The Greening of Government: Getting To Net-Zero
Summer 2010 • Volume 2 • Number 3

For Chuck Powers the much anticipated Data Center moving day is almost here. Powers is the manager of NREL’s IT Infrastructure and Operations Group. In June, the moving begins; by August, the migration will be complete.

The migration began three years ago, when it looked like the RSF was really going to happen. Powers began putting in place a strategy “to skinny our IT infrastructure requirements so we could operate in that environment.”

“What a lot of folks don’t know,” Powers told On The FrontLines in a recent interview, “is that Data Centers are the most energy intensive facility in the building.”

Many of the more than 1,000 government Data Centers are facing a crisis. They are out of power, out of space and out of cooling capabilities. Powers made sure the RSF would not face those issues.

10 Cent PUE

Powers’ goal was to make the Data Center super efficient. The first step was to reduce the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) metric.

The industry average PUE is around 3:1. That means only 1/3 of power to the Data Center goes to power equipment; the other 2/3 goes to power the supporting cooling and power distribution systems.

“So, what we are in the process of doing and what we have done to the design of the RSF is we have significantly optimized our cooling and power distribution capabilities so we will get a metric of 1.1: 1. It won’t use 2 times, but now 1/10 the power,” explained Powers.

In other words, with an industry average PUE of 3:1, for every $1 spent on powering the equipment, an additional $2 is spent for the cooling, heating and power. At the RSF, instead of spending $2, spending will be reduced to 10 cents.

Virtually Free Cooling and Heating

When designing the Data Center, Powers said they implemented every best practice they could, including using its favorable climate conditions that allow use of evaporative cooling (free cooling) rather than traditional AC.

“This will be for 99.5 percent of the entire year, which takes a huge, huge bite out of power budget for cooling, explained Powers. “We are using air and water economizers to take cool air from the outside rather than using traditional AC systems.”

The result is the AC is needed for about 33.5 hours—that’s right 33.5 hours—out of the entire year.

The new center is also organized with hot aisles and cold aisles.

We don’t want the hot air that’s generated from the equipment to mix with the cool air which makes it less cool,” Powers explained.

“So with hot aisle containment there is a roof over the hot aisles with doors. We are extracting the hot air from the hot aisle to supplement the heating. We are recovering the heat and putting it to use for productive purposes. All of a sudden our Data Center is also a heater for the building.”

“Getting Skinny” Using Virtualization

The 222,000 square foot RSF will be home to 825 office and administrative staffers. According to Powers it exceeded the LEED Platinum by so much “it should have its own designation.”

It shows this type of super-efficient building and the potential of net-zero is really available today with today’s material if very sophisticated design techniques are applied. All the power required for the building including the Data Center is produced by solar cells, meaning just getting to a great PUE wasn’t good enough said Powers.

“We had to work the equipment side of equation to further reduce our footprint. We are heavily leveraging virtualization so that our server footprint can be reduced by 90 percent because in the end we want to account for every watt.”

With hardware, one of the first things Powers did was go from traditional one use servers to blade servers. Right off the bat— even with higher and heat density of blades—he saved 30%.

And once the deployment of thin clients is complete, the hardware lifecycle will get longer. “Now instead of 2 years, we want to see a 5-6 year life cycle out of end user computing devices and 4-4 1/2 years out of servers versus 3 years,” Powers added.

Reducing Desktop Footprint

Further he is trying to leverage virtualization capabilities for storage, networking and especially the desktop to manage their footprint.

“We are taking a really hard look at large deployment of thin client technology that means instead of having 300 watts on each desktop, we have got less 10 watts with the Data Center running the process,” explained Powers. “All the user will have is a low energy monitor and a low energy thin client device, so we will significantly reduce the footprint there.”

While thin client deployment is being readied, the laboratory will initially deploy energy efficient laptops which use between 35-40 watts. Compared to desktops this still represents a huge savings said Powers.

Like other facilities, the NREL has logistical challenges getting people on and off the site. That has resulted in a very aggressive telecommuting program Powers said. “If you have a laptop it makes it easier to support the program because you want to control assets that connect to your internal network.”

Virtualizing the desktop also gives Powers more control over the image and the data meaning costs go down and security goes up while reducing your desktop footprint.

“We should be able to reduce requirements for every desktop administrator; and they should be able to administer twice as many devices.”

Another really important strategy for Powers is sourcing. He is one of a growing number of government IT pros who say they will no longer build up infrastructure to meet an infrequent large peak load requirement.

“We want to build to leverage cloud computing capabilities for things that make sense and take advantage of Google’s or Amazon’s environmental economies of scale, so that if we have a project that has a large peak load requirement for two weeks we don’t end up with infrastructure for three years.”

Future Story

In fact the story Powers would like to tell in a year or two is that the new Data Center has a super PUE and what was done to accomplish that. But that’s only part of the story.

“I want to make sure every resource in the Data Center is fully utilized. I don’t want to see servers running at 5% utilization. I want 60-70% because we cannot from a power perspective afford to over provision infrastructure.”

Powers is looking forward to having tools in place “so we can demonstrate how effective we have been with utilization and make sure I can demonstrate I haven’t over provisioned this space.”

The next couple of years will also be a period for determining whether the right processes are in place and that architectures have been designed to scale quickly and nearly on-demand. Conversely, when resource utilization is down, there is a need to optimize use of power across the center by consolidating workload, powering down or putting equipment in stand-by mode.

“The challenge today is we need a clearer understanding of what capabilities we’ve got; we’ve got to integrate those and figure out what the gaps are. We are not quite there yet.”

In the meantime, across government people are looking at the NREL Data Center as a model and for lessons learned on how to build a Green corporate Data Center that provides basic services and networking capabilities. 
 

Learn more at: http://www.nrel.gov/sustainable_nrel/rsf.html.

 
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Green Chronicles

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The Lean Green Data Center Machine

Chuck Powers, IT Operations Director at NREL RSF shows how the new Data Center is consuming and providing energy as a part of the lab’s new net-zero sustainable green building. 

Green Proving Ground—Interview with GSA’s Kevin Kampschroer

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