A well-known social commentator once lamented on national TV that it’s not easy being green. For IT managers charged with implementing data center strategies that are more eco-friendly, the response might well be, “no kidding.” Turning a data center from inefficient to environmentally friendly requires a fundamental shift in the way corporate IT personnel think about data, the storage of information and the systems used to process the information.
To transform a data center to one that is environmentally friendly will likely require new capital investments along with a review and thorough understanding of the total cost of data stored by the company. By understanding data, how and why it is used and determining when it can be moved to lower-cost data storage options, IT managers will begin to understand the overall the impact on corporate costs.
How Much Power is Consumed
The energy used by companies to power data centers is significant. In 2006, the amount of energy consumed by U.S data centers was estimated at 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) (about 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption) for a total electricity cost of about $4.5 billion. This level of electricity consumption exceeds the amount of electricity consumed by all of the televisions in the U.S. and is equal to the amount of electricity consumed by approximately 5.8 million U.S. households.1
The power and cooling infrastructure alone, which is needed to keep IT equipment in data centers at moderate temperatures, accounts for 50 percent of the total electricity consumption within data centers. Among the different sizes of data centers, more than one-third (38 percent) of electricity use is attributable to the nation’s largest (i.e., enterprise-class) and most rapidly growing data centers.2
Using current efficiency trends, the energy consumed by servers and data centers will likely double by 2011 to more than 100 billion kWh, which represents $7.4 billion in annual electricity costs. The peak load on the power grid from these servers and data centers is currently estimated to be approximately 7 gigawatts (GW), the equivalent to the output of about 15 base load power plants. If current trends continue, this demand would rise to 12 GW by 2011, which would require an additional 10 power plants. In 2007, carbon dioxide emissions for all US data center will exceed 44.4 million metric tons.3
According to a 2005 survey of AFCOM members (an IT trade association dedicated to providing education and resources for data center managers), data center power requirements are increasing an average of 8 percent per year. Power requirements of the top 10 percent of data centers are growing at more than 20 percent annually.4 At those rates, companies are more likely to be motivated to change their data centers than in cheap power markets.
Going green can have a number of meanings, but the most common is having the ability to recognize the environmental impact that you and your organization have upon the world. U.S. data centers data center release more than 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air annually and consume 100 to 200 times more energy that the average household per square foot.5 Becoming green in the data center is about reducing power, reducing carbon and driving profit to the bottom line.
In order for a data center to be considered green, many technology strategies need to work together. Server consolidation through virtualization and replacing older hardware with more efficient platforms is an easy start to a green data center. However, low-energy hardware does not address a fundamental component of the data center - large volumes of data are retained beyond their usable life, creating the need for high availability server and storage, which, in turn, creates the need for extra power and cooling in the data center.
