The cost of data center power and cooling can be higher than the server and storage equipment

The problem Growing Power and Cooling

There is no doubt that the economy tightens, many senior officials of companies throughout California including San Diego and Irvine, looking much closer to their budgets, particularly the cost of balloon total corporate data center. The main objective technical and financial assistance for the year was virtualization and reducing the cost of IT equipment companies have grown. Fortunately, the new servers today are producing 70-80 times more powerful for the same cost in dollars 8-10 years ago. At the same time, the equivalent performance per watt is increased 16 times. The rising data center costs appear to be in contradiction with the server statistics described above. What is driving this is the rising cost of power and cooling equipment. While the server costs have remained flat, the cost of electricity in California to drive this equipment to high-performance power hungry has grown exponentially. Suddenly the new attention to the companies is the total actual cost of managing the data center rather than groped to decrease the money spent on computer equipment and software.

Despite all the performance advantages of technology, the increasing number of rack servers and storage equipment each year is aggravating the financial situation for companies. At the same time the number of racks grow, the perception that the equipment becomes more and more mission critical grows as well. This entails the need to make more redundant systems which comprises more power and cooling, so as to exacerbate the problem of increasing costs. Some of California's aging and overcrowded data centers require significant investment to overcome the inefficiencies of co-location in power and cooling. These costs can run into millions of dollars.

According to the report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, August 2, 2007, "The energy used by servers and data centers of the nation is significant. It is estimated that this sector consumes about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006 (1.5 percent of total consumption of electricity in the U.S.) for a total cost of electricity of about $ 4.5 billion. This estimated level of electricity consumption is the electricity consumed from the nation's color televisions and similar to the amount of electricity consumed by approximately 5.8 million average American households. based on current efficiency trends, national energy consumption by servers and data centers could nearly double again in another five years (ie by 2011) to more than 100 billion kWh, representing a $ 7.4 billion annual cost of electricity. the peak load on the power grid from these servers and data centers is currently estimated at about 7 gigawatts (GW), equivalent to the production of plants for base load power of about 15. If current trends continue, this demand could rise to 12 GW by 2011, which would require 10 additional power plants. "

Stays Near Solutions

The current demand for energy can be used for the greater use of electronic transactions in general financial services, data storage, the migration to electronic health records for health care, global e-commerce and services, telecommunications and internet services, increasing requirements for disaster recovery, emergency services, homeland security information technology and high performance computing, to name a few.

Executives need to put greater focus on total cost of operating their data centers with particular attention to reducing energy costs and capital expenditures. The data center environment is a total state of flux. Resolution of some of these problems will take years to resolve and millions of dollars to solve the problem. Fortunately, some short-term solutions can be found in the data center while the problems are corrected. This involves moving data center to the states that have lower energy costs and use for each kWh of hydroelectric power or solar power when possible. For larger applications, data centers, moving the data center 400 to 1000 miles away from California or other states to high-frequency power can save $ 10,000 's of dollars a month. Make this move easier is the reduction of the enormous costs of data transmission and remote management of equipment. Key to a successful move is to find a financially strong data center owner, lower costs of energy alternatives, multiple fiber carriers and appropriate security .......