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Trading Carbon Credits in the Datacenter
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Concentric's innovative solution is giving it the best of both worlds. Sun recently spoke with Barbara Branaman, Concentric president and general manager, about how Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 CoolThreads servers are instrumental in enabling it to realize massive throughput, while reducing power, cooling, and space requirements. Q: At most enterprises, ballooning datacenter infrastructure is the source of skyrocketing energy consumption. Is that true at Concentric? Branaman: You can add energy price increases to the list of inevitabilities that also include death and taxes. For the last two years, our colocation customers who control their own equipment and power consumption have increased our power bills by up to 25 percent annually. We, in turn, then pass some of these increased bills back to these customers, which is fairly standard in the colocation industry. Q: How do these costs break down? How much of the increases are due to the rising cost of electricity and how much stems from server power requirements? Branaman: I wish I could say that most power cost increases come from inflationary energy markets, but the reality for the last couple of years is that up to 80 percent of this equation derives from increased server density. Companies require ever more processing power. For instance, our colocation customers gain more performance from their existing racks because of increased server density. But it's important to understand that there are other reasons why companies that run email services such as Concentric need more processing power. For one thing, the last two years has seen a twofold increase in the amount of spam — and our servers that provide anti-spam and virus filtering must scale to meet these increases. Beyond the zombies and botnets that cause these annoyances, anything that uses a back-end database adds to server load. Then there are Web 2.0 applications, which are exciting but often aren't written with scalability in mind. All of these occurrences come with costs that add up to increased CPU utilization and larger utility bills — as well as environmental consequences. And performance requirements are only going to increase. Q: How does an enterprise address the costs and environmental issues and still meet performance requirements? Branaman: At Concentric, we try to go straight to the heart of these issues. Hardware virtualization and our patented clustering technologies help us address many of these power concerns by giving our hosted customers the performance they need while granting us more power efficiencies. But the servers we use also need these performance and efficiency qualities — and come with price tags that allow us to remain competitive in the SMB market. Q: What types of server purchase decisions are you making that will have a positive impact on your power-related costs? We take a very close look at how we replace servers that we retire. In 2007, we plan to replace many of our clustered machines with Sun CoolThreads servers — the Sun Fire T1000 and Sun Fire T2000 models — because we've found that these machines allow us to do more computing without increasing power consumption.From an infrastructure cost perspective, Sun Fire T1000 and Sun Fire T2000 servers help us ramp our capacity without having to worry about power scalability, and allay our concerns about energy costs associated with older generation servers. Besides, the price of these servers is very competitive, and that allows us to provide our services with fees attractive to the SMB market. Q: What about other architecture options that combine performance with energy efficiency? Did you investigate any alternatives to the CoolThreads servers? Branaman: Last year we investigated CoolThreads servers along with other alternatives for increasing performance and scaling back power use. Ultimately, we decided to go with CoolThreads servers for a couple of compelling reasons. First, we have a long and rewarding relationship with Sun that dates back to the early 1990s. Secondly, we simply could not find any other machines capable of handling a heavy transactional environment at such low rates of power draw. Ultimately, the Sun architecture was suited for our applications. With 32 compute threads per multithreading processor, a single CoolThreads server acts like 32 distinct servers. As a result, a single CoolThreads server can replace five to eight existing servers that require energy for operation and cooling. Since our software platform is extensively multithreaded, we are able to very effectively utilize the CoolThreads servers. Q: Are your customers also migrating toward CoolThreads servers? Branaman: Yes, some of our colocation customers are showing up with T1000 and T2000 servers. But we don't control what kind of equipment customers bring into the datacenters — as long as the servers meet safety and liability standards. In fact, many of our customers come to us because they have high power consumption requirements that our competitors can't meet. We can devote the power savings we get from our CoolThreads servers to make up for the extravagant power demands of our customers — almost like we're trading carbon credits in the datacenter. Plus, our customers get other benefits from our use of CoolThreads servers. We run a lot of virtual machines that host applications, such as ecommerce stores. During the holidays last December, we discovered that we could simply use a single T2000 to replace clusters responsible for handling transaction traffic for many of our customers. In fact, the customers aren't even aware that we've been swapping out pieces of our hardware infrastructure, because as far as they're concerned, the system just continues to work as they expect. Q: What other infrastructure challenges does Concentric face in 2007? Cooling is a big issue, and something we're addressing with CoolThreads servers. Go to one of our server cages, put a hand on just about any server, and the box will feel very warm. But place a hand on a T1000 or a T2000, and the box will be cool to the touch. This means that we don't have to worry about these new boxes straining our climate control systems. Q: Do the utility companies supplying you with power know about your recent successes in energy reduction? Branaman: Power companies have their own capacity planning issues to worry about, which is why some utilities actually ask us to minimize server use between the hours of 3:00 and 6:00 in the afternoon. That's not going to happen, of course, because we can't tell our customers to expect decreased services during an exceptionally busy part of the business day. As a result, we're currently investigating the possibility of installing solar panels on our rooftops. The tax credits available make this an attractive possibility for reducing the amount of power we draw from the grid. Q: What about the possibility of new regulations covering datacenter power consumption? Branaman: The possibility of new legislation regulating energy draw in datacenters seems very likely. At the end of last year, Congress resoundingly voted to have the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study how datacenters can best save energy. The focus, unsurprisingly, will be on servers. What the government will conclude is anyone's guess, but the EPA will discover a lot of inefficient machines out there. The issue is not so much potential regulations, but rather how well written the legislation will be. It's very possible that companies running datacenters will discover new regulations on the federal, state, and municipal levels of government in the near future, and these companies better be prepared. We're convinced that we're ready to meet new regulatory mandates — as well any new power challenges as the year progresses. About Barbara Branaman |
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Like many organizations,