Technical Brief October 2008
‘Green up’ Your Data Center
‘Green’ is ubiquitous mantra you’ve heard for several years, especially when it comes to recycling, driving a fuel-efficient vehicle, and reducing consumption of resources such as power and water. Now it is becoming the mantra of businesses across the country, who are putting various environmental practices into place, including ‘greening up’ their data centers. In the near future, greening up your data center isn’t going to be just about being a good corporate citizen or reducing operating costs, it may be a government requirement. In 2007, based on a bill passed by President Bush, the EPA submitted a study of data center energy use. The study will be used to find approaches to reduce data center energy consumption and could possibly be used to create new legislature.
Energy efficiency is one of the biggest challenges that IT managers face when trying to create a greener environment. High-density servers create hot spots that require increased power and cooling demands. As businesses grow, they need to add more servers, which require more cooling and more power. In some cases, power consumption gets to the point where they can’t get more power to the building unless they make expensive changes to the infrastructure. Here are some tips for overcoming these challenges as your data center evolves:
- Use energy-efficient equipment. As you add or replace your servers, consider models that are designed to reduce power consumption. Multicore chips, which are used in an wide range of servers—from high-end, large scale servers, to economical servers for small business—are proven to decrease the overall power consumption. High-efficiency power supplies should also be examined as a means for reducing energy use. In some cases, power supplies can waste more energy than the server itself. Although they cost significantly more, they can deliver up to 80% efficiency.
- Consolidate your servers. Making efficient use of your servers is one of the keys to reducing power consumption. You’ll be surprised how many servers are underused or idle. Consolidating and removing servers can add up to a substantial savings in energy, and greatly reduce cost. Virtualization management software is another consideration. The primary goal of virtualization software is to ability to move workloads to a smaller number of servers when workload and service level agreements allow it. Then the unused servers can be powered down.
- Implement power management tools. If possible, data center power usage should be relative to the workload. One way to achieve this is to inactivate unneeded hardware. Power management tools can provide IT managers with more control of power consumption. Using power management IT can meter actual power usage and examine trend data for any single physical system or group of systems. Using this data, the amount of power used by a single server or groups of servers can be limited to optimize energy use and application performance without forfeiting productivity.
