How is a green data center trained?

--Interview with data center energy efficiency expert Roger R.schmidt

Dr. Roger R.schmidt, who has worked for 35 years at IBM, has more than 30 years of experience in mainframe thermal design and engineering management in IBM, and he is not only a member of the IBM Research Institute, the IBM Institute of Technology, or a member of the National Engineering Institute, but also the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Senior member. Recently, Roger appeared in the "IBM Wisdom Cloud Data Center Summit Forum" to China's IT people to introduce IBM's data center to improve energy efficiency in the latest research results. After the meeting, the reporter also had the opportunity to interview the data center in the field of energy efficiency technology "Montana".

Global Vision is critical

Uptime Cato defines four metrics that measure whether the data center is "green", namely IT system design and construction, it hardware asset utilization, IT hardware efficiency, and the general management cost of the physical infrastructure of the room. These four indicators can be seen, a multi-pronged, all-round consideration is the best way to achieve the green energy-saving data center. And Roger also said that IBM has been particularly focused on the global vision, whether it is IBM's own technology in the field of data centers, or the provision of various IT services to data center users. At the summit, Roger demonstrated IBM's IT infrastructure energy efficiency strategy for data center users (Figure 1). The figure clearly shows IBM advocacy and can help users improve data center energy efficiency from multiple perspectives such as data center consolidation, virtualization, application consolidation, and more advanced cooling technologies.

"Figure 1" IT infrastructure energy efficiency strategy

However, Roger mainly studies cooling systems, such as fans, or pumps and compressors used in hydraulic cooling. But in terms of cooling, Roger says, IBM is also emphasizing global cooling design, multivariable design and multidisciplinary design. "To reduce the server's energy consumption, we need to understand the server's processor, memory, fan, and other components of the operation, comprehensive consideration, in order to design a server with the best performance power ratio," he said. ”

Realize fine operation

In order to build a high energy efficiency data center, we must master the actual performance of the data center and do fine operation. This means that data center operators need to be able to accurately measure the power consumption of each system in the data center, monitoring and automatic analysis of micro environment such as humidity and temperature, being able to handle abnormal situation automatically through "equipment linkage control", setting up various energy-saving operation modes, and being able to understand energy consumption in real time and monitor by class; Ability to understand data center equipment operation, etc.

There is no doubt that the refinement of operations requires the use of various tools. IBM also provides IPDU (Intelligent Power allocation unit), MMT (Mobile measurement Marvell), AEM (energy manager) and other hardware and software tools to help data center operators in real-time monitoring and improvement of data center energy consumption.

Roger R.schmidt, Dr.

Roger introduced among other things the MMT. MMT, a technology developed by IBM for data Center environmental monitoring, has now developed into a second generation. MMT by deploying a large number of sensors on temperature, humidity, pressure, flow and other monitoring, and can provide air-conditioning, energy efficiency, asset management, distribution, battery, fire control, providing water leakage detection, its core is the measurement, modeling analysis and management of these three traditional sense of relatively independent parts, organically integrated into a whole, Form a benign loop of control loops.

When reporters asked how many sensors were needed for a data center, Roger bluntly replied: "If it's only for monitoring temperature and humidity, then we have a clear experience of the location and number of sensors deployed, but it remains to be seen how to deploy the sensors for monitoring corrosion of equipment." "But Roger admits that monitoring and protection of corrosion is becoming more and more important because the EU electrical and electronic equipment waste Directive (WEEE) and the Dangerous Material Restrictions Directive (RoHS) have prohibited the use of lead in solder for electronic products and silver solder instead, but silver is susceptible to sulphides (e.g. smog) and chlorides ( such as seawater) react, resulting in an increase in the failure rate of IT equipment. So IBM is also stepping up research in this area.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)