Developments in green sustainable data center infrastructure management (DCIM) energy tools
Authors: Dalton Damian 
Published: November 2013

Energy management and reduction is one of the major challenges in the Cloud industry's data centres. The Uptime Institute's 2012 report, the industry's leading authority, highlighted the crisis in data centre energy management. 30% of data centres will run out of power, space and cooling in 2012. On average there's a 90% energy overhead in data centre operations, yet 55% of servers use less than 10% of their capacity. The 500,000 data centres worldwide have a server electricity consumption of 400 Billion kWh/year (approx $40 Billion ) which is growing at 12% CAGR, yet only 11% of the centres monitor their consumption. The global CO2 emissions of these centres, is equivalent to the airline industry, 2% of global emissions. It is expected that by 2020 20% of Europe's electrical energy will be data centre related. Data centre cooling requirements also have an enormous hydro footprint. A 1 MW data centre in a U.S-type climate has an annual hydro footprint of 99 million litres/annum Yet studies have shown that operational energy savings of 40% and substantial reductions in physical space, cooling requirements and water consumption can be achieved, where comprehensive and effective energy monitoring and management systems are employed. These can deliver a ROI within months, and further savings which extend over the centre's lifetime. The technologies which have the potential to deliver these benefits, DCIM (Data Centre Infrastructure Management) systems have only emerged in the last 3 to 4 years and are still in their infancy. Not surprisingly, a new global industry providing innovative, green, sustainable data centre technologies will be worth €45 Billion by 2016. The main barriers to effective monitoring/management is instrumentation and training. Vast volumes of data are gathered and must be competently analysed. Most monitoring systems, involve some form of physical metering and cabling and downtime, a major challenge when 10's thousands of servers are involved. Furthermore, all approaches physical and hybrid approaches limit the level of monitoring visibility to the server, individual processes cannot be monitored. A spin-out company from University College Dublin Ireland, Stratergia, has developed a unique data centre energy management system PAPILLON. It is totally software-based, measuring every server's energy consumption in real-time. It is intuitive to use, operates on any platform and can be installed in hours without any downtime or retrofitting. It uses a client-server type architecture. Software agents on servers communicate periodically, to a master server which has power models for each server type. Using the power models, the master computes in real-time and saves in a data base, all relevant energy information of the centre. In operation, Papillon identifies and quantifies energy saving actions that can be implemented, and coupled with electricity network data, more sustainable energy sources can be introduced into the power input of the centre. Papillon has been trialled at Swedish Compare Testlab and is one of the core tools being installed at state-of-the-art data centres at Kajaani, Finland and Cenit, Spain for a new international EU-funded Masters programme in green, sustainable data centre management.