Signposts on the Road to Data Center Energy Savings
The EPA's report to Congress recommends standard guidelines for energy efficiency at the nation's electricity-hungry data centers.
CIO — Four and a half billion dollars. That’s how much it cost the United States to power the nation’s servers and data centers in 2006. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) newly released report on data center efficiency, unless the nation changes the way it designs, builds and operates these energy hogs, annual data center electricity costs, which have grown twofold since 2000, are predicted to reach $7.4 billion in 2011.
Data centers now consume roughly 1.5 percent of the nation’s electricity, or about 60 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006, the EPA said.
The EPA report includes a set of recommendations that raise awareness and highlight the need for industry cooperation. The recommendations include:
- The creation of standard metrics so data center operators can measure and assess their energy consumption and performance. The agency calls for the federal government and industry to establish these metrics. And the federal government should be the first to report on its energy performance at its data centers.
- Calling on private-sector CEOs to conduct energy-efficiency assessments at their companies’ data centers, implement improvements and report energy performance of their data centers.
- The distribution of “objective, credible information” about the performance of new technologies and how they will impact data center energy consumption and performance.
- The development of standardized energy performance measures for data center equipment.
- More research by government and university researchers, along with utilities, to develop technologies and best practices for data center efficiency.
- The development of federal purchasing specifications for energy performance at outsourced data centers.
- Considering state and local regulations to measure data center energy consumption.
- Asking electric utilities to consider offering incentives to companies that run energy-efficient data centers.
Ken Brill, founder and director of the Uptime Institute, an IT consultancy, hopes the EPA report will spur a green data center movement. “We, in the enterprise IT industry need to give the EPA’s efforts a high level of attention, begin planning and take action,” he writes in a reaction paper to the report. According to Brill, the green data center will be achieved through standardized metrics, specifications, design principles, management best practices and governance policies.
As the Environmental Protection Agency’s report to Congress illustrates, even companies that want to save energy—and money—by cutting their electricity bills find they need help assessing what to do. But there’s another problem, say data center experts: At many companies, IT people are not in charge of the data center.
That is due, in part, to a culture that has traditionally put facilities managers, not IT managers, in charge of the data center. In some cases, says Neil Rasmussen, CTO of American Power Conversion, a provider of data center power and cooling equipment, no one knows who pays the bill. And due to the lack of measurements and benchmarks, even the person who is faced with an expensive electric bill doesn’t know how to cut costs. And that’s a problem. “No data center on Earth has an efficiency meter today.”
