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http://www.sda-asia.com/sda/article/psecom,id,229,srn,1,nodeid,1,_language,Singapore.html

Scalable and right-sized solutions that can grow with IT load offer the best opportunity to improve electrical efficiency, reduce energy costs — and contribute ecologically.

Reduce Costs & Better the Environment

Data center power consumption is rapidly becoming a global issue–as both an environmental concern and a business matter. As energy costs skyrocket, IT departments are facing increased C-level demands to bring the escalating power and cooling expenses of today’s high-density deployments under control. And growing public concern over the long-term health of our planet has forward-thinking corporations (as well as governments) looking at ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Clearly, improved electrical efficiency within the IT room–the “greening of the data center” — has become a priority.

Check out this interesting article which is talking about improving the energy efficiency of your data center. It’s got some great comments about achieving this, it’s got contribution from APC but is nonetheless relevant if you’re thinking about how to manage the business needs within the constraints of your existing data center.

Of the top of my head, to reduce power utilization:

• Consider getting rid of those storage arrays-  the external storage shelves populated with disks (you’d be surprised how much power you’re using just to provide 18GB disk space for that Compaq 5000R)
• Think about what systems you have and how they are being used – those servers you use to copy security patches/upgrade packs to, could they not be on a filer or hosted/consolidated on to one server?
• Consider SAN booting those servers, granted in the scheme of things you might argue a disk does not use that much power, but scale it up to 1500 servers with those 15k drives (all RAID1), switching to a SAN solution could save you in hardware support costs and energy.
• Establish what you’re doing with the legacy infrastructure, could we consolidate those 16 DEC Alpha A1200s on to one or more Itanium servers? Saving on space, energy and your hardware support cost. A vendor will support anything at cost.
• Consider the temperature of the data center, the servers are rated to operate up to a certain temperature, could we raise the temperature of the data center say 5 degrees, granted you might find your hardware support contract cost rises a few percent, but compare that with your energy costs and it might just be worth doing anyway.
• Look at the air flow in your data center and see if it needs optimized to ensure that all the systems are getting the cooling they need, that the air you’re forcing through the data center is delivering the benefit to the associated cost. Cabinet design, and floor tile allocation can make a huge difference to this.
• DC power or fresh air cooling – these are also being debated, though might require a bit more configuration to achieve – not necessarily something you could do overnight.

Related posts:

1. Matching your data center to your application Computerworld Computerworld – Next month is the one year anniversary...
2. Reducing the carbon footprint of your data center I asked one of the IT Managers to give me...
3. EDS uses free air cooling in data center http://www.cnplus.co.uk/news/business/new-free-air-cooling-technology-used-at-30m-teesside-centre/5211362.article IT services supplier EDS is using Flakt Woods technology...
4. IBM and Syracuse university building THE energy efficient data center? An interesting article talking about how IBM and the Syracuse...

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