Five Ways to Find Data Center Energy Savings
Energy savings are there to be found in most data centers. Here are five places to look for them.
CIO — Retrofitting a data center is about managing limitations and trade-offs. Decision-makers have to consider physical limits (such as the weight a floor will support and how much cooling equipment can fit into an existing space). Then there’s infrastructure to think about: It would be difficult to swap out an old uninterruptible power supply (UPS) cable for a brand-new one. Such restrictions have an impact on energy efficiency too: Existing UPS cables generally operate at 85 percent efficiency, whereas the newest ones are in the range of 97.5 percent. To reach the highest efficiency numbers, you’d need to change your entire data center architecture, which is impractical for most companies.
Retrofitting a data center to make it more energy efficient has its restrictions, but doing so can be less costly than having to rebuild an entire facility. To weigh the variables—and achieve energy cost savings – you need to know what’s broken. Here are five tips for determining the efficiency of your data center and how to make it green as can be.
1. Get to know your data center.
An energy efficiency assessment from someone who specializes in
data centers should be a priority, says Neil Rasmussen, CTO of
American Power Conversion (APC), a provider of data center
power and cooling equipment. IBM, EYP Mission Critical, Syska Hennessy, APC and Hewlett-Packard offer such services.
HP recently added Thermal Zone Mapping to its assessment offering. This service uses heat sensors and mapping analysis software to pinpoint problem areas in the data center and helps you adjust things as needed, says Brian Brouillette, vice president of HP Mission Critical Network and Education Services. For example, the analysis looks at the organization of equipment racks, how densely the equipment is populated, and the flow of hot and cold air through different areas of the space. It’s important to place air-conditioning vents properly so that cool airflow keeps equipment running properly, without wasting energy, says Brouillette.
2. Manage the AC: Not too cold, not too hot, but
just right.
Energy efficiency often starts with the cooling system.
“Air conditioners are the most power hungry things in the
data center, apart from the IT equipment itself,” says
Rasmussen. If your data center is running at 30 percent
efficiency, that means for every watt going into the servers,
two are being wasted on the power and cooling systems, he says.
To reduce wasted energy, one of the simplest and most important
things you can do is turn on the AC economizers, which act as
temperature sensors in the data center. According to Rasmussen,
80 percent of economizers are not used, just as IT
administrators often turn off the power management features in
PCs. It’s also important to monitor the effects of
multiple air-conditioning systems attached to a data center;
sometimes, Rasmussen says, two AC systems can be “out of
calibration” one sensing humidity is too high and the
other sensing it'stoo low; their competition, like a game of
cooling tennis, can waste energy.
Richard Siedzick, director of computer and telecommunications services at Bryant University, uses such features in his data center. “If the temperature rises to a certain level, the AC in that rack will ramp up, and when it decreases, it will ramp down.” The result is a data center climate that few are used to. Instead of being met with an arctic blast at the door, Siedzick says people have told him his data center is too warm. That’s not actually the case: AC economizers help cooling stay where it is needed, rather than where it is not. And that means increased efficiency and monetary savings. “We estimate we've seen a 30 percent reduction in energy [in part, due to more efficient cooling] and that translates into $20,000.” Siedzick says other precision controls, such as humidity sensors, are used in the data center as well.
