Approximately a year (and a half?) ago I had read an article about new data
centers were capped at x amount of power and or the power company said "NO".
I am not 100 percent certain this is the same case (or a different one) but it
seemed like it was close to the item I had read.
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I dialed in recently to an online technology discussion sponsored by
Wikibon.org, a community of technology professionals. Speaking was Rich Avila,
director of server and network operations at California State, who said saving
power wasn't a fuzzy, feel good goal for him. It was a necessity.
Avila is the director of server and network operations at California State
University, East Bay, and he was responsible for 250 servers at the Hayward,
Calif., institution. The school's data center had ramped up quickly and by late
2007, his utility was telling him he was drawing 67 kilowatt hours of power
while the maximum available to him was going to be capped at 75 kilowatt hours.
Pacific Gas & Electric said in no uncertain terms there'd be no additional
power available when he reached that limit, a date that appeared about six
months off, Avila said.
Avila looked at his infrastructure and found his 250 servers were mostly one
application units, being utilized at six percent of capacity.
His direct access storage and SAN storage was a similar story, being utilized
at 10-15% of capacity.
Avila developed a plan to replace 50 servers with three Sun Fire 4600 servers,
an Opteron-based server that can be loaded up with random access memory. In
other words, it was an ideal machine to serve as a host to multiple VMware
virtual machine guests. By the end of 2008, he had shut down 25 servers.
Seventeen NAS devices were turned off. And despite a 26% reduction in
electricity use, he had installed 21 new applications. By the March 17 of this
year, he had installed four Sun servers to consolidate 60 university servers.
He also installed a 3Par S400 storage unit with 923 drives and 43 terabytes of
virtualized storage. His combined server and storage virtualization moves lead
to the data center's electricity consumption dropping from 67 kilowatt hours to
51 kilowatt hours, saving the school $2,000 a month in power costs.
A significant side benefit was ridding the data center of 15 pallets of servers
and miscellaneous gear, including 27 cathode ray tubes and 150 cables. That
gave him room to fit in some badly needed earthquake reinforcement structures.
His data center, slated to be moved within the next two years, sits 120 feet
from the Hayward fault, one of the most active in the Bay area. Because of
that, the ten story building in which he resides, which was not built to be
earthquake-proof, is destined to become a four story building soon after he
moves out. But for now, refitting is the best he can do and he's glad to have
the space to do it.
To crown the capping of his power consumption, Avila received a $12,000 check
from PG&E or $200 per consolidated server, which the university qualified for
under PG&E's power savings incentives.
So, as Earth Day dawns, the California State University, East Bay, can say it's
achieved a greener data center. Avila would say he's started down a new path to
managing the data center as a more flexible resource, and if power savings flow
from that
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