Industry Issues: Energy Efficiency
Data Centers around the world are facing three key issues as managers do their best to cope with the ever-increasing demand for computing power:
- Electrical power constraints: caps on the amount of power available to the data center, as racks and racks of traditional cluster systems with faster clock speeds are added to the facilities.
- Cooling constraints and costs: computers need to be kept cool to function, and that effort is not trivial. For every extra watt needed to power computing, up to another watt is required for cooling. Cooling equipment often takes as much space as the computers themselves, and involves armies of plumbers to get it right.
- Space constraints: data centers are simply running out of floor space as racks of cluster systems and the necessary cooling equipment proliferate.
At a macro level, the growing demand for power to drive data centers has become a serious global issue. See below for a cursory view of current press on the issue.
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10/20/2008
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Tideway’s CEO on the Green Data Center Virtualization Review “Bitter” because of the increasingly significant impact data center energy use and power consumption is having on the planet. Between 2000 and 2005, energy usage rose from just over 50 billion KWh per year to over 150 billion KWh. Over half of this energy is used to power servers, and 40% is used to keep those servers cool enough to operate.
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10/17/2008
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IT Vendors Go Green, Says Researcher EETimes The Green Wi-Fi, Data Centers, and Network Switches report reveals that the environmental impact of IT equipment is significant. For example, in one year a 1U rack switch with 24 Ethernet ports in continuous use will consume 2190 kWh, and the coal used to generate that power will release two tons of CO2 along with other pollutants.
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10/13/2008
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Six Steps to a Green Data Center ARN Environmental issues exposed by the media and driven by consumers have placed IT departments under pressure to develop "green" data centers. Factors including the reduction of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions in large data centers often provide the impetus for becoming green.
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6/6/2008
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Primary Storage and the Green Data Center InfoStor The green data center—or rather the lack thereof—is a serious issue. Bloated energy budgets are finally impacting IT after years of successfully ignoring them, overburdened urban power grids are threatening energy supplies, and data-center build-out is forcing companies to build new data centers—never number one on anyone's hit list.
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5/30/2008
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Green Data Centers Blossom Business Week Data centers are notorious energy hogs due to the vast quantities of electricity required to power and cool servers and other computing equipment. Yet, very few companies are willing to build green data centers because of the extra cost and complexity involved.
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5/22/2008
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Down on the Server Farm Economist As servers become more numerous, powerful and densely packed, more energy is needed to keep the data centres at room temperature. Often just as much power is needed for cooling as for computing. The largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume. Microsoft's $500m new facility near Chicago, for instance, will need three electrical substations with a total capacity of 198 megawatts.
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5/13/2008
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IT going green: Built with power on the doorstep Financial Times Data centres are leading culprits when it comes to corporate energy use, not just because servers require a lot of power, but because a third of the energy used by data centres goes on air-conditioning to stop servers overheating. Attempts to improve the energy efficiency of data centres have focused on small changes, such as raising the temperature a degree or two or using virtualisation to reduce the number of servers needed.
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5/1/2008
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Study: Cut Datacenter Power with Bureaucracy, Green Tech Ars Technica Worldwide data center power consumption doubled between 2000 and 2006, and US power consumption alone will require an additional 10 power plants' worth of energy between now and 2010.
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5/1/2008
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Data Centers as Polluters New York Times The world's data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as greenhouse gas polluters by 2020, according to a new study by McKinsey.
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3/20/2008
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It’s Too Darn Hot Business Week The tech industry is facing an energy crisis. The cost of power consumption by data centers doubled between 2000 and 2006, to $4.5 billion, and could double again by 2011, according to the U.S. government. With energy prices spiking, the challenge of powering and cooling these SUVs of the tech world has become a major issue for corporations and utilities.
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3/14/2008
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Ocean Power: Europe's Next Green Thing Business Week The need for alternative energy sources has never been more urgent. But while wind and solar have dominated the recent rush to invest in renewables, market watchers reckon it could now be marine energy's turn to shine.
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9/29/2007
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The Green Grid Banks On Power Reduction InformationWeek The long-term cost to power and cool an enterprise data center can dwarf the price of the hardware it hosts. The Green Grid alliance hopes to change that by developing standard metrics that will enable CIOs to spend less on utilities and more on innovation.
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8/6/2007
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EPA: Power Usage in Data Centers Could Double by 2011 Ars Technica According to the government's best estimates, energy usage at data centers has doubled between 2000 and 2006, and it's poised to double again by 2011.
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