Kermit the Frog probably said it best when he sang, “It’s not easy being green,” but then again, he was talking about a completely different subject. I am amazed at how quickly society and the commercial sector have transformed ecological energy awareness from socially-awkward kookiness (embodied best by Ed Begley, Jr., in his HGTV show “Living with Ed”) to the new cool. Sure, a lot of it is credited to the “man who invented the internet,” but face it, Al Gore, Jr. isn’t much cooler than Ed. But in an all-pile-on frenzy, the media have become laser focused on the topic and public sentiment has followed suit. Even the peace/love/save-the-world sixties didn’t have as much impact on this topic.

But poking beneath the surface, it seems that appearing green is more important to some than actually being green. During conversation at dinner last night, the owner of a Toyota Camry hybrid confessed to not being in the “in” crowd because you had to look closely to see that it was a hybrid—it looked just like the regular Camry and so didn’t shout “Green!” to everyone who saw it, so he wasn’t supporting the cause the same way as if he had a Prius (although if you really wanted to publicly display green-ness, the homely Honda Insight would be the way to go). This “green image” has got to be a consolation prize, because there is widespread disappointment with hybrid gas mileage, even leading to several lawsuits. And now there’s a big blow to all of those whose consciences have been soothed by buying a hybrid, a recent report that a Prius does more environmental damage than a Hummer. It seems like the most eco-friendly thing to do is to really use less by changing habits and driving less often.

There’s a lot of truth to this as it applies to the computer industry as well. Since a fair percentage of servers exhibit low utilization on average, stacking applications on servers through the use of virtualization has been a popular method of consolidation. HP even cooperated with Pacific Gas & Electric in a rebate program designed to cut energy use through virtualization. PG&E’s interest was in cutting future demand growth so it could avoid having to build new power generating capacity to meet the projected need.

HP has taken many steps to reduce energy consumption in ProLiant servers. When we moved to the Generation 5 series, we transitioned from hard drives with 3.5” platters to 2.5” that (if I did my math right) require about half the power at peak and operating modes. We also have been providing highly efficient power supplies for some time, and been designing for power efficiency. Recently, we’ve qualified low-power memory DIMM options for ProLiant servers which have resulted in placing 3 of our servers in the top 5 of the new SPECpower_ssjTM 2008 benchmark results.

Server-class processors from Intel and AMD have also become available that consume less power and allow stepping down power consumption to meet the demands of lower utilization. If you’re using an operating system that recognizes that, some power savings can be realized. However, self-deterministic individual policies aren’t really in keeping with data center operational best practices, and administrators want to have a way of getting insight into what actually is happening and the actual wattage consumed and the BTUs produced.

Enter HP Insight Power Manager. This plug-in to HP Systems Insight Manager interfaces with the Integrated Lights-Out processor on ProLiant servers and blades (and the newest version supports Integrity servers, too) to monitor and control power. It’s available as part of the Insight Control Environment license, on its own, or as a bundle with an iLO 2 license. Insight Power Manager lets you collect data from systems on how much power they actually are consuming as well as actual thermal output and retain it for up to 3 years. You also can input what your local utility charges on a per-killowatt-hour basis so it can express costs to power the system. Probably best of all is that you can set the dynamic power saving mode across one or more systems, and by using the iLO 2 management processor, it’s able to sample utilization up to 5 times a second without having to install any software on the operating system. Testing in the lab has found that for servers with utilization up to 80%, there is no sacrifice in performance in running in this low-power mode (see “Power Regulator for ProLiant,” page 6). It also can enforce an average power “cap” on a set of systems and soon it will be able to cap the maximum power as well.

What does it all mean? Even though power prices have gone up, it’s still relatively cheap, isn’t it? Well, analysis shows that the 3-year cost of power and cooling can actually exceed the equipment cost. Whoa. But there’s more. Since power consumption has actually been growing faster than Moore’s Law (see “Data Center Cooling Strategies,” page 3), unless you’re using some power conservation strategy, you’re probably paying for wasted electricity.

It’s more than just paying your electricity bill. Power consumption has implications for the server room or data center with each new device added to it. And data center build-outs are millions of dollars of capital expense. It’s easy to see that using one or more of the strategies above is an imperative for a business, not just from an economic standpoint, but also an ecological one. In fact, HP’s own efforts at data center consolidation and efficiency are designed to reduce IT power and cooling consumption by more than 50 per cent—enough to power a city the size of Palo Alto, California, where HP is headquartered.

Go green. Be green. Live green. Learn more at HP’s Green Power and Cooling Seminar.