Powering Down IT
Written by Karen E. Thuermer
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Companies are working to provide the military
and government with green technology solutions
that achieve energy-saving goals.
The statistics are staggering. According to a recent estimate, DoD uses almost 30,000 gigawatt hours (GWH) of electricity a year, at a cost of almost $2.2 billion—enough to power more than 2.6 million average American homes.
Other statistics indicate that the federal government spends $293 million annually to power PCs and $479.5 million annually to power and cool data centers. In recognition of the critical need to cut the federal government’s energy costs and environmental impact, an executive order was issued in 2007 aimed at achieving certain energy management and reduction goals. Following suit, last year DoD released its Electronic Stewardship Plan, which outlines how it will implement those goals through acquisitions, operations and maintenance, and end-of-life management processes.
The plan’s requirements include that 95 percent of equipment purchased be certified by the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool; 100 percent of computers and monitors be Energy Star compliant; the life of computers be extended to four or more years; and discarded equipment be donated, sold, refurbished or recycled.
“We do not see so much a push for the reduction of DoD’s carbon footprint as we do a cost savings and economic focus,” commented David Ryan, chief architect for the HP Federal Group. “But it is not all a cost story on the DoD side, but also tactical requirements.”
HP, Citrix Systems, Microsoft and Intel have formed a coalition to encourage government and industry to be responsible with energy consumption. The coalition was scheduled to hold its second annual “Power IT Down Day” on August 27.
“Last year, over 2,800 government and industry employees pledged to power down their computers, printers and monitors when they left their offices for the evening, which resulted in over 37,000 kilowatt hours saved,” said Tom Simmons, Citrix area vice president for government systems.
Dell, meanwhile, has been working to improve the energy efficiency of its products. Since 2006, energy efficiency of Dell laptops has improved 16 percent, and the company has announced a commitment to reduce energy consumption by its laptops and desktops by 25 percent by 2010.
Dell also plans to transition all of its new laptop displays to mercury-free LED in the next 12 months. Dell’s 15-inch LED displays consume an average of 43 percent less power at maximum brightness, resulting in cost and carbon savings of some $20 million and 220 million kilowatt-hours in 2010 and 2011 combined.
EFFICIENT INFRASTRUCTURE
Besides this awareness day, companies are working to provide the government and DoD with green IT solutions that achieve their goals. Among them are products that transform data centers from sprawling server farms into energy-efficient hubs, virtual desktops and applications that can be used across any network and device, and servers that power down monitors so as to use less electricity.
HP is working on an energy-efficient infrastructure that fits around the products themselves.
“What we see in the military is they have lots of data centers, some of which are very good and others that are very bad,” Ryan said. “A lot of easy money can be found by conducting a simple data center analysis using techniques like computational fluid dynamics and thermal analysis.”
This provides a view of any flaws where systems may be operating inefficiently. “Some data centers are over-chilled,” Ryan explained. “That’s because a knee-jerk reaction to keeping data centers cool is to ice them down. That is a waste of money.”
Consequently, HP’s efficient critical facilities group focuses on critical data centers to analyze and come up with solutions to reach optimal efficiency using IEEE standards. Facility and technology assessment services include power and cooling analysis, computational fluid dynamics analysis, thermal zone mapping, energy efficiency analysis, and energy efficiency design. DoD, FAA and the Department of State are among the customers of HP’s mission critical facilities services.
“When we do thermal zone mapping analyses, we identify what should be hot or cold—the chillers, their velocities, and how we can improve their optimization,” Ryan explained. “We take the data center data and compare it against standards. If we have customers who want new centers, we can design and contract the building of the centers to IEEE standards or to whatever tier they need.”
In some cases, systems and applications that are not mission-critical do not require totally redundant power and cooling infrastructure and other support systems. HP offers multi-tiered hybrid designs that can right-size an infrastructure by engineering the facility to incorporate multiple operational environments, each aligned with the business priority and criticality of specific systems and applications.
Systems and application environments that require similar levels of business criticality are grouped within segmented raised floor spaces or modular data centers called performance optimized data centers (POD). A POD is a trailer with 22 industry standard racks that has been optimized to industry standards with a power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.25. PUE is determined by dividing the amount of power entering a data center by the power used to run the computer infrastructure within it.
“A traditional center normally has a PUE ratio of 2.0 or more,” Ryan added. “Consequently, PODs are much more efficient than brick and mortar data centers and are modular, mobile and low-cost.”
From a DoD perspective, PODs are an attractive option, particularly for data centers that are running out of space and need a quick solution.
“We can put these in within six weeks from the time of order,” Ryan remarked. “If the military is running out of space due to the war effort, we can have a power data center up and running quickly.” HP is currently doing just that for the Army.
To optimize the center’s power at a lower level, HP offers software solutions such as dynamic power management inside the rack.
“I think what is even more interesting is the life cycle logistics planning, where we work with an individual program and how we can optimize the way servers go from our integration plant to the warfighter as quickly as possible,” he said.
Not only are shipping costs reduced, but also HP can pre-integrate a POD and deliver it directly to the program.
“Lastly, we are working with customers on collaborations such as Halo studios, which offer virtual videoconferencing and telepresence solutions,” he added.
HP estimates that each internal Halo studio eliminates at least one roundtrip flight per day, or 237 tons of carbon dioxide per studio per year.
On the asset side, HP has been concentrating on optimizing its server storage—blade servers that have approximately 33 percent less power requirements. “Our printers and notebooks have technology that allows them to shut down instantly,” Ryan said. “Everything is Energy Star compliant.”
The company has been a leader in recycling programs over the past 20 years. It offers skinless systems that get rid of all extraneous packaging, which can be a good solution for large cloud computing infrastructures that take advantage of many small commodity servers with direct attached storage.
Intel, meanwhile, is reducing thousands of pounds of carbon dioxide emissions through remote services and off-hours power management.
The company started early in maximizing performance while minimizing energy consumed on several fronts. On the process side, it initially started with bipolar transistors, then made transitions to positive-channel metal-oxide semiconductor to negative-channel metal-oxide semiconductor, and finally to complementary metal oxide semiconductor to better manage energy efficiency. Centrino mobile technology was Intel’s first “from the ground up” example of this platform approach.
The company continues to be recognized for its leadership efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Energy. In particular, by working with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Intel made changes to its power supply design guidelines to encourage the development and adoption of more energy-efficient power suppliers. Intel also has a strong focus on leveraging software to drive power savings, despite the fact that most software products are not currently power-aware.
Consequently, Intel is working with the industry, particularly independent software vendors, to improve software sensitivity to battery power and configuration, as well as to tune for power. This includes developing benchmarks to help spur development of software cooperation with power-conserving devices, as well as making device characteristics and energy saving evaluations part of the operating system vendor design discipline.
LOWER MAINTENANCE COSTS
Microsoft’s work with the Federal Desktop Core Configuration in conjunction with the Air Force has resulted in a standard desktop configuration that helps lower maintenance costs. As a result, the Air Force is moving to standardize its desktop around Microsoft’s Vista software.
“That’s because Vista, unlike previous versions of software, has significant enterprise-level power management capabilities,” said Kim Nelson, executive director for e-government for Microsoft U.S. Public Sector and former chief information officer for the EPA. “This gives customers a more efficient and environmentally friendly operating system than they ever had before. It helps to leverage savings from the hardware using the software itself.”
As a result, the Air Force expects to save around $15 million per year by using Vista enterprise “This is huge. In addition, the NRDC has looked at Vista and determined that using it is the equivalent of reducing carbon emissions by about 300 million tons per year, or like taking 400,000 cars off the road per year,” she said, noting that the Army is rolling out Vista as well.
Meanwhile, the company has been focusing on building an endto- end virtualization strategy—a technology that isolates one computing resource from others. By separating the logical operation from the physical hardware, a virtualized environment provides greater operational flexibility and streamlines system changes, to provide an operating environment that strengthens business continuity and scales rapidly to meet demands.
The company is doing some interesting things as well on the server side, where it is implementing systems that turn the processors off as load decreases in the middle of the night. The feature is called Core Parking in Windows Server 2008R2.
“We are moving load to underutilized cores on a multi-core processor,” added Jeff Schnegelberger, core infrastructure solutions specialist at Microsoft. “We will turn two or three of those cores off so that we can show significant power savings as well as savings to air conditioning. We are not generating as much heat, and so do not need as much AC.”
Microsoft is also building the same policies with Windows 7 Client software so that similar savings can be realized, as well as looking at energy savings around Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V hardware-based server virtualization technology.
By going through lab consolidation, Microsoft has found that the system uses 27 percent less energy, saving more than $100 million in hardware and 3.5 billion kilowatt hours per year.
Already, Microsoft is finding it is saving 25 million kilowatt hours per year just by doing virtual consolidation.
“Internally, 80 percent of internal Microsoft IT servers are virtual,” Schnegelberger explained, noting that such savings could be especially beneficial to DoD, which generates huge amounts of power in deployed locations from diesel fuel.
“If they can generate less power, then they do not have to deliver as much diesel fuel in trucks, meaning fewer trucks and drivers in convoys,” he said. It also translates to less risk and a better force protection posture for the U.S. military.
END-TO-END VIRTUALIZATION
Meanwhile, Citrix Systems has introduced a server virtualization system called Citrix Essentials for XenServer.
“We can virtualize the physical server and load multiple iterations of an operating system or multiple operating systems—making one server function as 10 servers,” reported Rue Moody, strategic products technical director, government systems, for Citrix. According to Moody, the average server in a data center today runs at 30 percent utilization.
“Data centers are built to handle peak time usage; so, for most of the day, 60 percent to 70 percent of the server capacity sits idle, drawing power and waiting for that peak demand,” he said. “With Citrix XenServer, we can dynamically repartition servers and have them run on average at 60 percent or 70 percent utilization.”
XenServer consolidates servers, improves system availability and management flexibility to move workloads from server to server as needed. As workloads change, Citrix can provision the servers to change with them. That creates a lower demand for the number of physical machines, which mean less power to both run and cool the servers.
XenDesktop and its virtual desktop infrastructure essentially virtualizes desktops—running them in the data center and delivering them to users on-demand—for simpler management, improved data security and increased IT agility. Operating systems and applications are hosted centrally on a server, and the desktop is assembled, identity is verified and the desktop is delivered based on the user’s profile.
“This allows the military to deploy less expensive, lower wattage, longer lasting thin clients for a greener desktop,” explained Moody. “Virtual desktops can, in some cases, double the life cycle of existing end devices.”
With the e-waste involved in the disposal of desktops and laptops, the higher wattage of traditional “fat” clients and the expense of replacing IT hardware, virtual desktops help the military save energy, reduce e-waste and save money at the same time.
“Citrix XenDesktop also helps the Army meet the Thin Client Architecture Standardization for the Army Small Computer Program,” he added.
Citrix XenApp virtualizes applications—hosting applications in the data center or streaming them to run on user desktops—making them available for use anywhere, online or offline.
“This end-to-end virtualization solution reduces the power needed to operate and cool the data center and enables the use of lower-wattage thin clients. Citrix Delivery Center allows the military to utilize green IT without compromising performance,” Moody explained. “With Citrix virtualization solutions, IT departments can achieve their missions while minimizing energy consumption and waste at both the server and desktop levels.”
Citrix Cloud Center (C3) offers an integrated portfolio of Citrix delivery infrastructure products (Citrix XenServer, Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, Citrix NetScaler, Citrix Repeater and Citrix Workflow Studio) packaged and marketed to the cloud service provider market. C3 integrates cloud-proven virtualization and networking products that power many of today’s largest Internet and Web service providers.
Citrix contends that this unique combination lets next-generation cloud providers take advantage of the most widely adopted virtual infrastructure platform for hosted cloud services, as well as a proven infrastructure to deliver those services reliably and securely to both cloud consumers and enterprise data centers.
“Again, Citrix virtualization solutions help military data centers save energy by optimizing servers and dramatically reducing the power needed to run the data center itself, and by enabling thin clients for the military,” Moody noted.
In addition, Citrix offers online services that provide remote access, remote support and Web conferencing solutions, which are ideal for mobile workers such as military personnel in the field. “Citrix also supports our troops with Citrix WANScaler, which optimizes satellite bandwidth for the U.S. Army and its Warfighter Information Network-Tactical initiative,” Moody added.
Citrix WANScaler facilitates real-time communication for forward-deployed troops within TCP/IP, SCPS and other standard protocols.
“Citrix flow control capabilities reduce latency issues and improve performance up to 30 times over, which means our warfighters quickly and securely receive the IT services they deserve,” he said.
STORAGE SAVINGS
Another major area of potential energy savings is storage, which in today’s data centers accounts for an estimated 37 percent of the total energy consumed. This is why, as federal agencies seek to reduce energy costs and lessen carbon footprint, data storage is moving to the top of the list.
One company in the field, 3PAR Government Systems, reduces energy costs and environmental impact by enabling data centers to replace 2.5 TB of traditional storage with only 1 TB of 3PAR Utility Storage, according to its federal director, Steve Foley. “Virtualization technologies pioneered by 3PAR—including 3PAR Thin Provisioning software—allow data centers to meet performance and service level objectives with 50 percent to 75 percent fewer disks than traditional arrays.”
These capacity savings greatly reduce the amount of energy required to power arrays and cool the data center. But even data centers that do not take advantage of 3PAR’s unique thin technologies still benefit from the built-in energy efficiency of 3PAR arrays, Foley said. “All told, 3PAR customers enjoy a combined annualized energy savings of approximately $7 million.”
According to Foley, an excellent “real world” example of the savings that 3PAR delivers is the Army’s selection of 3PAR Utility Storage for its Distributed Learning System group. “3PAR Utility Storage not only reduced resource consumption by facilitating remote learning programs, but also our Thin Provisioning software has saved the group an estimated 50 percent on capacity purchases,” he said.
3PAR also emphasizes innovative green programs unique to the storage industry, including the 3PAR Carbon Neutral Storage Program. Through this initiative, 3PAR augments the inherent energy efficiency of its utility storage platform by purchasing carbon offsets for every terabyte of disk capacity sold with 3PAR Thin Provisioning. “Since the program’s inception in 2007, 3PAR has sub.purchased carbon credits to offset nearly 15,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions,” said Foley. ♦
