A New Look at Data Center ROI

Effectively dealing with facility costs requires a new way of looking at IT spending and data-center management.

Start with the justification processes for new applications. They must be changed to take energy-related costs into account. The TCO of a power-hungry application covers more than IT hardware, software and maintenance costs. One major financial institution didn’t consider facilities in its decision to spend $22 million on blades—and then discovered that it needed an additional (and unbudgeted) $54 million to install extra power and cooling capacity. Key questions to consider include how critical the application is to the enterprise and who is going to foot the total bill for it—including the cost of power and cooling.

Next, IT performance has to be measured and optimized against watts consumed in operation. Charge-back formulas traditionally have been based on space (for example, cost per square feet), but power consumption (watts) is the real driver of facility expenses. Continuing to allocate data center expenses by space perpetuates decisions with invisible and costly consequences because minimizing space has almost no impact on actual data center facility costs.

Finally, CIOs need to take a hard look at what is in their data centers. Determine how much of your site’s capacity (in terms of space, power and cooling) is being used, and how close you are to running out. Recover capacity by consolidation and virtualization. Simply turning off dead servers can cut power consumption between 10 percent and 30 percent. Most data center managers are afraid to pull the plug on old systems for fear that they might affect mission-critical operations. But most of the time they don’t even know what’s on those servers, how well they’re utilized or whether some functions could be offloaded to other servers.

Cooling Ideas

Another recent study of ours found that in most computer rooms, cooling capacity is wasted. Hot spots occur despite having three to 22 times more cooling than the heat load requires. In a server closet, these hot spots waste a few dollars. In a 10,000-square-foot-plus data center, they’re more like a wide open suitcase packed with thousand-dollar bills.

Here are two inexpensive fixes. First, you can reduce cold air loss by sealing the cable openings in your raised floor. Up to 50 percent of cold air is wasted via this bypass airflow. Sealing just 24 openings (at a cost of $100 per opening) will typically save you from having to buy another $30,000 cooling unit. Second, stop cooling units from “dueling” (a situation in which one unit dehumidifies the air while adjacent ones simultaneously humidify it). These are the lowest hanging fruit in an energy efficiency tune-up of your data center. Taking these steps provides you with a possible savings of up to 25 percent.

Moore’s Law is no longer a good predictor of IT productivity because rising facility costs have fundamentally changed the economics of running a data center. Even if you try to reduce costs by outsourcing, the outsourcer will be confronted with the same changed economics. By rethinking the fundamentals of how new equipment purchases are justified, by taking increasing site costs into account when choosing equipment and by doing an energy tune-up of their data center, CIOs can continue to reap the benefits of more powerful processors without breaking the budget.