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The Greening of IT
134 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

Data Center IT and Facilities Management

What is the problem we’re trying to solve?
• Constrained resources (space / power)
• High cost of infrastructure and operations A Green Data Center Energy
• No holistic view of IT and facilities infrastructure Management objective is to:
resources
• Develop innovative solutions strategy
Why is it a problem?
• Implement deployment plans that
• Inhibits revenue growth and responsiveness
integrate IT and facilities infrastructure
• Increased cost of operations reduces • Infuse state-of-the-art hardware and
competitiveness software technologies
• Limits ability to drive intelligent business
• Optimize economically feasible and
decisions around E2E resource management
environmentally responsible data center
designs and operations.
What is the high-level solution?
• Jointly optimize IT and Facility DESIGN
• Jointly optimize IT and Facility OPERATIONS

ptg
IT Assets Data Center Infrastructure Building Systems
(Servers, storage, network) (UPS, PDUs) (HVAC, power, lighting, security)
Source: IBM Big Green Team
Figure 8.1 Managing data center energy use

Back to the Future—Water-Cooled Servers

Not all IT venders are happy about the back-to-the-future trend to use
water- (or more generally liquid-) cooled servers. IBM produced its last
water-cooled mainframe in 1995. Generally speaking, data center facility
engineers are concerned that water leaks in the data center could be devastat-
ing. In 2008, Sun Microsystems, Inc., indicated that it would no longer use
liquid cooling. That was in significant contrast to 2008 commentary and
product rollouts from IBM, HP, and American Power Conversion Corp.
(APC), among others. In 2008, Sun rebuffed the view that liquid cooling is
necessary now—or even an inevitability in the future. Jeff O’Neal, director of
product marketing for Sun Scalable Systems Group, said liquid-as-an-answer
is inefficient and described it as Band-Aiding a problem that should be
addressed with design at the chip level. “With Niagara, we created a chip
with eight-cores…by keeping those threads busy, we could actually run at a