Check out the commentary from the Rocky Mountain Institute. Many industry types participated in the research. Changing the heat capabilities, using better grade components adds a small amount to the cost and enables other techniques. Some are very traditional. Let’s say, we move to DC, open racks and convection. We won’t need fans, or the same number of fans. Fans are a big contributor to power consumption, infact, they add heat, their power supplies add heat, etc.

Your comments are well taken, however, I disagree – we will have to talk at Symposium, to bring you to the right rather than the party.

I agree with your general point — GE does the same thing with their “ecomagination” marketing effort, and claims the 3% evolutionary improvement in locomotive design as a specifically green initiative. That’s a bit disingenuous.

On your specifics, however:
- better heat sink, reducing cooling cost without making MTBF shorter
- better components in drive that can allow run at higher temperature ($1 more per drive), again reducing cooling cost without making MTBF shorter

Neither of these reduces cooling cost, in terms of BTUs that eventually have to be removed from the data center. (They may reduce costs slightly in terms of needing fewer fans within a single chassis.) A better heat sink will move heat from the drive to the environment without the need for a fan, but the heat still needs to be removed from the environment. Similarly, drives that can run at a higher temperature only raise the point at which you have to remove the heat, but the heat still has to go.

The only thing that can be done to make drives greener is to have them consume less energy. If a drive consumes 8W, all that energy turns into heat that has to come out of the data center. (OK, some of it turns into noise or motion, which eventually turns into heat.) The only thing that can be done to reduce heat (and thus cooling) is to have the drive draw fewer watts.

With mechanical drives, this will always only be evolutionary improvements. It turns out, capacity increase has been the biggest win here! It’s been much easier to double the capacity of a single drive, thus halving the power consumption per GB, than halving the power consumption of a drive at the same capacity point. This will likely continue to be the case for a few years more.

If and when we run out of technology for shrinking our magnetic domains, the next frontier will be new storage technologies. Solid state disks have the opportunity for great additional savings due to near-zero idle power draw, and there are many likely paths forward for reducing their active power consumption. Spinning disk is slowly reaching the end of its road, as 15K RPM disks will in the next two years, but there are many other roads that lead on.

In the mean time, if you’re unhappy with the rate at which disk power consumption is falling your other option is to reduce the amount of spinning disk needed in the first place. That’s why we see deduplication as an inherently green technology, reducing the amount of disk necessary. This, in addition to an architecture that can properly utilize multi-terabyte drives, allows us to provide low operational costs without the reliability risks associated with things like drive spindown.

Regards,
Jered Floyd
CTO, Permabit Technology Corp.

I want to see real green, not “natural evolution green”. Real green is the result of an engineering change beyond the normal curve. For disk drives, the normal curve is smaller, faster, etc. In the case of a hard disk, real green could be:

- better heat sink, reducing cooling cost without making MTBF shorter
- better components in drive that can allow run at higher temperature ($1 more per drive), again reducing cooling cost without making MTBF shorter

I agree – hypervisors increase complexity, but not completely

However, they address the problem that the structure of the O/S does not lend itself to applications playing well together. Consider the registry. Put two apps on the same box, and you have double the trouble. Use a virtual instance, and each remains independent, taking away a complexity that most could not manage otherwise – the registry is a nightmare. So a VM is a different complexity, new, maybe worse, maybe the same – the jury needs better evidence. Hyper-V looks at it a bit better, more of a “view” approach where each instance only need adjust it’s view of the base (and might not need to adjust.)

Maybe, we need to go to the root cause – the O/S and
- control interaction between applications
- isolate parameters, independent of the registry

Of course, this is the way we did things in ____.

Disagree – the cloud is a goal, although you still need a place to put the stuff. Data centers breath, if parts of them could sleep and workloads, seamlessly, juggle, then there would be great energy savings potential, in addition to an ability to create a standard, commodity infrastructure that could be turned to any purpose. But to get there, you need to understand the service level requirements of data, CPU, etc. There are emerging ways to record these requirements, but nothing standard. You also need a non-centralized management strategy. Yet, without these tools, many shops are standardizing (a though precursor).

Election – Vote for Phil (one of the guys I work with)

Slogan: Common Sense, Practical and Cheap

In addition, would find a way to incorporate a go-kart track into the White House rose garden, increasing revenue by selling seats to watch the President race, and by using ATF to accept bets on who would win.

The main thing we need is common sense.

Running so many instances of an OS on one box is only necessary because the “worse is better” OS vendor can’t get two different applications to run on the same box.

Storage networks grow because one vendor wants to “own the datacenter” and capture as much high-profit margin business as they can.

The stock market really only exists to serve itself.

When you wake up in the middle of the night laughing for a reason you can’t quite make sense of, remember that all this stupid sounding stuff is some other person’s business plan.