Until the knock of environment friendly concepts and public concerns, traditional datacenters had fixed their eye on maximum uptime. Times have changed and datacenters are concentrating on conserving energy. Here are some tips that can contribute towards building eco-friendly datacenters.

Recently, I was involved in redesigning our company’s datacenter to consolidate hardware and systems running at two different physical locations. This was planned not as a “marketing” or “great idea!” move, but in fact it was a pragmatic business decision that helped the company to save money each year. I would like to share here my key learning’s that helped us make decisions to work towards a Greener Datacenter.

Evaluate Current Infrastructure: This is the first step where analysis needs to be done on the energy bills, current consumptions, and how much is being utilized by the servers, air conditioning systems, cooling fans and other devices like routers and switches in the datacenter. This helps in creating a baseline for calculating the Return-On-Investment after the changes are actually put in to implementation. Here is a link to couple of Power Calculators:

India – http://www.indiaenergyportal.org/
UK – http://www.ukpower.co.uk/running-costs-elec.asp
USA – http://www.42u.com/efficiency/energy-efficiency-calculator.htm

Rack Placements: This is an important aspect while designing the datacenter floor plan. Plan the layout of the equipments and structural components in a hot aisle and cold aisle rack layout method as recommended by Green Grid. The basic principle is to maximize the separation between the exhaust air flow and intake air flow. The figure below would give a better idea of the basic design principle.

The benefit of this arrangement is that it affects the required air delivery temperature that must be used to equalize the temperature throughout the room.

Need Analysis: Evaluate what is required out of the datacenter, not just what is needed now but maybe two or three years down the line. This helps in estimating the room for growth and helps avoid costly mistakes which fail to allow enough headroom for IT growth.

Eliminate: Look at every single area where you can eliminate, reduce or consolidate current hardware and equipments. For example, if you have two 24 port switches using only 18 connections consolidate them and shut down one of them. This does not have much impact in small organizations, but when we talk about companies which have lot of equipments in their datacenter, I’m sure figures would be impressive. Moreover, while calculating the ROI also consider the capital equipment and ongoing operational cost savings.

Consolidation of Servers: Identify areas where servers can be consolidated on to one single piece of hardware rather than running multiple physical boxes. By running multiple platforms and applications on a single server with many virtual servers can help reduce the amount of physical boxes. This in turn would help save the power consumption of not only the hardware box but also affect the cooling systems energy consumption.

Usage Patterns: There is a misconception that servers in a datacenter should be available and performing 24×7 regardless of the usage levels. In fact, identify and list out how all different parts of the network are being utilized and what are the peak hours for bandwidth, processing power and storage to handle peak network traffic. Set the power savings features on the hardware or OS level such that it helps in saving power. Allow the servers to sleep when they are not being utilized and explore the Wake-On-LAN technology.

Rated Appliances: Use Energy Star rated appliances, specially the air-conditioning or cooling systems. Devices carrying the Energy Star logo tend to save about 20% to 30% of energy on an average and the specifications differ with each item. Keep an eye on this point as it is estimated that EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) will announce and enforce the ratings for datacenter appliances and servers by 2010. At times, devices with Energy Star rating come costly but it is worth investing that marginal amount during the initial purchase. The overall running costs of power consumption would be much higher if the devices are not power efficient and you will run spending more on the energy costs in the long run.

Monitoring: It’s important to keep a track on the uptime and usage patterns of the datacenter. It basically allows the IT managers to accurately measure the effectiveness of the changes. Moreover, it also assists the top level management to decide on green energy solutions to reduce or eliminate their carbon footprints.

Remember, Green is just not a color – it’s more than that.

Do feel free to add in your comments, ideas and experiences. They would be much appreciated by all those who are planning to make computing energy efficient.

On May 18, 2009 Wolfram|Alpha was officially launched. Basically, it is a web tool that could be as important as any Search Engine or rather as important as Google (most popular of the breed). It is the brain child of British born physicist Stephen Wolfram and has been developed by Wolfram Research.

Wolfram|Alpha is an online service that computes and provides results to factual queries. In Google when we search for something, it provides us a list of web sites, documents and links while the same when computed at Wolfram|Alpha would provide a web page with statistical data. This should prove to be a boon to college students, researchers and the like. So out of Google, Wikipedia and Wolfram|Alpha, what do we use and when? Technically, while Google’s automated search algorithms crawl tens of millions of web sites to gather data, Wikipedia is a human-driven effort. Meanwhile, Wolfram|Alpha, uses a team of dedicated experts to add, evaluate, judge, and parse data.

I decided to give this new computational knowledge engine a try and choose “distance between Sun and Earth” as my query.

The results from Google were about 2,060,000 links and pages and the first link that it showed me was that to Wikipedia but not the actual figure.

Opening up Wikipedia provided me not only the figures but lot of interesting facts and data as well.

Feeding Wolfram|Alpha with the above query gave me the numbers in astronomical units – something which would not interest a common person. What I needed was either Kilometers or Miles.

The bottom line? Well, Wolfram|Alpha is surely promising as it offers a good amount of organized data along with charts and graphs. Moreover, Wolfram’s legacy application Mathematica has been put to use in Wolfram|Alpha and so this means that the site will shine in parsing mathematic queries. Maybe I’ve just scratched the surface of the knowledge engine here, but the fact is – how many Internet users would be interested in the statistical data.

Website: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Yesterday I delivered a presentation on Secure Computing to employees of Guj Info Petro Ltd. (GIPL). at Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University. Here is the link to the presentation:

Secure Computing – Download Powerpoint Show

Since I maintain and administer lot of Windows and Exchange Servers, running basic disk checks and defrag on the servers manually is simply impossible. To achieve the goal, I had a small batch file written which automates this task for me.

To start with, create a folder on the machine that you want to automate this on. I named my folder as “MaintenanceScripts”. The next step was to write the batch file with the content given below and save it as “ChecknDefrag.bat”.

@Echo Off
REM ***************************************************************************
REM *                                                                         *
REM *      AUTOMATED DISK CHECK AND DEFRAGMENTATION SCRIPT                    *
REM *                                                                         *
REM ***************************************************************************

REM chkdsk and defrag automation
REM Read the Drive Letter from the file
for /F "eol= tokens=1 delims=( " %%i in (DriveLetter.txt) do set DrvLtr=%%i& call :dsKchk

:dsKchk
If %DrvLtr% == end goto :eof
echo. >> diskcheck.rtf
echo. >> diskcheck.rtf
echo ******************************************************** >> diskcheck.rtf
echo CHECK DATE and TIME for %DrvLtr% >> diskcheck.rtf
date /t >> diskcheck.rtf
time /t >> diskcheck.rtf
echo ******************************************************** >> diskcheck.rtf
echo. >> diskcheck.rtf
echo. >> diskcheck.rtf
echo RUNNING DISK CHECK ON %DrvLtr% ....
chkdsk %DrvLtr% >> diskcheck.rtf
goto :defrag

:defrag
echo. >> defrag.rtf
echo. >> defrag.rtf
echo ******************************************************** >> defrag.rtf
echo CHECK DATE and TIME for %DrvLtr% >> defrag.rtf
date /t >> defrag.rtf
time /t >> defrag.rtf
echo ******************************************************** >> defrag.rtf
echo. >> defrag.rtf
echo. >> defrag.rtf
echo RUNNING DISK DEFRAGMENTATION ON %DrvLtr% ....
defrag %DrvLtr% -b >> defrag.rtf
defrag %DrvLtr% -f >> defrag.rtf

:EOF

The above batch file checks for a file called “DriveLetter.txt” in the same folder from where the script it going to run from. You can change it to your liking. It also saves the report of the disk check to a file called “diskcheck.rtf” and for defrag to a file called “defrag.rtf”. I choose RTF so that I can open it in MS Word or any other application to see a nice formatted output.

Next, we create a file called “DriveLetter.txt” in the same folder where we saved the Batch File and add all the drive letters that we want the script to check:

C:
end

You can add more disks to the above file by writing the drive letters to the text file – one drive per line.

Run the batch file once and wait for it to finish. Once it finishes its run, you can open the RTF files and see the results. If you are satisfied that everything is working fine with the batch files, you can now move towards scheduling the batch file to run at off-peak hours.