Tackling Data Center Energy Efficiency Challenges

Energy consumption is a growing concern for data centers. Advances in server equipment technologies and increased demand for computing power have increased load densities in the computer room, which in turn has caused corresponding increases in data center power consumption. Energy efficiency measures are thus of high importance for data center designers, operators, and owners. A new white paper from Schneider outlines an approach to the data gathering, trending, and analysis that are necessary to apply successful energy efficiency measures in data center environments.

According to the Uptime Institute, the typical 3-year cost (operating expenses + amortized capital expenses) of powering and cooling servers is approximately 1.5 times the cost of the server hardware itself, with projections of up to 22 times by the year 2012. The reason for increased energy consumption in the data center is, simply put, an increased demand for computing power. Since the heat generated by computer equipment must be removed in order to avoid overheating, increased computer load density results in increased heat density, which becomes a challenge for the HVAC equipment design. This power and cooling challenge is expected to continue.

Techniques for the reduction of energy consumption in the data center environment take many forms, and if these are implemented without an overall strategy, the maximum energy savings will not be achieved. Such a strategy involves a large amount of energy usage data and a large number of computations, some of which must be performed for different sets of data. Doing this by hand is labor-intensive and may not give optimal results. Instead, the implementation of both a hardware monitoring layer and software monitoring and analysis layer allows the gathering of energy usage data and the analysis of this data to achieve maximum energy savings.

To learn more about systems that can allow data centers to realize energy savings today, and increase energy savings in the future download this white paper.