Presentation Title1

The data centre market

Dr Ehsaan FarsimadanOctober 2013

Presentation Title2

Problem we are trying to solve…

23-26°C

15-18°C

CRAC

Water cooled

CHILLERDry Air Cooler

IT Rack IT R

ack IT Rack

Power Delivery Chain

Heat Removal Chain

Typical 1MW Data Center consumes about 15GWh of energy annually

Presentation Title3

Some history

What has happened recently?

What do we expect?

The data centre market

30-34°C

20-24°C

CRAC

Water cooled CHILLER

Cooling Tower

PHE

Presentation Title4

• Current state of most data centres

‒ Unnecessary levels of redundancy and environmental control

‒ Very low power density << 1kW/m2 2kW/rack‒ Very poor efficiency in operation

Some history - The current state

‒ 2%+ of global energy‒ Data centres in the EU consumed more electricity

than Portugal in 2009

Presentation Title5

• Out of date practices • Vendor educated market, little training• Problems not addressed at source• Most operators treating symptoms• Industry focussed on the only metric it has “PUE”

Some history - Cause of the problem

23-26°C

15-18°C

CRAC

Water cooled CHILLER

Dry Air Cooler

Presentation Title6

Some history

What has happened recently?

What do we expect?

The data centre market

Presentation Title7

• Education and standardisation‒ EU Code of Conduct for data centre energy efficiency

What has happened recently?

• Cloud scale computing has brought some economic reality to the market‒ Cloud is the globalisation of data centres, some will adapt‒ Your data centre can be anywhere you want

• Some attempts to standardise design‒ Open Compute ‒ Commoditisation of equipment to lower costs

Presentation Title8

• Power density‒ Circa 2000 500W – 800W / m2 < 2kW / rack‒ Circa 2009 1.5kW – 2kW / m2 > 5kW / rack‒ Circa 2013 2.5kW – 8kW / m2 5kW to 20kW / rack

What has happened recently?

• Large data centres are now > 100MW per site

• Many are built in modular 2MW chunks

• Recent activities show up broken old methods

Presentation Title9

• Starting to deal with root causes instead of symptoms

What has happened recently?

Server

ServerAir

Con

ditio

ning

U

nit

Raised Floor Void

Rack

Server Server

ServerAir

Con

ditio

ning

U

nit

Raised Floor Void

Rack

‒ Computers are not fragile – No need to air condition them like the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun

‒ Expansion in the environmental ranges through ASHRAE TC9.9‒ Use of contained air flow in place of “waft and hope” designs

Presentation Title10

What has happened recently?

Class A1

Class A2

Class A3

Presentation Title11

What has happened recently?

0

730

1460

2190

2920

3650

4380

5110

5840

6570

7300

8030

8760

Direct Air Indirect Air Indirect Water

Annual Chiller Hours (Adiabatic Cooling) Class 2StockholmAmsterdamSan FranciscoLondonSeattleFrankfurtParisSan JoseBostonChicagoTokyoMadridNew YorkWashington DCBeijingSao PaoloHong KongRiyadhMumbaiSingapore

Hou

rs

Presentation Title12

• We realised that mechanical cooling is‒ Unnecessary and undesirable in many locations‒ Not a significant contributor to energy or opex cost

What has happened recently?

0

8760

730

1460

2190

2920

3650

4380

5110

5840

6570

7300

8030

Annual mechanical cooling hours

Economised cooling

Increasing free cooling

Fully mechanical cooling

Full “free” cooling

Annual chiller energy consumption

0%

100%

50%

Presentation Title13

• Summarising Cooling‒ Cooling should not be a significant overhead‒ Correctly designed data centres can eliminate the

need for cooling ‒ No need for new cooling technologies, no real

problem left to solve

What has happened recently?

AHU

AHU Mix

ing

AHU

AHU M

ixing

Presentation Title14

• Electrical power systems‒ Improvements in electrical infrastructure have made

power to the server > 95% efficient

What has happened recently?

Presentation Title15

• Effect on overall efficiency

What has happened recently?

PUE

Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4

‒ Anyone can build a data centre with a PUE < 1.3, there are a very few climates where you can’t

‒ Many will choose to build a data centre with a PUE > 1.3 because the economics don’t work

Presentation Title16

• IT equipment‒ IT equipment has continued to provide more stuff / kW‒ Our utilisation of IT equipment is getting better‒ IT equipment is slowly becoming more load:power linear‒ Servers, storage and network equipment are now completely

commoditised

What has happened recently?

Presentation Title17

• Facility utilisation problems‒ The majority of the cost and energy consumption are a fixed entity‒ The challenge is to make Utility power draw more linear with IT

What has happened recently?

Presentation Title18

Some history

What has happened recently?

What do we expect?

The data centre market

Data Center Option 1 in London

DCiE

DB Temp.

Presentation Title19

• Continued commoditisation‒ Less specialised equipment only a few classes of workload will

be able to cost justify “HPC” equipment e.g. Cray

What do we expect?

But you don’t need to go to Iceland…..

• Data centres are moving to locations with the right mix of‒ Cheap energy (US < $0.05 / kWh, don’t forget water!)‒ Climate (Anywhere outside the tropics )‒ Jurisdiction (Which intelligence agencies do you want to be

hacked by?)

Presentation Title20

• Compute is going in two different directions:

What do we expect?

‒ Lower power 1 to 10 Watt processors‒ ARM has led the way (for non CPU intensive tasks)

‒ Higher power‒ General purpose compute (Intel) is getting denser‒ Starting to hit the limits of air cooling at > 15kW per rack ‒ Many will move to direct liquid cooling - Iceotope‒ If you take liquid to the data floor – take it all the way to the

chips

Presentation Title21

What about software?

What do we expect?

‒ Data is only useful if it can be consumed and processed

‒ More emphasis towards business metrics

‒ Count the cost of running the Data Center

Presentation Title22

We now know how..

Air cooled Data Center with Free cooling

DCiE

DB Temp.

‒ Does my design actually work?