Green Datacenter Initiative
Talking of IASA conferences (see last post), one of the areas in IT infrastructure architecture that I see becoming exciting is the “Green Datacenter”. A colleague of mine, Lewis Curtis, recently blogged about the evangelism work that he is doing in this area. He mentions that Michael Manos (who leads Microsoft’s internal datacenter work) has a keynote at the Atlanta and Washington DC IASA events.
I see one of the big challenges for green computing today being not what can be managed, but what can be measured. With many of today’s hardware and software it’s still very difficult to determine the exact power consumption for particular components in a system. For example, I can tell the power usage of a server by placing a monitor on the external AC cable, but how do I break down that data? How do I determine whether the majority of the consumption is coming from the CPU, Disk Array, PCI bus etc.? Moreover, how can I report this information to applications such that they can take advantage of this?
We can see the beginnings of this from a number of startups, one of which is LocalCooling. They have a downloadable desktop application for Windows XP that determines your desktop consumption based on a preset configuration, which then hooks into the desktop at the ACPI APIs to adjust battery usage etc. As we advance in both the hardware specifications, and the power managements APIs exposed by operating systems, it should only be a matter of time before we can accurately look at power consumption at the server level in the datacenter.
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