How to react to data center power use

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/2243595.html

According to a recent report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), datacenters across the country consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2006 at a cost of $4.5 billion — twice as much as in 2000. That’s more power than is required to operate the nation’s 250 million television sets. The EPA predicts that by 2012, U.S. datacenters will consume 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity at a cost of $7.4 billion.

IT managers have long known they pay “twice” for electricity in a datacenter: first to power up the many racks crammed full of IT equipment, and then to cool off all those power-hungry, heat-generating systems. Power is getting expensive, too — up to half the cost of ongoing operations, according to some reports. And being wasteful is no longer politically correct given the tons of carbon dioxide being dumped into a warming atmosphere.

Some organizations face an even more pressing problem: they simply do not have the power or cooling capacity to grow. Gartner estimates that up to half of all datacenters will encounter this problem in this year. And datacenters are scaling ever larger to meet the growing demand for new services and to satisfy the need for more online storage, particularly given the increasing use of video content. Consolidation to fewer and larger datacenters is also driving growth as operators seek greater economies of scale. Many of these new “mega” datacenters are being located, quite consciously and prudently, near sources of readily-available and low-cost power.

A very cool article. I wonder if we’re going to find more organizations get involved more in the data center space. Not only just in terms of how much space we have, how much power or cooling we have left. But to have the data center management taken to the next level; how efficient is our power and cooling - are we efficiently cooling the data center, are their hot and cold spots? How we use the power in the data center on a per application/revenue basis, I’m happy to use the necessary power and cooling, but do I not want to divert those resources to the systems that generate me or my client with the most benefit, the most revenue generation?  As costs rise in terms of hosting and in buying or leasing data center space rise wherever you are, how you manage and account for your data center usage will depend on your business, but by acting now, thinking medium to long term you can not only save money but get benefits direct and indirect by thinking about how you provision the IT service; virtualization, application/server consolidation, lower voltage servers - even something as simple as upgrading the servers to newer more efficient models, reducing those disk shelves to SAN or bigger drives could bring savings with little real disruption or significant investment.