Using Situation Awareness Principle to Green the Data Center, Google continues the march from 1.16 to 1.14 PUE

Google posts it's latest PUE achievement of 1.14.

Measuring to improve: comprehensive, real-world data center efficiency numbers

March 26, 2012 at 9:00 AM

To paraphrase Lord Kelvin, if you don’t measure you can’t improve. Our data center operations team lives by this credo, and we take every opportunity to measure the performance of our facilities. In the same way that you might examine your electricity bill and then tweak the thermostat, we constantly track our energy consumption and use that data to make improvements to our infrastructure. As a result, our data centers use 50 percent less energy than the typical data center.

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Google's Joe Kava uses the Lord Kelvin principle of "if you don't measure you can't improve."  But, I think a more apt explanation for the complexity of greening a data center is situation awareness.

Situation awareness

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Situation awareness is the perception of environmental elements with respect to time and/or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the

projection of their status after some variable has changed, such as time. It is also a field of study concerned with perception of the environment

critical to decision-makers in complex, dynamic areas from aviation, air traffic control, power plant operations, military command and control, and

emergency services such as fire fighting and policing; to more ordinary but nevertheless complex tasks

such as driving an automobile or bicycle.

Situation awareness involves being aware of what is happening in the vicinity to understand how information, events, and one's own actions will

impact goals and objectives, both immediately and in the near future. Lacking or inadequate situation awareness has been identified as one of

the primary factors in accidents attributed to human error.^[1] Thus, situation awareness is especially important in work domains where the information

flow can be quite high and poor decisions may lead to serious consequences (e.g., piloting an airplane, functioning as a soldier, or treating critically

ill or injured patients).

Having complete, accurate and up-to-the-minute SA is essential where technological and situational complexity on the human decision-maker are

a concern. Situation awareness has been recognized as a critical, yet often elusive, foundation for successful decision-making across a broad

range of complex and dynamic systems, including aviation and air traffic control,^[2] emergency response and military command and controloperations,^[3]

and offshore oil and nuclear power plant management.^[4]

Situation awareness vs. Lord Kelvin's principle has you thinking in the bigger picture.  Thinking about knowledge.  Am I doing the right thing?  How did I get here and can I repeat it?

Situation assessment

Endsley (1995b, p. 36) argues that "it is important to distinguish the term situation awareness, as a state of knowledge, from the processes used to achieve that state. These processes, which may vary widely among individuals and contexts, will be referred to as situation assessment or the process of achieving, acquiring, or maintaining SA." Thus, in brief, situation awareness is viewed as "a state of knowledge," andsituation assessment as "the processes" used to achieve that knowledge. Note that SA is not only produced by the processes of situation assessment, it also drives those same processes in a recurrent fashion. For example, one's current awareness can determine what one pays attention to next and how one interprets the information perceived (Endsley, 2000).

Google has shared the high level concepts of achieving a lower PUE.

1. Measure PUE

You can't manage what you don’t measure, so characterize your data center's efficiency performance by measuring energy use. We use a ratio called PUE - Power Usage Effectiveness - to help us reduce energy used for non-computing, like cooling and power distribution. To effectively use PUE it's important to measure often - we sample at least once per second. It’s even more important to capture energy data over the entire year - seasonal weather variations have a notable affect on PUE.

2. Manage airflow

Good air flow management is fundamental to efficient data center operation. Start with minimizing hot and cold air mixing by using well-designed containment. Eliminate hot spots and be sure to use blanking plates for any unpopulated slots in your rack. We've found a little analysis can pay big dividends. For example, thermal modeling using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can help you quickly characterize and optimize air flow for your facility without many disruptive reorganizations of your computing room. Also be sure to size your cooling load to your expected IT equipment, and if you are building extra capacity, be sure your cooling approach is energy proportional

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What does Google do to determine where it should spend its resources?  At some point there is a marginal return or a negative return.  It will cost more than what can be saved.  On the other hand at Google's scale what may be small for most can be huge for them.

Our 2011 numbers and more are available for closer examination on our data center site. We’ve learned a lot through building and operating our data centers, so we’ve also shared our best practices. These include steps like raising the temperature on the server floor and using the natural environment to cool the data center, whether it’s outside air or recycled water.

The really interesting thing to know is what has Google tried and found not to work.  As any good engineer knows many times you learn more from failures than success.

See Inside

How You Learn More from Success Than Failure

The brain may not learn from its mistakes after all

By Frederik Joelving | November 4, 2009 | 15

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Have you ever bowled a string of strikes that seems like it came out of nowhere? There might be more to such streaks than pure luck, according to a study that offers new clues as to how the brain learns from positive and negative experiences.

I think good engineers have learned to rewire their brain vs. others.

“Success has a much greater influence on the brain than failure,” says Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist Earl Miller, who led the research. He believes the findings apply to many aspects of daily life in which failures are left unpunished but achieve­ments are rewarded in one way or another—such as when your teammates cheer your strikes at the bowling lane. The pleasurable feeling that comes with the successes is brought about by a surge in the neurotransmitter dopamine. By telling brain cells when they have struck gold, the chemical apparently signals them to keep doing whatever they did that led to success. As for failures, Miller says, we might do well to pay more attention to them, consciously encouraging our brain to learn a little more from failure than it would by default.

Telling White Lies is common practice for many Doctors, who else is lying to you on a regular basis

Most people don't think other people lie.  The media doesn't lie.  Commercial don't lie.  They just tell stories in a way that fulfills their own needs.

MSNBC posts on how Doctors tell white lies.

Many docs tell white lies, study finds

By MyHealthNewsDaily staff
MyHealthNewsDaily

Everybody lies — even doctors.

A new study finds 11 percent of doctors say that they have told a patient or a child's guardian something that was not true in the past year, and about 20 percent say they have not fully disclosed a mistake to a patient because they were afraid of being sued.

The results also show 34 percent of doctors surveyed did not "completely agree" that physicians should disclose all significant medical errors to affected patients. Instead, these doctors said they only somewhat agreed, or disagreed.

The researchers admit they have more work to do.

To be fair, the researchers acknowledged not knowing the circumstances under which physicians lied, and communication regarding health issues can be complex. Physicians must often wade through conflicting and confusing information as a case goes on. Telling a patient something that turns out to be wrong might not be helpful, the researchers said.

More research is needed to better understand when and why physicians feel justified in a lapse of honesty.

And guess what the minorities and women were more honest than the white men.

Women and minority physicians were more likely than white, male doctors to say they agreed with the principles of honesty and openness, according to the study. This may be because, as underrepresented groups in medicine, women and minorities feel more compelled to comply with such professional codes, the researchers wrote.

If some doctors lie on a regular basis it is hard to believe that in your data center operations, there are not people who accept telling white lies.

Do you think about this when designing monitoring systems?

Google takes the Lead in Greenpeace's Cool IT Climate Leaderboard

Greenpeace's Gary Cook posts on Greenpeace's latest Green IT Scorecard with Google in the leadership position.

Google wrests control of Cool IT climate Leaderboard

Blogpost by Gary Cook - February 8, 2012 at 9:00

The tussle for the top of our Cool IT Leaderboard has taken its latest twist, with Google grabbing the top spot ahead of 20 other tech companies, including Cisco and Ericsson.

Google is singled out as the leader.

Google is way ahead on climate solutions and energy impacts, thanks to its disclosure of its energy footprint, and for providing its impressively detailed mitigation plan for achieving emissions reductions. On top of this, Google continues to speak up on important climate change policies, and make its voice heard on the immediate need for both US and EU governments to aggressively cut emissions.

Last is Oracle with a score of 10 vs Google's 53.  The full report is here.

The IT Energy impact score has IBM in the lead.

And Fujitsu leading the IT Climate Soltuitons.

And Political Advocacy has Softbank with high score.

Google sets a high standard, all US Data Centers are ISO 14001 environmental and OHSAS 18001safety Certified

Google has posted on their achieving ISO 14001 and OSHAS 18001 certifications for environmental and safety standards.

All of our U.S. owned and operated data centers have received ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001certification. We’re the first major Internet services company to gain external certification for those high standards at all of our U.S. data centers.

In a nutshell, both standards are built around a very simple concept: Say what you’re going to do, then do what you say—and then keep improving. The standards say what key elements are required, but not how to do it—that part’s up to us. So we set some challenging goals for ourselves, and we asked our auditors to confirm that we’ve followed through on them.

Two improvements listed are in diesel generator maintenance and handling of batteries.

Here’s an example of the kind of improvements we’ve implemented: Like most data centers, ours have emergency backup generators on hand to keep things up and running in case of a power outage. To reduce the environmental impact of these generators, we’ve done two things: first, we minimized the amount of run time and need for maintenance of those generators. Second, we worked with the oil and generator manufacturers to extend the lifetime between oil changes. So far we’ve managed to reduce our oil consumption in those generators by 67 percent.

A second example: each of our servers in the data center has a battery on board to eliminate any interruptions to our power supply. To ensure the safety of the environment and our workers, we devised a system to make sure we handle, package, ship and recycle every single battery properly.

Joe Kava and a few other Googlers are featured in this video discussing the achievement.

Check out this Google logo with a tree for letter "l" and moon hovering.

This is the closest to a tour of inside a Google data center many will get.

What is more important a LEED certification or meeting environmental and safety standards?  Google has hopefully woken up some data center decision makers that there is more to being a green data center than a low PUE and LEED certification.

I am curious on how many views this video will get through out the day.  so far it has 201.

Are privacy rights of cattle compromised with RFID replacing brands?

SJMercury News has an article about how the USDA is requiring cattle transported interstate to have RFID tags.

The history of branding is long.

And there of course cattleman protesting the change.

I wonder if the cattle could hire lawyers they can make a claim of their privacy rights being violated now that anyone can read their RFID tags and figure out their history.  Where they born, where they have been, etc.  This is of course silly.

Wouldn't it be great if everything in the data center had a unique ID?