Beating The Heat

Imagine millions of networked nanosensors embedded in data centers and office buildings, an Internet made corporeal to maximize energy efficiency while minimizing the environmental impact of a high-tech society. That may be the future of green IT (more on that later) but the reality over the next few years will be a bit more prosaic.

It’s the stuff your parents nagged you about – turn off the lights, turn down the air conditioning.

“At the end of the day the bulk of the cost of a data center is not the hardware on the front end, it’s rapidly becoming the energy to run the data center and cool it,” says Michael Murphy, Dell’s senior manager of worldwide environmental affairs.

That means companies are getting over their edifice complexes. With the average data center consuming five megawatts of electricity annually, power prices spiking and the credit crisis crunching balance sheets, IT managers are turning to new technologies to retrofit existing data centers rather than build more energy-hogging server farms.  

Intel and Dell are targeting power consumption. A server powered by Intel’s forthcoming Xeon 5500 multi-processor chip can do the work of nine machines, says Lorie Wigle, general manager of Intel’s Eco-Technology office. “You see a dramatic improvement in efficiency,” she says. “There are 11 million single core servers in data centers and so there’s a big opportunity for energy efficient servers.”

Dell pushes energy-efficient power supplies and servers that employ virtualization – software that lets one server to do the work of multiple machines

But the future of the data center is unfolding in Bangalore, India, where Hewlett-Packard has installed 7,500 sensors in a five-floor, 75,000-square-foot facility. The sensors, attached to server racks and shelves, taking readings every 10 seconds, according to Chandrakant Patel, director of HP Labs’ Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab.

That lets IT managers target cooling toward hot spots rather than just blast the entire data center with arctic air 24/7. As a result HP has slashed air conditioning costs by 40 percent. “I was in Bangalore last week and it was warmer in that data center than in the hallways of the building,” says Patel. “The fact that you have all these sensors collecting all this data means you can mine that data to find out what goes wrong or what could go wrong.”

For instance, he says, data from the sensor network recently indicated that an air compressor wasn’t operating properly. “I can show the data to an expert in the U.S. who can resolve the problem without traveling to India,” says Patel.

Over at HP Lab’s Information and Quantum Sciences Lab, senior scientist Peter Hartwell is a member of a team developing nanoscale sensors as part of the CeNSE – Central Nervous System for the Earth – project. The ultimate goal – still years away - is to deploy thumbtack-sized nanosensors in the trillions to collect data about the natural and man-made worlds.

“We have the ability to do an incredible amount of calculations, to collect data and to maintain data,” Hartwell says. “But all that compute power is, for all practical purposes, blind, deaf and dumb to the environment. We’re creating elements that can sense different things out in the world - measure pressure, vibrations, light intensity, chemical and biological signals – all pushed to the nanoscale level.”

At Intel, researchers are building a sensor technology they call the Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform, or WISP, by combining a RFID tag with a 16-bit microcontroller.  “You have this small device, wirelessly powered that can capture information and can communicate all kinds of information among themselves and to central storage,” says Intel technology evangelist Brian McCarthy.  

One WISP network might collect temperature data while another would monitor air quality. The networks would be powered by ambient heat, vibrations from the environment or energy from television broadcast signals. WISP networks could be embedded in data centers, roads, bridges and other structures to collect physical data.

Thousands of corporate desktop computers constitute another sort of power-draining data center and greening that IT means making PCs more energy efficient while managing their electricity consumption. Dell itself saved $1.8 million last year, according to Murphy, simply by using a power management software that turned the company’s PCs off at night.

Upgrading to more miserly computers is akin to taking a carbon-spewing old junker off the road. Intel’s Wigle says a current Intel-powered PC uses half the electricity of a three-year-old computer, saving about $83 a year in energy costs per machine.  Dell has set a target of improving the efficiency of its desktop and laptops by 25 percent by 2010.

Dell has also been greening up its PCs – it expects to use 12 million recycled plastic bottles this year in some models this year. Replacing mercury-laden displays in laptops with LED display took a toxic material out of circulation and resulted in a lighter, more energy-efficient computer with a longer battery life.

The ultimate in green IT may the solar or wind-powered data center for emissions-free computing. Google and Microsoft have located data centers near hydro power in the Pacific Northwest – and the search giant has filed a patent for a wave-powered floating server farm. Sun Microsystems last year unveiled a modular solar-powered data center and Intel is exploring the potential for sun-generated computing. As gigantic wind farms sprout from the Texas plains and massive solar power plant move into the Mojave Desert, look for data centers to follow.