Simple Ways To Make Your Server Room Green
Did you know that there are simple ways to make your current server room green?
“There are hundreds of areas identified as server rooms or data centers – from small server closets to large enterprise data centers, each with unique needs. Despite differing specifications, one key important conservation practice is to keep servers out of undesignated spaces; they should be housed in a server closet, server room, or data center that adheres to the energy-saving best practices.” – UMICH.edu
The University of Michigan has pointed out simple ways to adjust how your current setup can be adjusted to help you save energy and your environment. They list options for data centers the size of a closet (1 to 2 servers) to Enterprise size (100′s of servers)
Corria Nucci from Informationweek’s Green Computing Webblog points out that one of the best ways to save energy is to consolidate your servers. This option has become popular in recent years due to the power of the recent processors and the ease of “Virtual” environments like VMWare.
Analysts, however, are skeptical about all the new marketing over greener IT. “Many of the answers are things that don’t generate publicity, such as rightsizing the facility and supporting green design principles,” says Steve Wallage, a managing consultant at BroadGroup.
The end result is that companies are not buying into the hype due to cost or lack of supporting data. They just can’t see it helping.
The best answer? IT analysts and vendors both agree it is in metrics: studying power consumption, reallocating server loads, refocusing airflows—and even in simple measures such as shutting off a server that’s not in use.
This can all be done with simple equipment that will help you monitor your server rooms environmental conditions, such as Ravica’s “Used Power Monitor Sensor” and the “Temperature” and “Air Flow” sensors. In the end, these small steps will not only help the world be a little greener and possibly cut down your energy and equipment costs.
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Jim Dougherty aka “Jimmy D”
Lead PreSales Support Engineer and
Netflow Evangelist for Plixer International!
Follow me on Twitter
http://twitter.com/jimmydnet
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Scientists find a way to generate electricity through vibrations
Filed under: Data Center, Intelligent Sensors, environmental monitoring
Scientists have discovered how to make electricity by converting low-frequency vibrations, like simple body movements, the beating of the heart or movement of the wind into energy. The discovery could enable you to charge your iPod or BlackBerry with a wave of your hand. According to researchers at the School of Material Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the findings could also be used for environmental monitoring.
The vibrations from movement is converted into electricity using zinc oxide nanowires. The nanowires generate an electric current when subjected to mechanical stress, according to the American Chemical Society. The researchers presented their findings at the ACS’s annual meeting in March.
The nanowires can be grown on a wide range of surfaces including metals, ceramics, polymers and fabrics.
The researchers believe the discovery could be used by the military to generate electricity for sensors and communication devices when they are far from energy sources, but what is the application for environmental monitoring?
For our purposes, we monitor the environment to ensure that it remains the same so that equipment is not adversely affected by a dramatic change in temperature, for example. In theory, we could use the nanowires to convert the ambient vibrations of the room into electricity and use that to charge the monitoring equipment. Or perhaps set a threshold for the ambient vibrations so that a change in the environment would kick the nanowires to turning on an alarming device.
The nanowires reminded me of metal whiskers or zinc whiskers, a data center manager’s worst enemy. They’re tiny hairs that grow spontaneously on metal surfaces and can cause short circuits. According to Wikipedia, zinc whiskers have been responsible for increased systems failure rates in computer server rooms. They can grow underneath zinc electroplated floor tiles used in raised floors due to the friction when they’re walked on. They can break off disk drives causing head crashes or bearing failures.
They’re a data center manager’s worst nightmare because zinc whiskers wouldn’t be the first thing that would spring to mind when faced with a systems crash in the server room.
My Ravica sensorProbe woke me up! Time for some coffee.
What a morning here at our Network operations center. My cell phone paged me at 2:00 am letting me know that server room 4 was overheating. After I grumbled a few choice words, I got out of bed to see what the issue might be. I also received another page from the air flow probe .
I logged into Denika and then clicked on the SvrRoom4 report group. I pat myself on the back for being super smart. When we set up this server room I made sure to setup reports for the various Ravica probes and complimented them with other related SNMP reports. I have quite a few, port utilization, memory, CPU utilization and most importantly System Temperature.
So I looked at the reports. I drilled down in the historical graph and could see that the air flow sensor saw a steady decline a little after 1:30 am. I then went over to the temp sensor and started to see the temp climb around 1:45 am. The temperature sensor reached the threshold at 1:55 am.
At this point I was a bit puzzled. We had placed the air flow sensor by the cooling unit but the AC voltage detector was reporting fine. That means the environmental fan was running.
I’m lucky, I was the designer of this server room and was adamant about having a security light that I could turn off or on remotely. So I sent the command to turn on the light and then logged into the webcam. The good news is that I could see what happened. We had stacked some cardboard boxes on that wall and one had fallen in front of the vent. That means that fan was running but air couldn’t get out.
The good news is that I was able to find and remedy the problem quickly. The bad news is that I had to get dressed and drive over to the office and move the boxes. I did make sure to stack all the boxes on top of the desk of the person who was supposed to get rid of them in the first place!
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Jim Dougherty aka “Jimmy D”
Lead PreSales Support Engineer and
Netflow Evangelist for Plixer International!
Follow me on Twitter
http://twitter.com/jimmydnet
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