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Data, Data, Everywhere and Not a Drop to Charge

aeiforia-technos4-0113First I want to say a thank you to Gary Kayye and Scott Walker for asking me to take over Scott’s EcoSystems spot as a sustainability contributor to the newly indoctrinated rAVe GHGav eNewsletter. They both have provided tireless years of contribution to our industry on all things related to green AV. Scott, I hope to live up to your 44,000+ words of insight and carry the torch. Gary, I look forward to collaborating with you on many articles on what to me is a very important topic — sustainable technology. (So important to me in fact that my company is named after it.) To the readers of this I hope to bring my own perspective on news and events and where we should be not only within our industry but in others as well. We are an interconnected Web and even if you don’t see the connection right away, you have to trust it is there.

In the December 27th edition of rAVe GHGav (Vol. 3, Iss. 2), I found it fitting that Scott discussed an interesting question: “Have we (the AV/IT industry) proven that there is a market for sustainable technology?” Scott’s conclusion was that we should focus on our ability to make buildings smarter with what we do while keeping our eye on sustainability. Owners may ultimately be more receptive to this than the green fatigue they are experiencing now with LEED and other rating systems. After all, they have smart cars and smart phones — why not smart technology systems in their buildings?

Following this submission in the same publication was another connected article by Midori Connolly (brAVe New World’s Big Data, Smart AV). This was a great piece on how we can create smart AV systems that are data driven. After all, isn’t the intelligence in a building all about data? We are a data-driven society. Just look at the New York Stock Exchange, fantasy sports, retail and marketing or Google anything – all data-driven. Smart building systems pump out reams of data that need to be culled and collated for a facilities operator and other end users to be able to be efficient with their building.

Both of these articles have a great theme: being smart with data. I want to take it one step further and ask what do we do with all this data and where do we keep it? As we collect more and more data on everything, there needs to be a strategy for who stores it, how is it stored and where is it stored. Problem one: Who stores it? Is it locally stored, in the cloud or by another division off site? Problem two: How is it stored? RAID 5 Server system? Virtual Server? Something else? Problem 3: Is it local servers, desktop, or server farm? Any way you look at it, this is a problem that is difficult to manage in itself now throw sustainability on top of it and you have a headache the size of Texas.

One of the biggest disconnects in our quest for sustainable technology is that the IT department in four out of every five companies surveyed by the Uptime Institute, a private consortium that tracks data center industry trends, is not directly responsible for the cost of the heating and cooling or power use of the data centers for their company. It is lumped in with everything else. If you take into consideration my three questions and the normal day-to-day data transactions of a company then add the data driven smart building systems from HVAC, electrical/lighting or plumbing plus now smart technology from AV, security/life safety and other plug load intelligent devices, you can start to see how quickly the power and cooling demand of the IT system can rapidly escalate.

In September of 2012, the New York Times ran a front page story about the intensive use of power and heating and cooling in the data world. “A yearlong examination by the New York Times has revealed that the foundation of the information industry is sharply at odds with its image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness,” the article said. The article goes on to implicate data centers as using up to 2 percent of the nation’s power in the US (1.5 percent globally) and up to 90 percent of the energy used in some of these data centers is wasted as a result of full tilt operation with little demand. That is 30 billion watts of electricity annually, or roughly 30 nuclear power plants. This number would be larger except that it only accounts for the fact that data centers on average only use 6-12 percent of their power at any one time for actual computations. The rest is idle power use in case of a surge. To add insult to injury, many data centers use heavily polluting diesel generators to guard against power failures to the point where they can be labeled a major polluters, appearing on the government’s naughty list. Why so much? We are just generating that much more data and we don’t really give it much thought. This is especially true when we go into “the cloud.”

datacenter-0113

Source: Info-tech Research Group, 2010

The cloud is a bit of a misnomer. Quite often when people think about storing their data on the cloud, they picture a happy place in the Internet where data is held in suspended animation until such time as we call it down out of the heavens. This has been perpetuated with such great opportunities such as Dropbox, Google Drive and iCloud, where thousands of music tracks and video clips are sent from homes across the world and the user just expects the data to appear at the click of a mouse instantaneously with no glitches. The thinking is, “Well, I don’t have it on my network anymore, so I have smaller servers using less energy and I can get to it from anywhere, so look how efficient I am being!” Locally, yes you are, but your data is not in Never Never Land. It simply resides on a server farm somewhere else churning away with everyone else’s data until you call it back. And the farm is using a whole lot of energy.

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The main culprit is the way the IT industry practice has developed. Instead of location, location, location, it is redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. Even a millisecond of delay in a server can cause catastrophic crashes or provide an unfair advantage to the competition (think stock trades). This tends to make the IT industry a bit risk-adverse to say the least.

To create all of this redundancy and prevent a global nuclear meltdown for businesses, IT managers and data farm designers build in a crazy amount of safeguards, causing huge amounts of power use and cooling needs. These include lead acid battery farms that are constantly being charged, diesel generators and moment springs that store energy. This is not to say that IT guys are the Lex Luther of the technology world hell bent on creating a giant hole in the ozone. Quite often the cause of this, beyond financial, is smaller data farms that are using outdated technology and methods. They are getting better. A decade ago data companies spent more than 1.5 times the amount of money on energy to cool their servers as they did just to power them. Now they are at 80 to 90 percent, which, although a huge improvement, is still outrageously wasteful.

Not all data centers are evil. Large companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook and others are taking extreme measures to reduce operating costs and provide a lower footprint. This is mainly fueled by having the capital on hand to do so, as well as the desire to provide a positive outlook to shareholders. Google, for instance, uses just 12 percent as much power on cooling as they do to power their systems. They do this by employing both physical and technological solutions. A huge one is keeping hot and cool air separate. The more they mix, the more energy is needed to compensate. Data centers do this by creating “hot aisles” behind servers and “cool aisles” in front. If you notice I said cool, not cold. Doing this allows the data centers to run at warmer temperatures (80° instead of 60-65°). In addition to this, moving all the serviceable connections into the cool aisle allows data centers to maintain the separation between the two temperatures so technicians don’t have to go between them to do maintenance. Switching temperatures also has allowed data companies to rely less on power hungry chillers and more on “free cooling” evaporative systems using outside air. Now the chillers are a back up or not even included in the design depending on the location of the data center. Building in colder climates is another strategy employed by data centers like Yahoo and Google. They are able to take advantage of the colder climate to cool their servers with outside air rather than chillers.

A less massive data company, whose pockets may not be as deep as some of the large players, can also clean up their act with a little leg work. Google actually started publishing papers on how to minimize energy use in data centers using low cost methods and Facebook made its entire data center design available for free online, offering people the chance to learn from and offer improvements to the system.

A simple way to have efficiency, which I believe we already know in the AV world, is to replace outdated equipment, especially servers, with more efficient ones. Even with all of these strategies available, it is often counter to the behavior of IT professionals because of the lack of incentive beyond bragging rights. In other words, the people with the power to save the energy have no direct benefit to doing so.

So where does that leave us — the AV industry? Well with our devices creating more and more data and our smart technology relying on even more data, we will need to have an open conversation with the IT guys on how to manage this in a responsible way. Otherwise we are just trading horses and getting nowhere. Work with the IT guys to investigate how they can make their own systems more efficient or move their data to a cloud that is run efficiently (most companies will gladly provide this information). By doing this you are truly helping your client be better informed about their new smart building and helping them to make smart decisions. A good example is found in LEED where credit is giving to a building owner for sourcing their power from renewable energy generation. Help the client source there data from an efficient farm or help improve it locally.

Raymond Kent is the managing principal of Sustainable Technologies Group, LLC specializing in technology systems for the performing and cultural arts, healthcare, Government, higher education and corporate markets. He is a co-author of the STEP rating system and serves as the chair of the Technology Task Force for the STEP Foundation. Raymond received the 2012 InfoComm Sustainable Technology Award and is involved with the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts. Reach him at rkent@sustaintech-llc.com

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