Green has reached the server room.


Companies here that rely heavily on computer servers are turning to some high-tech strategies to battle the growing hunger such servers have for electrical power and to deal with the massive amounts of heat they generate. Among those strategies, IT departments are buying sophisticated servers that each can operate as and do the work of dozens of virtual servers. The machines use kinetic energy from a spinning flywheel as a backup power supply, eliminating the need for banks of batteries.


Just as computers have gotten smaller and more powerful, that fuels the demand for more energy, says Octavio Morales, co-founder of Liberty Lakes TierPoint LLC.


TierPoint operates a 28,000-square-foot server farm that houses servers for clients such as the University of Washington, Coldwater Creek Inc., and many othersand has instituted a number of green initiatives aimed at cutting power consumption and heat generation there, Morales says.


He says the IT world has been challenged by soaring demand to handle and store exponentially growing amounts of data, and to back up that data in case of disaster, all of which requires more servers and more data-storage devicesand results in far more energy consumption. TierPoint, Morales says, is committed to doing whatever it can to reduce that power consumption and be environmentally responsible.


Chris Green, director of IT infrastructure systems at Washington Trust Bank, of Spokane, says going green was partly a pragmatic decision at the banks Spokane server farm.


Part of the reason I got us going in this initiative is our power consumption was reaching full capacity, he says.


One technological advance thats having an impact on the industry is whats called server virtualization, which is a method of putting a number of individual server functions into one, larger-capacity machine, he says. Virtualization uses a powerful computer and software to create the illusion of separate servers so numerous programs can operate on the single big server simultaneously.


The reason that can be done, he says, is that servers typically have only periodic bursts of activity, but draw power continuously, whether theyre processing data or not. With virtualization, a number of virtual servers run on the same device, sharing both the servers computing capacity and power load.


Morales says virtualization can be up to 80 percent more power efficient than running a bank of numerous servers.


He says many companies need to have dedicated servers for several functions. For instance, one server might run database software, while another handles e-mail, and another shares big design files for research and development. Even a medium-sized business could need 30 or 40 different servers to handle separate functions, Morales says.


Though it takes some time to set up the virtual partitions for virtual servers, the maintenance costs of such an arrangement ultimately are lower than with more machines, he says.


Green says Washington Trust ultimately will save a lot of money not only with reduced power consumption, but in lower hardware costs by virtualizing most of its servers.


Washington Trusts Spokane server farm houses about 85 percent of the 240 servers that serve the banks branches throughout the region. Green says that about 140 of the banks 240 servers now reside on half a dozen machines, each of which accommodates between 30 and 40 virtual servers. Green says each big server that can handle a number of virtual servers costs about $25,000. Such servers typically have four central processing units, compared with one or two processors on a conventional server. While thats a much-higher upfront cost for a single machine, Green says that because such a server handles the work of 30 to 40 conventional servers, it saves the cost of buying that many of the conventional devices at $4,000 to $6,000 each.


In addition to the equipment cost savings, one of the primary reasons the bank started moving toward virtualization was that it was reaching capacity in the amount of electrical power it could provide to its servers, Green says.


We were faced with increasing capacity or shrinking demand for electricity, he says. Overall, he says virtualization has saved the company money and resources in a number of ways, from what it spends on hardware to reducing its power consumption by about 25 percent.


Kirt Runolfson, president of Interlink Advantage Inc., of Spokane, says computer manufacturers also are designing processors that use between 10 percent and 20 percent less energy, so just keeping equipment up-to-date helps the company reduce its relative power consumption over time.


If someone has a bunch of older serversthree years old or olderthey might be using twice the power of a new computer, Runolfson says. Interlink Advantage recently incorporated separately from a Web design company it was part of and still shares a building with, called Alt 29 Design Group, and designs network systems and provides colocation, Web hosting, and outsourced IT services for companies here.


One way the new processors reduce energy consumption is by automatically ramping down the speed of the processor if the server isnt receiving many data-processing requests, Runolfson says. When the workload increases, the processor ramps back up to full speed to meet demand.


Runolfson says computer makers also are making smaller, more efficient hard drives, essentially the size of a laptop hard drive, for servers. He says those drives are smaller and it takes less energy to spin them.


Saving on temperature control


The other big energy challenge IT departments face is dealing with heat. The powerful processors in computer servers generate large amounts of heat, and create significant need for server-room cooling. That, says Morales, is another energy cost.


For every dollar you spend to power a server, you can expect to spend $1.50 to $2 to cool the server, Morales says. TierPoints server rooms are set up with servers facing each other in rows, creating so-called hot aisles where the backs of the servers are hot, and cold aisles along the servers fronts, with air return ducts positioned over the hot rows to help remove the hot air from the room and funnel it through the air-conditioning units.


Washington Trusts IT department designed a hot- and cold-air handling duct system, which is set up in a similar fashion to TierPoints, and had it installed for only a few thousand dollars, Green says. He says that doing so, in combination with virtualization, has helped the bank reduce its cooling requirements by about 25 percent.


All electrical energy turns into heat, which has to be extracted, he says. Green says the reduction in how often the air conditioning kicks in is noticeable.


SprayCool Inc., a Liberty-Lake based company formerly called ISR Inc., is the maker of an electronics cooling system used mainly in military applications. It works by spraying a fine mist of liquid on the electronics in a closed system. The liquid evaporates, cooling the electronics.


Leading-edge technology


Some green initiatives are still in development, or are very expensive to implement. One such cutting-edge technology is a new kind of uninterrupted power supply system that TierPoint has installed in its newest server room.


Though expensive to buy and installat about $1.6 millionthe system is expected to save the company money that it would spend on the replacement of expensive banks of batteries typically used for backup power. The new system uses a flywheel that spins at about 7,700 rotations per minute inside a near-perfect vacuum. When needed, the flywheel can generate about 3 megawatts of kinetic energy, which can be used to power temporarily the many virtual servers there in case of a power outage.


Morales says that backup power is needed only for the minute or so it takes for the facilitys emergency diesel generator to kick in.


TierPoint still has a battery-based backup system in its original server room. The dozens of batteries in that system all have to be replaced every 18 to 24 months, Morales says.


Runolfson says large companies such as Google are experimenting with direct current, or DC , electrical distributors, which eventually could lead to substantial power savings. In a typical computer, a power supply converts alternating current (AC) to DC to power the machine. Creating a single DC power source in a server facility to power all of the equipment could produce significant energy savings, he says.


Runolfson says some of the new technologies, such as the flywheel system, might be a little ahead of the Spokane market.


Very few customers in Spokane are paying a premium to be greener, but they are attracted by advances such as virtualization that reduce not only power consumption, but maintenance costs, he says. The power savings is an added benefit to other benefits.


Morales says there are other strategies that could be employed at server farms such as TierPoint, including using heat-recovery systems to pull heat from a server room to heat the rest of a building during cooler months and, during those same months, pulling cold air from outside to cool the servers. He says some systems are being tested in server environments, but issues such as cleaning outdoor air must be resolved before such a system becomes practical and cost-efficient enough to invest in. Still, he says, in a cold winter area such as northeast Washington such a system could become a reality.


We already have air handlers repiping and circulating the air, so it would make sense to harness the capacity to reduce energy use, he says.