I was at the recent HP Datacenter Tech Day in Fort Collins, Colorado.

At the event, HP debuted their new 50,000 square-foot research facility where researchers and scientists are charged with developing sustainability solutions in working environments.

What was most impressive about this was HP’s definition of sustainability, as opposed to basic ‘green’ initiatives.

Our primary speaker on that day was Chandrakant Patel, HP Senior Fellow, and the Director of the Sustainable Ecosystems Research Group at HP.

To him – and an eye-opener for me – sustainability had to be measured in joules, with every use of power measured: from the creation of the devices used in the power generation (embedded joules), to the power consumed by the datacenter itself. For him, getting to a zero-joule situation over the lifecycle of the devices and/or facility is the Holy Grail.

The term “measurement over the lifecycle of the product” allows all power consumption to be taken into consideration, not just the power used at the end point. “Sustainability today is rife with anecdotes: reducing the power consumption of a server, while OK, is not sustainability” says Chandrakant.

Interesting to note that sustainability is not something faddish with HP. Work on power and cooling at HP started back in the 1990s, from 1997: Inkjet heads cool chips, more, more. In 2007, a determination was made that sustainability had to expand to include the entire ecosystem in order to create a holistic perspective.

The new HP Research Datacenter, Fort Collins
This new facility will be a production facility as well. It would work on not just on improving currently shipping products – servers, storage, networking, but also on future products as well.

The facility is impressive: at final build out, it will occupy 50,000 square feet incorporating 10,000 sensors, with 10,000 servers (they with their ‘sea of sensors’), and consume 10 megawatts of juice.

Sustainability principles abound here. For example, outside air and water based cooling; a couple of examples of HP Data Center Smart Grid would be used here.

At this research facility, HP is employing a myriad number of active and passive schemes to reduce the energy footprint of the datacenter: active cooling fans, the afore-mentioned sensors, giant refrigeration and ice makers, and more, all feeding telemetry back to the researchers in order to allow them to develop best practices over time.

Impressive.

However, all this is nothing without the right management framework to oversee the place. To that end, we were given demos of the management suite, which included pretty easy –to us onlookers – provisioning and deployment.

HP E5000 Messaging Server
In the world of corporate messaging, Microsoft Exchange stands alone at the apex of offerings. However, all you all know, architecting, deploying and managing Exchange can be daunting.

To alleviate this, Microsoft and HP, as part of a laughable $250 million alliance*, developed the E5000 as a quasi-appliance (user-extensible and upgradeable, as opposed to generic appliances) that makes implement Exchange a snap.

The demo of the product was mungo cool, and I found myself thinking immediately of a few situations where we could deploy it, saving ourselves a substantial amount, in both monetary and labor resources.

Conclusions
HP is showing leadership in power and cooling, another critical component of the datacenter, and of HP’s Converged Infrastructure strategy. It is good to see that with Servers, Networking, and Storage, the company is making sure that all parts of the CI puzzle fit, and fit perfectly.

I cannot wait to see what more HP is doing with regards to that other very important piece of CI, training. Yes, I know that the ExpertONE program has been announced. However, more information is needed in order for me to make a determination if HP is truly ready create its own cadres of foot soldiers, and to take on the thought leaders in training (Cisco, VMware).

* Laughable, in that here you have two companies that do several billion dollars of trading between themselves constantly touting a $250 alliance. Their combined revenues, for 2011 should be in the neighborhood of $200 billion, for goodness sakes!