Week 1 Blog 2: Designing more efficient data centers

IBM’s new next-generation data center seems to be all about more efficient management of waste so that the energy needed is cut down by 50 percent. An on campus gas-powered turbine will be providing electricity for the data center machines as well as the cooling services. Some of the power savings will come from simple and logic design changes, such as the heat generated by the runtime of the turbine being used to heat the buildings on campus. The $12.4 million, 6,000-square-foot data center however will not stop there. Since the output of the turbine is DC, the entire data center will run on DC voltage. This will create some obstacles for the hardware being adapted to run on DC voltage, but it will also eliminate the power loss associated with the DC to AC conversion in other similar data centers. According to another article I found, data center energy consumption has more than doubled since 2000. This is a very big step in bringing forth 21st century solutions to a problem that keeps growing. To explain why it was that IBM chose the University of Syracuse to partner with, they pointed at the fact that it requires a multi-disciplinary mindset in order to tackle the green IT issue. From a software standpoint, the data center will feature a completely virtualized design. This will allow for applications and workloads to be dispatched more efficiently in real time allowing for better management of power. I think that from a software design perspective, virtualization will however add an overhead in processing speed which might actually back fire in energy efficiency if utilized in a very busy data center such as those that Google has throughout the world. Moreover, it is important to note that while the data center features such as the heating of other buildings from the turbine generated heat fits nicely in this environment, it wouldn’t fit in environments where the data center is the only building on campus. For example an isolated data center building wouldn’t be able to take advantage of this design. As a conclusion, I think that this is a step in the right direction, more research and exploration needs to be done to solve the green IT problem.

Source:
http://www.reuters.com/article/gwmTechnology/idUS73610767920090529

Other sources:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197006210