Power measurement leads to improved efficiency, improved ROI and helps you achieve your green initiatives

Data Centers today are experiencing:
£ Rising Energy costs
£ The per-square-foot annual energy cost in data centers is
30-80 times more than a typical office building.
£ The cost of electricity and supporting infrastructure for three
years surpasses the capital cost of IT equipment.
£ Data centers account for 1.5% of annual electrical
consumption.

£ Unavailability of Power

£ Corporate social responsibility pressure and the need to
improve corporate image by going “green”

£ Energy regulation compliance

 

Data Centre Solutions recently interviewed Marc Marazzi,
VP International Sales for Server Technology, a company widely regarded as the experts in data center power, on steps to improve energy efficiency. Here is an overview of that interview.

Q What can be done to become more energy efficient and
incorporate Green IT into your company?

A 1. Measure power usage
2. Measure power usage effectiveness (PUE)
3. Make adjustments based on the power monitoring information to reduce energy usage and CO2 output
4. Continue to use power management tools such as Intelligent Power Distribution Units (PDUs) combined with a Power Management system (Sentry Power Manager from Server Technology) to evolve data center efficiencies, saving the company money and helping drive green initiatives.

Q Why is energy efficiency so important in terms of being green
and environmentally friendly?

A Energy efficiency has many definitions. It can be defined as the intention to reduce the amount of energy required to provide products and services. Energy efficiency can also mean better utilization of existing infrastructure. It can also mean the improvement of the usage of tools, systems or processes already in place. For example, you have a server running a job at 10% CPU utilization, what would happen if you ran more jobs on the server to bring the CPU utilization to 50% or higher? How would the extra CPU utilization correlate to energy consumption?
Energy efficiency and usage is the Green story. We know that we have a fixed amount of energy resources within the world and, closer to home, in our smaller microcosms of a company, group or product offerings. Existing infrastructure combined with notions of uptime and redundancy are already in place, things are working just fine, but are there alternatives?

The answer is yes, but the discussion needs to happen - can redundancy and energy efficiency live together? Without this, the environmentally friendly term ‘green’ will only be a buzzword with little enforcement.

Green needs to become more important because we do have a limited amount of resources and some simple changes today can have significant yields in the future.

Q What are some telltale signs that
energy efficiency isn’t as good as
it could be?

A Energy efficiency by itself is not a measurement of how energy is being used. How energy is being used is more of an applicable topic. To start the conversation we can discuss how energy usage, energy capacity and energy allotment are all associated with being
green and environmentally friendly.
A telltale sign about the misuse of energy efficiency is by going into a data centre and being cold, another sign is by looking at a trend of energy consumption and seeing low and static loads.

Q How should companies get started when looking at and
improving power efficiency?

A The best way to increase energy efficiency is to look at consumption rates over time and the most powerful tool is to ask the question ‘why?’

Why is the power being consumed? Why are all of the devices on all of the time? Do they need to be? Is someone even using the system?

We all have seen a running system and can appreciate it for what it does, but not question how is it being done. To improve energy efficiency, data centre operators need to ask themselves a series of questions - why? when? who? How come?

Q What are some ways companies can improve
the power efficiency of their cooling devices?
Power supplies?

A The easiest way to save on energy for cooling devices is to look at what is being cooled. For example, evaluating a data centre full of server cabinets from a temperature point of view over a period of 30 days to three months.
With a top-down view of the server cabinets or a trend-view, a data centre manager can see what devices are running warmer than others and then compare those readings to the set-point of the cooling infrastructure.

An organization can then match the temperature readings to power consumption readings. These two readings, when used together, can form a comparison to be used for capacity reports and to allow users to find out what actual jobs are being performed and to help evaluate if all of the devices are actually necessary.

Q What are different types of products and solutions that can
be used to improve power efficiency?

A A monitoring system, capable of power and thermographic views, list-view and trend reporting capabilities is the best starting point to help a user improve or increase the levels of efficiency. The monitoring system can be used two-fold, as a barometer and as an enforcer.

Barometer – this will allow a user to see consumption rates over a period of time, make changes and then see the results of their changes.

Enforcer – this will allow the user to build consumption reports (kw/h for example) and then use them to bill or show the responsible users.

Q How can improving energy efficiency reduce costs for data centers and enterprises?

A Energy efficiency will enforce the
notion of doing more with what you have.
By knowing what you have and comparing that with what you need, you’ll know what you need to improve energy efficiency.

Energy efficiency will result in a potential lowering of the overall energy usage. It can also result in the ability to restructure an existing infrastructure to do more with what a company already has, meaning to increase compute load by better allocating existing capacity.

Q What does an action plan for companies looking to
improve their energy efficiency look like?

A Here’s a four step simple plan to improve energy efficiency:

1. Monitor and measure power usage and post the findings for
people to see.
2. Evaluate the minimum and maximum requirements to run a job,
serve a process or support a product and compare the evaluation
to actual usage.
3. Compare actual usage to faceplate readings and compare that to
existing infrastructure.
4. Institute energy efficiency metrics into existing infrastructure.