Publisher squeezing IT energy costs via smart data center design

EBSCOhost is a fee-based research service that provides libraries in North America with access to more than 20 million articles from 20,000-plus journals and magazines, all driven from two data centers in the coastal town of Ipswich, Mass. The data centers are owned and operated by EBSCO Publishing, the second-largest business unit of EBSCO Industries, which is one of the largest privately held firms in the Fortune 500. Michael Gorrell, senior vice president and CIO for EBSCO Publishing, explained that green IT principles are fundamental to helping the company keep up with sales growth averaging 26% per year for the last three years and storage growth of 200% annually, without equivalent growth in computing and data center infrastructure.

Can you give me a sense of what your data centers look like?

We have 400 servers combined and the data centers are about 8,000 square feet combined. We use APC power structure racking systems, which have integrated UPS as well as all the cabinetry, wiring infrastructure and so forth. Both data centers are supported by multiple generators in a series, so if one generator fails there’s another to support it in backup mode. All EBSCO Publishing’s revenue comes from our EBSCOhost service. It’s used worldwide, available 24×7, with zero downtime and zero maintenance windows.

What is driving your green IT initiatives?

We’re good business people and when you spend less on energy, you spend less altogether, so that’s good. And when you spend less on floor space, you have to build fewer buildings. We own our buildings, so that makes good business sense. We’re also very committed environmentally. We’ve done some things that are environmentally proactive, but not necessarily financially attractive. We installed solar panels on our roofs, and because of the area of the country that we’re in, they don’t have kind of payback that we’d normally like to see in a business opportunity, but we felt it was the right thing to do. We just got an award in May from the [Environmental Protection Agency], a commendation for our efforts in the environmental arena. Our market is librarians and libraries and academic institutions, so doing things for the greater good is something that we’re very much in tune with.

To what extent was your rather impressive growth driving some of these initiatives?

When you start adding servers based on the growth that we’re seeing, especially when you add more and more disk storage which is disproportionately big, [you can quickly] run out of floor space. And not only floor space but certain power panels can’t feed any more electricity and HVAC units can’t blow any more BTUs worth of cooling. As we continue to grow, we could see that if we didn’t do something different, we’d be faced with building another data center sooner than we wanted to. If you cut back on the amount of space you’re using by going with smaller blade servers, and do virtualization so you can remove servers altogether, you get better cooling ratios in your data center per square foot and you save money on power. It’s all kind of win, win, win.

What are some of the green power initiatives you’ve already put in place?

On the roofs of two of our three buildings we installed solar panels. Those are fed right into our power system and powers about 20% of one building. That’s not necessarily allocated specifically to IT or the computing infrastructure, but we do use the electricity. And our data centers use about 70% of all the electricity in our facility, and that 70% comes to about $800,000 per year.

We also have outfitted the entire facility with motion-detection lights. Lighting is one of the other big costs in our facility. So when people go home at night, the lights go out automatically. When they come in the morning, the lights come on because the system detects motion. You can’t get much more efficient than that. We also installed in one of the buildings, and in this fiscal year plan to install in the second and third building, a building management system that allows us to tune the temperature based on a schedule, either time of year or time of day ambient temperature. In the data centers, we also incorporate ambient air to augment the cooling, which is especially helpful during the winter months. When it’s cold outside, we can pump cold air from the outside in, and it saves us from firing up our HVAC units, compressors and all that.

What are some of the power initiatives you’re looking at?

We’ve looked at wind turbines. We have a parking garage in our campus and have plans to install two wind turbines on the upper deck of the garage. We’re also looking at something called an Archimedes Screw. We’re right on the Ipswich River and there’s a tidal waterfall where the river meets Ipswich Bay. So we’re thinking of putting an Archimedes type screw, which is a hydro-electrical generation unit, to generate power from the river. The payback on that is not too bad, about four to five years, which is better than solar panels — they’re about eight years. And then we’re also looking at CHP [combined heat and power, or co-generation], which is essentially burning natural materials for fuel, instead of burning oil. The payback on that is really good. The issue for us being able to do it is our physical location. You need to bring in wood chips, basically, and we’re not sure we have the physical space to do that. We also have all the permits and such to get through. So we’re not sure we can do that but we’re definitely looking at it.

Isn’t it kind of a different calculation from a traditional ROI calculation because you get the savings forever, or for the life of the solar panels or hydro screw?

Yes, you have to factor that in. If energy costs triple, then that increases the payback for sure. And the length of the savings, too, is something that’s also part of the calculation, but the first thing we look at is the initial payback.

What about inside the data center — can you talk more about how blades factor in to your green initiative?

For blades, the benefit there is smaller footprint, higher density, so it saves on some square footage but it also consumes less power and generates less heat. Just generally, if you did processor for processor blades vs. the other units, blades are cheaper to run. We’re probably 60% blades now.

The other thing we’re doing that’s similar but with an interesting different dynamic is virtualization. As we approach virtualization, the basic idea is, instead of having three physical machines that aren’t heavily loaded, you have one physical machine that is heavily loaded but has three virtual machines inside. If you just use that 3:1 or 10:1 — there are different ratios you can use depending on the server workload — if you break that down it’s easy to see how you save energy and HVAC. Basically for every three machines, you remove two of them. So boom, there’s savings there. We tend to lease our servers and so, for all the server leases that are up this fiscal year, the 12 months starting in July, we’re not going to replace two-thirds of them. So that’s 67% fewer physical machines in our data center and the energy savings are directly proportional to that.

How far along is your virtualization effort?

It’s in the early stages, but we’re about to ramp up over the next four months. By the time we get done with this fiscal year, we’ll be about 80% as virtualized as we’re going to be. So going from zero to 60 in one fiscal year.

Another thing we’re doing inside the data center that relates to green initiatives is we’re leveraging snap mirror and deduplication technology from Network Appliance.

How does that relate to green?

The basic gist of deduplication is it looks at a block level and if it seems the same pattern in a block, it won’t store that, even if that block may belong to a different file. So you can get a reduction in the amount of storage you use and on the disk itself. We’re just beginning to explore that and we think that’ll be pretty big in, for example, our Microsoft Exchange Server environment. You can imagine in a company of 800 people, where e-mail is the biggest application, when people share files, the same file goes to 10, 20, 50 people. Instead of having that file stored 50 times inside 50 different mailboxes, it’s stored once and 49 other mailboxes just refer to the same block on the disk. We’re interested to see how that can help us.

So the basic idea is less storage and then less power?

Exactly.

Can you talk about the hot aisle/cold aisle design that you use in your data centers?

We moved into the third building about two and a half years ago and one of the reasons was we needed more data center space. When we did that, we had the ability to design the data center from scratch. So one of the things we did was to design it with a hot aisle, cold aisle design which is, according to the data center experts, the most efficient way to design your data center. Computers are all designed to suck air in the front and blow it out the back. So you set up aisles of racks facing each other, with a space in between and blow the cold air coming from air-conditioning units into that aisle. So the backs of our racks face each other and the fronts face each other. That’s how you design a cold aisle, hot aisle. Having cold air flow over computers is more efficient than having warm air, or mid-level air.

So it reduces the load on your HVAC?

Right. And it allows you to get more computers into that same space.

In your recent presentation at Network World’s IT Roadmap event in Boston, you said you’re predicting a 15% reduction in the energy consumed by data centers in 2008. Does that still hold?

That’s conservative. I think we’re going to get higher than 15% based on the projections we have now. Mostly it’s the virtualization that’s going to get us there.

Desmond is events editor for Network World and president of PDEdit, an IT publishing company in Southborough, Mass. Reach him at paul@pdedit.com

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