An exploration of the benefits and limitations of the popular Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric, for gauging datacenter efficiency.
How to avoid the pitfalls inherent in the definition of PUE; and some suggested means by which the PUE concept can be enhanced in real-world applications.
CORPORATE PLUG: For more information about how Raritan helps solve this problem, I encourage you to see: http://www.raritan.com/resources/screenshots/power-iq/
Green data Data Center is the only way going forward.To improve efficiency and PUE count we are leveraging technology and resources to cut down on emissions and utilizing power in a better way to reduce losses.This project speaks about the latest trends in Green IT and also how can banks use the technologies to upgrade their legacy systems
Energy Efficient Data Center
source : http://hightech.lbl.gov/presentations/6-23-05_PGE_Workshop.ppt&ei=BVxPVIy_Bse68gWwy4HAAw&usg=AFQjCNGHU_rSwcF4BMo2A6KnFfSZglP2UA&sig2=wZlTGXORD_HOUDJi-a2uAA&bvm=bv.77880786,d.dGc
An exploration of the benefits and limitations of the popular Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric, for gauging datacenter efficiency.
How to avoid the pitfalls inherent in the definition of PUE; and some suggested means by which the PUE concept can be enhanced in real-world applications.
CORPORATE PLUG: For more information about how Raritan helps solve this problem, I encourage you to see: http://www.raritan.com/resources/screenshots/power-iq/
Green data Data Center is the only way going forward.To improve efficiency and PUE count we are leveraging technology and resources to cut down on emissions and utilizing power in a better way to reduce losses.This project speaks about the latest trends in Green IT and also how can banks use the technologies to upgrade their legacy systems
Energy Efficient Data Center
source : http://hightech.lbl.gov/presentations/6-23-05_PGE_Workshop.ppt&ei=BVxPVIy_Bse68gWwy4HAAw&usg=AFQjCNGHU_rSwcF4BMo2A6KnFfSZglP2UA&sig2=wZlTGXORD_HOUDJi-a2uAA&bvm=bv.77880786,d.dGc
Energy efficient VM placement - OpenStack Summit Vancouver May 2015Kurt Garloff
Some measurements of cloud energy consumption in our FusionSphere5 OpenStack cloud. And some thoughts on improving it by intelligent scheduling.
(Radu Tudoran, Kurt Garloff, Uli Kleber -- Huawei)
This is my presentation, explaining the energy and carbon efficient algorithm presented in the conference paper published by the CLOUDS research lab, who developed the cloud simulator - CloudSim.
This presentation brings insights on cloud and green cloud computing and briefs the readers with its potential in india and how it can be achieved. Numerous insights have been collectively put in into this presentation.
Cloud computing & energy efficiency using cloud to decrease the energy use in...Puru Agrawal
Cloud can be used to decrease the energy use in large companies. This presentation deals with a model which explains as how cloud can be used to decrease the energy uses. This is a field related to green computing and minimum use of energy resources.
Energy efficient VM placement - OpenStack Summit Vancouver May 2015Kurt Garloff
Some measurements of cloud energy consumption in our FusionSphere5 OpenStack cloud. And some thoughts on improving it by intelligent scheduling.
(Radu Tudoran, Kurt Garloff, Uli Kleber -- Huawei)
This is my presentation, explaining the energy and carbon efficient algorithm presented in the conference paper published by the CLOUDS research lab, who developed the cloud simulator - CloudSim.
This presentation brings insights on cloud and green cloud computing and briefs the readers with its potential in india and how it can be achieved. Numerous insights have been collectively put in into this presentation.
Cloud computing & energy efficiency using cloud to decrease the energy use in...Puru Agrawal
Cloud can be used to decrease the energy use in large companies. This presentation deals with a model which explains as how cloud can be used to decrease the energy uses. This is a field related to green computing and minimum use of energy resources.
Timonen, Päivi & Fedofott, Jaana (toim.) 2003. Näkökulmia nuorisotiedotus- ja neuvontatyöhön, Helsingin kaupungin nuorisoasiainkeskus, Nuorisotiedotuskeskus Kompassi ja Oulun kaupungin nuorisoasiainkeskus, nuorten tiedotus- ja neuvontakeskus Nappi.
Online Social Networks as a Catalyst for Software and IT InnovationLeif Singer
People have many creative ideas, but only a few of these ideas are realized and lead to innovation. Good ideas often fail because they are not shared between innovators and stakeholders, hence are unlikely to be realized. Consequently, many opportunities are missed to excite customers and to gain a competitive advantage. This paper proposes an innovation process that uses online social networks to lower the hurdle to sharing ideas. The process leverages diffusion effects of social networks while supporting the generation, evaluation, consolidation, and implementation of innovative ideas with lightweight activities. The process is illustrated and discussed using an application example. Although we are focusing on innovation regarding software-intensive systems, we foresee that the discussed process has the potential to be applied to other domains as well.
Koordinaatit nuorten tieto- ja neuvontatyöhön julkaisu, julkaisija Julkaisun tiedot:
Koordinaatit nuorten tieto- ja neuvontatyöhön – Suuntaviivoja ammatilliseen osaamiseen
ISBN 978-952-5465-99-0 (nid.)
ISBN 978-952-7094-00-6 (pdf)
Julkaisija: Koordinaatti – Nuorten tieto- ja neuvontatyön kehittämiskeskus, Oulun kaupunki
Julkaisuvuosi: 2016
Toimitus: Jaana Fedotoff, Heidi Leppäkari & Päivi Timonen
Kustantaja ja kustannuspaikka: Koordinaatti – Nuorten tieto- ja neuvontatyön kehittämiskeskus, Oulu
Hannes Sildnik, Tallinnan yliopisto
- Youth Information from Social Inclusion point of view
- Youth information and Counselling work in Estonia
Luento: Humak, Nurmijärven kampus 16.9.13, kesto 48 min.
Bringing Enterprise IT into the 21st Century: A Management and Sustainabilit...Jonathan Koomey
I gave this talk as a webinar on March 19th, 2014 for the Corporate Eco Forum. It discusses ways to improve the efficiency of enterprise IT, mainly focusing on institutional changes that are necessary to make modern IT organizations perform effectively. It draws upon our case study of eBay as well as my other work on data centers over the years.
ScottMadden has developed an approach for analyzing data center requirements and driving improvements in existing data center retrofits. Our approach takes into account the technological requirements, the physical attributes of a data center, and the requirements for a rigorous measurement and verification program needed to ensure improvements actually capture the energy efficiently gains and the resultant greenhouse gas reductions.
Our approach addresses the latest trends in data center management such as virtualization and cloud computing and provide a framework for developing metrics needed to drive changes in data center performance.
On June 24th I presented to the Dependable Systems Engineering group here in the School of Computer Science, St Andrews. The group meets once a month for a presentation from one of its members over lunch. The presenter talks about their current research, providing a good opportunity to keep up to date with other work within the group.On June 24th I presented to the Dependable Systems Engineering group here in the School of Computer Science, St Andrews. The group meets once a month for a presentation from one of its members over lunch. The presenter talks about their current research, providing a good opportunity to keep up to date with other work within the group.
Xergy Consulting surveys the programs, standards, and metrics used to evaluate the environmental performance of data centers. What are we missing? What information do we lack to fully evaluate the greenness of clouds?
Sklubi AlumniWeekend 23.10.2010:
Reijo Maihaniemi
Electricity Consumption: General
Electricity Savings Through DC Power Feed
DC Data Center Projects in the World
ICT Energy saving actions
A Journey to Power Intelligent IT - Big Data EmployedMohamed Sohail
Sustainability has become a hot topic as a result of significant concerns about the unintended social, environmental, and economic consequences of rapid population growth, economic growth, and consumption of our natural resources. For the IT industry in particular, a highly important consideration that affects the decisions of IT managers is data center power consumption and carbon emission.
Connector Corner: Automate dynamic content and events by pushing a buttonDianaGray10
Here is something new! In our next Connector Corner webinar, we will demonstrate how you can use a single workflow to:
Create a campaign using Mailchimp with merge tags/fields
Send an interactive Slack channel message (using buttons)
Have the message received by managers and peers along with a test email for review
But there’s more:
In a second workflow supporting the same use case, you’ll see:
Your campaign sent to target colleagues for approval
If the “Approve” button is clicked, a Jira/Zendesk ticket is created for the marketing design team
But—if the “Reject” button is pushed, colleagues will be alerted via Slack message
Join us to learn more about this new, human-in-the-loop capability, brought to you by Integration Service connectors.
And...
Speakers:
Akshay Agnihotri, Product Manager
Charlie Greenberg, Host
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 3DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Builder.ai Founder Sachin Dev Duggal's Strategic Approach to Create an Innova...Ramesh Iyer
In today's fast-changing business world, Companies that adapt and embrace new ideas often need help to keep up with the competition. However, fostering a culture of innovation takes much work. It takes vision, leadership and willingness to take risks in the right proportion. Sachin Dev Duggal, co-founder of Builder.ai, has perfected the art of this balance, creating a company culture where creativity and growth are nurtured at each stage.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical FuturesBhaskar Mitra
The field of Information retrieval (IR) is currently undergoing a transformative shift, at least partly due to the emerging applications of generative AI to information access. In this talk, we will deliberate on the sociotechnical implications of generative AI for information access. We will argue that there is both a critical necessity and an exciting opportunity for the IR community to re-center our research agendas on societal needs while dismantling the artificial separation between the work on fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in IR and the rest of IR research. Instead of adopting a reactionary strategy of trying to mitigate potential social harms from emerging technologies, the community should aim to proactively set the research agenda for the kinds of systems we should build inspired by diverse explicitly stated sociotechnical imaginaries. The sociotechnical imaginaries that underpin the design and development of information access technologies needs to be explicitly articulated, and we need to develop theories of change in context of these diverse perspectives. Our guiding future imaginaries must be informed by other academic fields, such as democratic theory and critical theory, and should be co-developed with social science scholars, legal scholars, civil rights and social justice activists, and artists, among others.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
"Impact of front-end architecture on development cost", Viktor TurskyiFwdays
I have heard many times that architecture is not important for the front-end. Also, many times I have seen how developers implement features on the front-end just following the standard rules for a framework and think that this is enough to successfully launch the project, and then the project fails. How to prevent this and what approach to choose? I have launched dozens of complex projects and during the talk we will analyze which approaches have worked for me and which have not.
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...Jeffrey Haguewood
Sidekick Solutions uses Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apricot) and automation solutions to integrate data for business workflows.
We believe integration and automation are essential to user experience and the promise of efficient work through technology. Automation is the critical ingredient to realizing that full vision. We develop integration products and services for Bonterra Case Management software to support the deployment of automations for a variety of use cases.
This video focuses on the notifications, alerts, and approval requests using Slack for Bonterra Impact Management. The solutions covered in this webinar can also be deployed for Microsoft Teams.
Interested in deploying notification automations for Bonterra Impact Management? Contact us at sales@sidekicksolutionsllc.com to discuss next steps.
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...
E source energy managers conf 4 24-13-final
1. www.esource.com
Who needs skeletons? We’ve
got servers in the closets
Mark Monroe, Chief Technology Officer and VP at DLB Associates
Kendra Tupper P.E., Principal at Rocky Mountain Institute
Josh Whitney, Senior Project Director, WSP Environment + Energy
Energy Manager‟s Roundtable
18. Types of Data Centers
Space type
Typical
size (sf)
Typical IT device
characteristics
Notes/ Examples
Server closet <200
1-2 servers
No external storage
Managed in-house in small-
medium organizations
Server room <500
Few dozens of servers
No External Storage
Managed in-house in small-
medium organizations
Localized data
center
<1,000
Dozens to hundreds of servers
Moderate external storage
Typical of large organizations or
a university, often managed in-
house
Mid-tier data
center
<5,000
Hundreds of servers
Extensive external storage
Smaller colocation facilities and
private cloud data centers
Enterprise-class
data center
5,000+
Hundreds to thousands of
servers
Extensive external storage
Largest colocation facilities and
public cloud data centers
20. Server rooms/closets represent a huge
opportunity for savings in commercial building
23% of annual energy costs
(typical office
bldg, including plug
loads)
40-50%
of annual energy costs
(high performance office
bldg, including plug loads)
21. Predicted Post Retrofit Performance
• 28-38 kBtu/ft2-yr
• 60-70% reduction from 2009 use
• LED Ltg
• Chilled beams
• Super-insulated
envelope
• High perf. glazing
• Heat recovery &
thermal storage
• DOAS
• Solar thermal
• EnergyStar office
equipment
Byron Rogers Federal Office Building
(Denver, CO)
22. Byron Rogers Federal Office Building
(Denver, CO)
Cooling
(includes
pumps &
fans)
27%
Space Heat
7%
DHW
1%
Plug Loads
16%
Server
Rooms
20%
Lighting
29%
Breakdown of
annual energy
costs
25. Source: Masanet et al. 2011, Koomey 2011
National average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) = 1.91
Comparison of PUE
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3
Server Closets
Server Rooms
Localized
Mid-tier
Enterprise-class
Public Cloud (hyperscale)
PUE
Some images and actions are easily related to waste and environmental harm. CLICK. Driving a hummer….CLICK. Office building lights left on all night.
But what about archiving an email you really don’t need? Storing 10 gigs of music on the company’s server? It’s all just going to “the cloud” – and what could be more harmless than fluffy white clouds?
But “the cloud”…that magical, mythical computer in the sky is really just a bunch of third party owned, shared remote servers in large, centralized data center. And these servers, which process the data needed to run our televisions, cell phones, computers and mobile devices, consume about 75 billion kWh of electricity annually in the U.S.
That’s equivalent to the output of 26 medium-sized coal-fired power plants. Which is a whole different kind of “cloud”.And demand for compute is steadily rising. This industry has sustained 60-90% annual growth rates and as of this month, there were over 2.5 billion internet users.
The most common of these is Power Usage Effectiveness or PUE. Simply stated, this is the ratio of total energy consumption to the energy used by IT equipment alone.The ideal value is 1.0, with all power going to IT equip.Developed by Green Grid
Another common metric is Carbon Usage Effectiveness, or CUE, which is the ratio of the total CO2 emissions to the IT equipment energy.The ideal value would be 0.0 – no carbon use associated with data center operationsDeveloped by Green Grid
Next, a less common metric is Rack Unit Effectiveness, or RUE.Typical servers in the U.S. only use 5 to 15 percent of their maximum capability on average, while consuming 60 to 90 percent of their peak power.Utilization can be CPU/network/storage….gets very complex and hard to measure.http://blogs.gartner.com/david_cappuccio/2012/11/09/rack-unit-effectivenessa-useable-data-center-metric/
Developed by Green Grid
Both Microsoft and Saleforces have released metrics showing that their cloud facilities have a much lower carbon footprint than on-premise servers. Microsoft expressed this in terms of CO2 per user, which Salesforce measured their performance in terms of carbon per transaction. They recently showed that while their number of transactions grew by 63% in 2012, the carbon per transaction decreased by 20%.In leading these studies with both clients, what was most interesting was that in both cases, the client’s own understanding of their IT systems, specifically how their physical infrastructure impact translated to software usage and correspondingly how to measure performance, was poorly understood. Meaning, for even the largest of IT services firms, the have to start somewhere. By mapping the efficiency of their own cloud services, both companies have been able to measure performance increases in one area, say cooling, and see how that translates to overall efficiency and carbon impact. Also, the work here enabled both companies to connect many of the disparate dots within their own organization around provisioning IT services, managing IT services and selling those services to customers.
Similarly, ebay recently launched a digital service efficiency dashboard that reports the number of transactions per kWh used in their data centers. It also reports more common metrics such as PUE, WUE, and CUE….and some more unique ones: Carbon per million users, and revenue per server.Building upon the momentum from companies like MSFT, Salesforce and Google, that latter of which as some great data on the efficiency of their Google Apps, eBay has really elevated the game, lifting the hood on their data center portfolio. What’s most powerful about these metrics are that they connect the C-suite together, enabling a unique story to be told to the CEO, COO, CIO and where they exist, the CSO. We think their transparency here is a watershed moment for the large public cloud providers and enterprise users.
Revisit at the end…
So which is more efficient?
So which is more efficient?Transactions per IT kWh seeks to quantify the efficiency of the IT hardware in delivering a software service or useful workload, based upon the amount of energy it takes power the application. The more units of useful work per kWh hour, the better. This remains the most challenging metric to define or a business but enables a discussion between software developers and IT managers that likely hasn’t existed before. Where software development has in the past rarely had a connection to hardware efficiency, and consequently the cost of operating the equipment. This in particular is a major focus at SFDC, where through a rigorours focus on efficient coding results in an efficient software architecture and a drastic reduction in the number of servers required. This this influences cooling, and therefore PUE directly.
Data centers are responsible for about 2% of the entire U.S. electricity demand. Only half of that energy actually goes to powering IT equipment, such as servers, and network and storage devices. While the larger data centers are well aware of energy/sustainability issues and many players are working in this market segment, 28% of the energy consumption for U.S. data centers come from small, disaggregated server rooms and closets, which are often overlooked.Full citation: Masanet, E.R., Brown, R.E., Shehabi, A., Koomey, J.G., and Nordman, B., Estimating the Energy Use and Efficiency Potential of U.S. Data Centers, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 99, No. 8, August 2011
Commercial building energy retrofit efforts typically target HVAC systems, building envelope and lighting since they potentially have the largest energy saving opportunities. However, plug loads and server rooms make up a significant part of the energy end use. The most recent California Commercial End Use Survey shows that plug loads in office buildings account for about 23% of annual energy costs, and this fraction is much higher for energy efficiency buildingsFor the Byron Rogers federal office building in downtown Denver, plugs loads and server rooms are projected to account for over 38% of the total energy use in the building. As the design team has drastically improved the building envelope, and completely redesigned the lighting and mechanical systems, the plug loads remain the one area in which energy savings have yet to be realized.
Byron Rogers is on track to become one of the most energy efficient office buildings in the U.S., targeting a 70% energy use reduction. Key energy saving features include the use of LED lighting throughout the building, active chilled beams, an insulated building envelope, high performance glazing, heat recovery, and solar thermal. The full energy reduction potential will not be realized for several years, until tenant education has resulted in plug load and behavior savings.
For the Byron Rogers federal office building in downtown Denver, server rooms are projected to account for 20% of the total energy use in the building. As the design team has drastically improved the building envelope, and completely redesigned the lighting and mechanical systems, the server rooms remain the one area in which energy savings have yet to be realized.
Just how much more inefficient are these smaller server rooms and closets? Actually, most data center types are relatively consistent with the national average of just below 2.0. The big outlier of course are the internet hyperscale clouds – the googles, mircosofts, amazons and facebooks. And while the data is much murkier on utilization, that is where the smaller server rooms and closets are clearly lagging.Full citation: Masanet, E.R., Brown, R.E., Shehabi, A., Koomey, J.G., and Nordman, B., Estimating the Energy Use and Efficiency Potential of U.S. Data Centers, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 99, No. 8, August 2011Koomey, J.G., Growth in Data Center Electricity Use 2005 to 2010, Report by Analytics Press, completed at the request of The New York Times, August 1, 2011
Google average: 32%Typical Enterprise: 6%(Measured on a 7x24 basis)
Google average: 32%Typical Enterprise: 6%(Measured on a 7x24 basis)
But assuming we could overcome these challenges, what is the real opportunity here?There’s been a lot of buzz on cooling – easy to address and blame and its called out with PUE. But the IT architecture is more complex, gets at how software developers write codeServer Reduction: virtualization, consolidation and legacy server removalOnly 37% of the server stock for large organizations has been virtualized, or moved to the cloud. For small organizations, that figure is only 26%. Most of the barriers to this switch is due to lack of information and misaligned incentives.Full citation: Masanet, E.R., Brown, R.E., Shehabi, A., Koomey, J.G., and Nordman, B., Estimating the Energy Use and Efficiency Potential of U.S. Data Centers, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 99, No. 8, August 2011U.S. EPA, ENERGY STAR Program, Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency, Public Law 109-431, August 2, 2007
But assuming we could overcome these challenges, what is the real opportunity here?There’s been a lot of buzz on cooling – easy to address and blame and its called out with PUE. But the IT architecture is more complex, gets at how software developers write codeServer Reduction: virtualization, consolidation and legacy server removalReduced IT demand: infrastructure savings from the reduce demand from the IT equip savingsNow, Josh and mark to talk about best practices to realize this efficiency potential.Only 37% of the server stock for large organizations has been virtualized, or moved to the cloud. For small organizations, that figure is only 26%. Most of the barriers to this switch is due to lack of information and misaligned incentives.Full citation: Masanet, E.R., Brown, R.E., Shehabi, A., Koomey, J.G., and Nordman, B., Estimating the Energy Use and Efficiency Potential of U.S. Data Centers, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 99, No. 8, August 2011U.S. EPA, ENERGY STAR Program, Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency, Public Law 109-431, August 2, 2007
Taking a closer look the intersection of the cloud and its energy and carbon footprint, we’ve identified 3 goals that IT organizations are trying to achieve with regards to reducing its carbon footprint:Reduce application resourcesImprove IT utilizationImprove Infrastructure efficiency. Each of these has a resultant driver when realized cloud environment. Dynamic Provisioning reduces over allocation of resources, and helps to size infrastructure to actual demand. Multitenancy allows for the sharing of hardware resources across multiple organizations at the same time. This dramatically flattens peak loads and reduces over head as the platform grows. With dynamic provisioning and multi tenancy applied, we see servers that operate at higher utilizations rates, and therefore need fewer servers to support the same load. Regarding infrastructure efficiency, the two key drivers are the data center’s power usage effectiveness ratio, the total facility power over the IT equipment power; and the carbon emissions factor of the power going to the data center itself.
However, we have found that there are many cases where a move to the cloud will not always results in a lower carbon footprint. Partnering with the NRDC, we completed a study designed to define the primary types of data centers that small & medium sized business run, and compare them with common cloud types, as Kendra explained earlier. What we found was that the use of server virtualization and the location of the data center were the two biggest drivers of carbon efficiency. In the case of the former, in a best case scenario, a small on premise server room, when virtualized can actually operate nearly as efficiently as the best in class enterprise data centers – though most rarely do. On the other hand in a worst case scenario, a poorly run public cloud with a data center in a region with coal based power, may have a similar carbon footprint to an on-premise standard deployed server room in a lower carbon region like California.
Cloud data centers using energy-efficiency best practices and powered by renewable energy or efficient natural gas power plants can have dramatically lower carbon footprints, by as much as 97%, than typical server rooms in small- and medium-sized organizations.But “brown” clouds that do not optimize energy efficiency and use electricity from coal-fired power plants, can have a larger energy and carbon footprint, by up to a factor of two, than on-premise server rooms using effective methods to improve energy efficiency and sustainability.
For those in the room managing multiple server rooms or data centers in a variety of locations, a portfolio planning approach to managing your data center strategy can help fine tune the decisions you make with regards to identifying ways to reduce your IT carbon footprint. Pictured here is a projection of a clients data center portfolio carbon footprint from 2011 through 2017 in terms of projected MW load by location. In this case the client was evaluating potential sites as well as a build to own strategy versus continuing to lease colocation data center space. In the lowest row, in green, you can see that their existing data center in CA will be slowly decommissioned as other come on line – indicated in the lines on top in Australia, Canada and the UK. Also you can see that their Chicago DC grows significantly. This then translates to a vastly different carbon footprint in 2017 from 2011 – an important consideration.
Another way to look at your portfolio could be through this visual developed by a Jonathan Koomey and colleague at the University of Chicago, Eric Masanet. Here you could place your server room or data center locations on this map to compare and contrast their total carbon footprint based on power supply, energy use and PUE. Again this provides an interesting visual to evaluate existing and potentially future IT expansion.
Finally, another approach that may integrate the prior two visuals would be to develop a scorecard to evaluate on a more holistic basis the best location for a data center. This scorecard plots a range of indicators and applies a relative weighting for each, to compare across 4 different sites. In this case, sustainability criteria such as the carbon intensity of the power supply and the PUE of the colocation space are given an ample, to be honest, 25% weighting. Through this apples to apples comparison, we see that in this case, Oregon was the best, overall, site for the client to build their data center.