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I came across an interesting project that University of Michigan is doing called PowerNap
Basically the goal of the project is to put servers to sleep quickly when they are idle and wake them up quickly when they are called for again.
Here are some interesting quotes from the article:
"The Environmental Protection Agency expects the energy consumption of the nation's data centers to exceed 100 billion kWh by 2011, for an annual electricity cost of $7.4 billion. Those figures are about twice what they were in 2006, when data centers already drew more electricity than 5.8 million U.S. households."
"For the typical industrial data center, the average utilization is 20 to 30 percent. The computers are spending about four-fifths of their time doing nothing," Wenisch said. "And the way we build these computers today, they're still using 60 percent of peak power even when they're doing nothing."
It's a well recognized problem, I think. But I've yet to see an effective solution. I hope PowerNap will become one by itself. I think such technology can achieve its full potential by coordinating with not only operating systems but also applications such as Citrix infrastructure. For example, the applications can help making more intelligent decisions of where to route the traffic to increase the chance and duration that a server can be turned into a power saving mode. Today Citrix's products drive a large share of DataCenter work load, I think Citrix can play an important role in addressing this important issue.
I led an experimental project called PowerSmart not too long ago. The basic idea is to funnel the load to a smaller set of servers so that the rest of the servers can be powered off during off peak hours. But the project was suspended due to lack of resources. The good news however is that the development team has picked up the concept and is working on something better. I will blog more once I get clearance to do so.
What I am curious about is how the bad economy is going to affect the investment on "Green IT technologies". According to the articles, it sounds like saving energy in the data centers may still make sense as far as return on investment is concerned even in today's economy. What do you think?
| Do you think companies will invest in Data Center Power Saving technology in today's environment? | Choose |
|---|---|
| yes |  |
| no | |
Of course, there are many variables in making investment decisions. I would appreciate it if you could elaborate in the comment section.
Here is another article I found titled "digital Diet - Computing industry gets serious about energy conservation" that offers additional data.
Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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Citrix PowerSmart Utility is created to help XenApp users conserve energy. To learn more about this project, please visit the project site.
To try out the utility however requires access to physical servers with certain capabilities, such as HP ILO2 support for example. I understand not everyone has easy access to these machines. To make it easier for people to understand the utility, I created a short demo video. The video shows how to configure this utility and see it in action.
The HP team who helped with testing the Citrix PowerSmart Utility just released a new white paper explaining how the utility adds value to HP Integrated Lights-Out(iLO) 2 technology. The white paper also includes some interesting data about power and cooling cost. You can find the white paper at HP web site here.
I just updated the Citrix PowerSmart Utility user guide based on some feedbacks I received from our users. Thanks! This is a living document. Your suggestion or comments are welcome!
| Is the user guide helpful? | Choose |
|---|---|
| Yes | |
| No | |
| Would you prefer an HTML version of user guide? | Choose |
|---|---|
| Yes | |
| No | |
A colleague pointed me to an article that talks about how much power data centers are consuming. The number is staggering.
"The electricity used by servers in the U.S. -- including servers, cooling, and auxiliary equipment -- was approximately 45 billion kWh, resulting in total utility bills amounting to $2.7 billion in 2005"
"The study goes to project that, based on current trends, worldwide server consumption from 2005 to 2010 would require an additional capacity equal to more than 10 additional 1000 MW power plants."
And at the end the author suggested "Don't forget to turn off the lights when you leave the office at the end of the day." Although it is a big challenge to solve the overall power consumption issue, there are relatively simple steps we can take that have potentially big payoff. It's the same simple idea this Citrix PowerSmart Project is based on.
Here is the link to the article.
We released the Citrix PowerSmart Utility for Presentation Server just before the holiday. Now that people are coming back to work mode, I hope more people will have the opportunity to try out this utility. We want to make it easier for users to exchange ideas and ask questions. Please use the MFCOM user forum to post PowerSmart related questions.
Shawn Bass wrote a good blog about the new PowerSmart Utility
In his blog, he explained his take on our choice of of using WinRm and server vendors's out of band management products. It's a good read.
One thing I need to clarify is that it is fairly simple to configure this version of PowerSmart to power on HP servers if you follow the user guide. We'd like to hear your experience and improve the tool and its documentation.
Shawn was right that if you just want to give the tool a quick try without reading much, the out of the box default configuration will allow you to try it without much restriction. It will even work in a virtualized environment. Please see the minimum requirement section of the download page. The trade-off however is that this default configuration won't power on servers. A good default power on mechanism is hard to find because user environments are likely to be very different. The included HP script won't work with IBM servers for example. We thought this default is a safer option and it can lead the users to think about the best way to power on servers. Plus this default makes it easier for users to have an alternative mechanism to power on servers. For example, users can use windows scheduler to schedule a script to power on servers. Yes, the HP scripts we provided can be easily modified to do so.
We thought about using Wake On LAN as default. But we soon realized that it has many limitations too. Please see the FAQ page for more details. However If you know WOL well or you can get some experts such as Shawn to help, it may very well work for you. I heard a large company had successfully used WOL to save millions of dollars by powering off idle desktops. In the data center, I expect administrators may have more control over the servers and thus WOL may have a higher chance to be useful.
Please share your experience with others so that we can benefit from each other.
The wait is over. I am happy to announce that Citrix PowerSmart Utility is available for download now at this newly designed Developer Network site. Please visit this page for more information and to download the utility. Be sure to check out the related page section for the FAQ page page and new idea page page.
The new site makes it so much easier to post new projects. I love it. Please try it out. I hope you like it too. I've even left the FAQ page open so that you can edit directly yourself.
A great platform is of no use if no one is using it. We'd love to hear from you and we hope the new platform makes it easier.
I've also posted the same information at my blog post at official citrix blog site. Going forward, I guess I will post more CDN specific information here and general information at Citrix blog site and cross reference. It's the power of the web...
Many thanks to everyone who have contributed to this project!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Ray Yang
I am happy to announce that Citrix PowerSmart Utility is available for download at the new Citrix Developer Network web site now. Please visit this page for more information and to download the utility. Be sure to check out the related page section for the FAQ page and new idea page.
Many thanks to everyone who have contributed to this project!
We'd love to hear from you. The new Wiki based Citrix Developer Network is cool. Please check it out. I've even left the FAQ page open so that you can edit directly yourself.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Ray Yang