Power costs dominating data centres

Without proper management, power costs could become the most important factor in operating a data centre, according to a report from BroadGroup.

Power consumption for data centres is increasing, and firms must take a holistic view of their IT infrastructure in order to find the right balance to reduce energy costs, as no one technology or device will fully tackle the problem. Reducing the cost of power and cooling requires greater efficiency - which in turn requires a detailed audit of current practices.

Last year's edition of the survey showed that European operators didn't see much use for power hungry operations, but that's changed this year, said Keith Breed, director of research at BroadGroup and the author of the study.

"They were very sceptical a year ago, and didn't think it would affect business very much," he said. "A year on, it's been somewhat of a change, an increase in power and cooling demands."

In the US, demand increases 25 per cent annually, he said, off the back of more demanding business applications. Europe is set to catch up within the next few years. "Europe is a year or two behind," Breed said. "But seems to be increasing quite fast."

Solutions such as blade servers are increasingly being used to replace lower power legacy servers. While blade servers are more efficient and can handle more applications on one rack, they generate a lot of heat, Breed said. "There's a trade off," he said. "The assumption has always been that you put a number of applications on one server, to consolidate." While that has cost advantages from fewer servers, it's often been assumed that leads to less space being used. "That doesn't actually happen, as blade servers generate more heat, so you need more space to one server than with a legacy," said Breed.

Virtualisation could be the key, Breed said: "If you virtualise all components on a server to share computing power, then you can make some savings." One benefit of virtualisation is that applications can be more accurately controlled, allowing servers to be powered up and down when not being used, creating an increase in utilisation levels to between 60 to 80 per cent. "IBM has said many of their servers are utilised ten per cent of the time," Breed added. "Virtualisation lets servers be powered on and off according to needs."

The increase in demands will cause problems for data centres, which use as much as five times the power as a similarly sized office tower, as many will have to upgrade their power supply. "There's going to be a limit to power available... some have to look at generating their own power," Breed said.

But data centres will only be able to cut their energy use by so much using technology. In order to be more environmentally friendly and cut costs, they can site their buildings closer to hydroelectric power sources or make use of colder external air for cooling, drawing in outside air at night or in the winter to cool servers.

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