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February 20, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 8
Page(s) 19 in print issue
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Energy-Efficient Rebates
Will Saving The Planet Also Save Your Bottom Line?
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Why would a company provide incentives for you to use less of its product? But that’s basically what energy companies are doing when they provide a rebate or other form of incentive to help you drive down your electricity consumption.
“Actually, the reasons are more than ‘It’s the right thing to do,’” says Mark Bramfitt, principal program manager at PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric Company). “While that is a big part of it, there is significant cost savings in helping our customers be more energy efficient.” Bramfitt indicates that the cost of acquiring more electrical power—or worse, the cost of building a new power plant—are more expensive than helping customers reduce their consumption. As a result, providing incentives for customers to lower their electric bills is a very popular idea.
 Data Centers Enter The Fold
For PG&E and many electric companies, providing incentives to reduce power consumption is nothing new. Well-established utilities have had energy-efficiency programs in place for decades. What’s new is the inclusion of data centers in those programs.
The data center is an important target for reduction of energy consumption. For example, a study by Stanford University estimates that data center energy use represents 1.2% of electric energy use nationwide. But globally, less than a fifth of the population is currently accessing IT services.
According to Bramfitt, PG&E’s definition of an enterprise data center is one that is operated by Web-based, financial services, high-tech, and colocation companies. Bramfitt says that these centers can be standalone or part of a campus environment, and their consumption loads are in the tens of megawatts; some individual centers approach 100MW. For some of these customers, energy use is second only to employee costs.
Additionally, data center annual growth rate can be upwards of 50%. SMEs’ data centers tend to be smaller (5,000 to 20,000 square feet) and are usually part of an office complex. Growth rates are usually some low multiple of GDP—10% annually, for example.
Plan For Success (& Savings)
Typically, energy-efficiency programs focus on new data center construction, retrofitting the current environment, or optimization of the equipment in the data center. As an example, under the PG&E program, when an enterprise is set to start new construction, it brings in its plans, and PG&E brings in the appropriate engineering talent to see how they can design in greater power efficiency. In some instances, PG&E will help provide funding to cover some of the costs, so be sure to check with your provider to see if similar options are available.
Bramfitt uses the example of helping a local company design its new data center. The project generated a $1.4 million cost savings in electrical consumption. The company used free cooling and high-efficiency UPSes. Free cooling is an economic method of using low external air temperatures to assist in chilling the data center. For example, when the ambient air temperature drops to a set temperature, the free cooling system uses the outside air to cool the data center.
But for SMEs with no plans for new data centers, seek out aggressive programs that center around optimizing the current data center. PG&E, for example, endorses server virtualization and storage consolidation as targets to improve energy efficiency. PG&E realized that it was ignoring the “white room,” focusing on high-efficiency equipment (chillers, pumps, fans, etc.) and air- and water-side economizers (free cooling). Based on a joint study conducted by PG&E and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, more than 55% of the power consumption was coming from servers and data equipment.
Michael O’Malley, director of analyst relations and market intelligence at VMware (www.vmware.com), confirms that the program is making a difference. “We have seen high interest from customers to start or even accelerate their virtualization strategies as a result of data center-focused energy-efficiency programs. It allows them to further justify a server virtualization project and expand its scope, while of course driving down data center power and cooling costs.”
Craig Nunes, vice president of marketing for 3PAR (www.3par.com), says that the programs are working. He says that a particular client was able to shut down 25 servers and migrate away from 17 NAS servers. The result of these server and storage virtualization endeavors reduced the client’s power consumption by 26%.
“Customer interest in programs like these remain very high,” Nunes says.
What You Can Do
Bramfitt suggests accelerating server virtualization projects. Server virtualization can commonly consolidate 10 or more servers into a single server; doing so naturally reduces power consumption and space requirements. It can also delay the need for a new data center. In addition, storage optimization techniques, such as thin provisioning and the use of MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) storage, are also eligible for the incentives. Although the rebates will vary, there is essentially an incentive for every server that is removed. In addition to these, there are incentives for airflow control systems and high-efficiency UPSes.
There are also incentives for the desktop IT environment. Consider purchasing Energy Star PCs, monitors, etc. Beyond that, look for incentives for the use of power-management software or converting from desktops to thin-client systems.
More than 100 utility companies have incentive programs, and many of these are now including data center incentives. For example, the Utility IT EE Coalition comprises utilities in the Pacific Northwest, but the inclusion of companies from Texas and Vermont suggests that the group is expanding nationally. It is worth your time to contact your provider and see what programs they have for a data center of your size.  by George Crump
Solid-State Drives: Additional Rebates Could Be Coming
SSD storage has often been known and used for high performance. According to Woody Hutsell, vice president of Texas Memory Systems (www.texmemsys.com), “SSD is now being looked at for its green capabilities. If you measure the I/O per watt of SSD technology, it is far superior to that of mechanical drives.” In a performance-sensitive environment, customers will add drives to an array to increase response time, even though the existing drives in the array are not even close to capacity limits. Adding drives for performance increases power consumption and heat while decreasing available floor space. A single SSD can often replace all of these drives, reducing overall power consumption while improving performance. If other utility companies follow PG&E’s lead, using SSDs could net you additional rebates. “For 2009, we will be looking at adding solid-state disks to the [incentive] program,” says Mark Bramfitt, principal program manager at PG&E. "We think that will help further drive down costs." |
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