Blade Watch

Hardware Today: Energy Efficiency Hits the Data Center

“DC-based systems can increase server efficiency and reliability while reducing power consumption by as much as 30 percent,” says Colette LaForce, vice president of marketing for Rackable Systems. “Systems that consume less power naturally put out less heat — which means less air conditioning for the data center, and therefore an additional expense reduction.”

There has been more of a business driver to manage your data center more effectively in the past few years, power and cooling being the main issues raised. The difference is that power is limited, issues of space, support costs and cooling can be hidden from view, I can move things around, the power aspect is a bit more binary.

So when I’m in a meeting discussing that your DEC uses 1100 watt, (or 2 web servers dependent on configuration) it has a more binary finality angle to it than, well the DEC Alpha takes up one cabinet. (My datacenter can hold 100 cabinets right? “One cabinet, ok” I here my business colleagues say).

People understand power, don’t get me wrong they understand costs, but that only matters if the cost is significant enough, the outage significant, or most importantly, if the cost is truly reflected in the actual hosting cost. But when I say, you’ve got enough power for three servers full stop, no discussion please, it makes people ask, where is our power being used.

Power is always going to be an issue coupled with cooling the data center for the forseable future, regardless of the physical and financial efforts taken to keep your legacy kit in business, the issue of cooling and powering the servers allows me to explain the issues in a more real format.

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