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  1. #1

    Is energy efficiency ever part of customer's purchasing approach?

    Hey guys, I'm quite new the this forum, but after searching around for a bit and reading the quality of writing here, I know I'm in the right spot. I'm currently trying to write a weekly post for my alternative energy oriented blog and am trying to better understand the mindset involved in purchasing data center space. Do you honestly think companies take "greenness" into consideration when approaching potential spaces, or is this a distant buying requirement?

    Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!

  2. #2
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    In general, I think its probably a distant requirement for the majority of customers.

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    It depends, we force all our customers to use the power saving modes on their servers, we give customers incentive's who use less amps per U.

    Most servers do not need to run at full performance at speed, using power saver will allow the CPU to slow down when its not needed, same with fans. In the end this saves a lot of money with thousands of servers.
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    Absolutely 'greenness' is a consideration - regardless of where you are located in the country - the biggest consumable, and most costly build out is going to be in regards to your power needs.

    Before it was known as being 'green', most data center locales are picked for their climate and availibility of power--> cheap power that is. So if being green can save money-- you bet it's a huge consideration.

  5. #5
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    Hell yes, data centers charge per power circuit or per amp some even have very low power footprints (15A for a whole rack.) The only way you could fill that rack is with very low power servers.

  6. #6
    To the extent that power costs money, of course it's a factor. Since power in a datacenter is a commodity, if you run a more efficient datacenter, the cost of the power you deliver to servers is lower, but you can get away with charging the same price for it, increasing your margins. Increasing efficiency of the servers themselves of course lowers the cost for the end customer as they don't have to buy as much power. There's also the issue that power efficient datacenters tend to be newer and more carefully designed and built, which has advantages completely aside from cost savings.

    In terms of being "green", I would say it's not normally considered an end in itself, but rather a means to the end of lowering cost.
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    They may include energy efficiency / 'green' in the RFP; however it gets lost in the noise when looking at reliability / scalability / redundancy / carriers, etc

  8. #8
    A lot of good insights with regards to cost savings, etc. Thanks so much! I was wondering a little more, though. Is it likely that companies that employ the services of a "green" data center would use that fact as part of a green/environmentally-conscious promotional campaign? Do we have any examples of this?

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    It depends on the situation. Larger shops that are deploying multiple racks may put more thought into greeness. For us smaller guys that just need a place to stick our existing servers, I'd say probably not.

    I still have a fair amount of Dell Poweredge 1750s/1850s/2850s. None of those are really green. But if you figure the time it would take me to migrate all my stuff from those to newer servers. Combine the cost of purchasing the new servers.... Not soo much. All the places I colocate at factor in the cost of power with my space and I don't pay per amp. So for me, I could care less about the amount of power they are using.

    While we are on the topic:

    I don't recycle because the chemicals used in the process are actually more harmful to the environment than not recycling.

  10. #10
    I have been a part of the critical evironment power industry for a while now and have seen a definite shift in marketing materials for UPS units and distribution gear for improved efficiency. There seems to be little focus on the "green" benefits and more on cost savings, but changing technologies are beginning to pressure the market to present green alternatives for the sake of LEED certification, etc.

  11. #11
    more efficiency , lower cost

  12. #12
    Well, here's a question to challenge your principles: would you guys pay a premium for "green"?

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by operationajax View Post
    Well, here's a question to challenge your principles: would you guys pay a premium for "green"?
    I'll answer your question with a question:

    Are my customers willing to pay a premium for green?

    If yes, then I'd be happy to provide it.

    If no, then no.

    Hosting is usually a low margin commoditized business. If my customers are willing to pay more to get green, all the better, can improve my margins and save the planet at the same time If customers aren't willing to pay more, I'm not going to go ahead and increase my costs and bring my margins to 0.
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    Bingo FunkyWizard!

    I see it as a feature request on a lot of RFP's but none the less when it comes right down to it- paying a premium for greeness - has not taken hold.

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    It's all really economies of scale, you will generally see the larger deployments looking at making things green as it's them who get the financial benefit from doing it.

    Less often do you see the single server colo guy looking at power usage, unless the data center is quite restrictive on power, or very expensive on power usage.

    Where I work the clients only seem to start looking at power consumption when there getting around 1/2 a rack, even then it's more of a thought than an action.
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  16. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by operationajax View Post
    Well, here's a question to challenge your principles: would you guys pay a premium for "green"?
    IF the CUSTOMER will
    we will


    We are planning a carrier neutral data center in China shanghai, and there are some VIP customers really need to pay a premium for "green"...so we are talking with an EMC company to find out a solution...

  17. #17
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    As far as actual space goes, not so much.

    As far as hardware to fill that space, absolutely. Intel instead of AMD, 80+ PSUs, variable speed fans, etc.
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  18. #18
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    Of course energy efficiency matters because higher energy efficiency will mean lower prices long term. Energy rates are only going to continue going up, and data centers will always pass those costs on to the customers. A less energy efficient facility will then have more costs to pass on to the customer, either forcing them to raise your pricing or to cut other service levels. The energy efficient facility cares about the long term, spending money now to save money later.

    Long term, the point of an energy efficient facility is going to save you money. If it doesn't, well, then it isn't efficient. Why should you pay more for something that is going to save the data center operator money long term? Note: Remember to factor in long term cost with price increases, etc. as well and that you're comparing apples-to-apples otherwise.
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  19. #19
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    O-Ajax, I think there are three separate areas to consider for your question: 1) the power consumed by data center customers; 2) the power consumed by the data center itself (delta of power delivered by the power company to the center and the power in item 1; 3) the "carbon footprint" of the power delivered by the power company to the data center.

    As people have discussed, for item 1, anyone with metered power (many if not most of the users in this forum) has a direct incentive to manage his power consumption. For item 2, the way we handle our fees in our data center gives us strong power management incentives, but all data centers take some steps to manage power consumption. So since power is a major cost element of our business, we all take steps to manage these costs.

    The third item is a different take on your question. Without making any value judgement about ultimate cost, as things stand today, coal-generated power is pretty inexpensive while nominally CO2-free alternatives are relatively expensive. (No comment on natural gas.) However, if you ask "do end customers and data center customers ask about the power company's carbon footprint", we've rarely heard that come up in discussion.

    I think this pretty much seconds Funky W's comments.
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  20. #20
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    Quote Originally Posted by operationajax View Post
    A lot of good insights with regards to cost savings, etc. Thanks so much! I was wondering a little more, though. Is it likely that companies that employ the services of a "green" data center would use that fact as part of a green/environmentally-conscious promotional campaign? Do we have any examples of this?
    Yes.

    Here's the press release Opera (the mobile browser people) put out when they moved into Thor: http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2010/11/01/

    And here's the press release from the Pan-Nordic supercomputer project recently announced as moving into Thor: http://www.snic.vr.se/Nordic-HPC-Pre...ease-final.pdf

    You'll see strong threads in both of them about the green energy aspects of the move.

    In general, in my experience I would concur with those that said that it's the larger customers who genuinely take account of the carbon footprint aspects of their IT. CSR reports are linked from the front page of most large corporates (certainly in Europe, less so in US). And if you read the CSR reports, IT power consumption and the emissions from it are often highlighted.

    Darrell - you said "Without making any value judgement about ultimate cost, as things stand today, coal-generated power is pretty inexpensive while nominally CO2-free alternatives are relatively expensive" (must learn how to do multi-quotes!). While that does hold true in the UK and many other northern European countries (no comment on US or Asia as I just don't know), it's not always the case - countries with lots of hydro power tend to have cheap power as well as low CO2 emissions. As an extreme example, the Icelandic grid is practically CO2 free (about 1g/kWh compared with about 540g/kWh in UK) yet the power is around a quarter of the price.

    A further factor forcing corporates to look at their CO2 footprint in the UK is the CRC carbon tax - large users will pay £12/tonne (~$20) for all CO2 emitted. With a 10kW rack responsible for producing something like 30 tonnes per annum that adds up quickly.

    PUE (the widest used measure of the energy efficiency of the data centre) is mostly about bragging rights within the industry, most customers don't care. (And 1.16 since you ask!)
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  21. #21
    I would argue that these companies are going to pick whichever option makes the most sense to them, and then if that happens to be green, they'll make a big deal about the greenness even though it was barely a motivating factor in the first place:

    ”This move makes sense in multiple ways. The environment wins by the switch to green energy and cooling methods. Meanwhile, our finance department is happy with the savings we make by locating these servers closer to the natural resources on which we rely,”
    Clearly opera is choosing the long term cost of power as their biggest factor, or else the proxy servers working for their mobile phone OS would be located in multiple datacenters closer to users, rather than in iceland where few of their users are located.
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  22. #22
    At what point (in terms of PUE) would you guys say a data center is "green"? Is there an industry standard for this label?

  23. #23
    Quote Originally Posted by operationajax View Post
    At what point (in terms of PUE) would you guys say a data center is "green"? Is there an industry standard for this label?
    There's certainly no industry standard on this.

    I would think that anything less than 1.5 PUE, and you've probably put some considerable time, effort, and usually money, into making sure you're more energy efficient than would be typical.

    I don't think any datacenter can really be "green", when you take everything into consideration, any more than you can have "clean coal". "Less brown" would be a more accurate way of describing the more efficient datacenter deployments. Consider that they all use massive amounts of electricity, that the servers inside them were manufactured with massive amounts of heavy metals that were mined with great environmental impact, and when those servers become obsolete, in many cases those heavy metals find their way back into the environment. Factoring in the UPS systems that typically use lead acid batteries (more heavy metals), miles of copper cabling (more mining impact), all the water use that goes into the cooling systems, and everything else, even the most green of datacenters is going to have a huge impact on the environment.
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  24. #24
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    Quote Originally Posted by funkywizard View Post
    I would think that anything less than 1.5 PUE, and you've probably put some considerable time, effort, and usually money, into making sure you're more energy efficient than would be typical.
    Depends on where the DC is located - any DC in UK, for example, should be able to deliver 1.5 relatively easily. It would be more of a challenge in Saudi. My initial reaction in reading this was 1.3.

    Quote Originally Posted by funkywizard View Post
    I don't think any datacenter can really be "green", when you take everything into consideration, any more than you can have "clean coal". "Less brown" ..., even the most green of datacenters is going to have a huge impact on the environment.
    All very true, but if the DC didn't exist, the businesses that use it would simply place the exact same type and amount of computing capacity somewhere else. Probably distributed across poorly designed server rooms in 20 different HQ buildings. The fact that the capacity is concentrated in a DC gives the DC owners the economic scale to invest in doing the energy efficiency piece well, which wouldn't happen in the other case. You could therefore argue for a substantial net 'green' benefit.
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  25. #25
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    O-Ajax, Everyone has made good points, and everyone here has a good sense of what is a reasonable measurement for and condition to measure a center's PUE. I would only add that if you're going to be speaking to data center owners for the purpose of writing or otherwise evaluating, that there's a lot of "marketing" that goes on about this, i.e. caveat emptor.

    Besides the outright manipulation, there are some complexities too. For example, in our data center in the Washington, DC area, we have a couple of (segregated) customers who run "cold" and pay for the energy consumption to do so. Most equipment is designed to run "warm" and most people run it that way (and pay accordingly - back to the point about users having incentives to save energy). So on a data center- wide PUE basis, PUE is pushed upward in this case.
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