With the improvement of the national policy of energy saving and consumption reduction, energy saving and consumption reduction is becoming the focus of attention of the country and the whole society. The proportion of it energy consumption in all electricity use is rising, which makes IT become one of the main areas advocated by society to save energy and reduce consumption. As a leading IT company in the world and an enterprise with a strong sense of social responsibility, Hewlett-Packard Company actively advocates the concept of "green IT", strengthens research and development, and launches a series of innovative technologies and products aimed at green IT. 10 10 On October 26th, Hewlett-Packard Company held a seminar on "Green Blades" in Xiangshan Hotel, introducing the green innovative technology and environmental protection and energy-saving advantages of HP's new generation data center and new generation BladeSystem c-Class in power supply and heat dissipation, and introducing the complete solution of green data center.
For a long time, more powerful data center processing power has been our goal. However, with the increasing energy expenditure today, the other side of the development of processing capacity is the need to consume more resources. Moreover, with the increase of server density, the demand for power supply increases accordingly, thus generating more heat. In the past ten years, the power density of servers has increased by 10 times on average. According to IDC's forecast, by 2008, the IT procurement cost will be equal to the energy cost. On the other hand, cooling accounts for 60% to 70% of data center energy consumption. Therefore, with the rising energy prices, the power supply and heat dissipation of data centers have become an unavoidable problem for all data centers.
Hewlett-Packard Company has been committed to the research of energy-saving and consumption-reducing technology for more than ten years, and is committed to three levels of innovation: first, environmental protection energy-saving technology at the data center level; Second, the green design of IT products such as servers and storage at the system level; The third is the research and development of key energy-saving components, such as technological innovation in power supply, refrigeration and fans. At present, these innovative technologies of HP Labs are leading the green trend of the industry. In view of the data center environment, HP has launched a new dynamic intelligent cooling system to help customers build a new generation of green data centers or transform existing data centers; On the equipment level, HP's next-generation green blade server system has become the most critical infrastructure for energy saving in the future data center with the innovation of thermal logic technology and PARSEC architecture. At the same time, these innovative technologies are embodied in some key energy-saving components, such as active cooling fan and dynamic power saver (DPS). HP's green innovation will help customers reduce operating costs by improving energy efficiency.
Hp DSC precision refrigeration realizes green data center
The traditional data center computer room adopts the average heat dissipation design mode. However, with the emergence and popularity of rack servers and blade servers, a mixed mode of high-density servers and low-density servers has emerged in data centers. Due to the uneven density of servers and the uneven heat generated, the traditional average heat dissipation method in data center has been difficult to meet the demand. At present, there are two situations in the data center: first, over 85% of the computer rooms have excessive heat dissipation problems; Second, in the power supply of data center, only 1/3 is used for IT equipment, and the cooling cost accounts for 2/3 of the total power supply. Therefore, reducing refrigeration energy consumption is the key to energy saving in data centers.
Aiming at the disadvantages of average heat dissipation in traditional data center computer rooms, HP introduced a new solution based on dynamic intelligent heat dissipation technology-"DSC". The goal of dynamic intelligent refrigeration technology is to improve refrigeration efficiency through precise refrigeration. DSC can dynamically adjust the cooling system according to the running load of the server to reduce energy consumption. Depending on the size of the data center, energy saving can reach 20% to 45%.
DSC combines HP's existing innovative technologies in power supply and cooling, such as HP Thermal Logic, an important component of the C-class architecture of HP blade server system. By installing many thermal detectors connected to the data center on the server rack, the temperature change information of the server can be transmitted to the central monitoring system at any time. When the detector sends a message that the temperature of the server is rising, the central monitoring system will send an instruction to the nearest cooling device to increase the cooling power to reduce the temperature of the server. When the temperature of the server drops, the central monitoring system will send instructions to the nearby cooling equipment according to the new information from the detector to reduce the power. According to HP's experimental data, in the same data center of HP Lab, without DSC technology, the heat dissipation needs 1 17 kW, while the DSC system only needs 72 kW.
HP Blade System: Key Production Line of Green Data Center
If the data center is regarded as an "IT factory", then the energy saving of the "IT factory" should not only realize the energy saving of the "factory-level" environment through DSC and other technologies, but also realize the energy saving and consumption reduction of each "production line", and the production line of the data center is IT equipment such as servers and storage. At present, the blade system meets the new requirements of the new generation data center for servers with the characteristics of saving space, facilitating centralized management, easy expansion and providing uninterrupted service, and is becoming an important "production line" of the future data center. Therefore, the energy saving and environmental protection technology of blade system itself is the key to energy saving and consumption reduction in future data centers.
The modular design of HP BladeSystem c-Class, a new generation of green blade system of HP Company, is based on industrial standards. It not only integrates blade server and blade storage, but also integrates many elements of data center such as network, power supply/cooling and management, that is, it integrates computing, storage, network, power supply/cooling and management. At the same time, in the innovative BladeSystem c-class blade system, the requirements of modern data center infrastructure for power supply, cooling, connection, redundancy, security, calculation and storage are fully considered.
On the basis of standardized hardware platform, the three key technologies of HP blade system are far behind competitors. The first is HP insight management technology, which realizes unified and automatic management of physical and virtual servers, storage, network, power supply and cooling system through a single console, which improves the management efficiency by 10 times, and the proportion of administrator equipment reaches 1:200. The second is energy intelligent control technology-reducing energy consumption by effectively adjusting power and cooling. Compared with the traditional fan, the super cooling fan reduces the airflow of the server by 40% and the energy consumption by 50%. Finally, the virtual connection architecture-greatly reduces the number of cables, without additional switching interface management. Allows servers to be added, replaceable and removable without the administrator's involvement in SAN and LAN changes.
At present, HP has a complete blade server strategy and product line, including ProLiant blade servers supporting 2 or 4 channels, Integrity blade systems using An Teng chips, storage blades and backup blades. At the same time, HP BladeSystem c-class blade server system has been widely recognized by customers. According to the fourth quarter report of 2006 released by IDC, HP ranks first in the world in terms of factory turnover and shipment of blade servers. In the second quarter of 2007, HP's blade market share was 47.2%, ahead of competitors by 65,438+05%, and the gap will continue to widen. As the leader of the blade market, HP BladeSystem c-class blade system will become the key infrastructure of the data center.
PARSEC Architecture and Energy Intelligent Control: Two Core Strategies of Green Production Line
As the key infrastructure of data center, green is one of the important development trends of blade system and the key to energy saving in data center. In the innovative design of HP BladeSystem c-class blade system, green is one of its key innovative technologies, and its unique PARSEC architecture and energy intelligent control technology are two key technologies of this green production line.
HP PARSEC architecture is another innovation of HP blade system green strategy. Nowadays, rack servers are all arranged with several local small fans, which will lead to higher cost, greater power, poor heat dissipation, power consumption and space occupation. HP parsec (Parallel Redundancy Scalable Enterprise Cooling) architecture is a hybrid model, which combines the characteristics of local and central cooling. The chassis is divided into four zones, and each zone is equipped with a fan, which provides direct cooling service for the blades in that zone and cooling service for all other components. Because the cooling standards of server blades and storage blades are different, and the cooling standards are applicable to the basic components inside the chassis, sometimes different types of blades appear in multiple cooling areas. With HP's innovative active cooling fan, users can easily obtain different cooling configurations. HP fan design supports hot plug, and the airflow can be adjusted by adding or removing it, so that it can effectively pass through the whole system and make the cooling more effective.
HP's thermal logic technology is a system-level energy-saving method, which combines HP's innovative technologies in power supply and heat dissipation. This technology provides embedded temperature measurement and control functions. Through real-time thermal monitoring, the heat dissipation of the chassis, the internal and external temperatures and the power consumption of servers in each rack can be tracked, so that users can understand and match the system operation requirements in time, and at the same time set the temperature threshold manually or automatically. Or automatically start the refrigeration or adjust the refrigeration level to deal with and solve the generated heat, so as to realize the most accurate power supply and refrigeration control capability. Through intelligent energy control management, customers can dynamically apply thermal control to optimize performance, power consumption and thermal performance, thus making full use of power budget and ensuring flexibility. By using energy intelligent control technology, the number of servers available under the same power is doubled, and the efficiency is 30% higher than that of traditional rack stacking equipment. When more servers are inserted into each rack, the power and cooling consumption will remain the same or decrease, and the components required for the overall design will also decrease.
Active cooling fan, DPS, power regulator: every part of the production line should save energy.
As a "green production line", the C-class blade system of HP Blade System has realized energy saving and consumption reduction at the level of "production line" through energy intelligent control technology and PARSEC architecture, and the technological innovation of each component in this production line is the key technical guarantee of the green production line. For example, innovative active cooling fan, ProLiant power regulator for intelligent power management and dynamic power regulation technology.
Fan is the key component of heat dissipation. Is the fan design as big as possible? The answer is no, some blade server products in the market use large centralized cooling fans, which not only take up a lot of space, make a lot of noise, have poor redundancy, and have air leakage channels, but also have a large supply volume and require a high power supply load.
HP blade servers use innovative active cooling fans. The design concept of active cooling fan is derived from aircraft technology, and its volume is small. The blade speed reaches 136 mph, which produces strong airflow and consumes less power than traditional fan design. At the same time, it has the characteristics of high air volume (CFM), high wind pressure, the best noise effect and the best power consumption, and can cool 16 blade servers with only100W power. This innovative fan is currently applying for 20 patents. Active Cool fan with PARSEC cooling technology can automatically adjust the working state of the fan according to the load of the server, so that the most energy-saving airflow and the most effective cooling channel can cool the required components and effectively reduce the energy consumption. Compared with the traditional cooling fan, the power consumption is reduced by 66% and the data center energy consumption is reduced by 50%.
In terms of power supply, compared with the traditional independent power supply mode of rack server, HP's blade system adopts centralized power supply, realizes intelligent power management through innovative ProLiant power regulator and dynamic power regulation technology, and adopts targeted strategies according to the power supply situation, which greatly saves power consumption.
ProLiant power regulator can realize server-level and policy-based power management. Power adjustment can provide power for CPU according to its application, provide full power for CPU application when necessary, and put CPU in power saving mode when not needed, so that the server can realize policy-based power management. In fact, the power state of CPU can be controlled in two ways: dynamic and static, that is, the power adjustment scheme can be set to the static working mode of continuous low power consumption, or it can be set to the dynamic mode of automatically adjusting the power supply according to the usage of CPU. At present, power adjustment suggestions can be applied to AMD or Intel chips. For convenience, HP can display the usage data of the processor through the iLO advanced interface, and perform configuration operations through this window. Power supply adjustment can save power and cooling costs without losing performance.
HP's innovative Dynamic Power Saver (DPS) can monitor the power consumption in the chassis in real time and automatically adjust the power supply according to the demand. Because the power supply is most efficient when operating under high load, DPS further reduces power consumption by providing power distribution that meets the overall infrastructure requirements of users. For example, when the server needs less power, only one pair of power modules can be started, and the other power modules are in a stand-by state, instead of turning on all power units, but each power unit runs at a lower efficiency. When the power supply demand increases, the power supply module can be started in time to meet the power supply demand. This ensures that the power supply system always maintains the most efficient working state, while ensuring sufficient power supply, it realizes power saving through lower power supply load. Through dynamic power adjustment technology, 20 cases with power of 0.075/ kWh can save about $5,545 per year.
Concluding remarks
The increasing energy cost of traditional data centers has aroused widespread concern. While the cost of server power supply has doubled in the past decade, the cooling system has also brought unprecedented pressure to the infrastructure construction of data centers. In order to solve the problem of rising heat and energy consumption, Hewlett-Packard Company innovatively introduced a new generation of green BladeSystem c-Class and a green data center solution based on dynamic intelligent refrigeration technology DSC. Through HP's innovative PARSEC architecture, thermal logic and active cooling fan, energy consumption is reduced. Depending on the size of the data center, these technologies can save 20% to 45% energy for the data center.