Originating Author: User:dvellante
Why is the TV on if Nobody's Watching! When our family moved into a new home ten years ago, we had one computer and a TV. Like most families we now have several computers, multiple TV's and a zillion gadgets. Our monthly energy bill has nearly tripled. Does it kill us? No. Do we notice it more-- you bet.
Imagine running a data center for a large corporation in a metropolitan location. Energy consumption and environmental parameters are an increasing concern among CIO's at large organizations. Recently, several IT vendors have brought attention to this issue, most notably Google, but also Dell, EMC, Intel, Sun and others have made noise in this area. Google in particluar is said to have annual energy costs comprise double digits in terms of its overall TCO (most organizations are in the low single digits).
There are five issues that are contributing to this concern about IT environmentals:
- Increased energy costs
- The escalating power density of equipment means traditional “simple” cooling approaches are not sufficient because of hot-spots, etc. (i.e. “Mainframes Revisited”)
- Energy efficiency improvements are lagging far behind performance and capacity improvements of IT equipment
- Cooling responsibilities often reside with facilities staff and not inside IT and new IT environments may require more sophisticated cooling specific to IT.
- The cost of provisioning new space to be computer ready is now a significant investment (~$400 per sq. ft. on average according to Horison Information Strategies).
These factors have lead to an increased focus on budgets and planning for the installation of IT equipment, in particular for high density blade servers, storage and other equipment. Assuming continued increased energy prices, these factors portent energy becoming a larger portion of overall TCO.
User action items: The answer to this problem lies in better utilization strategies for equipment, exploiting virtualization and thin-provisioning capabilities, more consciously considering environmental impacts and sometimes curbing appetites for higher density technologies. As well, it means intelligently configuring data center space to create 'zones' capable of supporting higher density equipment. On the supply side, new chip designs such as CMP (chip multiprocessor) are said to be promising in terms of addressing this issue.
References
- For an article with some interesting stats on this topic written by Luiz André Barroso of Google, check out An Economic Case for Chip Multiprocessing.
