General Meeting

Jim Gleason, IBM Corporation on The Green Data Center

At Google, located at 76 9th Avenue, 4th floor, New York, NY

RSVP required

Driven with a 10-to-1 price performance improvement over Unix-based "big iron" systems, Linux x86 servers have transformed the world's IT infrastructure. Over the last ten years, compute capacity has been gained by adding higher-density Linux servers to a data center; and then, the difficult tasks of power and thermal management were handed off to the data center administrator. This is no longer feasible.

Energy consumption in data centers has doubled since 2000 and they are fast approaching the limits of their power and cooling capacities. By way of comparison, an average home consumes approximately 1 watt per square foot of power and a typical office uses 10 watts/square foot; but a corporate data center consumes 200 watts per square foot or more. In the US, data center infrastructure comprises 1-2% of overall national electrical usage. This is the equivalent of five 1,000 MW power plants. And by the way, demand is _not_ decreasing. The rising cost of a kilowatt further compounds the problem. The cost to cool a server now exceeds the cost to purchase it. In many cases, extra electricity isn't available at any price. Some utilities, especially those in crowded urban areas, are telling customers that power feeds are at capacity and they simply have no more power to sell.

Not only do power-constrained environments inhibit business growth, they also emit millions of tons of greenhouse gases every year. Whether you are discussing energy or discussing climate, you are really talking about the same thing. The question is, how can corporations meet their increasing demands for more electricity and protect the climate at the same time?

Speaking from first-hand experience, Jim Gleason of IBM Corp., will explain all of the modern approaches for managing power consumption and reducing data center operating costs. He will discusss a broad set of technologies ranging from server virtualization, phase-change "cool storage," power management software and techniques for "hot spot" optimization, that improve cooling and minimize the carbon footprint of data centers. In addition, Jim will cover other IBM initatives to improve the nation's electrical grid and IBM Research efforts involved in transforming renewable energy, including solar power. Lastly, the floor will be opened up to discuss collective lessons learned from open source software development and distributed computing, and how this knowledge may factor into the possibility of distributed energy and micropower.

About Jim Gleason:

Responsible for the introduction of the first mission-critical Linux clusters to Wall Street investment banks ten years ago, Jim Gleason began to observe energy and heat issues in these data centers soon thereafter and has focused his efforts on these concerns ever since. Currently, Jim works in IBM's Financial Services Sector Industry Solutions unit. IBM's "Project Big Green" is a $1 billion per year initiative with the goal of focusing IBM expertise and resources to reduce data center energy consumption and transform the world's business infrastructures into "greener" data centers. Jim is also the founder of the New York Linux Users Group, which is sponsored by and holds its meetings at Google's facilities in downtown Manhattan.