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Another important working group seeking to lower the overall consumption of power in data centers isThe Green Grid, which lists AMD, APC, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun,and VMware among its founding members.Improvement & OptimizationThe following recommendations are geared towards those enterprises on the “larger” end of the SMEdemographic. These enterprises do not have dedicated data center facilities and are more likely housingserver racks in a shared facility or room within the enterprise’s corporate offices. Truly “small” enterpriseswith only a few servers will also benefit from some of the best practices discussed, but realistically,power and cooling issues don’t really become an IT priority until the enterprise has at least a couple ofserver racks and an IT budget of $1 million or more.Data center design and management is evolving to maximize energy efficiency and lower coolingrequirements. Implement the following ten best practices to ‘do more with less’ when it comes to powerand cooling:1. Right-size IT equipment. The number one way to reduce asset acquisition as well as ongoingenergy costs is rightsizing IT equipment to match near-term requirements. This is a step that canbe taken by enterprises of all sizes – even those with only a few servers. Case studies show thataverage server utilization rates range from 10% to 20% of capacity. Equipment – includingservers, storage, power supplies, UPS systems, air conditioners, fans, and air exchange systems– operating with significant overcapacity is a waste.In addition to lowering IT investment in fixed assets, The Green Grid estimates that rightsizing ITequipment can reduce energy consumption by as much as 50%. This is due to the fact that fixedlosses in power and cooling are present regardless of how much IT load is actually being used.Where possible, smaller enterprises should invest in modular, scalable equipment and addcapacity only as growth in IT loads demands it. Also, prioritize availability requirements forapplications and services to balance uptime against costs. The ongoing energy costs ofmaintaining fully redundant systems can easily match or surpass the cost of simply duplicatingthe hardware. Even if IT has no intention of implementing chargebacks to business units,providing a cost allocation for energy consumption in proposals to business leaders will helpconvey the message that high availability comes with an associated “energy burden.” Significantenergy savings can be achieved by ruthlessly prioritizing and only providing redundancy where itis really needed.Operate & Optimize 6Top 10 Energy-Saving Tips for a Greener Data Center
2. Foster communication between IT and facilities. For the most part, energy costs are invisibleto the IT department because the electricity bill is managed by the facilities department,independently of data center personnel. This problem is exacerbated in small IT shops becausein many cases the data center exists in a shared facility where power and cooling are metered atthe building level and accounted for as corporate “general and administrative” expenses. Thisallows IT to remove itself from the problem and not worry too much about how much energy iswasted. The majority of IT departments don’t know what the annual energy spend is for the datacenter and IT and facilities departments don’t generally coordinate efforts unless there’s arelocation involved.However, for energy savings to be realized, there needs to be better visibility into what the otherside is doing. IT needs to understand how purchasing decisions affect facilities and what thebaseline is in order to track improvement. Similarly, facilities must know ahead of time what’scoming down the pipeline in terms of power, space, and cooling requirements. Virtually all energyefficiency-related metric gathering initiatives should be joint IT-facilities projects.3. Track and manage the energy consumption of IT equipment. Tracking energy usage in thedata center provides a baseline for calculating the ROI of new energy saving initiatives and helpsidentify areas of opportunity. Moreover, energy management products can reduce energy useduring regular operation and can keep critical applications running during brown-outs.Best of breed products will track and manage power intake, monitor inlet/outlet air temperatures,and allow administrators to throttle server CPU performance to match requirements and savepower. As an example, HP recently announced Insight Power Manager (originally introduced as ablade product). The software allows administrators to track and adjust how much power serversare using. IBM’s PowerExecutive offers similar functionality.In order to monitor non-IT equipment such as air conditioning and UPS devices, involve the facilitiesdepartment. For small facilities with shared air conditioning and electricity metering, these metricsmay be difficult to obtain. In this case, consider investing in “smart metering” capabilities thatseparately measure usage in different areas and provide the desired level of granularity.4. Engage in longer-term capacity planning for power and cooling infrastructure. The growthin electrical and cooling requirements may cause a shortage of power and cooling capacity in theenterprise’s data center. A critical extension to right-sizing equipment is using energyconsumption data to develop forecasts, assess future capacity requirements, and avoidunpleasant surprises. Since expanding or building a new data center may not be an option, takesteps now to reduce energy consumption and improve current capacity utilization.Operate & Optimize 7Top 10 Energy-Saving Tips for a Greener Data Center
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Top 10 Energy-Saving Tips for a Greener Data Center - Info-Tech ...

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