Feb 22 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Victor Godinez The Dallas Morning News

The technology industry is ready to go green, but it's got nothing to do with dodging criticism from activists or regulators.

What has tech firms nervous is a simple bottom-line calculation: Electricity is getting way too expensive.

And one of the biggest energy gobblers for many tech firms such as Plano-based Electronic Data Systems Corp. is perhaps the least publicized: the data center.

These dark caves crammed with humming servers -- the lifeblood of the Internet and countless corporate applications -- are devouring more electricity at a time when the price of power is surging.

"This is a very active topic in the community these days," said Ray Cline, vice president of EDS' infrastructure service line. "Most publications are looking at this. Analysts are asking questions about it. Customers are asking questions about it."

Taming the data center won't be easy, but corporations such as EDS, private think tanks and the federal government are all highlighting the urgency of the problem.

In a report submitted to Congress last August, the Environmental Protection Agency said that data centers accounted for 1.5 percent of all electricity consumption in the U.S. in 2006, or as much power as the state of Wisconsin used, at a price tag of $4.5 billion.

EDS didn't provide its annual electric bill to run its servers.

'Red hot' demand

Curt Holcomb, who specializes in finding data centers for corporate customers as senior vice president of mission critical solutions at real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle in Dallas, said the demand for new centers is nearly insatiable.

"The demand is red hot, and it's continuing to increase," he said. "What is being built right now doesn't come close to meeting demand."

The amount of electricity used in data centers doubled from 2000 to 2006 and could double again by 2011, the EPA said, as new centers are built and the servers inside those facilities get more powerful.

Jeff Wacker, an EDS fellow and futurist, noted that it now costs nearly as much to power a server for three years -- the typical lifespan -- as it does to buy the hardware.

He said that electricity use in data centers has been rising for years, due to more powerful computer processors that required more juice.

But efforts to address the problem were half-hearted when energy was still fairly cheap.

"When we had this fad before, we didn't have the economic incentives that went with it," he said. "There were temporary economic incentives at the gas pump, but when the prices at the pump came down, everybody went back to their wasteful activities."

With those financial incentives now large and growing, tech companies are looking at a variety of ways to shrink their energy expenses.

One approach adopted by titans such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo has been to build giant data centers along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest to tap into cheap hydroelectric power.

Mr. Holcomb said other regions with relatively cheap power that are luring data centers are Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix, Denver and northern Virginia.

Easy solutions

But EDS and others are also looking at a more systemic overhaul of the data center.

Ken Brill, founder and executive director of the Uptime Institute, which consults on tech issues, said there are some fairly simple changes that could dramatically reduce power use in data centers.

One big drain, he said, is old servers that are left in place even after they've been replaced by new equipment.

"In the typical data center, up to 30 percent of the equipment could just be plain old turned off," he said. "However, figuring out which 30 percent is now a big problem, because there are no records. So the safest thing is to leave it all on."

Another source of electricity savings is a more complex tool called virtualization.

Instead of dedicating one server per customer, virtual servers are partitioned so that each machine handles work for a variety of different applications.

Currently, servers spend the vast majority of their time twiddling their digital thumbs.

"Typically we see that servers have about a 5 to 20 percent utilization rate," Mr. Cline said. "In any other industry, if 80 to 95 percent of your product was going unused, it would be a significant item for you to deal with."

EDS currently manages about 300,000 servers.

Plugging drains

It is also looking at the design of the data center itself.

Much of the power piped into a center, for example, never makes its way into the server itself.

A big chunk goes to running the air conditioning system that cools the servers and prevents them from overheating.

Figuring out how to plug that drain was one of the goals of a workshop hosted by EDS at its Plano headquarters earlier this month.

The event brought together 65 international experts in disciplines such as architecture, air conditioning and electricity to formulate a design for the green, next-generation data center.

The results of the conference and a video documentary of the gathering will be published in a few weeks.

In the meantime, EDS continues to work on the issue at its new Virtual Services Lab, where it is testing ways to cut back on power use.

Mr. Wacker said that one of the design changes that would cut power use in data centers is to use water instead of air to cool the servers.

He acknowledges that overhauling existing data centers is itself an expensive project.

Convincing customers of the benefits is another issue.

Many EDS clients are still reluctant to embrace virtualization, for example.

"Clients are just getting used to virtualization," Mr. Cline said.

"There are concerns about security. There are concerns about performance. And these things are being addressed in the marketplace. Right now, we're often limited by what we can do with what our clients are comfortable with."

Savings add up

The savings could be substantial.

The EPA, in its report, laid out several different scenarios for improved energy efficiency, ranging from moderate changes such as eliminating unused servers and improving the air flow of cooling systems in the data center to more radical proposals such as liquid cooling and full-scale virtualization.

Even the most modest path would cut electricity costs by $1.6 billion by 2011, while the most aggressive approach could chop $5.1 billion off the electricity bill.

Mr. Brill, whose group will name its first "Green IT" corporate award winners at an event in April, said those sorts of numbers cannot be ignored.

"This is not a case of tree huggers," he said. "Doing the right thing for green is also bottom-line profitable."