Along with greater computing capability, businesses have increased demand for storing digital data, both in terms of amount and duration due to new and existing applications and to regulations. In order to be able to retrieve and transport the corresponding exponentially rising amount of data, the data transfers both in the (wired) Internet and wireless networks have been rising at the same speed. Data centers have become the back bone of the digital economy. They represent major investments for their owners and they also cost a huge amount to run and maintain them. They deserve to be well cared for.

According to the Cisco report from 2000 to 2008 the Internet was dominated by peer-to-peer file sharing traffic. This traffic didn’t touch a datacenter. from 2008 most of the Internet traffic has originated or terminated in a datacenter. It is estimated that the global datacenter IP traffic will increase fourfold over the next 5 years with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33 percent during the period 2011 – 2015. During this period the ratio between DC-to-User / DC-to-DC / Internal-DC data traffic will be more or less the same. For 2015 the ratio is estimated on 17%/7%/76%.

DC traffic (c) Cisco

In the same report Cisco is stating that from 2014 more then 50% of all workloads will be processed in the cloud. But in 2015 the traditional datacenters still process 47% of the workload

DC Workload (c) Cisco

According to Oracle’s second ‘Next Generation Data Centre Index’ report businesses are reacting to this data tsunami with a short term increase in outsourced data centre and cloud service use, while planning longer term to build their own in-house data centre facilities. Sustainability is also back on the agenda for 2012 as “businesses react either out of a need for a demonstrable green policy for governance reasons, or to reduce spiraling energy bills related to their IT use”.

Some highlights:

• The proportion of data centre managers who see a copy of the energy bill has risen from 43.2 percent to 52.2 percent.
• More than one third (36 percent) of data centre managers still have no visibility of energy usage, while almost 10 percent of respondents also doubt that anyone else sees a copy of the bill for data centre energy usage.
• Virtualisation of IT hardware is gathering pace in the data centre but remains patchy with only 12 percent of respondents having virtualised more than 70 percent of their IT estate,38 percent have virtualised less than 30 percent.
• Worryingly, almost 39 percent still admit to second guessing future workload requirements. However, the proportion that use advanced analytics or predictions based on historical usage has increased from 39 percent to 50 percent.

Consolidation, Virtualisation, Utilisation (c) Oracle

Combining the outcome of the two reports you can certainly questioning how well the datacenters are prepared for the Zettabyte Data Wave that is coming.

One of the most significant challenges for the IT organisation was and is to coherently manage the quality attributes performance, availability, confidentiality and integrity for the complete IT service stack. Energy usage as a quality attribute is a relative new kid on the block. This ‘Housing’ or site infrastructure attribute is composed of the power, cooling and floor space sub attributes. These attributes are not independent of each other. They form a hidden threshold or hidden ceiling.

To paraphrase Greg Schulz, author of ‘The Green and Virtual Data Center’: “For a given data center these site infrastructure resources are constrained therefore, together, these attributes form a certain threshold. If the demand for IT capacity reaches this threshold, further growth of the IT load is inhibited because of technical (over heating, not enough power) and or financial (excessive capital investment) reasons. In that case IT services are constrained and therefore business growth inhibited, which causes economic penalties and lost opportunities”

Remember that 76% of the Zettabyte Data Wave will be internal datacenter traffic. To anticipate on this coming Zettabyte Data Wave you must manage your datacenter IT infrastructure AND site infrastructure in a coherent and consistent way. What does this Zettabyte Data Wave means for your datacenter in terms of processing power, storage and network capacity? What is the impact on the power consumption and the cooling capacity?

Do you have an appropriate datacenter architecture? And do you have appropriate tools (DCIM software) for integral datacenter management so that you don’t hit that hidden ceiling by surprise?

He walked the talk and fifteen years later after his call for change there were some impressive results:

• Greenhouse gas emissions cut by 82%
• Fossil fuel consumption by 60%
• Cut waste by 86%
• Cut water use by 75%

And at the same time increased sales by 66% and doubled earnings.

In the data center world we have  discussions about energy consumption, E-waste, green IT and we are working on the PUE, WUE and CUE metrics of the Green Grid. But do we have the same kind of impressive results?

In his book “Confessions of a radical industrialist”, Anderson explains how he created a model of profitable sustainability. According to Anderson our industrial system today, inherited from the steam-driven days of the first industrial evolution 18th century, is primarily linear, with “Take-Make-Waste” processes. What does this mean? In short: “materials are extracted from the earth’s crust, transported to manufacturing sites, used to produce products (all materials not part of end product are discarded as waste), then products are transported to users and finally, at the end-of-life, discarded as waste”.

The implicit assumption of this production system is that we have infinite resources. Now we now better, fossil fuels are limited, rare earth elements in electronic components are scarce, water is scarce. So by definition this way of producing is unsustainable. Anderson states in his book that every company has to face three ecological challenges:

• What we take from earth
• What we make and what collateral damage we do in the making of it
• What we waste along the way, from source to the landfill

Within Ray’s company this lead in 1994 to the mission and aim for zero waste and zero environmental impact: Mission Zero or in Ray’s terms climbing Mount Sustainability. To reach this summit of Mount Sustainability the Interface enterprise defined seven paths:

1. Moving toward zero waste
2. Increasingly diminish emissions along the supply chain
3. Increasing efficiency and using more and more renewable energy
4. Closing-loop recycling
5. Resource efficient transportation
6. Creating commitment (sensitivity hook up all along the supply chain
7. Redesign commerce

Nevertheless this clear and distinctive steps, this isn’t an easy ride. Anderson regular quotes Albert Einstein “Problems cannot be solved by the same thinking used to create them”, innovative thinking is key to get results.

In the data center industry we have the same kind of issues as Anderson is describing for the carpet industry. The only difference is that Ray Anderson started already in 1994 with addressing these problems and showed some impressive results.

So why not prepare your self for the new year and read Anderson’s book to get inspiration for your Sustainable Data Center and balancing the complexities of the triple bottom line: people, planet and profits?

Alchemy Plus which hoped to build a multi-million pound data centre in Shetland has gone back to the drawing board, but says it is still keen on doing business in the isles.

Alchemy Plus held talks with Shetland Islands Council in April 2010 as part of research into what might have been a “state-of-the-art” £12 million computing resource housing 300 racks of IT equipment. At the time Alchemy stated that it hoped to have the data farm up and running on the outskirts of Lerwick within 18 months.

Since then things have gone quiet. According to Alchemy chairman Peter Swanson technology in the world of data centres had been moving at breakneck speed. This dramatic shift in technology had given his firm cause to “rehash our whole thinking”.

Further north Skýrr, the leading IT company in Iceland, has announced that it has bought Thor Data Center, a data centre situated just south of Reykjavík in Hafnafjordur.

The data center which was opened in May of 2011, is primarily known for the fact that Opera (the Norwegian web browser company) will move a significant part of its electronic data traffic to the Thor Data Center via sub-sea cables run by the Icelandic telecommunications company E-Farice.

Thor DC also recently announced the Emerald Express Trans-Atlantic Cable System in Grindavik, Reykjanes, set to be launched in December 2012. The planned 100×100 Gbps network could transform trans-Atlantic bandwidth and connectivity, allowing the Iceland-based data center to offer ultra low latency connections to Europe and North America.

Gestur G. Gestsson, the CEO of Skýrr, has commented, “Thor Data Center has actively been involved in the marketing of Iceland’s environmentally friendly options for data centre companies. The data centre has great employees with advanced knowledge of the structure and architecture of data centres. Here at Skýrr, we are very proud of this great addition to the to the family” Gestsson continued, “We have been looking into developing a data centre here in Iceland for a while now as there are so many great opportunities in this field, especially in foreign markets. We expect that Thor Data Center will help bring in foreign currency and contribute to the overall development of the country’s economy.”

Skýrr is based in Iceland but also has a solid position in the Nordic markets through its subsidiaries abroad in Norway and Sweden.

Although the climate and natural environment of this remote parts of Europe is definitely interesting for DC operators the continuity of business initiatives and companies is still not certain.

The analogy

Currently data centers are constructed on the intersection of the electrical energy infrastructure and the network (data) infrastructure. Considering the current electrical energy infrastructure, for this moment the trend is consolidation of data centers to mega data centers, with the principle of economy of scale as the thriving force.

In the book “The Big Switch” Nicholas Carr makes a historical analysis to create the idea that data centers in combination with the Internet following the same developmental path as electric power did 100 years ago. At that time companies stopped generating their own power and plugged into the newly built electric grid that was fed with electric energy produced by huge generic power plants. The big switch is between today’s proprietary corporate data centers to what Carr calls the world wide computer. Basically the cloud with some huge generic data centers that provides web services that will be as ubiquitous, networked and shared as the electricity infrastructure now is. This modern cloud computing infrastructure is following the same structure as the electricity infrastructure: the plant (data center), transmission network (Internet) and distribution networks (MAN, (W)LAN) to give process power and storage services to all kind of end-devices.

So this is a nice analogy but is the analogy right? Is the current power grid architecture able to accommodate the ever rising energy demands?  And by taking the current power grid architecture as an example for the cloud infrastructure architecture do we really get a sustainable, robust IT infrastructure by centralizing IT services in mega data centers?

Not everybody is following the line of reasoning of the big switch.

A hitch in the network

While previous studies of energy consumption in cloud computing have focused only on the energy consumed in the data center, researchers ¹ from the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia, found that transporting data between data centers and local computers can consume even larger amounts of energy than storing it. They investigated using cloud computing for  storage, software, and processing services; on public and private systems.

The reduction of energy consumption depends on the use case. Using infrequently and at low intensities, cloud computing can consume less power than conventional computing. But at medium and high usage levels, transport dominates total power consumption and greatly increases the overall energy consumed. The researchers explain that home computer users can achieve significant energy savings by using low-end laptops for routine tasks and cloud processing services for computationally intensive tasks that are infrequent, instead of using a mid- or high-end PC. For corporations, it is less clear whether the energy consumption saved in transport with a private cloud compared to a public cloud offsets the private cloud’s higher energy consumption.

A hitch in the power grid 

A very specific element of an electrical power infrastructure is that there is no storage. Therefore demand and supply must be the same, in equilibrium, else there is the risk that this infrastructure shuts down. A controlling agency must coordinate the dispatch of generating units of electricity to meet the expected demand of the system across the power grid. This is a complex management task with the ever fluctuating energy demands.

Another issue is that the power grid is suffering huge energy losses, this loss from primary energy source to the actual delivery of electrical power at the data center, is almost 70% (around 67% conversion loss for a traditional power plant conversion loss and 8-10% transmission grid loss). In some parts of the world there are certain critical locations, also known as Critical Areas for Transmission Congestion, were there is insufficient capacity to meet the demand at peak periods².

Indirect mega data centers are part of this 70% energy loss in the power grid and the power grid capacity and delivery issues.

These are examples that by a traditional scale up of capacity by centralization and a simple-minded reach for economy of scale we are neglecting the tradeoffs of growing management complexity of the central node and capacity issues of the network.

The analogy one step beyond

But where Carr stops using the power grid analogy we go one step beyond. Current developments in the electrical energy infrastructure shows local power generation based on alternative, renewable, energy sources such as wind and solar energy. Local power generation that, with improvements of the current technology, could even lead to local energy self-sufficiency. The two kind of approaches can even be mixed in a hybrid service model where a macro, centralized, delivery model works together with a localized delivery model using intelligent two-way digital technology to control power supply.

Using this as an analogy another cloud industry development, or next step or next phase, can be envisioned.

Taking another direction

Instead of relying only on a cloud with centralized mega data centers there is another solution, another paradigm, that is much more focussing on an intelligent localized delivery of services and local power generation: the micro data center.

This new distributed systems architecture with a swarm of collaborating data centers should create a sustainable distributed data center grid and take care of the issues that accompanies a centralization approach.  A cloud architecture were data centers are scale out instead of scale up.

In delivering computer process power and storage capacity there are two opposite cloud computing approaches, the mega data center  “bigger is better” and the local micro data center “small is beautiful”. The current “bigger is better” model of cloud computing leads, although shifted from customer to supplier, still to enormous capital expenditures, problems in power usage and cooling, power supply and leads also to some structural vulnerabilities in terms of resiliency and availability of the infrastructure. The alternative p2p data center approach leads to questions about delivering enough processing power, network capacity, network supply and the governance of such a distributed system.

Is this so called Energy Self Sufficient Data Center concept science fiction?

Examples

An example of this hybrid approach is developed in Amsterdam by the OZZO project. The OZZO Project’s mission is to ‘Build an energy-neutral data center in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area before the end of 2015. This data center produces by itself all the energy it needs, with neither CO2 emission nor nuclear power.’ According to OZZO the data center should function within smart, three-layer grid: for data, electrical energy, and thermal energy. Processing and storage move fluidly over the grid in response to real-time local facility and energy intelligence, always looking for optimum efficiency.

Another example for the distributed data center concept is a new paper from Microsoft Research,The Data Furnace: Heating Up with Cloud Computing³ . According to this research the problem of heat generation in data centers can be turned into an advantage: computers can be placed directly into buildings to provide low latency cloud computing for its offices or residents, and the heat that is generated can be used to heat the building. By piggy-backing on the energy use for building heating, the IT industry could grow for some time in size without increasing its carbon footprint or its load on the power grid and generation systems.

Future

How to create a green and sustainable cloud computing industry? Just scale up by consolidating data centers to huge mega data centers with the help of the current power grid is to simplistic and is also creating all kind of issues. Using developments in the power grid infrastructure as an analogy we can envision another solution direction; creating a smart grid of micro data centers. But still a lot of research has to be done before we have a working data center grid.

For the current moment with the trend of consolidation of data centers to mega data centers, based on the thriving force of economy of scale, the emphasis should be made on data center efficiency and the usage of renewable energy. Although we should take the Jevons paradox in considering; increases in the efficiency of using a resource tends to increase the usage of that resource, but we should appreciate that every kilowatt that isn’t used also doesn’t have to be generated.

[Article is also published on Cloud Computing Economics blog]

¹ Green Cloud Computing: Balancing Energy in Processing, Storage, and Transport, Jayant Baliga et all. Proceedings of the IEEE, Issue Date: Jan. 2011.

² DOE, “National Electric Transmission Congestion Study.”, 2006.

³ The Data Furnace: Heating Up with Cloud Computing, Jie Liu et all., Microsoft Research, June 2011.

Using the results of a research done by the Australian Computer Society (ACS) in 2010 we can estimate the financial consequences of this tax on using information technology . The ACS report gives an almost complete picture of the carbon footprint of ICT in Australia in 2009. Part of the equipment is used in households but a lot the equipment is used by organizations. Looking at the money that is involved this carbon tax must give an incentive to green IT.

Now in Iceland a third data center project has started after Thor DC and greenqloud: Verne Global. To enable Verne Global to open for business by the end of this year, Colt will manufacture and ship a 500m² Modular Data Centre (MDC)) from the UK to Iceland, where a total of 37 modules will be assembled and commissioned at the Verne Global Campus in Kevlafik, Iceland.

Manufacturer and construction time for the first data center space should be less than four  months. To follow the progress and build of the data center Colt made a interactive portal where a countdown already has started. Jeff Monroe at Verne Global stated that with the modular approach “… the opportunity to quickly scale capacity to address customer demand in a rapid timeframe.” Colt has customized its modular design to optimize Iceland’s climate to endure that free, fresh air cooling is available 365 days a year.

Verne Global claims to reduce cooling costs by 80% or more. Also by using electricity which is 100% sourced from geothermal and hydroelectric power plants there is no carbon footprint. To give an idea about the impact to transfer 8MW of critical load power to a data centre here, you would save approximately 50,000 metric tons of CO2 annually. This is equivalent to a savings of hundreds of thousands of pounds annually if you were to purchase carbon offsets on carbon exchanges.

The data center facility is on the site of the former Keflavik Naval Air Station. Connectivity to the site is provided by redundant, high-capacity, multi-terabit-per-second connections including FARICE-1, DANICE and GREENLAND CONNECT.

The Icelanders put a lot of effort to build a data center industry in Iceland. It was only a year ago, the 21 of may to be precise, that the President of Iceland and Iceland’s Minister of Industry opened the first Icelandic data center, at Steinhella in Hafnarfjörður. Some interesting background information can be found in the report “Iceland The Ultimate Location for Data Centers” made by PricewaterhouseCoopers for The Invest in Iceland Agency, that is run by the Trade Council of Iceland and the Ministry of Industry.

Hopefully for them it will give a new boost to their North Atlantic economy. Something dearly needed after the financial crisis struck Iceland last year.

The 2007 EPA report to Congress on data centers (US EPA 2007) predicted a little less than a doubling in total data center electricity use from 2005 to 2010 if historical trends continued. But instead of this, In the U.S., the electricity used by data centers from 2005 to 2010 increased about 36 percent instead of doubling. And worldwide electricity consumption by data centers increased about 56 percent from 2005 to 2010 instead of doubling.

With the DCD forecast of a 19% energy growth the next 12 months it looks we are back on track again.

Data centers currently consume about 31GW, a report on energy consumption data included in the census concludes. The average total power to rack is about 4.05kW, with 58% of racks consuming 5kW per rack, 28% consuming from 5kW to 10kW per rack and the rest consuming more than 10kW per rack.

Because energy demand is expected to rise so much, data center owners and operators are concerned about energy cost and availability. Analysis of the census data concluded that energy cost and availability is the number-one concern for them.

• 44% believe that increased energy costs will impact significantly on their data center operations in the next 12 months – this is the highest ranked issue
• 29% are concerned about the significant impact of energy availability (or the lack of it).

Energy concerns (c) DatacenterDynamics Global Industry Census 2011

Data center monitoring is directed by the priority to maintain availability (56%), reducing costs (31%) and reducing environmental impact scored 13%. According to DCD monitoring of energy efficiency is only conducted continuously by a minority of 42% although an equivalent proportion monitor it less regularly. This pattern is repeated for carbon emissions and is consistent with a lower priority given to the environmental impact of the data center.

Energy monitoring (c) DatacenterDynamics Global Industry Census 2011

Nevertheless these concerns big data centers are still being build in areas (for example London and Amsterdam) were lack of power supply has been touted as a supply constraining issue for years.

For example in the London arena:

• Telehouse West, opened last March, 7.5MW of new capacity.
• Telecity Harbour Exchange, 6MW opening in 2 phases.

And in the Amsterdam arena:

• Switch 8.320 m²
• Equinix  AM3 (in two phases 6400 m² )
• Terremark 2800 m² first phase (10.000 m² additional)

How can we explain these activities if power is in such tight supply?

During the day a wide range of cases and technologies were presented. And at the end of the day there was a grand final with a very interesting panel discussion led by John Abbott, founder & chief Analyst of the 451 Group and Harkeeret Singh (Thomson Ruters/Green Grid), Tom Dowdall (Greenpeace), Hans Timmerman (EMC/EuroCloud Netherlands) and Jan Wiersma  (Evo Switch/Data Center Pulse) as participants.

In the beginning some arguments were exchanged about how green cloud computing really is. Soon the focus shifted to a discussion about the relation between the electrical energy infrastructure and the IT infrastructure and how efficient it is to use mega data centers.

Currently data centers are constructed on the intersection of the electrical energy infrastructure and the network (data) infrastructure. The observation was made that based on technological developments, the principle of economy of scale and the current set up of the electrical energy infrastructure this leads to the building of mega data centers.

This development has also a downside, the example was given that for the city of Amsterdam 10% of the energy consumption is done by data centers, and in the vicinity of airport Schiphol/Amsterdam it is even 25%. The result of this is that there will be energy supply issues for the next decade for the Amsterdam region.

As a side step. In other parts of the world there are even certain critical locations, also known as Critical Areas for Transmission Congestion, were there is insufficient capacity to meet the demand at peak periods (DOE, “National Electric Transmission Congestion Study.”, 2006). And don’t forget that we also have to take into account that the energy loss in the power grid, that is from primary energy source to the actual delivery of electrical power at the data center, is almost 70% (around 67% power plant conversion loss and 8-10% transmission grid loss). Indirect this mega data centers are part of this 70% energy loss in the power grid.

The discussion about the developments in the data center industry at first followed the same line of reasoning as in the book “The Big Switch” by Nicholas Carr.

Carr makes a historical analysis to build the idea that the data centers / Internet is following the same developmental path as electric power did 100 years ago. At that time companies stopped generating their own power and plugged into the newly built electric grid that was fed with electric energy by huge generic power plants. The big switch is between today’s proprietary corporate data centers to what Carr calls the world wide computer, basically the cloud with some huge generic data centers that provides web services that will be as ubiquitous, networked and shared as electricity now is. This modern cloud computing infrastructure is following the same structure as the electricity infrastructure: the plant (data center), transmission network (Internet) and distribution networks (MAN, (W)LAN) to give process power and storage capacity to all kind of end-devices.

But where Carr stops using this analogy the panel went one step beyond. Here in the panel discussion the comparison was made with current developments in the electrical energy infrastructure: local power generation based on alternative energy sources such as wind and solar energy. Local power generation that, with improvements of the current technology, could even lead to local energy self sufficiency. Using this as an analogy another data center industry development, or next step or next phase, was envisioned.

Thus instead of relying only on centralized mega data centers another solution, another paradigm is possible in the nearby future that is much more focussing on an intelligent distributed network of localized micro data centers who are energy self sufficient.

For the current moment with the trend of consolidation of data centers to mega data centers, based on the thriving force of economy of scale, the emphasis should be made on data center efficiency and the usage of renewable energy. Although the panel revered to the Jevons paradox, increases in the efficiency of using a resource tends to increase the usage of that resource, the statement also was made that we should appreciate that every kilowatt that isn’t used also doesn’t have to be generated. Data center efficiency is not only about energy efficiency it is also about water usage, e-waste handling. The panel agreed that if you talk about efficiency, a holistic (not energy usage only), cradle to cradle approach should be used.

Apart from efficiency improvements, data center providers should also think about how they can reduce carbon emissions by powering data centers from low-carbon electricity sources, such as hydropower or wind energy. The panel discussed the ‘quality’ of the electrical energy that is being used in data centers. How to compare energy efficiency if this efficiency is reached by using nonrenewable energy resources? Currently most of the data centers providers don’t disclose what kind of energy resources they are using. According to the panel one of the issues is that at the current moment there are hardly independent resources about the composition of the electrical energy that is being delivered. It was stated that data center providers could take a much more pro active attitude in this issue by asking the power suppliers to give insight in there energy resource investment policy (renewable/nonrenewable) and take there answers into account when choosing a power supplier for their data centers.

All agreed that sustainability is an import issue for the data center industry. A pro active attitude of the data center industry in combination with a government that step up to support the sustainability initiatives of this industry (by creating the right incentives) can push and accelerate the power suppliers activities on sustainability and usage of renewable energy resources.

Amazon stated, as mentioned in an earlier blog entry about the Dublin outage, that the utility provider now believes it was not a lightning strike that brought down the 110kV 10 megawatt transformer. This outage was the start of a row of incidents that finaly would bring the Dublin data center on its knees.

“With no utility power, and backup generators for a large portion of this Availability Zone disabled, there was insufficient power for all of the servers in the Availability Zone to continue operating. Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPSs) that provide a short period of battery power quickly drained and we lost power to almost all of the EC2 instances and 58% of the EBS volumes in that Availability Zone. We also lost power to the EC2 networking gear that connects this Availability Zone to the Internet and connects this Availability Zone to the other Availability Zones in the Region.”

In 24 minutes Amazon “were seeing launch delays and API errors in all (emphasis by Infrarati) EU West Availability Zones.” The reason of this was “The management servers which receive requests continued to route requests to management servers in the affected Availability Zone. Because the management servers in the affected Availability Zone were inaccessible, requests routed to those servers failed. Second, the EC2 management servers receiving requests were continuing to accept RunInstances requests targeted at the impacted Availability Zone. Rather than failing these requests immediately, they were queued and our management servers attempted to process them.”

“Fairly quickly, a large number of these requests began to queue up and we overloaded the management servers receiving requests, which were waiting for these queued requests to complete. The combination of these two factors caused long delays in launching instances and higher error rates for the EU West EC2 APIs.” Later on Amazon was able to restore power to enough of the network services that they were able to re-connect. However the problem they found was that their database cluster was in an unstable condition. The last blow was that “Separately, and independent from issues emanating from the power disruption, we discovered an error in the EBS software that cleans up unused storage for snapshots after customers have deleted an EBS snapshot.”

In their description of actions to prevent recurrence Amazon stated that “Over the last few months, we have been developing further isolation of EC2 control plane components (i.e. the APIs) to eliminate possible latency or failure in one Availability Zone from impacting our ability to process calls to other Availability Zones.” (emphasis by Infrarati).

The Dublin incident shows that Amazon is still developing and improving the isolation between availability zones. Services in one zone are not yet safeguarded from incidents in other availability zones. That is a ‘must know’ for the customer instead of a ‘nice to know’.

According to The Wallstreet Journal for the second year in a row, ERCOT, underestimated summer demand in its forecasts. ERCOT’s forecasts are based on an average of the past 10 summers, but the past two years have been unusually hot, and this is pushing up energy use. With almost 40 consecutive days of temperatures of more than 37 Celsius (100 degrees F) it was the hottest start to August in Texas history. The drought in the southern U.S. is exceptional as can be seen in the map below, see also the 12-week animation of the U.S. drought monitor.

Texas has its own power grid, regulated and managed by  Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). The Texas Interconnect supplies its own energy and is completely independent of the Eastern and Western Interconnects, which means that Texas can’t get help from other places when it runs short of power.

On the second of august  ERCOT even put out a notice  saying the state’s reserve levels dropped below 2,300 megawatts, putting into effect an Energy Emergency Alert level 1.“We are requesting that consumers and businesses reduce their electricity use during peak electricity hours from 3 to 7 p.m. today, particularly between 4 and 5 p.m. when we expect to hit another peak demand record,” said Kent Saathoff, vice president of system planning and operations. “We do not know at this time if additional emergency steps will be needed.” ERCOT only has peak capacity of 73,000 megawatts this time of year, and about 3,000 megawatts is offline for repairs at any given time. ERCOT recorded an all-time peak demand for electricity: 68,296 megawatts. ERCOT thus narrowly avoided instituting rolling blackouts.

According to an Aug. 2 blog article by Elizabeth Souder of the Dallas Morning News, “The high temperatures also caused about 20 power plants to stop working, including at least one coal-fired plant and natural gas plants.” Souder noted that a spokesman for ERCOT, “said such outages aren’t unusual in the hot summer…”

The demand for energy sent prices sky high, topping out at $2,500 per megawatt-hour on Friday afternoon, more than 50 times the on-peak wholesale average, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The power plants are also in a different way under siege. The drought shows a structural problem with the U.S. energy sector: it needs a lot of water to operate. Power plants account for 49 percent of the nation’s water withdrawals (according to the U.S. Geological Survey). Levels of “extreme” and “exceptional” drought grew to 94.27 percent of the state of Texas. The drought and triple-digit temperatures (F) have broken numerous records and already left the southern Plains and Mississippi Valley struggling to meet demand for power and water. A prolonged drought such as in Texas can force power plants to shut down because their supply of circulating cooling water runs out or the cooling water is not cool enough (which happens in  2007 when several power plants had to shut down or run at a lower capacity because there was not enough water. As showed in a study from the University of Texas at Austin alternative cooling technologies, such as cooling towers and hybrid wet–dry or dry cooling, present opportunities to reduce water diversions.

Although we didn’t hear much from the data center operators about the current threat to the power grid, the Texas case shows very clearly the interdependency between data centers as huge energy consumers and the power grid, the water distribution systems and the weather and climate conditions.

Data centers are part of a complex electrical power value chain. People are mostly not aware of this value chain and the energy losses in this value chain. As a customer of cloud computing and/or data center services but also a data center provider you must have a good understanding of the power grid to appreciate the risks that are at stake in terms of resiliency and business continuity.  The power grid, and water distribution systems are struggling to survive a record breaking drought across the southern United States. That is also a wake up call for data center users and providers to rethink the energy efficiency and the energy consumption of their data centers.

Saving a kiloWatt at the end of this power value chain saves a lot of energy. This can offer some relief to the current power grid. It can be shown that by saving 1 unit power consumption in information processing saves us about 98 units in the upstream of the power value chain. See the blog entry Following the data center energy track