Arne Josefsberg, general manager of infrastructure
services at Global Foundation Services, Microsoft, says it is vital
to monitor the average
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) across all the company's
datacentres to understand how well datacentre operations are under
control, and to allow the company to make the right business
decisions.
Microsoft's current annual global average PUE is 1.60, says
Josefsberg.
PUE is a standard measurement for the power efficiency of
datacentres, as recommended by
global consortium The
Green Grid.
But all is not as it seems, explains Alan Priestly, consortium
spokesperson. "The initial focus was on energy efficiency, meaning
facility-load versus the IT load. Power comes in at the wall but
only a certain percentage is delivered to the IT equipment. But how
much of the energy [going to the servers] is converted to useful
work? An IT department can have a datacentre that is very
energy-efficient but is not doing a lot of useful work is that
really efficient?
"The more complex thing is to measure the effective workload
that the datacentre produces," says Priestly.
The Green Grid is working on the concept, but for the moment PUE
is the best measurement IT companies have, and it is the easiest
thing to measure.
Carbon emissions
It does introduce a gap, however. As a whole, IT can increase
its efficiency, but that does not mean carbon emissions will
fall.
Microsoft recognises this mismatch between measurement and
reality, and is keen to reduce the impact of its datacentres for
the entire lifecycle and along the whole supply chain.
"We want to bring the concept of Moore's law to energy
efficiency in computing. We want to grow computing power but keep
energy demands constant or reduced," says Francois Ajenstat,
Microsoft's director of environmental sustainability.
Ajenstat says he is pushing the vision through all operations
including original equipment manufacturers and suppliers.
"That is how we will manage the global growth in the IT
industry," he says.
Currently the company has more or less completed what it calls
Generation 2 datacentres, with a focus on improved efficiency.
Its Dublin facility, for example, will use outside air all year
round except for one or two days, and the company is exploring
broader range operating environments in order to deploy
chiller-less datacentres for huge power savings.
"At any given time we can see the carbon footprint of one
datacentre compared to another. We can even go down and compare the
footprints of servers such as Hotmail compared to Messenger," says
Ajenstat.
Through such metrics the company can charge its internal
business groups by power consumption rather than floor or rack
space.
"Business groups are becoming aware of their energy consumption
and are making different decisions based on energy as a key
consideration," says Ajenstat.
Ajenstat's law
Microsoft is now building Generation 3 ( best represented by the
Chicago, Illinois facility) founded on Ajenstat's law of doubling
efficiency every 18-24 months.
"The key concepts for our Generation 3 design are increased
modularity and greater concentration around energy efficiency and
scale. This facility will seem very foreign compared to the
traditional datacentre," says
Microsoft's Michael
Manos on his Loose Bolts blog.
Key to efficiency savings is containerisation. Servers are
pre-packed in lorry-transported containers complete with everything
required to simply plug them into a modular datacentre. This offers
interesting sustainability benefits because suppliers compete to
provide the most efficient designs.
"Think of it like building blocks, where the datacentre will be
composed of modular units of prefabricated mechanical, electrical,
security components, etc, in addition to containerised servers,"
writes Manos.
And other useful concepts have emerged. Designs for the
next-generation, Gen 4, datacentres have no roof. According to
Manos, a roof was entirely unnecessary. "How much energy goes into
making concrete? How much energy goes into the fuel of the
construction vehicles? We are asking, 'how can we build a
datacentre with less building?'"
Microsoft is gathering pace on its software as a service
strategy, and through the application of Ajenstat's efficiency law
hopes IT carbon emissions will remain static at worst. The company
is helping replace inefficient customer datacentres with
state-of-the-art facilities.
"As we grow into the cloud computing space we will increase our
carbon footprint as a datacentre operator," says Ajenstat. "But it
becomes an increasing value proposition for our customers where
they can choose to use Microsoft's infrastructure, rather than
build their own."
The company does not yet have plans to charge customers by
energy consumption, however.