Page 202 -

10: Green IT Case Studies for Universities and a Large Company 167

■ Reduce or eliminate servers being hosted in what is better used as wet
lab or faculty office space, an especially important issue in a space-
constrained New York City location.
■ Encourage sharing of research clusters to more efficiently utilize available
computing cycles.
■ Replace older, less-efficient servers with newer models that take advan-
tage of recent vendor improvements in power efficiency.
■ Use cogeneration. This is planned for a new campus in New York City
and is being researched and prioritized for the main campus.
■ Participate in regional and national consortia, including the New York
State Grid Consortium to further attain the benefits of sharing resources.
■ Investigate cloud computing and outsourcing computational needs to
areas that have abundant renewable power sources, such as hydroelectric
generating facilities.

Green IT Techniques to Be Analyzed and Verified
ptg
Columbia University’s IT staff plans to test several techniques for data
center energy efficiency, applying rigorous testing and measurement disci-
pline—as best as can be accomplished in a live data center, rather than a con-
trolled, artificial laboratory environment. These techniques include the
following:

■ Higher input voltage results in more-efficient operation. Most of
Columbia’s servers are connected to 120V power sources but are capable
of 208V operation.
■ New servers are more efficient than three-year-old and older servers.
Many of the servers are much older.
■ Active server power management (for example, reducing CPU speed) can
result in significant reductions. As is typical of most serve administrators,
BIOS and more advanced software power management techniques have
not been applied to those servers.
■ Cold-aisle containment and ducting improvements for conventional
forced-air cooling systems increase efficiency.
■ In-row cooling technology can be 30 percent more efficient than conven-
tional forced-air cooling. This is a common industry claim.