HPCwire: Ethernet's Role in Greening the Datacenter

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March 21, 2008

Ethernet's Role in Greening the Datacenter

by Dan Maltbie, Founder and Chief Product Officer at Woven Systems

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According to a recent report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), datacenters across the country consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2006 at a cost of $4.5 billion -- twice as much as in 2000. That's more power than is required to operate the nation's 250 million television sets. The EPA predicts that by 2012, U.S. datacenters will consume 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity at a cost of $7.4 billion.

IT managers have long known they pay "twice" for electricity in a datacenter: first to power up the many racks crammed full of IT equipment, and then to cool off all those power-hungry, heat-generating systems. Power is getting expensive, too -- up to half the cost of ongoing operations, according to some reports. And being wasteful is no longer politically correct given the tons of carbon dioxide being dumped into a warming atmosphere.

Some organizations face an even more pressing problem: they simply do not have the power or cooling capacity to grow. Gartner estimates that up to half of all datacenters will encounter this problem in this year. And datacenters are scaling ever larger to meet the growing demand for new services and to satisfy the need for more online storage, particularly given the increasing use of video content. Consolidation to fewer and larger datacenters is also driving growth as operators seek greater economies of scale. Many of these new "mega" datacenters are being located, quite consciously and prudently, near sources of readily-available and low-cost power.

The IT equipment in a typical datacenter consumes about half of the total power needed, with the balance going to transforming and distributing electricity, backup power sources, air conditioning, lighting and other requirements. Of the IT equipment, servers and storage are the major consumers of power at 40 percent and 37 percent, respectively, according to Gartner. The remaining 20 percent or so can be attributed to networking, and more efficient networking helps reduce total power demand both directly and indirectly. Direct network power consumption can be reduced substantially from current levels; the power required to network a single server, for example, can be cut from more than 50 Watts in some cases to less than 10 Watts, resulting in considerable savings for a datacenter with tens of thousands of servers. Indirect reductions in power consumption result from unifying the datacenter network to facilitate more efficient server virtualization and storage consolidation.

Mixed Motives

For some, the motivation for greening-up the datacenter is a noble effort to mitigate the effects of global climate change by reducing the facility's carbon footprint. For others, the motivation has a different green incentive: capital and operational expenditures for the power and cooling that currently represent nearly half of a datacenter's total cost of ownership, according to the Uptime Institute. Over a two year period, in fact, the total cost to power and cool servers can exceed the original cost to purchase those servers.

Reducing power consumption in datacenters is all about efficiency. And the best way to improve efficiency is to eliminate waste. For example, a dedicated server with direct attached storage (DAS) has a utilization of only 10-40 percent. Virtualized servers and consolidated storage can increase utilization rates to 80 percent or more.

Virtualization and consolidation, however, create new challenges satisfying the datacenter's networking needs. At a minimum a modern, virtualized datacenter requires both a local area network and a storage area network (SAN). Many datacenters also require high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. Operating two or three networks -- typically Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand -- is inefficient.

Perhaps the most inefficient way to accommodate these separate networking needs is the all-in-one "Swiss Army Knife" switch. These large, expensive and power-hungry general-purpose Layer 2/Layer 3 switch/router behemoths need to be full-featured to be able to support a full spectrum of applications, including many not applicable to the datacenter. The net effect of engineering for maximum application flexibility is power consumption growing to a factor of five or more over solutions engineered specifically -- and exclusively -- for the needs of the datacenter.

Unification via Ethernet Fabrics

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