Time to Think About Saving Power at the Data Center

‘To do more with less’, is todays mantra. What it means in the data center, is the increase in the data load while a deduction in hardware, infrastructure, management & power consumption.

Most of these things can be achieved with virtualization & automation, the power equation is a bit trickier. Though the systems are more efficient, but the data center industry is still constantly consuming more power.

Simply, the reason is the lack of participation from the data center industry. The big part is played by the simple economics into this equation: Large-scale facilities have to drive productivity to new levels avoiding the risk of their energy budgets crash the entire business model. Not just that, but standard enterprises, often have lower utilization rates in order to protect critical apps & services, on the other hand large cloud providers are more expert at shifting loads should key components go dark.

But still the average data center is a major cost center for any business. In between the aging, high-power components with lower-power devices or simply porting workloads to the cloud, many are choosing the cloud, which ultimately should lower their own data costs. But are they really grateful? Not exactly, watching the losses involved in highly distributed network architectures, but it would largely depend on the workloads involved and the nature of the infrastructure.

Low power is also the reason to invade the data center on the processor level. There are two important elements of energy usage in data centers, Hardware & architecture – specifically, the physical architecture of the data room.

Data equipment is getting denser & heavier, requiring more rigged, & expensive, floor designs, so the cold air tends to sink, a good part of the A/C that the enterprise pays for winds up under the floor to no good purpose. Organizations should reduce their power distribution infrastructure and even the wattage they provide to their racks.

-Archana Ghule