INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Green Technology
How to trim that rising datacentre power bill
Gartner contributor Christy Pettey presents various options that datacentre managers can follow to curb rising energy costs .
Optimising use of power in datacentres is a high priority for datacentre managers , but they continue to face challenges as power becomes a larger percentage of ongoing datacentre costs . In fact , Gartner estimates that ongoing power costs are increasing at least 10 % per year due to cost per kilowatt-hour increases and underlying demand , especially for high power density servers .
Approximately 10 % of datacentre operating expenditure is power , and power is likely to be about 15 % of datacentre opex within five years .
In most cases , improving IT equipment power usage can result in the greatest overall improvement in power usage efficiency . The power usage effectiveness metric has become a defacto industry standard for measuring how efficiently a datacentre uses energy . However , according to Henrique Cecci , Research Director at Gartner , although the power usage effectiveness metric focuses on the datacentre energy efficiency of the facilities ’ components , it does not provide insights into energy efficiency improvements at the IT equipment level .
Optimising IT power Since IT systems are what ultimately require power delivery , datacentre managers need to try to lower the amount of power to IT equipment , known as payload power , that is required . 60 % of the payload power is consumed by servers so taking the following actions to reduce the power they require is crucial .
• Consolidate virtual machines
• Virtualise more workloads
• Replace old servers with newer ones
• Continue to eliminate servers that are powered but doing nothing useful
• Clean up workloads and eliminate everything that is not necessary
Optimising datacentre space Datacentres built before the advent of server virtualisation may be overbuilt for today ’ s equipment needs , enabling further reduction of the necessary space for IT equipment and less IT power . When building a new datacentre , it is worth considering a modular design that breaks down the datacentre
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