Modius Data Center Blog

I spend a great deal of time talking about data center efficiency and the technologies available to assist in driving efficiency up. Additionally a great deal of my time is spent discussing how to determine success in the process(es). What I find is that there is still a fundamental missing appreciation for the need for 'continuous' real-time monitoring to measure success using industry norms such as PUE, DCIE, TCE and SWaP. I can't tell you how many times someone will tell me that their PUE is a given value, and look at me oddly when I ask 'WHEN was that?'. It would be like me saying 'I remember that I was hungry sometime this year'. The first response would clearly be 'WHEN was that?'

Most best practice guidelines and organizations involved here, (such as The Green Grid, and ITIL) are very clear that the improvement process must be continuous, and therefore the monitoring in support of that goal must also be. PUE for instance WILL vary from moment to moment based upon time of day and day of year. It is greatly affected by IT loads AND the weather for example. PUE therefore needs to be a running figure, and ideally monitored regularly enough that the Business IT folks can detremine trending and other impacts of new business applications, infrastructure investments, and operational changes as they affect the bottom line.

Monitoring technologies should be deployed that are installed permanently. In general, 'more is better' for data center monitoring. The more meters, values, sensors and instrumentation you can find and monitor, the more likely you'll have the raw information needed to analyze the data center's performance. Remember, PUE is just ONE KPI that has enough backing to be considered an indicator of success or progress. There surely will be many other KPIs determined internally which will require various sets of raw data points. More *IS* better!

We all get hungry every 4 hours, why would we monitor our precious data centers any less often?

So there I was, sitting in New York City a couple of weeks ago at The 451 Group's Uptime Institute Symposium, and spent a little time listening to Dean Nelson, the Sr. Director of eBay's Data Center services. He spoke about what eBay was doing with their new Salt Lake City data center and how it was paid for with their active cost savings initiatives. Sounds like the kind of data center we all dream about, and a management structure that understands long term winning strategy...

One of the most intriguing comments he made was regarding who pays the bill for power. Apparently, as soon as eBay moved the cost of power to the budget managed by the CIO, decisions were made in a much different manner. In fact, after the power bill was added to the CIO's bottom-line, he immediately ramped up it's efforts to reduce power consumption.  Surprising? Not really.

So the question bounced back to the top of my brain stack: Why don't we all just bite the bullet and add the power bill to the CIO's budget? Wouldn't that create the same catalyst for change that eBay saw? Wouldn't that shift efforts to reduce carbon, reduce cost, and become a Green corporate citizen into 5th gear everywhere? IT WOULD!!!!  Oh sure there are some logistic and measurement and data center monitoring issues, some economic G/L mechanics involved to implement the process, but for heaven's sake, we should encourage the proper behaviour, and stop hiding the problem. Hiding the budget as a 'burdened' cost, buried...

Frankly, it is very much like the Shell Game. Keep hiding the money so that know one knows where the money issue really belongs. Sure the CEO and CFO 'own' the power bills, but wouldn't it make sense to push the responsibility down a bit? To the teams that can actually DO SOMETHING CONSTRUCTIVE to lower these costs? Very few CIO's today pay (or are even aware of the detail for) the power bills for their data centers. My suggestion, follow eBay's lead and shift the G/L line items to the CIO and watch the rapid progress that will ensue...  (and when this higher level of interest takes hold, Modius will be there to help establish metric and measurement baselines by which to steer these cost improvements in very tangible ways!)

With the new focus on EFFICIENCY within the data center, it is quite clear that there are TWO major sub-systems that actually comprise the 'data center'... the IT / Infrastructure stuff INSIDE the rooms (i.e. on the raise floor) and then the Facilities stuff which is distributed through the facility and outside in the back yards. For years, the IT and Facilites groups were autonomous, and simply expected the other to exist.

Today, it is very short-sighted to look at data center efficiency as ONLY a function of the Metrics available in the rooms themselves. We must not ignore the Metrics about the power generation and distribution and Cooling plants. Remember, for every WATT going into a room, it had to COME FROM somewhere, and it had to be COOLED in some way!

Modius recognized that need to a SINGLE system that gathers performance metrics from IT and Facilities and created the only distributed technology that has no limitations of scale or geography. It's pretty cool stuff (in my unbiased view! LOL)

Imagine being able to say "How much POWER is my Fortune 100 company using right now?" I bet the CIO and CFO would love to know that. "How much is Power costing me this month?", "What is the PUE of each of my data centers?", "What is my Carbon Footprint?", etc etc etc.

These answers are possible today, and Modius customers are doing so TODAY! Data Center Metrics live across the data center and facilities, and can be treated as parts of a single system--- if you want to!