Power & Cooling

• Server News – Getting Greener with 80 PLUS, Busting Benchmarks

  Wed. Jun. 25, 2008
  by David Graves, Editor—Inside IT

  Great news from the server team today:

  First, Albert Esser, our VP, Power and Infrastructure Solutions, posted on Direct2Dell that we are the first in the industry to achieve 80 PLUS Gold-certification for a server power supply. The cool part is that it meets July 2009 Climate Savers targets for servers more than a year ahead of schedule, which require 92 percent minimum efficiency for the power supply unit at 50 percent of rated output.

  Up next…Dell’s PowerEdge™ 2900 III server now tops all competitors with a new number one ranking for price/performance on the TPC-C benchmark.

  · The leading price-per-transaction (price/tpmC) TPC-C result achieved 97,083 transactions per minute with a price/performance of $.68/tpmC.¹

  · The PowerEdge 2900 III achieved the new TPC-C price/performance world record benchmark result with Oracle® Database 11g Standard Edition One running on Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003, and utilizing one Intel® Quad-Core Xeon® 2.83 GHz processor.

  · Dell’s two-socket tower or 5U PowerEdge 2900 III server provides customers with a versatile platform designed for handling the most demanding workloads and application requirements. The 2900 III can be used for a variety of purposes including database, messaging and virtualization.
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• Dell CIO – IT change, SaaS and cloud computing solutions

  Fri. Jun. 20, 2008
  by David Graves, Editor—Inside IT

  Very interesting video discussion between Steven Schuckenbrock, our CIO and President/SVP Global Services and CNET News.com’s Dan Farber.

  From a CIO perspective he talks about how we’re transforming our own IT practices and implementing “green.” As SVP Global Services he’s asked about ITaaS, SaaS, and cloud computing.
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• Green Shout Out from ZDNet

  Fri. Jun. 06, 2008
  by David Graves, Editor—Inside IT

  In case you missed it, ZDNet "GreenTech Pastures" writer Heather Clancy gave Dell some green props this week in her post, "Dell's Esser: Green Tech is Not Just About the Data Center."  

  No doubt energy efficiency is critically important in the data center - but there's a lot of other places we need to be looking too. (Gartner says 40% of carbon emissions come from client systems and monitors)

  Also of note - we're the first IT vendor to attain Silver status under the 80 PLUS power supply designation.

  Thanks, Heather, for the kudos and for your continued focus on the subject of Green IT.
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• No Retiring From Technology

  Fri. May. 23, 2008
  by David Graves, Editor—Inside IT

  Brett Ortega faced a challenge. He is the redevelopment and project manager, of American Baptist Homes of the West.

  ABHOW's mission is to enhance the independence, well-being and security of older people by providing housing, health care and supportive services.

  Brett discusses their increasing technology needs - all over wireless access, adding more servers without adding data center space are a few examples.  His team of 8 IT pros and 7 technicians did it. And saved a bunch of money and went green at the same time.

  Format: flv Duration: 4:12

  Downloads WMV  MP4  OGG
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• Using Green IT To Get Into the Black - A How To Guide

  Wed. May. 14, 2008
  by David Graves, Editor—Inside IT

  "Nowhere are the potential benefits of a green strategy more compelling than in the data center." That's according to our power & cooling guru, Dr. Albert Esser in his new article "Using Green IT To Get Out Of The Red And Into The Black" that was just published in The Environmental Leader.

  Also important in driving down costs is how an organization approaches power management across its PCs. A 2007 Gartner study estimates that 40 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions are due to PCs and monitors, while 23 percent are due to servers and associated cooling technology in data centers.

  Statistics like this are among the reasons why we continue to take aggressive steps in providing with the most energy efficient products in the industry. Today, we just announced a 25% energy efficiency improvement commitment for our laptops and desktops. Read more here.

   
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• Purdue punches out supercomputer in near-record time

  Tue. May. 06, 2008
  by John Mullen, VP, Higher Education, Dell, Inc.

  I got my bachelors ME degree at Michigan State and understand what competition means in the Big Ten.  You crush it when you can.  Well, the folks at Purdue University's Rosen Center for Advanced Computing crushed it on Monday. With a huge team effort, they installed their new supercomputer - including unboxing the equipment - in just half a day. C|net called it an "electronic barn-raising."

  The supercomputer, named Steele, features 812 Dell PowerEdge 1950 dual-quad-core computer nodes and is predicted to have a peak performance of more than 60 teraflops, which means it could perform more than 60 trillion operations in one second, placing Steele in the top 40 on the current Top 500 computers list.  Tinkergeek has 249 photos of the install , which is probably some sort of record by itself.  You get to see them working on the raised floor, installing racks, rails, switches HVAC, power and network cabling.  My favorites are #s 79, 90, 152, 179, 200 and the last one - the rack with signatures of the team that worked on it - very cool.  They have a brisk stop action video too.  

  The HPCC will be used for research across a variety of disciplines, including engineering, biological, earth and atmospheric sciences, mathematics and physics. The leading researchers at Purdue pooled their grants and provided a majority of the funding for the cluster, which is housed at Purdue's Mathematics Building on campus.

  High-performance computing is helping to support research that benefits society and Purdue is one example of major universities using Dell technology to enhance their teaching, learning and research initiatives.
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• Green economics from the Uptime Institute Symposium

  Thu. May. 01, 2008
  by Albert Esser- VP, Power & Infrastructure

  I spoke this week at the Uptime Institute’s Symposium 2008. Green IT is a topic that undoubtedly is becoming more top of mind among CIOs and data center managers.

  Research from the Uptime Institute indicates that enterprise greenness is both socially responsible as well as economically smart. I couldn’t agree more.

  Greening your data center for efficiency is both good for the environment, since you’re lowering your overall CO2 emissions, and good for your pocketbook, since you’re able to reduce power consumption across your IT infrastructure. And this can be done without sacrificing performance. Dell analysis has shown that customers can lower their data center energy consumption by 45 percent while maintaining the same compute performance. This is the result of taking a holistic approach to data center energy efficiency which takes into account the synergy between hardware, power utilization rates, cooling and software solutions.

  Dell’s position is that you cannot afford not to be green. And the Uptime Institute would agree that the time to begin greening your data center isn’t sometime in the future – it is now. What questions do you have around the topics of Green IT or power & cooling? Let me know, and I’ll be sure to get back to you with answers.
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• Microsoft Management Summit is very hot and Dell is in the buzz

  Tue. Apr. 29, 2008
  by Ed Reynolds, Dir, Dell Systems Mgmt Mktg

  A Dell employee emailed from the Microsoft Management Summit this morning:

  I am in the opening keynote here at MMS. Being the featured hardware partner for SCCM is awesome. The room is PACKED and attendees are hearing Microsoft talk about how great Dell systems management is.

  Microsoft’s Bob Muglia, MS SVP, highlighted Dell’s preliminary bare metal deployment pack in his keynote. Hubba hubba and hey now.

  Many of our customers use Microsoft’s System Center and Dell’s OpenManage to manage their infrastructure. And who do you think offers the most comprehensive device management through Microsoft’s System Center Suite? (Dell does) And we’re not resting. This week we’re announcing the upcoming availability of the latest Dell Management Packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager that will give customers superior monitoring and control of Dell desktops, portables, workstations, rack and tower servers, blades, networked storage devices and even printers.

  Our new plug-ins and our roadmap to integrate Dell Services with Microsoft products means our mutual customers will continue to have industry leading tools to manage their IT infrastructures. All this talk about simplifying IT really means something.

  Thanks for the kind words this morning Bob!

  Technorati Tags: Microsoft,management summit,system center,openmanage,Dell,server management,infrastructure management
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• How much can you turn off?

  Fri. Apr. 25, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger
  Technorati Tags: ken brill,uptime institute,greenbiz,Blades,Dell,Energy conservation,Green benchmarks,Green technology,HP,Hardware,IBM,Open Source Systems (OSS),Power consumption,Power supplies,Sustainable IT

  GreenBiz radio has an interview with Ken Brill of the Uptime Institute.  Its a bit long, but all the text is there so you can speed read through it if you want.

  One of the more interesting things that Brill claims is that lots of energy can be conserved by turning off equipment that isn't being used.  Here's a quote from the interview transcript:

  KB: Well, the institute believes that IT could radically reduce its energy consumption, and it would save money in the process. And there are a number of things that people can do and we're gonna be talking about these at our upcoming symposium. But the first thing that people can do is to go through their data center and identify what is running that could just be turned off. Between 10 and 30 percent of the energy consumption in a typical data center is for servers and storage and other things that is no longer in use.  And it could just be turned -- I mean, as literally, as simple as turning the switch.

  Ken has some interesting things to say about blade servers too. Just like any other technology, there are important differences in blade server designs.
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• How should we measure Earth Day?

  Tue. Apr. 22, 2008
  by Albert Esser- VP, Power & Infrastructure
  Technorati Tags: Data Center,Data Centers,metrics,earth day

  Earth Day is a day to reflect on our planet’s condition and to re-dedicate ourselves to the work that lies ahead. One of the keys to effective conversation is having good metrics that indicate the progress we are making. That’s why we became one of the founding members of The Green Grid, an international consortium of companies dedicated to improving energy efficiencies in data centers and business computing ecosystems. One of the first Green Grid initiatives was to develop standard measures of infrastructure efficiency. As we said in an earlier podcast, there was no standard way to determine if you had a data center that was wasting energy. During its first full year, The Green Grid has been very successful in promoting the first set of these measures: Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE) and Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).(PDF link)

  DCiE and PUE are reciprocal metrics that describe how efficiently a data center powers and cools its equipment. A DCiE of 33% (the equivalent of a PUE of 3.0) means that 33% of the total power use is going to the data center. A PUE of 3.0 means that 300 watts into the facility in order to deliver 100 watts to the IT equipment. The other 200 watts is overhead. Obviously, efficient data centers look to reduce that.

  Why are these measures so important? You can only improve what you can measure. Standardization is essential to the development of benchmarks, which then can be used for improvements. Individual companies cannot do this all alone, which is why The Green Grid is having such a seminal impact on improving efficiency in data centers. DCiE and PUE are just the beginning. We’re looking forward to expanding our work to include data center productivity, methods for assessing data center designs, operations and technologies to improve data center efficiency.

  Dell believes The Green Grid helps our customers directly address the power and cooling issues that they face. These efforts, along with our own, will not only increase data center efficiency, but provide the ReGeneration for a much more sustainable computing ecosystem. The February issue of Power Solutions magazine has a number of excellent articles to read (PDF link) that can bring you up to speed.
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