To take this journey together, we'll have to move beyond the single home, single light bulb example, and examine some important trends in big business which are starting to gather momentum. Corporations are also being forced to think this way now, both by their shareholders and by new laws. Maybe you've given some thought to how "cap and trade" legislation will impact energy consumption in many fields, but chances are you haven't thought this through to the level where it affects the cost of sending a piece of email.
Rob Bernard, Chief Environmental Strategist of Microsoft has. In a recent talk he gave, he mentioned that there is potential for regulation by the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) that would force publicly traded companies to divulge their carbon footprints and maybe even detail how those numbers are calculated. This makes the average CFO start asking pointed questions of their Information Technology Department, who in turn may look to Microsoft for answers. Did you know that the IT industry uses about the same energy as the airline industry? That's why this matters, and why Microsoft has a team whose mandate is to think about the environmental impact of the Information Technology industry, in ways both subtle and grandiose.
Bernard also said "Our goal is to reduce the impact of our operations and products and to be a leader in environmental responsibility." One of the initiatives they have taken in the pursuit of this cause is to develop next-gen best practices for modeling and measuring the energy required to do various things related to information technology. When you sum these tasks up on a really large scale, it turns out a lot of barrels of oil and a lot of carbon emissions can result. To gain some perspective on the numbers here, Microsoft and chip maker Intel partnered with Christopher L. Weber, Jonathan G. Koomey,and other researchers at Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to compare methods of delivering music to a consumer. They looked at a total of 6 ways to get the job done, ranging from pure downloads, to downloading and then storing on locally burned CDs in a jewel box, to traditional retail store purchases, and so on.

Graphs excerpted from THE ENERGY AND CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS OF DIFFERENT MUSIC DELIVERY METHODS, a paper by Christopher L. Weber, Jonathan G. Koomey and H. Scott Matthews © 2009
You can read the 24 page white paper here , but in summary there's a lot of energy expended by the manufacture of plastics, or driving a few miles to the store, so by downloading you can save 40% of the energy and 80% of the emissions.

Objective ratings can help some

Bravo for that quantifiable demonstration of how superior the Internet model is, but the study also showed that the amount used by your computer and the Internet infrastructure in these scenarios is not trivial either. Whether it be for downloading a song, searching the web, or sending email, each electronic chore has its cost in terms of the environment. It may be less than old-fashioned ways, but we're still going to need to keep tabs on it, and keep the IT industry from becoming a larger carbon burden than it already is. According to Gartner Inc., the Information and Communications Industry now is the source of 2% of the world's emissions, and data centers account for 23% of that. So clearly it's still worthwhile to address the carbon footprint of the IT system, which is not yet as small as it can be, if proper steps are taken. The question is, how do we measure our progress and determine which steps are worth taking?

Perhaps one answer lies in the simple philosophy of buying greener hardware. When a smart consumer goes shopping for a refrigerator or other major appliance they may look at the EnergyStar rating on it. This labeling system helps buyers to compare one model to another and better understand what the total cost of ownership for each choice will be. Now the EPA has turned its attention to the rating of servers, and they are also seeking broader information to help grade different infrastructure elements in a data center on their own EnergyStar type of scale. They do this because studies have found that showing the user in an easy to grasp visual way what their usage patterns are, helps them to modify their electrical consumption by usually 10-15%.

At the same event where Rob Bernard spoke, Andrew Fanara of the ENERGY STAR® program at the EPA, quoted an article from March 13, 2009's US News and World Report which claimed that "By 2012 Virginia based Dominion Power estimated that fully 10% of all the electricity it sends to northern Virginia will be gobbled up by [the region's] data centers." This means that we don't just have to think about how heating our homes and driving our cars impacts the environment. How our electronic footprint in the world uses up carbon may be up to others, not ourselves, but this theme can't be ignored by the people charged with managing that data anymore.

These observations were made at the Grand Opening of the newly renovated Enterprise Engineering Center on Microsoft's Redmond, WA campus, July 15th, 2009. Enttec was invited to attend because of an innovation they were debuting that utilizes some of our technology to achieve a very worthy goal.

EEC - Enterprise Engineering Center

You may be familiar with Microsoft's Windows Operating Systems, and their Office applications, but perhaps not with Microsoft Server and the Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC). The EEC is, to the IT world, much like a previsualization suite is to the Entertainment Lighting world. That is, their biggest customers who have the most at stake when a new software revision needs to be deployed, reserve the EEC for a few weeks, to configure it much like a miniature version of their own huge data centers located in some remote place. Then they use it as a test-bed to see if everything works, and how it can be improved before it goes into Production. Microsoft's Kevin Engman, EEC Product Manager, explained further that “There is no cost to our customers, partners or product groups to use the EEC. The costs a customer or partner is responsible for is T&E.” When you see firsthand what the EEC looks like, you appreciate that fact a lot more. If the lighting previsualization software makers of the world gave you access on their dime to state of the art suites in which to use their software, for as long as it took to program your show, that would perhaps be comparable. (And this is not to say that they don't go a ways in that direction for their best customers, but the difference in scale is staggering.)

Data Center of the Future

When you set out to build the "Data Center of the Future" as Microsoft did at the EEC, you will not want to ignore how you light it. Microsoft's Joshua Adams , a Program Manager at the EEC, has designed a system which they call IRIS, the Integrated Rack Illumination System (patent pending). An energy efficiency study of that lighting hasn't been fully completed yet, but I think by going to LEDs, they have certainly made some nice improvements compared to halogen bulbs which many rack mounted power sources used to feature, at least as far as lumens per watt go. Then a functional study about footcandle distribution and how it impacts workflow will probably show thumbs up for the design of their integrated LED solution, which deployed 6 feet worth of Traxon 12SMD fixtures lining each side of the rack's door frame. That makes working on the inside of the rack easier, as a distributed ambient glow can be had with virtually nonexistent shadows, when the lightsource has been spread out over 12 linear feet. That's a good start for list of improvements, but does it provide the WOW factor that Microsoft has been evoking since the EEC reopened, from their customers and from their partners alike? For that, you'd have to look at the way they are controlling these fixtures with DMX, and what the values or Red Green and Blue being sent to them can signify.

Real-time data into color values

Josh wrote a custom application which reads data from a software program called PI (made by OSISoft) and converts that real-time data into color values that can be displayed with the Traxon LED fixtures. This data can be about power consumption at each location in the rack, temperature, humidity, CPU cycles, memory available, network traffic, etc. Once he sends the packets in Art-Net format, an Enttec ODE receives them and converts them into DMX signals for the LED fixture chain to digest and respond to. There are approximately 600 servers spread through two glass enclosed display areas where the Rittal server racks are located in “pods” and inside these racks is where IRIS is located and illuminates the servers. Currently the LEDs are separately controlled every linear foot, but in future implementations discussions are underway to increase the fine control so that each rack unit slot could be its own color

At the Grand Opening event, Adams demonstrated a few of the major scenarios he intends to make available to their customers during an engagement, including Temperature Mode, CPU Mode, and Power Mode. Others are still under development, but have clearly been outlined for future roll-out. This was received very enthusiastically by the audience, a combination of Microsoft executives and guests, and representatives of most of the companies whose equipment went into this infrastructure for the EEC. Name tags sported such corporate monikers as Raritan (racks and power measurement) Eaton (power distribution) Rittal (cooling system) OSISoft (the PI application which gathers and aggregates all the data about performance and resource allocation) Identity Mine (who developed a terrific user interface for touch computing including the Surface Computer in the EEC's lounge) Traxon (LED fixtures), and of course Enttec.

Partners gather for Reopening

And since it was a party too, Adams couldn't resist showing the guests a couple of humorously slanted display modes that have nothing to do with what is going on inside the servers or the racks. He had some green blips that descended from top to bottom at random seeming intervals which was recognizably paying homage to The Matrix, and a red horizontal chase sequence which he accompanied with the techno beat theme music from Knight Rider, coming out of a makeshift speaker system, which also gave his audience a big grin. We anticipate that if he needs to create Architainment-oriented shows to amuse customers or show off Partners' rack-mounted devices to their prospective customers in the future, he may be able to do even more eye-catching stuff with Enttec LightFactory, but that wasn't installed in time for the Grand Opening, so the choices which he had time to hand-code were more limited.

IRIS System

The real benefit of the IRIS system is not the "wow factor" of course, but the way it can impact corporate bottom lines and the environment in a single revolution. As Andrew Fanara of the EPA said, "if you're measuring it and understanding it, you're probably in a position to do something about it." But just staring at a graph of utilization figures doesn't do the same thing as making people viscerally aware. When they are forced to confront the data just by walking thru the room where their servers are, they can't claim ignorance of the waste that could have been easily eliminated if they were just made aware of it. And they will probably want to do something about it for the satisfaction of turning the rack colors more green, in a sort of virtual reality/video game hybrid with the real world.

Surface Computer

Microsoft's Sr. Business Development Manager for the EEC, Steve Cole, raved about the IRIS system as heralding in the potential for Data Center administrators to practice "Management by Walking Around."Instead of being anchored to a console in a control room somewhere, they can wander the aisles where the racks are located, and notice trends in a non-abstract, directly correlated way. One of the tools you will find in the EEC is a Surface Computer. This glass covered table has a very large touch-screen interface, and it is connected to the entire infrastructure in the Data Center. You can use it to monitor numeric data, view historic graphs about performance and efficiency of the servers related to your engagement, and of course, to make changes in the configuration of the equipment you're using. With the large tabletop area of the Surface Computer, different people can be looking at different servers or different data about them at the same time, and this information could also be piped down the hall to one of the labs where they are set up to run their tests, or to one of the kiosk-style wall mounted touch screens throughout the EEC.

Paging Neal Stephenson: your multiverse is ready

In bestselling author Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash he described a mode of existence in cyberspace (or as he called it, the "Multiverse") where large corporate data centers and their proprietary data were seen from the outside as virtual buildings or large architectural-scaled sculptures. If one of his characters were able to cause their avatar in the cyber world to enter such a structure, he would then in theory have access to the data it contained. The IRIS system provokes a mental revisit to that story because it has similar associations between the virtual and the real, superimposed upon each other, but the Microsoft innovation is kind of like Stephenson's Multiverse virtual reality turned inside out.
Microsoft has applied for a patent on the IRIS system, but talks with all the partners about how to roll this out in the future for other Data Centers are ongoing.

Top 3 photographic images as well as charts courtesy of Microsoft
bottom 4 photos by Jeremy Kumin. All photos and images copyright their respective owners