Exponential increases in processing power and bandwidth, paired with equally impressive drops in computing and storage costs, have revolutionized business operations. But the data centers and server farms that support these new operations are consuming more and more energy, causing growing concern in both industry and government.
From 2000 to 2006, energy use by U.S. servers and data centers more than doubled. And if current trends continue, energy use at these data centers will double again by 2011, according to a report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) delivered to Congress in August 2007.
The EPA estimates that the nation's servers and data centers - including both the energy to run equipment and the power to keep the centers cool - consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006. This amounts to 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption, at a cost of $4.5 billion. That's about equal to the electricity use of 5.8 million U.S. households, the EPA report says.
Server sprawl
Because of the increased performance and plunging prices of servers over the last decade, corporations have moved huge data processing applications that used to run on mainframes to server farms in data centers. "Now you can have many applications spread across thousands of servers," says Rich Brown, lead author of the EPA report and a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "This has created server sprawl - more and more servers in the data center and more keep coming all the time," which in turn is causing skyrocketing power and cooling requirements.
Such enormous energy consumption is already affecting business in significant ways. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, for example, have all built data centers in rural Oregon at least partly because of the proximity to inexpensive and abundant hydroelectric power generated by the Grand Cooley Dam.
Best practices to reduce consumption
Industry has responded with new products and techniques that use less energy. But, short of immediately ripping out old equipment and replacing it with new, what can CIOs do today to ease the problem? The report found that companies could reduce energy consumption by as much as 20 percent just by adopting best practices and consolidating applications to make more efficient use of servers.
For example, says Brown, most companies don't have optimal air flow in their data centers. A simple review of the placement of servers and making sure that cool air flows in and that the hot air is expelled can reduce energy consumption. The problem is that air flow is not the CIO's responsibility, but rather falls to facilities management people who typically report to the CFO. This illustrates one of the organizational barriers to improving efficiency. The CIO pays attention to the cost of the server, but not to the energy consumption over its life, the cost of which is often much higher than that. "The problem is that the incentives aren't set up right," says Brown.
Consolidating servers and data centers can also help. As many as 20 percent of the servers in any given data center are "dead" - they are still running, but their applications are no longer used, says Brown. The problem is that no one is responsible for turning them off. Undertaking a consolidation project may be "the only time when you can get rid of these things," says Brown. "You just don't turn the server back on when you get to the new data center, and if no one complains, then you know it's dead and you can retire it."
Another problem is that there is no standard for defining the energy efficiency of a data center. Without a common definition, it's hard for operators to know how to purchase the most energy-efficient equipment, operate it in an energy-efficient way, and design and build the most energy-efficient building to house it.
EPA recommendations
To address some of these barriers, the EPA recommends that government and industry should work together to develop:
- Objective, credible energy performance metrics for data center equipment, including servers, storage, network equipment and uninterruptible power supplies.
- An energy performance rating system for data centers that will include both the infrastructure and the productivity of IT equipment.
- Credible information on new technologies and best practices to raise awareness of energy efficiency and reduce the perceived risk of adopting such improvements.
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