5 Steps to Green Data Centers

Are your data center electricity costs adding to your infrastructure RoI? Have you thought of going green with efficiency in power and cooling? If you don't care now, you will soon start caring. Most data center managers have overlooked the steady rise in electricity costs, since they don't usually see those bills. But they do see the symptoms of surging power demands.

High compute servers are a major source of power consumption that has surpassed 30 kilowatts per rack for some high-end systems. As a result, some data center managers are struggling to get enough power distributed out to those racks on the floor. Since, the power distribution and consumption in each building is capped, organizations are struggling to add more electricity to their data center which definitely adds to overall real-time cost to company as well!

The need of the hour for every business head is to go green with energy efficiency systems, saving the extra dollar. A watt saved in data center power consumption saves at least a watt in cooling. IT managers who take the long view are already paying attention to the return on investment associated with acquiring more energy-efficient equipment.

Following these steps will keep astute data center managers ahead of the game.

Consolidation

Using the ‘capacity utilization assessment tools', one can do away with idle servers and identify the less capacity utilized servers which they can re-size on a virtual platform to run multiple workloads or applications and subsequently reduce footprint of the servers. It will allow IT to substantially reduce the number of physical servers required while increasing the utilization levels of remaining servers. Most physical servers today run at about 10% to 15% utilization. Since an idle server can consume as much as 30% of the energy it consumes at peak utilization, you get more bang for your energy dollar by increasing utilization levels.

Add to Power Management

Although power management tools are available, administrators today don't always make use of them. In a heterogeneous data center environment, it becomes difficult to access the real-time power usage of each system individually to manage and cap the overall consumption. But today tools are available to remotely manage and distribute power to multiple servers from a single console for each individual workload within the data center. IT managers can make use of such tools efficiently to dynamically distribute power to servers based on real time utilization. Just taking full advantage of power management features and turning off unused servers can cut data center energy requirements by about 20% .That's not happening in many data centers today because administrators focus almost exclusively on uptime and performance, and IT staffers aren't comfortable yet with available power management tools.

Upgrade to Energy-Efficient Servers

Most hardware vendors are building server technology that contributes to performance per wattage. With the introduction of multi-core processing architecture, the overall compute power of servers has increased manifolds. More so, the form factor has shrunk and today you can run high end workloads in half the density than what you did a year back. Energy efficiency is a fundamental design consideration for all servers. Today, servers feature energy-tuned technologies designed to reduce power consumption while increasing performance and capacity. Built with standards-based, high-efficiency components, servers are designed to perform optimally with minimum power consumption. Power supply units are right-sized to ensure your servers have the power they require without the wasted dollars and wasted watts associated with over provisioning.

Need for High-efficiency Power Supplies

Inefficient power supplies in commodity servers are a huge contributor to inefficient datacenter. With the less-efficient power supplies found in many commodity servers, efficiency peaks at 70% to 75% at 100% utilization but drops into the 65% range at 20% utilization-and the average server load is in the 10% to 15% range. That means that inefficient power supplies can waste nearly half of the power before the power even gets to the IT equipment. The problem is compounded by the fact that every watt of energy wasted by the power supply requires another watt of cooling system power just to remove the resulting waste heat from the data center. Still, moving to these more energy-efficient power supplies reduces both operating costs and capital costs. "If they spent $20 on power supply, you would save $100 on the capital cost of cooling and infrastructure equipment,

Storage-Another factor for Energy Efficiency

Storage represents a smaller fraction of data center power consumption, but decisions on storage products and infrastructure have a great impact on data center efficiency. Best practices include consolidating slower storage to faster, more energy-efficient solutions, and leveraging a strategy to reduce data footprint across all data and storage tiers. A planed ILM with technologies such as automated archival / auto tearing of data, structured backup and de-duplication will contribute in fewer disk drive utilization that will impact less power consumption & efficient management of data.

Conclusion

In a holistically designed data center, synergies among multiple products create improvements and efficiencies on overall data center efficiency. Traditionally, data centers have been build to increase computation, often without insight into overall power consumption. Focusing on energy use by individual data center systems has often ignored the business value of the systems and their role in the data center processes that support the business. It is therefore the need of the hour for IT managers and business heads to identify the right approach to a green data center which will overall benefit the organization with lower IT investment and higher RoI.