Improve Your Data Center While Being Energy Efficient
Posted July 12th, 2013
In a recent survey, most IT executives have stated that some of their organization’s data centers will max out of power, cooling or space by the end of 2014. As data keeps multiplying and arriving in more formats at faster speeds, data center operators struggle to balance their need for more computing power with the requirement to reduce energy consumption.
More than ¾ of IT respondents consider energy consumption to be important (anywhere from “somewhat important” or “extremely important”). Data centers worldwide now consume more energy annually than the entire country of Sweden. The need to go green has reached the data center. With only 17% of IT executives planning on building a new data center in the next year, the majority are planning to make upgrades and improvements to their current center to reach their goals.
However, employing energy-saving technologies (such as solar panels) require a large initial investment that many IT budgets cannot accommodate.
So some of the strategies that are being used to provide immediate short-term benefits are:
- Segmentation of data centers into alternating hot and cold aisles – i.e. hot aisle – cold aisle containment (used by 37% of respondents)
- Optimizing air handling to be as efficient as possible (used by 51% of respondents)
- Deploying power management tools (used by 41% of respondents)
- Monitoring power usage ( used by 35% of respondents)
- Undergoing a modular data center design to create the required high energy density, highly reliable environment (used by 27% of respondents)
Organizations are planning to further reduce their electric bill by
- Limiting the consumption of idle resources (40%)
- Improving power usage monitoring (34%)
- Improving power delivery to servers more efficiently (29%)
- Buying and managing energy efficient hardware – hardware that is able to consume power proportional to its required level of performance (27%)
IT executives do understand the need to prepare their data centers to manageably grow in an energy efficient manner. Methods may change, but the goal remains the same – to make data centers greener.
However, while many organizations do monitor their power usage (35%), they often fail to track critical key performances indicators (KPIs) – metrics such as power usage effectiveness (PUE) and data center infrastructure efficiency (DCiE). Improving power usage monitoring – and then acting on those results – requires the constant monitoring of how much power is actually delivered to the IT loads (compared to the amount of energy used by the entire data center) – PUE – and the percentage of the total load that is used by the IT equipment – DciE.
If this subject interests you, and you are looking to hire a technology professional today, Bayside Solutions can provide the people you need. Give us a call today!
