On Thursday the Green Grid released consolidated recommendations for measuring and reporting the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric in dedicated data center facilities. “Driving industry alignment of PUE through consistent measurement and reporting processes represents a significant step in improving data center energy efficiency,” said Dan Azevedo, Symantec representative and board member of The Green Grid.

A group of leading U.S. organizations released a task force report titled Recommendations for Measuring and Reporting Overall Data Center Efficiency – Version 1 – Measuring PUE at Dedicated Data Centers. The recommendations for measuring and reporting PUE put forth by the group are aimed at use of multiple energy sources (electric, natural gas, water, etc.).

The report affirms the PUE metric as the industry’s preferred data center infrastructure efficiency metric by The Green Grid in collaboration with 7×24 Exchange, ASHRAE, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, U.S. Department of Energy Save Energy Now Program, U.S. Enviornmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR Program, United States Green Building Council, and the Uptime Institute.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

Lifeline Data Centers has added a video to the home page of our website. It’s a quick overview by me on what the heck we do.

Lifeline’s affordable colocation facilities are being used by companies who care about data center compliance, 99.995% uptime or better, colocation power costs and risk management. Would outsource data center facilities help you with your critical computer systems? Call Lifeline at 317.423.2591.

Thanks to Another Cool Design for their great work on the video.

Just because server differentiation increasingly comes from factors outside the processor doesn’t mean those differences are insignificant. Consider the impressive power and cooling smarts that server vendors are bringing to bear.

Companies face a major challenge reining in the costs of running servers and air conditioning to keep them within thermal specs, because as data centers grow, so do electricity bills. It can cost $25 million to add a megawatt of capacity to a data center, according to industry estimates.

The upshot is that server vendors are integrating power-control technology deep within their boxes. “We’ve built into BladeSystem the ability to throttle pretty much every resource,” says Gary Thome, chief architect of HP’s infrastructure software and blades group, referring to the company’s best-selling blade server line. “We can throttle CPUs, voltage-regulator modules, memory, fans, power supplies, all the way down to trying to keep the power consumed as low as possible at any given time.”

These management smarts extend beyond each server to the chassis as a whole. “We have the ability to put power supplies into low-power mode, and then shed power onto other supplies while still maintaining redundancy,” Thome says. This lets the power suppliers that are running do so at high efficiency, but it goes beyond that. “We have variable-speed fans. Plus, the fans are set up in a zone, so if one part of the chassis is running hot, those fans will run faster, and on another part of the chassis, the fans will run slower.”

more of the Information Week article from Alexander Wolfe

It is an open secret that electrical costs of data centres are skyrocketing, says power management firm Raritan, which recommends better measurement strategies as the first step to better cost containment.

“Though the price of servers has come down, the cost of power is rising incrementally; about 31 per cent according to data from the independent organisation–Green Grid,” said Raritan vice president, Asia Pacific and Japan — sales and marketing, Chris McPherson, speaking in Malaysia recently.

“Adopting a green infrastructure approach does make immediate cost savings as well as give certain corporate brand positioning advantages,” said McPherson. “However, the ability to measure energy efficiency is the real first step to managing power costs.”

More of the Network World article from Avantikumar

Colocation power costs (the cost of power in an outsource data center facility) can make a big difference in your overall IT budget. The raw cost of power varies throughout the country. Midwest colocation provider Lifeline Data Centers pays Indianapolis Power and Light $.055 per kW/hr. East and west coast colocation facilities pay double that cost of power.

But more importantly, how does the outsource data center pricing model charge you for power? The fairest way would be to charge based on actual usage. At Lifeline, we charge $.175 per kW/hr based on actual power draw. $.055 is for power to the IT equipment, $.055 is for associated data center cooling for the IT equipment, and $.065 is overhead associated with running multiple utility feeds, multiple generators, and multiple UPS systems for each and every client.

Colocation pricing models vary; be careful.

If you’re considering outsource data center facilities, you know that data center uptime and data center certifications are important. But the cost of data center power can affect the long-term IT budget. Choose an outsource colocation facility that charges fairly with low power costs. Choose Lifeline Data Centers.

Google’s top energy executive has offered some simple steps for making data centers more energy-efficient, including raising the thermostat to 80 degrees Fahrenheit — or 27 degrees Celsius — to cut down on cooling costs.

Data center staff at some companies walk around in jackets because the buildings are kept so cold, said Bill Weihl, Google’s “green energy czar,” at the GreenNet conference in San Francisco on Thursday. “In our facilities, the data center guys are often wearing shorts and t-shirts,” he said.

The tips he offered have been batted around at data center conferences for a few years, but it’s likely that many companies still aren’t making use of them — especially to the degree Google does at its own tightly-run facilities.

By taking fairly basic steps, most data centers could lower their PUE to 1.5, Weihl said, compared to an industry average of 2.0 or more. PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness, measures the total energy consumed by a data center against how much actually reaches the IT equipment.

More of the Network World article from James Niccolai

Coy Stine is Director of Data Center Services for Bluestone Energy Services, a national design/build engineering firm focused on the cost effective reduction of energy use.

In these uncertain financial times, reducing data center operating costs has become a top corporate priority. Unfortunately, limited budgets often preclude efficiency initiatives that have high initial costs. An increasingly popular alternative approach involves leveraging technologies that improve the energy efficiency of existing equipment while minimizing up-front outlays and data-center disruption. Regardless of the methodology, considerations relating to safety, reliability and data-center uptime must be faced. Finding the right solution depends on a careful examination of financial and environmental goals, data center composition and layout, time horizon and budget.

What are the best opportunities for cost-effective retrofits and energy-usage reduction in data centers? Upgrading electrical equipment is one option. Replacing UPS and PDU equipment provides two immediate benefits: less electrical loss, and less waste heat to remove. Efficiency gains depend on the age of the equipment being replaced, but a 5% gain in UPS efficiency can lead to a 10%-60% reduction in annual operational costs. These items can give attractive returns, but relatively high capital costs, possible IT downtime and daunting electrical work may make approval difficult.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Coy Stine

Even as data centers are placed in increasingly exotic locations and tied to peripheral issues ranging from tourist attractions to economic-growth strategies, this one’s a real doozy: a new Helsinki data center built in a former bomb shelter under a historic cathedral will heat several hundred Helsinki homes while being cooled by frigid Baltic seawater.

Outside, the temperature is a bone-chilling minus 14C and Helsinki is struggling with its iciest winter since 1982, but deep inside a former bomb shelter carved from the bedrock beneath an Orthodox cathedral, the city’s power company is building what will soon be the world’s most high-tech municipal heating system.

Here, surplus heat from hundreds of computer servers in a new data centre located beneath Uspenski Cathedral, one of the city’s main tourist attractions, will be captured and pumped to heat hundreds of homes and businesses across the Finnish capital.

“This will be the greenest and most energy-efficient data centre in the world,” Juha Sipila, the project manager for Helsingin Energia, the company behind the scheme, said.

more of the Information Week article from Bob Evans

Is outsource data center space a better alternative than infrastructure as a service? Many of Lifeline Data Centers newer clients are second generation outsource data center users. They are moving out of the cloud, or out of another data center and into Lifeline. Their reasons for moving fall into a few categories:

Infrastructure as a service was a good solution at startup, but became too expensive to use as the client grew and needed more resources.

The cost of downtime is high and the clients have experienced data center downtime with their current outsource data center or cloud computing provider.

Data center certifications and data center compliance were difficult or impossible to evaluate/audit in a cloud-based environment.

Clients experienced performance issues that were difficult or impossible to isolate in a fully-hosted, cloud- based environment.

Clients do the math and determine that leasing/buying hardware and placing it in a facility with a sensible data center pricing model is a less expensive alternative.

Clients have had some costly downtime pain and want to take back control of their environments to guarantee that they have hardware, software and data center redundancy where it counts.

Clients realize that what they really need is a hybrid model that includes both outsource data center space and infrastructure as a service/software as a service.

Why are they choosing Lifeline Data Centers over other providers for their outsource computer room space?

Flexibility – clients can buy shared space or private cages, and can purchase extra space for growth without paying a penalty.

Uptime – Lifeline provides 99.995% uptime, the same levels as Uptime Institute certified tier IV data center facilities. And Lifeline’s hardened data centers are F5 tornado resistant.

Data center pricing model – Lifeline has a simple pricing model that separates floor space, per rack charges and power utilization. This appeals to clients who need incremental growth and easy forecasting of future costs.

Carrier neutral data center with no cross connect fees – Lifeline offers access to 15 carriers with no monthly cross-connect fees. Many clients find that the cross-connect fee savings can pay for their outsource data center space.

Data center power costs – Lifeline’s two Midwest colocation facilities deliver low power costs and pay-as you-use-it pricing.

Is outsource data center space a better alternative than infrastructure as a service? It depends, of course, on the nature of your business needs. For affordable colocation, call Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591 to learn more about your best alternatives for outsource data center and cloud computing data center options to take advantage of the best of both worlds.

As any homeowner knows, air conditioning is more expensive when the temperature spikes outside because the room unit or centralized equipment has to work harder to keep a steady temperature. The same is true with a data center, albeit on a much larger scale and with the added complication of heat rejection, notes Peter Sacco, president of PTS Data Center Solutions (www.ptsdcs.com).

“Air conditioning will almost always be more expensive in the summer months due to the harder the A/C has to work in rejecting heat into a warmer ambient environment,” he says. “‘How much is too much?’ is less a consideration for summer operation as it is for constant operation.”

Here are some strategies for keeping power and cooling operations streamlined and steady as the temperatures rise.

Consider Larger Strategies

To better address power and cooling, data center managers have to look past incremental improvements, according to John Busch, chairman and CTO at Schooner Information Technology (www.schoonerinfotech.com). “Most of the power and cooling that is consumed is wasted due to inefficient use of processing and storage and communications equipment,” he says. “This is, to a large extent, a consequence of dated application and infrastructure software which does not effectively exploit radically improving processor memory technologies.”

more of the Processor Magazine article from Elizabeth Millard