Sentilla Blog

A lot of green announcements have come down the wire this week, from IBM's "smart everything" to Cisco "EnergyWise" to Google's PowerMeter. With a number of emails questioning how the Google system works, I thought I'd explain it a bit.

First, a bit of background. Google.org is Google's philanthropic arm, focusing on innovations to make people's lives better. Energy reduction falls into this category; Google.org has invested in and supported numerous renewable energy initiatives and has funded Google's solar installation at their campus in Mountain View.

On the same day, two opposing articles have been published with completely opposite points of view.  On one side, Brian Fry argues that location no longer matters and we should build data centers in the most efficient locations and supply fiber connectivity to them.  On the other side, Paris Burstyn argues that location and latency are business critical for companies resulting in Equinix's acquisition of Switch and Data.

At the center of Brian's argument is that low cost, low carbon power is good for data centers.  If you can live with your data centers a few milliseconds away from everyone else's, then your IT operations can be greener and cheaper, a win-win scenario.  But in the world where every millisecond counts, that's not the right solution for all industries.

ECN asked technology leaders to brainstorm solutions that would make the most impact, specifically which green technology has the most commercial promise. I responded, along with 7 others, and our thoughts were published in the March issue. I've included my response below, and you can view the ECN March issue for the full set of responses.

New energy is really expensive. The most commercially viable option is to reduce your own energy use, which, as stated by the Obama Administration, is the cleanest fastest easiest, cheapest way to generate renewable energy. In order to reduce your energy consumption, you need to know precisely where and when you're using it.

This blog entry first appeared as a contributed news article at ZDNet.  The version posted here includes additional pictures and links to various related topics in line with the post, to provide greater context and justification for the claims made about Google's data centers.

I had the privilege of being one of the only -- and possibly the only -- startup person attending Google's Green Data Center Summit held at their Mountain View campus. While there were a wide variety of talks (which I'll cover with some analysis in a subsequent post), the gadget hacker in me loved how Google unveiled and described their servers.

Completely custom designed and built in Google-style, here's what they did:

• Instead of having a centralized UPS, Google integrated a battery into every server with a charge controller and test circuit. The battery is sealed lead-acid. Basically, it is a car battery. The goal is to keep the server running for "about a minute" until the generator turns on or the A/C power source is switched.
• The power supply ONLY provides 12VDC (notice the yellow 12V wires coming out of the power supply), and the power only goes to the motherboard. The motherboard then directly supplies power to the disks (at 5VDC) and no other voltage conversions occur (with the exception of 1.2-1.8V for the processor). As such, the AC feed of either 208VAC or 230VAC flow directly to the server with no UPS in the middle. The battery backup directly supplies 12VDC during power outages, so no more inverters.
• The power supply is about 92% efficient according to Google.
• The "distributed UPS" solution is estimated by Google to be "99.9%" efficient since there's no power distribution losses by operating directly at the DC voltage of the server.

Kevin O'Marah from AMR Research claims that Green IT receives a disproportionate amount of attention compared to other green initiatives.  His blog has stirred some discussion in the office and here I'm weighing in on the topic.  Understandably, Kevin's post was likely intended to stir up discussion, so I realize I'm playing into what the blog was likely designed to accomplish.  (Oh, and try googling "carbon accounting" if you want to catch the hype curve.)