Digital Service Efficiency

Today the Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) metrics were published to drive transparency on data center and server usage.  Many internet provided services use large quantities of servers and are continually growing to scale up with demands.  It is very important to understand the overall efficiency of technical infrastructure from server design to the associated data centers running the servers.

With DSE we took a look at the quarter to annual impacts of server growth and the associated affects on costs, business enablers, energy consumption, and carbon emissions.  The combination of technical metrics with business impacts provides great information to make decisions to optimize both to strive for even better results over time.

With many technical infrastructures utilization can be very low, which means the manufacturing and usage of servers and data centers can represent a waste of resources.  The under-utilization of technical resources represents one of the challenges in the industry and a metric like DSE is a key step in pinpointing inefficiencies and either designing better overall solutions or optimizing already created solutions for re-use.

Old processors for electronic recycling

In the end all computers will eventually reach their end of useful life and need to be recycled.  It is up to us to make sure what what work was done during the active lifespan of any given computer was found to be as useful as possible.

• Resources:
  • Blog article on release
  • Whitepaper (linked)
  • Media coverage:
    • GreenBiz
    • Data Center Knowledge
    • Information Week

Winning the Uptime Green Enterprise IT Award

It was my pleasure to receive the Uptime Green Enterprise IT Award for eBay's modular data center deployment in Phoenix.

During my career I have been in a never-ending march towards cleaner technology solutions. For this deployment we worked with Dell to conceptualize the server and modular data center deployments to ensure we could attain extremely high efficiency, optimal costs, and rapid deployment.

It was great to have the efforts recognized by the Green Enterprise IT Awards, hosted by the Uptime Institute.

The annual awards, which recognize outstanding effort in the field of data center energy efficiency, are not ones that are easily received, and we had to meet a number of impressive criteria in order to be declared a winner.

In partnership with Dell, I received the “Modular Data Center Deployment” award for eBay's highly innovative Project Mercury.

One of my favorite photos from the deployment where we were lifting a little under 2,000 servers about three stories high over power lines to the rooftop.

Centered in Phoenix, Arizona, Project Mercury was an exploration into data center density—the building, packed with nearly 2,000 servers, uses “standardized racks of gear on the floor and…high-efficiency data center modules on the roof”. The setup is so unique, so innovative, that as modules are added to the building, its energy-efficiency actually improves.

In this video, eBay and Dell Data Center Solutions accept the 2012 Uptime Institute Green Enterprise IT Award in the category of Modular Data Center Product Deployment for their project, "From the Data Center Floor to the Rooftop, eBay Drives Down Transaction Costs With Dell Data Center Solutions."

The honor of being recognized by the Uptime Institute with other industry peers, such as Facebook, is a great validate of our approach on data center modularity and efficiency.