Why it is impossible so easy to take and implement "green" technology in the data center
Recently, environmental issues have been increasingly raised. Including among the participants of the IT industry. Today, data centers consume more than 2% of the electricity generated in the world and emit about as much carbon dioxide as the air transport industry.
Participants in the Green Symposium of Green Enterprise Computing predicted this outcome 10 years ago. Thus, the deteriorating environmental situation has formed a request for "green" technologies and IT infrastructure using renewable energy sources.
However, not all “green” solutions have proven to be effective. Tell about it under the cut.
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/ photo by Robert McGoldrick CC
Energy is supplied to the general power grid both by the producers of “green” energy and those who extract it by processing coal or, for example, oil. If the data center wants to use energy from renewable sources, then in the United States, the company-owner can purchase special certificates - Renewable Energy Certificates (REC).
The principle of their work is as follows. The green energy company receives a certificate for each megawatt hour produced. The certification agency assigns a unique identifier to REC, and the electricity is sent to the public grid. The consumer company can purchase these RECs, as if confirming that it uses energy from renewable sources.
However, the electricity they receive may (and most likely will) come from non-renewable sources. Therefore, this system has certain disadvantages. For example, some consumer companies purchase such certificates for marketing purposes. So they seem to prove their commitment to "green" energy. This practice even has a special name: greenwashing ("green camouflage").
/ photo Hiroo Yamagata CC
In addition to buying electricity from suppliers, some companies build solar and wind farms on their own. Back in 2012, Google stated that they intend to fully transfer all processes, including the power supply of data centers, to energy obtained from renewable sources. And after 6 years, in April of this year, the IT giant announced the achievement of its goal.
Almost simultaneously with Google, this goal was achieved at Apple. Renewable energy sources feed the company's stores, factories, offices and data centers in forty-three countries. At the same time, the data centers of the corporation have been working on “clean” energy since 2013.
To achieve these indicators, Apple has implemented a number of energy projects. For example, Apple Park, the company's new office in Cupertino, has a 17-megawatt solar installation on the roof. In China, solar and wind farms with a total capacity of 485 megawatts were built to power Apple’s factories.
As for Japan, the IT giant signed an agreement with the local company Daini Denryoku to install 300 solar panels on the roofs of buildings owned by the corporation. Total panels generate 18 thousand megawatt-hours of "clean energy" annually.
However, not all companies can afford to build such an infrastructure. "Clean" energy projects are expensive - the same Google has spent more than $ 3 billion to implement their decisions. At the same time, the process of transition to “green” energy is rather long. For example, Amazon is gradually using renewable energy sources, but for now they provide only 40% of the electricity consumed by a company.
It can be difficult to make the transition to “green” energy, due to the opposition of energy companies lobbying the interests of traditional energy. The same Apple faced obstacles posed by the local energy company Duke Energy. When the IT giant built a network of wind and solar farms for a data center in North Carolina, Duke Energy prevented green energy from entering the overall network — it was only 3% of the company's total energy portfolio.
It is also difficult to start using electricity from renewable energy sources in Asia. Simply, many data centers are located in large cities where there is no physical ability to build large-scale wind and solar installations. Therefore, a large number of harmful emissions is recorded in this region.
According to estimates of the Swedish energy company Vattenfall, carbon-containing emissions in Bangalore (India), where the giant data center Tulip is located, make up 900 grams per kilowatt-hour. For comparison, in Norway (where hydroelectric power is mainly used) this indicator is 3 grams, in France - 100 grams, in California - 300 grams.
In such conditions, Chinese data centers are even forced to resort to special methods of air purification, as smog cities causes failures of air conditioning and ventilation of data centers.
In addition to filtering, companies are changing the approach to cooling IT systems, reducing the amount of air used from the street, but increasing the efficiency of cooling inside the machine room. For example, the Baidu data center team provided each server rack with a cooling module — a heat exchanger coil and a casing directing cold flows to critical systems.
/ photo Lydur Skulason CC
At the same time, part of the data centers, instead of switching to renewable energy sources, reduces the consumption of electricity as a whole.
To determine the energy efficiency in the industry, a special indicator is used - PUE. It is equal to the ratio of total power consumed by the entire data center to the power consumed directly by IT equipment. Google managed to bring the PUE to their data center to 1.12. A number of northern companies are close to this indicator due to the skillful use of climate. However, the average coefficient in Europe is 1.8, which means other organizations still have much to develop in this direction.
For example, as part of the Norwegian-American partnership, the world's largest data center Kolos is being built , which will be located in the Norwegian town of Ballangen inside the Arctic Circle. According to preliminary calculations, a cold climate and access to hydropower will reduce the cost of energy resources by 60%.
Another example is the London-based Verne Global, which built a data center in Iceland on the site of an abandoned military base. Technical Director Verne Global Tate Cantrell (Tate Cantrell) said: "Our cooling system is an open window." At the same time, the data center itself is “powered” by geothermal and hydroelectric energy.
Another example is the Norwegian Green Mountain data center. It is located in an underground bunker, which is cooled by water from the nearest fjord. The pond provides uninterrupted supply of "coolant" with a temperature of only 8 degrees Celsius. Among data center customers, one of the largest financial institutions in Norway is DNB Bank.
However, sometimes the cold climate does not play at all. There are data centers that stand where the temperature can drop to -70 degrees Celsius.
For example, in such conditions the Ice Cube Lab data processing center operates. It was built in the Antarctic at the Amundsen-Scott station. In such conditions, it will not be possible to open the door and cool the “iron”, since low temperatures will damage all the equipment in a short time. Therefore, a special ventilation system is set up at the station, which in a special way controls the flow of ice air outside. But as the engineers working with the equipment note , in especially extreme situations it happens that this system freezes.
Other difficulties are associated with the construction of data centers in the ice, in particular, the high cost of construction and maintenance in harsh conditions. Also it is necessary to take into account problems with the availability and throughput of networks, as clients will be far from the “data source”.
In the same data center Ice Cube lab for "communication" with the world uses a network of Iridium satellites, which provide a data transfer rate of 2400 bps. Although sometimes the station still gets access to the megabit channel - 8 hours a day it is provided by the former NASA GOES-3 meteorological satellite. This turns out to be sufficient for solving specific tasks that face this data center, but it is completely unacceptable for large “general-purpose” data centers.
PS Several materials from the First Corporate IaaS blog:
PPS Fresh posts from our blog on Habré:
Participants in the Green Symposium of Green Enterprise Computing predicted this outcome 10 years ago. Thus, the deteriorating environmental situation has formed a request for "green" technologies and IT infrastructure using renewable energy sources.
However, not all “green” solutions have proven to be effective. Tell about it under the cut.
')
/ photo by Robert McGoldrick CC
Not so "green" electricity
Energy is supplied to the general power grid both by the producers of “green” energy and those who extract it by processing coal or, for example, oil. If the data center wants to use energy from renewable sources, then in the United States, the company-owner can purchase special certificates - Renewable Energy Certificates (REC).
The principle of their work is as follows. The green energy company receives a certificate for each megawatt hour produced. The certification agency assigns a unique identifier to REC, and the electricity is sent to the public grid. The consumer company can purchase these RECs, as if confirming that it uses energy from renewable sources.
However, the electricity they receive may (and most likely will) come from non-renewable sources. Therefore, this system has certain disadvantages. For example, some consumer companies purchase such certificates for marketing purposes. So they seem to prove their commitment to "green" energy. This practice even has a special name: greenwashing ("green camouflage").
/ photo Hiroo Yamagata CC
Its "green" energy sources - expensive and long
In addition to buying electricity from suppliers, some companies build solar and wind farms on their own. Back in 2012, Google stated that they intend to fully transfer all processes, including the power supply of data centers, to energy obtained from renewable sources. And after 6 years, in April of this year, the IT giant announced the achievement of its goal.
Almost simultaneously with Google, this goal was achieved at Apple. Renewable energy sources feed the company's stores, factories, offices and data centers in forty-three countries. At the same time, the data centers of the corporation have been working on “clean” energy since 2013.
To achieve these indicators, Apple has implemented a number of energy projects. For example, Apple Park, the company's new office in Cupertino, has a 17-megawatt solar installation on the roof. In China, solar and wind farms with a total capacity of 485 megawatts were built to power Apple’s factories.
As for Japan, the IT giant signed an agreement with the local company Daini Denryoku to install 300 solar panels on the roofs of buildings owned by the corporation. Total panels generate 18 thousand megawatt-hours of "clean energy" annually.
However, not all companies can afford to build such an infrastructure. "Clean" energy projects are expensive - the same Google has spent more than $ 3 billion to implement their decisions. At the same time, the process of transition to “green” energy is rather long. For example, Amazon is gradually using renewable energy sources, but for now they provide only 40% of the electricity consumed by a company.
It can be difficult to make the transition to “green” energy, due to the opposition of energy companies lobbying the interests of traditional energy. The same Apple faced obstacles posed by the local energy company Duke Energy. When the IT giant built a network of wind and solar farms for a data center in North Carolina, Duke Energy prevented green energy from entering the overall network — it was only 3% of the company's total energy portfolio.
It is also difficult to start using electricity from renewable energy sources in Asia. Simply, many data centers are located in large cities where there is no physical ability to build large-scale wind and solar installations. Therefore, a large number of harmful emissions is recorded in this region.
According to estimates of the Swedish energy company Vattenfall, carbon-containing emissions in Bangalore (India), where the giant data center Tulip is located, make up 900 grams per kilowatt-hour. For comparison, in Norway (where hydroelectric power is mainly used) this indicator is 3 grams, in France - 100 grams, in California - 300 grams.
In such conditions, Chinese data centers are even forced to resort to special methods of air purification, as smog cities causes failures of air conditioning and ventilation of data centers.
In addition to filtering, companies are changing the approach to cooling IT systems, reducing the amount of air used from the street, but increasing the efficiency of cooling inside the machine room. For example, the Baidu data center team provided each server rack with a cooling module — a heat exchanger coil and a casing directing cold flows to critical systems.
/ photo Lydur Skulason CC
Cold climate is not a panacea
At the same time, part of the data centers, instead of switching to renewable energy sources, reduces the consumption of electricity as a whole.
To determine the energy efficiency in the industry, a special indicator is used - PUE. It is equal to the ratio of total power consumed by the entire data center to the power consumed directly by IT equipment. Google managed to bring the PUE to their data center to 1.12. A number of northern companies are close to this indicator due to the skillful use of climate. However, the average coefficient in Europe is 1.8, which means other organizations still have much to develop in this direction.
For example, as part of the Norwegian-American partnership, the world's largest data center Kolos is being built , which will be located in the Norwegian town of Ballangen inside the Arctic Circle. According to preliminary calculations, a cold climate and access to hydropower will reduce the cost of energy resources by 60%.
Another example is the London-based Verne Global, which built a data center in Iceland on the site of an abandoned military base. Technical Director Verne Global Tate Cantrell (Tate Cantrell) said: "Our cooling system is an open window." At the same time, the data center itself is “powered” by geothermal and hydroelectric energy.
Another example is the Norwegian Green Mountain data center. It is located in an underground bunker, which is cooled by water from the nearest fjord. The pond provides uninterrupted supply of "coolant" with a temperature of only 8 degrees Celsius. Among data center customers, one of the largest financial institutions in Norway is DNB Bank.
However, sometimes the cold climate does not play at all. There are data centers that stand where the temperature can drop to -70 degrees Celsius.
For example, in such conditions the Ice Cube Lab data processing center operates. It was built in the Antarctic at the Amundsen-Scott station. In such conditions, it will not be possible to open the door and cool the “iron”, since low temperatures will damage all the equipment in a short time. Therefore, a special ventilation system is set up at the station, which in a special way controls the flow of ice air outside. But as the engineers working with the equipment note , in especially extreme situations it happens that this system freezes.
Other difficulties are associated with the construction of data centers in the ice, in particular, the high cost of construction and maintenance in harsh conditions. Also it is necessary to take into account problems with the availability and throughput of networks, as clients will be far from the “data source”.
In the same data center Ice Cube lab for "communication" with the world uses a network of Iridium satellites, which provide a data transfer rate of 2400 bps. Although sometimes the station still gets access to the megabit channel - 8 hours a day it is provided by the former NASA GOES-3 meteorological satellite. This turns out to be sufficient for solving specific tasks that face this data center, but it is completely unacceptable for large “general-purpose” data centers.
PS Several materials from the First Corporate IaaS blog:
- Why a good IaaS provider should not have its own data center
- Unboxing: Cisco UCS B480 M5 Blade Server
- Organizing the blockchain on VMware vSphere: from theory to practice
PPS Fresh posts from our blog on Habré:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/359176/
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