Every now and then a really great way to reduce energy use comes along that is so simple we all whack our head wondering, “why didn’t I think of that!” My principles of achieving ultra-efficient data centers (PUEs between 1.03-1.08; I call anything less than 1.10 ultra-efficient) are based upon simplicity and a holistic approach while meeting the need not the want or convention. Generally the simpler the better, as simple is always lower cost up front and ongoing, as well as easier to maintain, more reliable and more efficient.

So, here is one that will not catch you by surprise: a rack that saves energy. We’ve all heard of passive and active cooling racks: those with fans, heat exchangers or direct cooling systems. I explored some of the front & rear door heat exchanger racks back in 2003, which work really well for high-density applications but can be very expensive compared to better-designed data center cooling systems. But how about a rack that not only reduces energy costs but also improves hardware performance?

I’ve had the pleasure of exploring with Green Platform’s CEO, Gus Malek-Madani, their anti-vibration rack (“AVR”), a carbon-fiber composite rack actually designed to remove vibration. Why remove vibration? Green Platform claims that a typical datacenter experiences vibration levels of around 0.2 G-Root Mean Square (GRMS); this, it claims can degrade a disk drive’s performance (both I/O and throughput) by up to 66%; a fact that was borne out during a ‘rigorous’ testing exercise it did in conjunction with Sun Microsystems.

As harddrives get “larger” in capacity, bits get crammed into a smaller space. This along with smaller drives force tolerances between rotating platters and the movement of mechanical actuator arms within the drives to get tighter, and thus, vibration causes drives to slow down or have higher mis-read & writes, slowing down I/O performance. “As a result of this ‘vibration penalty,’ the company believes that up to a third of all US datacenter spending – on both hardware and power – is wasted on vibration, amounting to some $32bn of wastage. The company also says there’s evidence that reducing the impact of vibration will serve to improve the reliability of drives (and improving mean time between failure.)”

In order to back up this figure, early tests with Sun Microsystems (pre-Oracle) and Q Associates (“Effects of Data Center Vibration on Compute System Performance” by Julian Turner) showed IOPS improvement of up to 247% in random I/O. The following chart shows this storage performance degradation:



You can also watch the following video that clearly shows that just yelling into the face of storage hardware causes a very visible degradation of storage performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

If the vibration from yelling into a rack causes performance degradation, think about the vibration affects from HVAC systems, thousands of server fans, and even walking thru your data center.

The company says its carbon-composite design massively reduces the vibrations that can cripple hard disk drive performance, boosting performance, efficiency and even reliability. From the results of these tests stated above, they assume that most folks should see a 100% improvement in storage throughput, 50% shorter job times and consequently, 50% less power consumed per job. In testing with Sun Microsystems the AVP dissipated vibration by a factor of 10x to 1000x. In further testing with systems integrator Q-Associates, which pitted the AVP against a regular steel rack – it found that random read IOPS increased by between 56% and 246%, with random write IOPS showing a 34% to 88% improvement with the AVP.  

“The throughput and I/O rate of storage remains a significant performance bottleneck within the datacenter; though hard disk drive (HDD) capacities have increased by several orders of magnitude in the last 30 years, drive performance has improved by a much smaller factor. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that server performance, driven by Moore’s law, has increased massively, to the extent that there’s now a server-storage performance gap. The way most datacenters engineer around this problem is inefficient; typically workloads are striped across many disks in parallel, and disks are ‘short stroked’ — i.e. data is only written to the edge of platters – in order to minimize latency. Although this does address performance, the trade-off is that disk capacity is massively underutilized, wasting datacenter space and energy, not to mention the cost of reliably maintaining an unnecessarily large disk estate.”

In the many data centers I have had the pleasure of working in lately, storage is growing faster than server capacity and the greatest performance limitation is storage throughput. This product works for the high-end video/audio and scientific markets; a niche space where another of Malek-Madani’s company– Composite Products, LLC — is focused. The test results clearly show storage throughput dramatically improved by reducing vibration at the rack of storage hardware. With some 3 million storage racks currently in use inside datacenters worldwide, and growing by the second to probably eventually exceed server racks, this is a very large opportunity to improve performance while reducing energy use, always one of my main mantras. Green Platform expects to have their racks as an option from storage vendors, NetApp, EMC, and others, so that as you purchase and provision new storage systems, you pay a small incremental increase in price of the storage system for a very large improvement in performance and energy reduction. Think of all of those servers waiting so much less for data throughput and how much that can improve the utilization of those systems? Think about it.

I’m looking to conduct an end-user test with their rack; contact me if you’re interested so we can determine results for your organization.