Sentilla Blog

To raise awareness of the impact of IT energy consumption, Friday August 27 is "Power IT Down Day".  The idea is this -- turn off your laptops, desktops, monitors, printers, and anything you're not using for the weekend.

To do my own part, I have installed a TED monitoring device at my home in San Francisco (since PG&E has decided that Silver Spring's technology is not able to handle the density and elevation changes in San Francisco, as told by a PG&E representative in a recent SVLG meeting).  I used this data to decide what to turn off and its impact when I go out of town.  I found that I can unplug my printer, turn off my thermostat, and power down everything around the TV except for the DVR.  I even unplug the microwave and toaster.  The impact has been about a 50% lower energy use during periods that I'm not home.

The same idea holds for the office -- people tend to work 8ish hours per day (unless they're in a startup!) and not on weekends.  By powering down for the weekend, we can make a big impact.  Now the question is when will we start shutting down our servers when they're not in use?

In October, 2009, President Obama issued an Executive Order (EO 13514) that set federal energy efficiency standards.  EO 13514 superceeds the previous executive order put in place by President Bush (EO 13423) from 2007.  While the previous order required the government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3% per year, totaling at least a 30% reduction by 2015 from 2003 levels, Obama's order actually lets each department set their own goal.  EO 13514, in contrast to EO 13423, is much more specific about the improvements that have to be made in transportation fleets, building design, etc.  Just to be clear, this order only applies to federal government and their respective organizations, not the country at large.  You can think of it as a government-specific climate bill.

What's more important, is that EO 13514 has specific language about data centers.  Federal organizations must "implement best management practices for energy-efficient management of servers and Federal data centers."  The goal is to bring the Federal government in line with commercial best practices.  The government has thus set some very generic "Guiding Principals", and then it is up to each of the organizations to meet their stated GHG goals for Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3 emissions. Let's take a look at what some of the government organizations have done to comply with EO 13514.

There's been a lot of discussion recently about the difference between monitoring and management.  This week, I received an email with the title "Revolutionizing Energy Management".  Interesting, I wonder what management solution this company provides for energy.  The content of the email went on to talk about a brand new meter that provides real time power load information.  While I'm sure this company's meter is very innovative (names purposely omitted to protect the innocent), it was clear that this company did not understand what the word "management" even means.

I'd like to point out the difference between management and monitoring.  There are a LOT of tools for monitoring but much fewer for management.

Monitoring is the process of being aware of the state of a system.  It involves observing the current situation and typically necessitates a measuring device or meter.  Monitoring typically results in a large set of data, un-correlated and un-analyzed.  The data is not tied to your business objectives but is just data, it is that simple.  It is up to you, as the human, to figure out what all this data means.

Management, in contrast, is the act of getting a system to deliver a desired goal/objective.  It involves managing and allocating resources, organizing resources to execute a task, designing and re-designing systems, and optimizing a system to produce useful outcomes.  Monitoring is a key component to management; after all you need credible information to make decisions.

I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at this year's Data Centres Europe (DCE) conference, held in June in Sophia Antipolis, France by BroadGroup.  It was delayed due to the ash cloud mess back in April, when I had planned to originally attend but ended up stuck in London instead.  The event was well attended despite being rescheduled, although the weather in Côte d'Azur was a bit warmer than the organizers had anticipated.

At DCE, I was honored in two ways that I want to share with you.  The first is with an award!  The annual Data Centres Europe awards are given out in a number of categories to recognize innovative data centre design.  With a panel of judges consisting of end users and analysts, I was surprised and excited to hear them announce that I am the recipient of the European CTO Award for Innovation in Data Centres!  In the introduction of the award, the judges introduced me and Sentilla with these nice words:

I wrote earlier about IBM's high density Blue Gene/P data center that is a state of the art HPC system fitting tons of computing power into a small space.  It pushes the envelope in a number of ways, including how to keep it cool, and how to provide enough power at such high density.

This weekend, the New York Times Magazine profiled Watson, the system running on the Blue Gene/P cluster at the T.J. Watson Research Center in order to take on humans at Jeopardy!  The article is lengthy, but the video is equally entertaining.

IBM has their own website too that explains Watson.