Green Wombat

San Jose Mercury News tech columnist Dean Takahashi recently took a measure of his household’s carbon footprint, and the veteran gamer discovered the greenest gaming console by far is the Nintendo Wii. Attaching a device that measures electricity use to various  gadgets around his Silicon Valley home, Takahashi found that the Wii consumed just 17 watts. Microsoft’s (MSFT) Xbox 360, on the other hand, is a veritable power hog, sucking down 194 watts, rivaling Takahashi’s 42-inch plasma TV. The Sony (SNE) PlayStation 3 wasn’t much better, guzzling 171 watts by Takahashi’s measure. Nintendo scored a huge hit with the Wii’s relatively simple graphics and family-friendly games that require players to put down the Cheetos and get off the couch. By eschewing traditional testosterone shoot-to-kill gaming that requires ever more powerful chips to render movie-quality scenes, the Wii is also doing a decent job playing the carbon game.

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photo: sun
Two weeks after the U.S Environmental Protection Agency warned that server farms could double their energy consumption over the next five years, Sun Microsystems today unveils a green data center that has resulted in a dramatic decline in electricity use. Deploying new server technology and state-of-the-art cooling systems, Sun (SUNW) consolidated its Silicon Valley data centers, halving the square footage while cutting power consumption nearly 61 percent. Although Sun reduced the number of servers from 2,177 to 1,240, computing power increased 456 percent, according to the company.

Last week Sun gave Green Wombat a sneak peak at its Santa Clara campus’s next-generation data center.  Through virtualization – enabling one server to do the work of multiple machines – Sun slashed the number of computers in the data center and the heat they generate. Sun has invested in smart cooling technology to reduce the considerable energy the typically goes to cool  hot-running servers. For instance, in one data center room on the Santa Clara campus, servers are arrayed in long black pods called hot aisles. Hot air from the machines blows into the interior of the closed pod where it is captured by heat exchangers. (The visual effect of the stark white room and rows of black server pods is something of a cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Borg.) In a traditional data center, each server rack might consume much as 2,000 watts and produce a lot of heat, says Dean Nelson, Sun’s director of global lab and data center design services. The hot aisle server racks in contrast need just a fraction of that power. He points to displays in each rack that monitor the temperature of individual servers, allowing the network to distribute cooling where it’s needed. As we head toward the exit, the noise level drops as the cooling system has been automatically turned off in those pods where servers aren’t operating. "In a traditional data center the air conditioning would be blasting the entire center all day long," says Nelson.

If all this is good for the environment and contributes to the fight against global warming – the consolidation will eliminate 4,100 tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the company – it’s even better for Sun’s bottom line. By shrinking the square footage needed to house its servers, Sun avoided spending $9.3 million on new construction. Company executives say the investment in the new data center will pay for itself within three years. And by taking a load off the electricity grid, Sun earned a $1 million incentive payment from local utility Silicon Valley Power. Sun has also opened green data centers in India and the U.K.

Of course, the server and software company also hopes to sell its eco-data center solution and is launching "Eco Ready" services to assess and improve a data center’s energy efficiency. "We’re dealing with a lot of the same things as our customers," says David Douglas, Sun’s vice president for eco responsibility. The company faces competition from IBM (IBM), Dell (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), all of which are increasingly marketing the energy-efficiency of their servers.

Douglas says Sun is continuing to explore other ways to further green its data centers. For instance, the polluting diesel back-up generators that most data centers rely on might be replaced by fuel cells – Sun’s Silicon Valley neighbor Fujitsu last week began using a fuel-cell generator to power its data center – or converted to run on biodiesel. "They could be used in an emergency or during peak demand to take some of the load off the grid," he says.

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It’s time for the annual back-to-school computer buying binge, as college students get the ‘rents to cough up for that new aluminum-clad iMac (AAPL) or the latest from Dell (DELL). But according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, only about 10 percent of students turn on their desktop’s power-management software that minimizes energy consumption and puts the computer to sleep when not in use. The Climate Savers Computing Initiative – the consortium of tech companies led by Google (GOOG) and Intel (INTC) – has done some calculations to show how students can lower electricity costs and greenhouse gas emissions by clicking on the power-management feature: If the 61 percent of the U.S.’s 18 million university students who use desktop computers activate their computers’ power-management program, they could eliminate 1.8 million tons of greenhouse gases – the equivalent of taking 350,000 cars off the road – and save $206 million on their schools’ annual electricity bill. Those calculations were just for desktop computers; add in the laptops many students carry and the environmental and economic benefit would be even greater. Of course, turning on power-management software at the factory, as it were, would be best.

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Apple chief Steve Jobs unveiled the new iMac today, touting the computer’s recyclable aluminum frame and glass screen. Apple (AAPL) also won an Energy Star rating from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the iMac’s energy efficiency. The latest generation iMac appears to help fulfill the pledge Jobs made in May to make Macs more environmentally friendly.  Of course, while aluminum is indeed recyclable, the process for making the metal is highly energy-intensive.

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California’s PG&E has become the first utility to join the Green Grid, a consortium of tech companies working to boost energy efficiency in data centers to cut costs and fight global warming. PG&E (PCG) signs on to the effort just days after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a report forecasting a dramatic rise in data center energy consumption over the next five years that would require the equivalent of 10 new power power plants to be built. However, if data center operators consolidate servers, buy energy-efficient equipment and tap alternative energy sources, they could cut annual electricity costs by $1.6 billion to $5.1 billion by 2011 and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 47 million metric tons a year, according to EPA researchers. That’s the path being pursued by the Green Grid, which includes such Silicon Valley heavyweights as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Intel (INTC) and Sun Microsystems (SUNW), as well as Dell (DELL), IBM (IBM) and Microsoft (MSFT). (Later today Green Grid members will unveil a "technical road map" to achieve its goals.)  PG&E’s participation in the effort is significant because of the incentives the utility can provide to data centers to get green. For instance, PG&E offers discounts and rebates to companies that replace old computers with more energy-efficient ones and that use virtualization software to reduce the number of electricity-sucking servers. Data center operators that upgrade their cooling systems qualify for other incentives as do companies that deploy software to put computers in sleep mode when not in use. PG&E will use the energy efficiency standards being developed by the Green Grid group as the basis for future programs. Given the growing drain on the power grid from data centers, the utility in turn will reap the rewards of lower electricity demand on its network. "PG&E has been a leader in providing incentives for data center managers to put more energy efficienct equipment into the data center," said Jon Haas, Intel’s energy efficiency programs manager, during a conference call. "We want to bring that to other regional utilities going forward."

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photo: wirenine
Time to put server-farm hogs on a diet of greens. Left unchecked, data centers could double their energy consumption over the next five years at a cost of $7.4 billion annually, according to a report issued today by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. By 2011, the equivalent of 10 new power plants would be needed to supply 12 gigawatts of electricity unless the energy efficiency of data centers can be improved. That’s bad news for the corporate bottom line and the environment. It’s also a hit on taxpayers’ wallets: federal government data centers alone consume about 10 percent of that electricity.

The good news, says EPA’s researchers, is that greening the data center through consolidating servers, energy-efficient equipment and tapping alternative energy sources could cut annual electricity costs by $1.6 billion to $5.1 billion by 2011 and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 47 million metric tons a year.

A tech industry consortium called the Green Grid is working to ramp up data center energy efficiency as is the Climate Savers Computing Initiative led by Intel (INTC) and Google (GOOG). But the EPA report called for federal leadership to spur such measures, including working with industry to establish standardized performance standards for data centers, establishing energy efficiency standards for government contracts with data centers, and investigating whether Energy Star efficiency standards should be applied to servers and other data center equipment. State and local governments, say researchers, should consider requiring separate utility meters at large data centers while utilities could offer financial incentives for energy efficient data centers. Some utilities, like California’s PG&E (PCG), already provide such programs.

The push to make data centers more environmentally friendly is a boon to companies like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which has focused on energy-efficient chips, as well as data storage companies like Network Appliance (NTAP) and virtualization software makers such as VMware (EMC).

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As part of its Big Green initiative, IBM is replacing some 3,900 servers in its data centers with 30 mainframe computers – a move that the company says will result in a staggering 80 percent decline in energy usage. Ever more powerful servers were supposed to be the death of the mainframe but Big Iron is back – with a twist. Software will let each Linux-powered mainframe act as thousands of "virtual" servers, providing the same capabilities of individual physical servers while consuming significantly less electricity. IBM (IBM) will roll out the project at data centers in Australia, Japan and the United States. "The mainframe is the single most powerful instrument to drive better economics and energy conservation at the data center today," said James Stallings, general manager, IBM System z mainframe, in a statement. IBM’s greening of the server farm comes as tech companies like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) join Internet giants like Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YAHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) to slash computer energy consumption and combat global warming through such programs as the Climate Savers Computing Initiative and the Green Grid.

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