Alcatel-Lucent launched GreenTouch in 2010 with the stated goal of making wireless and wireline networks 1,000 times more energy efficient than they are today in the long term. Three years later the consortium — which has grown to include 53 vendors, carriers and research institutions — is releasing its first set of recommendations to green up the telecom industry.

The recommendations are a long list of technologies and network topologies, some of which would require mere software tweaks to current equipment while others would require new telecommunications standards and a new generation of network equipment, said Thierry Klein, GreenTouch’s technical committee chair and head of Bell Labs green research.

New small cell topologies could drastically reduce the power necessary to run mobile data networks since smaller the cell radiuses require less power necessary to maintain a connection, Klein said. Those networks would have to be managed much differently than cellular systems are today, however, with cells automatically shutting off and turning on to meet the real-time capacity demands of subscribers.

“We’re talking about adjusting the resources of the networks on the microscopic level,” Klein said. “We can create a power profile for the equipment that’s much more proportional to its use.” Basically, carriers have to commit to running only as much network as need at any given moment.

GreenTouch is also recommending infrastructure sharing, which would require operators to virtualize their own networks a common set of base stations, towers antennas and core routers. On the wireline side, GreenTouch has developed a new technique for delivering fiber connections to homes called bit-interleaved passive optical networking (BIPON), which reduces the energy required to deliver high-speed broadband by a factor of 30.

Thierry Van Landegem

GreenTouch said if fully implemented, the recommendations would meet its 1,000x improvement goal on wireless network, but would only get about halfway to the same milestone on wireline networks. But GreenTouch Chairman Thierry Van Landegem claimed that taken together these recommendations could reduce the operational energy consumption of all of today’s communications networks by a staggering 90 percent by 2020.

In an interview I pressed Van Landegem on that number, but he insisted he wasn’t talking about a 90 percent efficiency improvement but actually cutting the energy consumed by all the world’s communications networks to one tenth of 2010’s levels. That’s even accounting for the facts that many more networks will be built, billions more people will have access to those networks, and average mobile and wireline data consumption will skyrocket in 2020, Van Landegem said.

If GreenTouch can live up to that promise — and if the mobile industry follows its recommendations — such an energy reduction truly would be an impressive feat. And Van Landegem said GreenTouch is just getting started: “Reducing energy by 90 percent is conservative as we have many projects underway whose effects were not taken into account in that number.”

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Evolution of the home energy market

That Nest and Opower have emerged as the leading companies fighting over this business says something about the small and slow-moving industry. Over the years the market for devices, websites and services that attempt to get consumers to reduce their energy use — a largely unsexy and unappreciated task — has been riddled with struggling startups and failed clunky product launches.

Home energy dashboards never made a dent with consumers. Various startups from Tendril to EnergyHub realized early on that high-end energy dasboards were not the way to go. People don’t care enough about energy and didn’t want to spend money on an energy-specific device.

At the same time, residential-focused energy efficiency services from utilities have taken years to roll out in any meaningful way. Utilities are notoriously slow moving and cautious. Companies that tried to work in these markets got frustrated, too. Google and Microsoft both shut down their energy efficiency web tools after failing to gain much interest or develop any partnerships.

Opower’s entrance

When Opower launched almost six years ago, it found early success with an energy efficiency product that provided immediate value to utilities: mailed energy reports. While Opower has always been an energy software and data company, it were these mailed reports that were initially valuable to utilities that (particularly back then) had unsophisticated digital presences.

Honeywell & Opower’s iPad smart thermostat app

The Opower reports came in envelopes that looked like bills (so were almost always opened) and they used behavioral techniques (smiley faces, peer competition) to gently convince the utility customer to reduce consumption. The mailed reports were also relatively inexpensive compared to home energy devices and dashboards.

But over the years Opower has had to morph into a company that largely sells digital energy data products to utilities. There’s only so much business — and so much effect on consumer behavior — that paper reports can have.

Opower now largely interacts with utility customers through email, text messages, and websites. Its newer digital products include a Facebook app and more recently software for connected thermostats, in partnership with thermostat giant Honeywell.

Opower’s work with Honeywell and its connected thermostat product was one of the first indicators of how competitive Opower and Nest could become. The thermostat has emerged as the great hope for creating a gateway into home energy efficiency following the demise of the energy dashboard. In addition, Honeywell saw Nest as a pretty direct threat, having previously sued Nest over patent infringement around the learning thermostat.

It’s unclear how much success the Honeywell/Opower thermostat is having, given that it’s such a new product. PG&E was the first utility that piloted it and some early results suggested that customers liked using the smart thermostats and particularly liked being able to remotely control the thermostat using their iPhone.

But one of the key differences between Opower and Nest’s business models is clear through that partnership. Opower’s utility products are almost always white-labelled for utilities, so, for example, if it creates a website and system of emails and texts for PG&E customers, then Opower’s alerts are branded with PG&E’s logo. In contrast, Nest has long been focused on selling directly to consumers and building a consumer brand.

Nest emerges

Nest was officially launched toward the end of 2011, though the company had been building its technology for a year and half before that. Its core business philosophy involves the production of a well-designed thermostat that users would covet and that could also collect data about the user and learn their behavior. The thermostat can use that knowledge to shave off between 20 and 30 percent of the user’s monthly heating and cooling, and Nest has mostly focused on selling the thermostat directly to consumers.

But Nest has more recently started to move into offering utilities and energy service providers energy efficiency services. Last month Nest launched a variety of energy services, including demand response, and also this week acquired a startup, MyEnergy, that aggregates and analyzes utility data. It’s clear that one of the most important aspects of the Nest thermostat is the services that can be run based on both the consumer’s individual and the collective Nest users’ data.

Nest appears to want to maintain its brand and its ability to connect directly with customers. When it launched its energy services last month, the company told me that its services sit between the consumer and the utility. It also approves eligible customers and monitors how the services are performing and how the customers are reacting.

This direct-to-consumer approach could also prove useful if (and when) Nest launched any more connected home products in the future.

Power in the data

Essentially, both Nest and Opower are cloud-based data analytics companies that are using various — and increasingly competitive — ways to access home energy data. Nest calls its cloud-based big data algorithms Auto-Tune, and the data that is collected is from its increasingly large amount of thermostats being installed throughout the world.

Opower has built out its big data platform, Opower 4, which collects data from at least 75 utilities, processes data from more than 50 million homes, and has 15 million homes fully connected into the Opower platform. Opower is analyzing 16 percent of all of the smart meters in the U.S.

Each company’s approach has unique benefits and hurdles. Opower has been widely successful with utilities using the approach of starting out with a basic data analytics service, and adding on more complexity and control over time. Utilities are hard customers to win over, so the benefits of winning their business early is invaluable. Nest, with its direct to consumer approach, could be slightly threatening to some of the more conservative utilities.

Nest, on the other hand, has the capacity to build a consumer brand that can make money from direct consumer electronics sales as well as working with energy service providers. Opower has little consumer brand presence and mostly subverts its brand to its utility customers.

Which method will prove more successful over time? It’ll be interesting to see, but in reality there will be room for both. It’s also refreshing to see different types of innovation and execution in the home energy efficiency space — an industry that has been neglected for quite a long time.

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The social-networking giant is giving the general public access to near-real-time dashboards on PUE and another key measurement, water-usage effectiveness (WUE), alongside humidity and temperature data for its data centers in Prineville and in Forest City, N.C. Previously, the PUE and WUE figures were released quarterly. The new dashboards show data down to the minute, albeit with a two and a half hour lag. In the future, Facebook will also post a PUE and WUE dashboard for the data center it’s building in Luleå, Sweden.

The facilities are still under construction, and, as a result, the data in the two dashboards can have abnormalities, but it should become more stable over time. The company detailed its plans in a Thursday blog post on the Open Compute Project site.

Facebook’s Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) and Water Usage Efficiency (WUE) dashboard

Facebook’s Power Use Efficiency (PUE) and Water Use Efficiency (WUE) dashboard

To prod other companies operating data centers to share more up-to-date power- and water-usage data, Facebook will open-source the code for the dashboards. Similar data from other companies could make Facebook look good, as Facebook (along with Google) is on the leading edge when it comes to PUE. A self-benchmarking guide on high-tech buildings from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory puts the standard data-center PUE at 2.0, a good one at 1.4 and a better one at 1.1. The PUE at Facebook’s data center in Prineville fluctuated between 1.06 and 1.08 on Thursday, and at the Forest City data center the PUE was between 1.08 and 1.1.

eBay, for its part, has released a dashboard showing PUE and WUE as well as other measurements, such as the number of checkout transactions per kilowatt-hour.

Innovations in hardware and software at Facebook’s data centers make lower energy use possible. Whether Facebook will be able to squeeze even more computing power out of its energy and water consumption is an interesting question, and now that more current data is being shared, it’s worth asking what innovations will come in the future. If Yahoo, Microsoft and others follow suit, the pressure will be on for data centers across the board to become more transparent. Those efforts could help data center operators respond to notions that data centers waste energy.

This post was updated at 5:24 p.m. to include federal benchmarking figures for power-usage efficiency (PUE) and current Facebook figures.

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A: McDipper, a Facebook-built implementation of the popular memcached key-value store designed to run on flash memory rather than pricier DRAM.

Memcached, for the unfamiliar, is an open-source key-value store that caches frequently accessed data in memory so applications can access and serve it faster than if it were stored on hard disks. It’s a very popular component of many web applications stacks, including at Facebook where the company runs thousands of memcached servers to power its various applications.

But DRAM is expensive, especially when you get to Facebook’s scale, and not all applications deserve that kind of performance. So, according to a Facebook Engineering post on Tuesday, the company designed McDipper to handle “working sets that had very large footprints but moderate to low request rates. … Compared with memory, flash provides up to 20 times the capacity per server and still supports tens of thousands of operations per second.”

Facebook has deployed McDipper for a handful of these workloads, the blog states, and has “reduced the total number of deployed servers in some pools by as much as 90% while still delivering more than 90% of get responses with sub-millisecond latencies.” It has been part of Facebook’s photo infrastructure for about a year and serves 150 gigabits of data per second — or “about one library of congress (10 TB) every 10 minutes” — over Facebook’s content-delivery network.

How McDipper stores data

This is the same logic that drove Facebook to undertake its cold storage engineering effort for even more infrequently accessed data, which aims to find a middle ground between the inefficiency and latency of hard disks and the high cost of flash storage. To meet that goal, the company is getting creative by considering everything from lower-performance flash to Blu-ray — pretty much anything but tape — VP of Engineering Jay Parikh told me in January.

Building a tool like McDipper is the just the tip of the iceberg, though, when it comes to managing the cost and efficiency of infrastructure at large web companies such as Facebook. On Tuesday, eBay released its Digital Service Efficiency report that lays out a methodology for assessing the effect that infrastructure (more than 52,000 servers in eBay’s case; Facebook has even more) has on larger corporate goals such as clean energy and the bottom line.

And later this month at our Structure: Data conference, data center executives from Facebook, Microsoft and Goldman Sachs will take the stage to discuss how smart analytics help them plan to meet capacity needs while keeping costs in check.

Feature image is Facebook’s new all-flash Dragonstone server design.

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Dean Nelson, eBay’s vice president of Global Foundation Services, says the effort, called the Digital Service Efficiency report, “is the miles per gallon measure for technical infrastructure for eBay.” Essentially, the company has boiled its business down to a single currency — transactions (specifically URL requests) associated with users’ buying and selling on the site — and created a slew of metrics that measure how efficiently it delivers those transactions in terms of revenue, performance, cost and carbon footprint.

The project has been about 18 months in the making, Nelson told me during a recent phone call, and eBay was finally able to set a baseline measurement of its performance in 2012. Now that it knows what’s in place and how its infrastructure performs over the course of a year, the goal in 2013 is to cut its computing-related carbon usage and costs by 10 percent and increase performance in terms of transactions per kilowatt-hour by 10 percent.

In order to meet these goals, he said, every member of the technical team — from facilities managers to software engineers — has be striving toward them and also be cognizant of how turning their “knobs” will affect the other metrics eBay is measuring. “Think of it like a Rubik’s cube,” Nelson explained. “You can solve one side but screw up the rest of them.”

eBay plans to release quarterly updates on its progress along with its earnings reports, but employees will have access to down-to-the-second visibility into what’s going on. “It makes it personal for them,” Nelson said. “They can see what their efforts mean.”

52,075 servers doing a lot of work

Nelson offered some pretty compelling examples of how the Digital Service Efficiency project works in practice. If the goal is to decrease cost per transactions, data center engineers might try to minimize power usage at the facility level while server engineers might look to lower-power gear or better utilization on existing gear. They essentially reduce the denominator in that equation “and the net result is we should make more money from those transactions,” he said.

In one real-world instance, a software engineer tweaked some code that affected how much memory an application requires and the company was able to eliminate 400 servers. That cut energy usage by 1 megawatt and a $2 million savings in capital expense when the time would have come to refresh those servers.

eBay also has created a “list of fame” and a “list of shame” that highlight the 1,000 best- and worst-utilized servers within the company. “We have a hit list,” Nelson said, and it’s going to examine the bottom 20 percent to figure out why they’re as wasteful as they are.

However, he added, it’s important to remember on the server front that improving cost, performance and carbon usage doesn’t always mean buying lower-power gear. If eBay can improve the power density of its racks using technology such as liquid cooling — something its Project Mercury data center in Phoenix is pre-equipped for — it can handle more transactions on less gear. It already has some racks running at a sustained rate of 35 kilowatts and thinks it can push that up to 50 kilowatts, Nelson said.

Clean transactions with solar panels and Bloom boxes

On the carbon front, eBay has nothing but an open field in front of it thanks to some big clean-energy projects set to go live in 2013 in its new Salt Lake City, Utah, data center called Project Topaz. For starters, it’s using Bloom Energy boxes as the primary power source, which mean a slightly higher cost per transaction, but also a 13 percent reduction in carbon emissions and increased reliability (downtime costs eBay a lot of money).

Also, the company has finally cleared some regulatory hurdles to tie an on-site solar array back to the grid. Because of changes to a Utah law that eBay lobbied for, it’s about to start sourcing off-site clean energy for its data centers, as well.

“That is a corporate priority,” Nelson said. “We want to create the cleanest commerce engine on the freakin’ planet.”

Trying to change an industry

Of course, the Digital Service Efficiency methodology isn’t the only attempt by a major data center operator to show the world how efficient it is. Google publishes annual Power Utilization Efficiency (PUE) ratings for its data centers, and Facebook occasionally does as well. On Monday, Salesforce.com released a statement underscoring its commitment to sourcing renewable energy.

However, Nelson pointed out, what eBay is doing — and encouraging others to do — is more transparent in that it gives a lot more depth about operations, including the company’s server count. Even if companies don’t publish their results, tying operational efficiency to other business objectives should have a positive effect on the bottom line and the environment, regardless. Every company will have its own base currency, Nelson explained, and they’ll have to find their own metrics to measure and figure out what are the knobs that each part of the company can turn to meet goals.

“We all have the same challenges, the same things to solve for, but we have numerous ways to solve it,” Nelson said. …”[Their implementations] may change completely, but the point is the conversation is starting.”

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Most of the sectors that GE’s newly coined effort covers — transportation, aviation, locomotives, power generation, power distribution, oil and gas development, and industrial processes — are highly energy-reliant (if not all about energy) and the use of digital technologies in these sectors is meant to enable the use of energy (electricity and fuel) as efficiently as possible. That’s where a lot of the cost savings lie. The one exception in the mix is GE’s attention on digital health care.

GE says that with digital and sensor technologies, the commercial aviation industry could reduce fuel use by one percent, which is a savings of $30 billion over 15 years. A one percent efficiency gain for gas-fired power plants globally could deliver $66 billion in fuel savings. A one percent gain in efficiency for the world’s rail networks could lead to $27 billion in fuel savings. The list goes on — and it’s filled with energy efficiency measures, which equals cost savings.

GE has been classifying a lot of this technology under its Ecomagination brand, and it’ll probably continue to do so well into the future. Saving energy — electricity use and fuel — is clearly in the best interest of the planet. Burning fossil fuels for transportation and electricity is a major cause of climate change.

But GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt has said before that he regrets spending so much time over the past four years focused on how green GE’s technologies are. In the Spring of 2011, Immelt said at an event at MIT (reported by Reuters):

“If I had one thing to do over again I would not have talked so much about green. . . Even though I believe in global warming and I believe in the science … it just took on a connotation that was too elitist; it was too precious and it let opponents think that if you had a green initiative, you didn’t care about jobs. I’m a businessman. That’s all I care about, is jobs.”

The re-branding of green technologies — and the clean tech sector — is happening across the board. The term cleantech (and green for that matter) have been deeply politicized in the U.S., and have become a dirty word in some post-Solyndra circles. From a startup perspective, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have had a harder time making money in “cleantech” than in mobile and web ventures.

As a result some investors — and some innovators — have moved away from so-called cleantech. The term “smart grid,” too, has been a bit tainted as consumers have pushed back on smart meters in certain regions. Smart grid returns for investors and startups have also been scarce. Investor groups looking to rebrand cleantech have been emphasizing terms like Clean Web, digital green and the intersection of cleantech and IT.

But as I reported recently, the trends behind the cleantech movement (and the smart grid) are still in place: there will be 9 billion people by 2050, which will lead to resource constraints, and a need for the better management of resources (energy being a major one). GE seems to be at the forefront of trying to rebrand this trend with this Industrial Internet moniker — and I applaud that.

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DCS doesn’t sell to just anyone, though. The unit’s banner customer used to be Facebook (although it has since begun building much of its own gear, and claims to be off vendor gear entirely for its newest data center), and others include Microsoft, Salesforce.com and eBay. In fact, Dell provided the bulk of the web servers for eBay’s Project Mercury data center that I profiled in April. Outside the web space, Dell’s DCS customers include large oil & gas companies and research centers.

Those types of customers are important. As cloud computing and large web sites have shifted server-sales dynamics over the years, fewer customers account for an ever-increasing percentage of server sales. Thanks to Facebook’s Open Compute Project and other efforts, they’re increasingly demanding high-density gear that packs as much power as possible into the most-efficient footprint. In fact, the company claimed in 2011 that its DCS division, combined with its off-the-shelf PowerEdge C line of energy-efficient servers, would be the fourth-largest x86 server vendor in the world if it were spun off from Dell.

To give you a sense just how many servers 1 million is, consider that Google runs about a million servers (give or take, if estimates are accurate), while Facebook is estimated to be running about 181,000 servers. Dell has produced an infographic putting the number into context in terms of energy savings, as well.

And you can check this post from Dell’s Barton George for a celebratory video, as well as a photo of the napkin on which the whole DCS idea was hatched.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Oleksiy Mark.

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Big data is actually a ripe field for ARM-server manufacturers to pick, as scaling out to handle large volumes of data can also mean using up a lot of energy. The problem can get so bad at scale, in fact, that web analytics company Quantcast actually developed its own distributed file system for Hadoop to help cut down on the power bills. The theory behind Dell’s new server concept — which is called “Zinc” and uses Calxeda’s EnergyCore architecture — is that parallel processing jobs that need a lot of nodes, but not necessarily a lot of brawny nodes, can do the same work while consuming far less power.

Calxeda’s Barry Evans explained it thusly last year, when commenting on competitor SeaMicro’s deployment of an Intel Atom-based Hadoop cluster at eHarmony:

“Big data is a great fit for us and ARM servers for three key reasons. First,  it is an inherently scale-out application, requiring a lot of efficient processors. Second, it is a fast-growing market place without a lot of requirements for legacy baggage. Third, the application software is widely available to run on ARM today.”

AMD bought SeaMicro in February. In early October, Calxeda raised $55 million in venture capital.

Zinc isn’t Dell’s first foray into the world of low-power servers, either. In May, it announced another ARM-based design called “Copper,” and it has been rolling out a collection of low-power Intel Xeon servers for the past couple years that are modeled on the hardware it sells to its webscale Data Center Solutions customers. One could say this all evidence that Dell understands it’s part of a changing server market where fewer companies, such as Facebook, will buy a greater percentage of servers, and where vendors had better meet their efficiency demands or get left out in the cold.

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