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Data centres are energy intensive, so it follows that energy consumption is one of their biggest environmental issues. In data centres, large-scale inefficiencies (in areas such as distribution and power conversion) occur throughout the energy chain, from the potential of the fuel source to generation and distribution.

However, a green data centre will broaden its environmental strategy beyond energy efficiency, gleaning the maximum amount of production from the minimum amount of materials and energy, without compromising performance, resilience and security.

During the next 10 years, the increased energy appetite of processors, servers, storage devices and network appliances will increase the energy required to power and cool the ICT hardware infrastructure. A shortage of prime quality data centre space to host new infrastructure, as well as the rapidly increasing cost to build new data centres, will add to the problem.

For many organisations, actual energy consumption will outpace this underlying trend for a period of time. Users will get onto a 'technology platform runway' and, by sticking to it and increasing the volume of hardware technology, they’ll experience a sharp increase in energy consumption. However, the industry will see innovation at many levels (including servers, management software, liquid cooling and blowers), and, at some point, they’ll switch to newer technologies and almost instantly reduce their energy consumption.

In a data centre, massive inefficiencies occur throughout the energy chain, from the potential of the original fuel source through generation and distribution. Many of these inefficiencies lie outside the control of IT departments, resulting from how power is generated and distributed in a country’s national electricity grids. Once the electricity reaches the data centre, cooling, uninterruptible power source (UPS) and other 'non-productive' uses expend resources. This is compounded when energy gets to the server and IT devices, which often have low utilisation rates and extraneous software.

Although data centre energy efficiency is not about improving cooling, power management and the power source, these areas are a good place to start the greening process. IT management can help enterprises that run data centres improve their energy efficiency.

This endeavour requires:

1. Close cooperation with architects, software engineers and data centre operations, as well as collaboration with the facilities and real estate teams.

2. Sourcing decisions based on coefficiency, including shared service models, such as software as a service (SaaS) that have the potential to be energy and eco efficient. Business process and application architects and designers need to take heed, because these decisions will affect service levels, technology choices and implementation — all of which will influence energy efficiency.

3. Models that provide a granular picture of energy costs, floor space and infrastructure topology of data centres and related offices. These models will be important to developing projections based on the growth of IT equipment and changes to the data centre or office layout, and will enable the consideration of different scenarios of equipment deployment and internal financial management (such as chargeback). For example, a model using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis can determine how many more servers can go into a data centre, where they should be located and whether any changes need to be made to an air-conditioning system.

4. A systematic program for consolidating machines and workloads to use available spare capacity and maximise return on investment (ROI) in server technology. This will delay the need to purchase more of the newer, high-density hardware and could push back the manifestation of the energy problems by months, if not years.

5. Procurement of new servers that run at approximately 60–70% utilisation rate. This will ensure that they better manage power and cooling issues at the initiation of hardware deployments. Increasing ICT equipment utilisation levels from less than 20% has dramatic and multiplying benefits for a data centre’s energy consumption.

6. Use of software tools to achieve optimal utilisation rates. These tools include virtualisation software from such companies as Microsoft and VMware, as well as better workload applications. However, these tools are of little use if the organisations don’t change their operational processes, so they benefit from the software.

7. A rigorous decommissioning process that physically removes equipment once it becomes redundant. The IT organisation must also identify low-utilisation devices and consider consolidating and decommissioning them. Examine devices that are plugged in and drawing power for no purpose.

8. Disposal strategies. Organisations should comply with directives and legislation – Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) – as well as go further by developing processes for disposal/break-up/smelting and the recovery of metals.

9. Measurements of power consumption at the power distribution unit level to gain a higher threshold of energy for core computing equipment.

While data centres of the future have the advantage of being 'groomed green' from the ground up and designers can choose a site based on energy security, cost and source, established data centres have no such advantages. Enterprises will have to contend with many challenges but they can ameliorate this tendency by implementing a comprehensive green strategy.

*Rakesh Kumar is research VP for Gartner

 

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