| Dear Sustainability Watch Reader,
I am pleased to provide you with your weekly Sustainability Watch newsletter. This week's topic is "Data Center Management."
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Data Center Management & Energy Efficiency
In September 2012, the New York Times released an article based on a year long study of data center management. Overall, the Times believes that data centers and the information industry as a whole are severely at odds with the image of energy efficiency they continue to claim to the public.
Currently, the size of data centers has reached a staggering amount. According to the Times, a single data center now uses more power than a medium-sized town in the US. Further, most data centers are run at full power 24 hours a day to meet the constant needs of information users. However, roughly 90% of this energy is completely wasted, as information is not pulled constantly for 24 hours.
Upon further analysis, consulting firm McKinsey & Company found that data centers, on average, only use between 6-12 percent of the electricity powering servers. The rest of the electricity was spent on idling servers in preparation for a surge in activity.
Currently, the amount of information created and replicated via the internet reached 1.8 trillion gigabytes. Moreover, there are over 500,000 data centers throughout the world, which now occupy almost 2% of the world's electrical energy. The management of data centers has long gone without scrutiny, and will continue to drain energy across the world without serious regulations.
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Executive Summary
After the publication of an EPA report in 2007 on data center energy efficiency, greater attention has been given to data centers' growing use of electricity. Improved efficiency could result in large savings. The EPA has suggested that a 10% reduction in data center energy consumption over the next few years would save enough energy to reduce industry IT costs by as much as $740 million per year, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and power up to 100 million homes annually.
There are a variety of reasons why data centers are not energy efficient today. The first is that most servers are not fully utilized. Some studies suggest that servers are only utilized at about 10%, yet they still use full power. Another reason is that data center managers are not aware of electricity consumption levels. There are several technological solutions that can be implemented in the data center environment to improve energy efficiency. These include application optimization services or software, virtualization, the use of multicore or low-voltage processors, CPU power throttling, and the use of uninterruptible power supplies. From a facilities point of view, data center managers should work to right-size the cooling system and also increase the temperature a few degrees.
Several metrics have been developed to measure data center energy efficiency. One of the most comprehensive is corporate average datacenter efficiency or CADE. CADE evaluates both the power usage and CPU utilization rates of a data center. The higher the CADE score, the more efficient the facility is. One limitation of CADE is that it is most easily calculated by large organizations. Smaller companies are unlikely to have the automated monitoring tools needed to measure server utilization.
Governmental agencies in the United States and the European Union have already or are in the process of issuing guidelines for greater data center energy efficiency. When the EPA energy performance rating system is released, those data centers with a score of 75 or higher will be eligible for the Energy Star label.
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Want to Learn More?
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