IT Managers Discover the High Cost of Ignoring Data Center Efficiency Problems

If sky-high electricity bills aren’t enough to bust an IT budget, the likelihood of new regulations and standards—as well as pressure to “green up” the corporate image—are forcing IT managers to think about how much juice their operations are consuming. But, to paraphrase a famous icon of popular culture: “It is not necessarily easy being green.”

Nevertheless, achieving data center efficiency is now a critical corporate priority. Understanding data center energy consumption requires IT managers to think hard about physical plant costs (heating, cooling, ventilating, and lighting their facilities), as well as the costs of operating IT equipment.

Simply discovering the energy consumption patterns of different IT elements can be expensive and complicated. For instance, simply “nameplate rating”* individual IT components – such as servers, routers, and storage units – can yield inaccurate results, because it doesn’t account for variables such as idle time or fluctuations in use.

To really measure how much wattage is consumed by specific elements of a data center, such as individual routers, may require dedicated instrumentation that can be quite costly. As a result, many organizations do not have a solid baseline of data from which to work.

In the past year, IBM conducted more than 30 energy assessments around the world and found the average data center infrastructure efficiency (DCiE) index was 43 percent. This means 43 cents of every energy dollar are spent to power IT, while 57 cents are spent on the physical infrastructure for conditioned power and cooling.

Energy is used by the IT equipment (servers, storage and network equipment), as well as the physical infrastructure equipment, like the computer room air conditioners, uninterruptible power supplies and chillers. As a result 60 to 70 percent of the energy in a data center is used on the physical infrastructure equipment, while only 30 to 40 percent is used on the IT equipment.

Key Steps to Launching a Green IT Program

Step one: Diagnose – It can be difficult to capture accurate and detailed information on the energy efficiency of your data center, and even more difficult to identify the right opportunities for improvement. Nevertheless, without getting a comprehensive picture of the current state of energy efficiency, it is impossible to set effective goals. To learn more, click here:
http://ibmgreen.bathwick.com/?S_TACT=6N8AJ21W&&S_CMP=Green2.0_Web_Bathwick_Tool (link resides outside of ibm.com)

Step two: Build – The next step is to build the data center by selecting and configuring hardware in the most energy efficient manner. The demand for more computing power and electricity, better cooling solutions, and facilities that can grow with an organization is creating a crisis in data centers around the world. Simply adding more servers and turning up the air conditioning is not feasible. Instead, numerous organizations are planning to cope with this crisis by building new facilities or making significant changes to their existing sites. They are aiming to optimize their data centers — not only to accommodate more hardware, but also to meet business objectives that include: To learn more, click here:
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/itservice/igs/a1026000

Step three: Virtualize – Organizations are implementing a variety of virtualization solutions from server, storage and application virtualization and workstations in virtualized environments. The most successful virtualization projects deliver real business value through practical benefits. To learn more, click here: http://www.ibm.com/itsolutions/virtualization/

Step four: Manage – Provisioning and effective virtualization management software can reduce server power consumption by up to 80 percent annually. If this software was deployed in all U.S. data centers, the country could save an estimated 5.4 billion kilowatt hours per year—enough electricity to heat 370,000 homes for a winter. To learn more click here:
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/management/director/about/director52/extensions/actengmrg.html

Step five: Cool -- Analyst firm IDC estimates that in 2006 $29 billion was spent on powering and cooling IT systems. IT professionals must exploit new liquid cooling solutions that require no additional fans or electricity and still reduce server heat output in data centers up to 60 percent by utilizing chilled water to dissipate heat generated by computer systems. To learn more click here:
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/greendc/green_technology/

For more information about data center efficiency solutions for IT managers, contact IBM.