentation capability in hardware. In these cases it is impossible to programmatically read power consumption metrics. Instead one approach has been to model the power consumed based upon a model of the hardware configuration of the device. Mostly for servers, it could be argued that a good approximation for a device can be calculated by knowing an inventory of components inside each device, and then the power consumption of each of those components. Coupled with some workload information and a fair assessment of consumption can be derived.

It is funny how many times I have recently visited larger data centers considering 'Green IT' or other Efficiency initiatives and find high priority funded projects  for wireless temperature sensors. True wireless environment technology is some of the coolest 'tangible' stuff I have seen in a long time. It is a high-tech version of the kind of technologies that we all grew up with, things we all just inherently 'get'. Temperature and Humidity Sensors. What could be simplier? 

Here it is in 2010, and is important to realize that finally there are a number of great choices for wireless sensor solutions out there either using Active RFID or 802.15.4 (zigbee) technologies. A customer today really can deploy a fairly granular 'mesh' of sensors in data centers and related facilities areas without much difficulty. The sensors are simple, small, have long battery lives (> 3 years each) and low-cost. All of the solutions have easy to install packaging with double-sided tape or velcro. How easy is that?

Well, I would argue that the REAL VALUE for wireless temperature and humidity environmental sensors are NOT the sensors themselves, nor the data derived from each individual sensor but the aggregation of all of the data from all of the devices, rolled together with the metric data from the co-located IT gear and the facilities deployed HVAC gear, all normalized and easily accessible using ordinary tools. EXCEL anyone? (Or for the web-bies in the crowd, "Xcelsius Anyone?"). Imagine being able to plot the PUE of your data center as a function of outside temperature, or the total power consumption as a function of actual CPU processing (IT load). Remember, sensors can be found everywhere in your data center as discrete wired and wireless boxes, as well as embedded in every IT device purchased in the past 3 years, such as your servers, routers, firewalls and storage directors as well as in every PDU or iPDU (power strip). Sensors are everywhere just waiting to be queried for their metrics!

Customers should think BIGGER. Push the envelope and think PAST the wireless sensors (which ARE very cool), think PAST the pretty pictures that any one of the wireless vendors can draw, and focus on how to transform ALL of the data that you can get your hands on into actionable, cost saving information that can be directly applied in the BIGGER picture of running the IT structure at the lowest cost possible, supporting SLAs, etc.