An Approach to Greening Data Centers

An Approach to Greening Data Centers

The second decade of the 21st Century brings a whole new challenge for data center managers. Up until now, business was happy as long as data was safe and business continuity was assured. With hardware costs falling, there was no barrier to the growth of data centers. Now, big is bad. Today, big data centers can consume enough electricity
required to light up a small town, and alarm bells have begun to ring. There are costs to drive down, carbon caps to worry about, power consumptions to limit. Quite suddenly the data center manager has a new set of issues to contend with.

While data center greening can be handled at different levels, starting from the design of the building to the kind of equipment that is acquired, how much can we do with what we have? This paper discusses saving and optimizing with the existing infrastructure in a typical data center where spanking new hardware resides with legacy systems. It considers practical issues while
generating a solution framework and solution options based on the framework.

Introduction

Consider these facts: in the last decade, data centers have grown exponentially with several million servers being sold annually; the average rack power density has grown from 6 to 8 KWh; while data center power density has increased at an average of 15 percent annually, processors in blade servers are now generating 100 watts per square cm or more; trends indicate that, by 2020, data centers will globally consume more electricity than France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined [1]. These facts, coupled with the environmental impact of the carbon emissions that accompany this energy consumption, show that any effort aimed at reducing the energy footprint of data centers will significantly reduce the operational cost of running data centers, as well as contribute towards achieving overall environmental sustainability.

This white paper looks at the problem of managing and optimizing data center energy and carbon footprints. It identifies the main issues faced by IT managers in addressing this problem, and also outlines the contours of a solution approach needed for this.

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