Building an Efficient & Ecologically Friendly Data Center

Part three in a series. Greg Schulz is the founder of StorageIO and the author of The Green and Virtual Data Center.

By understanding fundamentals and background information about electricity usage along with options and alternatives including rebates or incentives, IT data centers can deploy strategies to become more energy efficient without impeding service delivery. Reducing carbon footprint is a popular and trendy topic. However, addressing energy efficiency -- that is, doing more work with less energy -- addresses both environmental and business economic issues. By reducing energy consumption or shifting to a more energy-efficient IT model, business can reduce their operating expenses and enable more useful work to be done per dollar spent while improving service delivery.

The available supply of electricity is being impacted by ageing and limited generating and transmission capabilities, as well as rising fuel costs. While industries such as manufacturing consume ever more electrical power, IT data centers and the IT equipment housed in those habitats require continued and reliable power.

Data center demand for electrical power is also in competition with other power consumers, leading to shortages and outages during peak usage periods. There are also increasing physical requirements for growing data centers in the form of more servers, storage, and network components to support more IT and related services for business needs. Other pressing issues for IT data centers are cooling and floor space to support more performance and storage capacity without compromising availability and data protection.

Typically, energy usage is based on metered readings -- either someone from the utility company physically reading the meter, remote reading of the meter, estimated usage based on historical usage patterns, or some combination thereof. Electric power is charged at a base rate (which may vary by location, supply, and demand for fuel sources, among other factors) per kilowatt-hour, plus fuel surcharges, peak demand usage surcharges, special fees, and applicable commercial volume peak usage, minus any applicable energy saver discounts.Thus, if a data center is at its limit of power, and if the data center needs to increase processing and storage capabilities by 10 percent per year, a corresponding improvement in efficiency of at least the same amount is required. Over the past decade or so, capacity planning has been eliminated in many organizations because of the lowering cost of hardware. However, there is an opportunity to resurrect the art and science of capacity planning to tie power and cooling needs with hardware growth and to implement data center power demand-side management to ensure sustained growth.

With a current focus on boosting performance and reducing power consumption for servers and their subsequent cooling requirements, the power, cooling, floor-space (footprint) and environmental (PCFE) focus will shift to storage. Even with denser equipment that can do more work and store more information in a given footprint, continued demand for more computing, networking, and storage capability will keep pressure on available PCFE resources. Consequently, addressing PCFE issues will remain an ongoing issue, and, thus, performance and capacity considerations for servers, storage, and networks need to include PCFE aspects and vice versa.

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Greg Schulz is the founder of StorageIO, an IT industry research and consulting firm. He has worked as a programmer, systems administrator, disaster recovery consultant, and capacity planner for various IT organizations, and also has held positions with industry vendors. He is author of the new book The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and of the SNIA-endorsed book Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier).