Strategies for Green IT at Penn - Spring 2008

Meeting Minutes
April 9, 2008

Updates

Bob brought the team up to date on the current campus sustainability efforts, including

Business Services

Business Services has launched a new sustainability website containing links to all of the efforts within the business center. The information we put together for this evaluation effort will likely make its way to this site

http://www.business-services.upenn.edu/sustainability

They have also launched an internal informational campain for their affiliates to make them more aware of their overall impact. Business Service is looking to us to provide them with facts to include in this effort.

Team efforts to date

There has been a good level of contributions to the brainstorming sections of the sub-team wiki pages. While we worked on refining those ideas today, team members should continue to post additional ideas as we go forward. In addition, sub-team members should keep an eye on the progress of the other sub-team by monitoring the wiki pages. Mistakes are more easily caught, and ideas from one team may be applicable to the other.

Sub-team Breakout

Data Center/Server lifecycle diagram

At this point in the meeting, we broke out into subteams to further refine the existing brainstorming ideas, and to identify tasks going forward.

Data Center / Server

We started out discussing the larger categories listed in the brainstorming section of the sub-team wiki page, with the following larger buckets:

• Started with 7 "buckets" for ideas
• Virtualization
  • Consolidation
• Cooling
  • Airflow
  • Monitoring
• HW Lifecycle
• Power Consumption
  • Metering
  • What is a "typical" rack?
• Build Awareness
• Example Cases
• Vendor Offerings

As we began to progress through the list, Alex Chekholko proposed organizing our information into a lifecycle diagram. We expanded on this idea, and came up with the lifecycle diagram (see figure on right). The lifecycle from this diagram is as follows:

1. System Requirements
2. Vendor Offerings
3. Purchasing
4. Choosing a Physical Location
5. Racking/Cabling
6. OS Optimizations
7. Software Installations
8. Monitoring/Metering
9. End of Life

Stephanie brought up concerns about Scope, as well as deciphering what options are costly and what options are not.

Deliverables

We decided to base our deliverables on the discussion from this idea, and assigned tasks to the team members:

• Bob DeSilets
  • Research vendor delivery packaging options from the major campus server vendors
  • Consolidate information on racking/cabeling optimization
• Stephanie Alarcon
  • A blurb on end-of-life considerations, and questions to ask to help extend the life of a machine
  • A simple chart/dataset showing example low-power hardware configs for a typical "small" and "big" server for each of the 3 vendors
• Gavin Burris, Clay Wells, and Stephanie Alarcon
  • OS power consumption optimization
• Alex Chekholko and Stephanie Alarcon
  • Begin a "how-to: for measuring your own servers' power consumption
• Barbara McAleese
  • Data centers and server efficiencies from a Business Administrator's perspective

Important Dates

• The next full team meeting will be 4/30
• IT Convention - 5/5
  • David Toccafondi and Bob DeSilets will be moderating the session on Green IT and will be drawing heavily from the work of this team
• SUG and IT Roundtable Presenatations - 2nd or 3rd week in May
  • David and Bob will be presenting our preliminary findings to SUG and IT Roundtable
• Targeted end date - 5/16