Mission Critical Facilities - Technology Information

Computer Technology Review, Jan, 2001 by Fred Moore

The first 50 years of the information age have been based on the availability of electricity, and the 21st century promises to begin based not only on the availability of electricity, but its widespread abundance as well. We have all too often taken the supply of high-quality electricity for granted, believing that it would just always be there, the sign of a true utility. Time is starting to alter this assumption.

The Internet is now the number one driver of new technologies, including power technologies. The terms "mission-critical" and "7x24" are more meaningful than ever as we are immersing ourselves in an industry based on ever-increasing global e-commerce and B2B applications. Traditional enterprise servers have designed and delivered the highest availability of any computer systems and can presently achieve "five nines" 99.999% availability levels. Most of the enterprise systems' facilities have a similar availability index for electrical power.

The majority of e-commerce and Internet growth is coming from markets and businesses that have never needed to cope with the uptime pressures that the traditional enterprise-class systems have lived with for well over a decade. Money transfers, airline reservations, customer inquiries, account balances all require "7x24" availability. Constant system availability for server clusters, the Internet infrastructure, and rapidly growing telecommunications applications are now the top priorities for mid-market computer systems also.

The rapid build-out of the co-locations, mission-critical data center facilities used by the xSPs, in North America (presently estimated at [sim]1000) have also focused increasing attention on the availability of energy and specifically the supply of high-grade electricity. For these truly mission-critical facilities, the need to develop a power supply strategy that deals with and delivers stable, high-quality levels of power and continuous operations is becoming clear. Strains on the national power grid are appearing. As an industry, we can't afford to overlook or avoid the suddenly critical task to implement a power supply strategy too much longer.

Does anyone know what the availability index (how many nines) your power source actually delivers and what it should become over the years ahead to meet the demand of your IT technologies and facilities? Strengthening mission-critical facilities along with an overall energy supply strategy is not an option. Consumption levels are higher and less predictable as the use of electricity for computing is soaring.

Estimates indicate that electricity accounts for nearly 40% of the overall energy consumption in the U.S. today. Many of those electrons are flowing into information technology devices. Even more interesting, the Internet is estimated to use 8% of the kWh output of the U.S. and another 5% of the kWh goes to support non-networked computers. This number projects to reach 50% of all electrical consumption in 2010 being used for information technology support. In summary, by the year 2010, electricity will account for half of the energy consumption in the U.S. and half of all electrical consumption will go for information devices!

Microprocessors consumed about 90 watts in 1995 and are expected to consume about 180 watts each in 2010. The consumption per microprocessor increases while the number of microprocessors in use exponentially grows. The net is obviously more and more electrical demand. To elaborate on this area, a study by Suhas V. Patankar, president of Innovative Research, and Roger R. Schmidt, Chief Thermal Architect for IBM presented at the 7x24 Exchange (http://www.7x24exchange.com) conference held recently in Phoenix provided many additional insights into power consumption trends.

The study provided projections of the heat loads per product footprint of various types of data processing equipment using watts/[ft.sup.2] as the primary measurement. As heat increases, reliability of computing equipment decreases. Teleprocessing equipment topped the list by generating the largest heat load of the technology classifications sampled. Servers and disks ranked second followed by workstations. Tape storage systems ranked fourth as they generated the smallest heat load. Specifically their measurements revealed telecommunications equipment generated a heat load of 2000 watts/[ft.sup.2], severs and disk generated 1000 watts/[ft.sup.2], workstations generated 200 watts/[ft.sup.2], while tape was at 100 watts/[ft.sup.2].

This excellent study also projected heat loads for each of these equipment types through the year 2010. The rank order of the equipment remained the same; however telecommunications technology increased more than the other areas. The server and disk storage systems grew faster in watts/[ft.sup.2] than did tape systems that ranked as the most energy-friendly of all four-technology groups measured in the study. By the year 2010, telecommunications gear will approach 10,000 watts/[ft.sup.2]. Servers and disk systems will approach 2000 watts/[ft.sup.2] while tape storage systems will consume nearly 200 watts/[ft.sup.2]. The study also assumes that there will be technology advancements during this period that will reduce the heat loads. For example, it is not expected that CMOS will last for ten more years. What will be the next breakthrough?