The Green Grid

No, it’s not the Power Grid. It is the data center, and grid computing. It’s multi-processor computers running virtual machines. As one guy said to me, “Before we had a bunch of freshly delivered pizza boxes. Now we have flamethrowers in the rack”

These systems have extraordinary power requirements. These systems have extraordinary air conditioning requirements. These systems have extraordinarily bad failure modes if they overheat or lose power.

These systems are no longer managed as computers. Sure the data center uses DMTF (Desktop Management Task Force) information to track and manage them as assets.

What these systems are managed for is business services. How fast is that transaction running? Should I move the virtual computer to another system? Should I launch another virtual computer to run in parallel. Is it OK to delay processing HR to meet my QOS targets for the delivery of sales transactions?

Sales transactions are quick. What if my transactions are long running? What if the cost of losing this application is mid process is very high, and the process runs for hours? What would I do differently if I want this process to complete as quickly as possible yet the cost of failure during any single transaction is small?

These questions come down to energy. A computer working twice as hard can use much more energy than one that is not. A computer with multiple virtual machines running generates a lot of heat. Energy systems can be pushed to the brink and more by grid data centers.

If a computer has redundant power supplies, I have some choices. I can run it flat out, using all the power available from each power source and lose redundancy. I can run it half loaded and suffer failure of one power supply without noticing. Load becomes a proxy for reliability.

Of course, nothing is more efficient at converting electricity to heat than a computer. This means each of these decisions effect heat load in the building, and there by air conditioning. It take more energy to remove heat from a system than to put it in. Because air conditioning equipment can accept dirtier power than the computer can, there may be another decision about power reliability made there. Conversely, a failure of cooling systems may require shedding business services to reduce heat generation

Time of day billing, brown outs, and even black-outs require that the mix expand to include generators, batteries, and perhaps even fuel cells. If that is not enough, you can include considerations of AC vs. DC power.

These are the problems that The Green Grid is wrestling with. They wish to extend the data center’s management paradigm to include the facilities services that support the data center.

I got to sit in on one of their meetings this afternoon. Eaton was trying to formulate their technology and interface to support this vision. Aaron Merkin from IBM, well versed in DMTF, was explaining the data center side of things. I was there to talk of oBIX. Aaron is one of those guys whose knowledge of standards is deep and wide. It was a fascinating afternoon.

I wish the Green Grid the best of luck and a quick journey. I hope we can find some way for oBIX to use their surfaces to define the standard contracts for Power Systems. I know I could use their work.

Check out www.TheGreenGrid.org.

IT starts to think about Facilities

I had the pleasure of beginning a correspondence with Ken Uhlman through this blog, and of meeting Ken tonight. Ken is with Eaton (Power) in their Data Center group. Eaton is part of a group I had not been tracking before, The Green Grid™.

The Green Grid is a consortium seeking to lower the overall consumption of power in data centers. The organization is chartered to develop meaningful, platform-neutral standards, measurement methods, processes and new technologies to improve energy efficient performance of global data centers.

Readers know that I reach for phrases that get the message quickly, or in a different light when I can. (I alternate with long-winded opaque discussions to keep you on your toes.) Ken had two such phrases he was willing to share.

“Everything in the enterprise today is on the IT network, EXCEPT for Facilities, and when facilities goes down, that’s a problem.”

I have had conversations similar to this many times at UNC. Our remote stations lose connectivity if they rely exclusively on the central data center, especially after a few day outage, as happens during a Carolina Ice Storm, or after a Hurricane, or…I’d say pretty reliable every three years. When it does, the people who are impacted are the folks that Data Center is waiting on to re-create the utilities to get the network up. (That doesn’t matter, during emergencies, non-essential employees are to stay at home)

Ken relates the other question he likes to ask CIOs.

“Tell me about your data center automation strategy, and they espouse all their storage, network, and compute activities with HP, IBM, CISCO…,” and then I ask them, “tell me about your facility automation strategy that supports your IT automation strategy.”

Ken relates that this results in a deer in the headlight stare…I can tell Ken lives in the city. Out where I live, the deer in the headlights usually leap into your car.

Power, Power Quality, Power Back-Up, Power Management, Power QOS, and, dare I say it, 3^rd party Power Auditing loom large in thinking about facilities in the years ahead.

Tomorrow, I will meet more of the members of The Green Grid. I will report back later.

Let's Make Energy Models Relevant

Energy modeling is an important part of designing more performant and healthful buildings. Energy modeling is a foundational requirement of important initiatives such as the Zero Energy Building Initiative (link) or the Zero Net Carbon Building project (link). Building Energy Modeling is also an important tool to determine problems in building design before the more expensive construction process begins. Today, because of lack of integration and a reluctance to re-think the design-build process, Energy Modeling is often an ineffective sop to public constituencies, adding cost but little value to a project. This is particularly true for construction projects performed by government agencies, with their commitment to traditional processes and metrics that are often in conflict with innovation and new business processes.

New building projects have two sources of design constraints: organizational goals and design intents. Organizational goals are larger than any single project, and stem often from public pronouncements. All new buildings will be at least LEED Silver. Each new office building will have an energy budget 20% below that of our existing portfolio when it comes on line. Design intents are transcribed for each building, often during marathon charrettes with lots of soggy deli take-out. Together they describe the success points against which the design should be evaluated.

Many of today’s energy models are generated in response to organizational intents. Energy models are a source of green points, and they may have some tangential applicability to the construction documents. They are rarely an intrinsic part of the design process. They are often a sub-contract let by the design firm.

It is more useful to think of Energy Modeling as an audit or commissioning process applied to the design. Just as we wish to commission a building before we accept occupancy, we should commission the design before we bring it to bid. Just as we commission a building to see if it works as designed, we should commission the design to see if it has met the organizational goals and design intents. The energy model is one part of commissioning the design, and as an audit, it may be best be performed by a third party working for the owner rather than the designer.

Often the sole real liability for the designer pre-construction is meeting the bidding budget. If this constraint is not met, we return to the designer for the misnamed “value engineering”. A better process, based upon a persistent building model, would re-subject all value engineered designs to energy modeling as well as the other design validation processes currently being developed [1] . These models would then present explicitly to the owner the compromises to design intent and organizational goals that derive from the value engineering process.

This increased liability on the designer will not come without cost. Increased liability demands increased payment for increased value. This increased cost will be easy to recapture. Errors are always easiest and cheapest to fix earlier in any process.

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[1] See efforts by the International Codes Council (ICC) to automate compliance checking, beginning with automated Energy Code Compliance checking, with Electrical Code, Plumbing Code and other compliances in the plans.

Facilities Systems Integrators

Pervasive Systems. Pervasive Security. Service Oriented Architecture. Federated Identity Management. The building owner is rarely able to find these skills in the A&E community.

I know how many consultants can do this. I know most of them, and have heard of the rest. If I am wrong, and there as many again that I don’t know of, I may have to take off my shoes to finish counting.

Why are there so few in an industry filled with so many bright, competent, people? We are in the early swell of something new. Beyond Intelligent Buildings. Some are calling it Buildings 2.0. That captures it, but it will outlive the trendiness of that name.

The days of integration by extension need to pass. “Enterprise enabling” a hotel room system must mean more than a BACnet node on the room key set-up. “We can manage energy” must mean more than putting an on/off switch to the package unit at the end of the access control system. Some people who are quite good at the old way. The best have realized the limits of the old way of integration. Integrators will need to interact with the business surfaces of SAP, and PeopleSoft….

Human responsive systems will demand something different. Building systems that interact with personal area networks (PANs) and even body area networks (BANs) won’t interact at the control protocol level. Building services will need to be aware of not only identity, but the role and context of that identity. Temporary delegation of role authority for a fixed time will be just another trick in the repertoire.

Zero Carbon buildings will require heterogeneous selection of best of breed systems for each site and each use pattern. Each of these systems must be able to defend its mission against the others, while its producer warrants and tunes its performance. These buildings will require integrators skilled in choreography, not in control.

Building systems will also be small participants in a larger realm. Intelligent buildings will barter with markets on the intelligent grid. They will brace themselves as they receive warnings from the National Weather Service. They will lend situation awareness to emergency personnel during a disaster. They will be full citizens of the digital world.

Building owners have no way identify those competent for this new role. There are no training programs, or certifications to prepare them. There will be.