August 18, 2011 - Half Moon Bay, CA - Samsung in partnership with Dell held thier first annual CIO event in CA. The event is the first of 4 worldwide events that are planned. The theme of the event is the greening of the data center, and the challenges/options that they face. The speakers were not your typical technology speakers, rather it was a very balanced, yet eclectic group of speakers.
The speakers included Samsung SSI (Memory division), Google, VMWare, Dell, Facebook, Microsoft, SAP, Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI), and a closing keynote from Steve Westley. The event was opened by President of Samsung Semiconductor Charlie (Young Chang) Bae.
The talks at the event were showing the technology, innovation, straight forward engineering and results that come from these efforts towards reducing energy use. A surprising duality in all the discussions, was the financial positions along with the engineering performance, actually improves with these efforts, rather than being shortcut as is often the case when “reducing operating costs”.
Korea & Samsung Lead Green Initiatives
Samsung is leading the way for green energy solutions as part of Korea’s $21B in green energy initiatives. Their major contributions to reducing power consumption in data centers is through the creation of new low power, high performance DDR3 memory (4GB density, 30nm technology and 1.35v operation) and their SATA II (3.0Gb/s) SSD drives. These drives provide a 60X performance improvement on IOPS while delivering a 75% reduction in active mode power vs traditional SAS 15K rotating disk HDDs. The Samsung SSDs, are rated at 2M hrs of MTBF so they are well suited to data center applications.
On data center architectures, software and configuration, Dell, Google, VMWare, Microsoft, and SAP discussed optimizations and ways to determine improvements in operating cost of the data center. Microsoft, in association with Dell, showed thier new “ambient air” data center built with the extender operating range servers from Dell. The devices are now rated up to 113F operation, which means the majority of the US can provide open air operation without the need for chillers to cool the equipment.
In addition to these companies, there were two organizations that presented - CSCI and OpenCompute.org as presented by Facebook. CSCI showed their progress toward thier goal of eliminating 54M tons/yr of CO2 emissions from IT and data centers. Their progress since thier inception in 2007 is 32M metric tons and partnership with over 280 companies actively incorporating their goals in to thre new IT product designs. An overview of the recommended efficiency areas is shown in the following figure. A basis of the group is that IT is holistic system that has all stages interrelated, so any minor improvements cascade through the ecosystem.
CSCI Holistic Data Center View
Facebook described their new program OpenCompute.org which is a community based organization to share ideas, technical information, and results for the creation of higher throughput and higher efficiency data centers and computing. Their initial contribution is the full scale designs of their power supplies, motherboards, chassis, racks and bldg design for their new Prineville data center. They tackled the problem of power efficiency by address the power supply and conversion aspects, as others were addressing the components directions. Their solution reduces total power loss from the 11-17% range to the 2% range, by bring high voltage supplies directly to the server and then having a local step down converter for running the motherboards. The motherboard designs have also been optimized for air flow and dual processor architectures. Full BOM and CAD for these designs is available from OpenCompute. The resulting implementation has created a data center with a PUE of 1.077 in Q2 of 2011. They encourage people to participate in the community and attend the Open Compute Summit on Oct 27, 2011 in San Jose.
Facebook OpenCompute Data Center Power Optimization