14 DAY TRIAL // The global economic crisis provides ample opportunity to reinvigorate the focus on increasing efficiency on all aspects that combine to drive business success and data center operations make no exception to this. Microsoft is no stranger to efforts designed to increase the efficiency of data centers, from cutting costs in order to be able to meet ever shrinking IT budgets, to consuming less resources as energy costs continue to grow, and ultimately to catalyze the reduction of the environmental impact in tandem with that of the economical footprint.
As far as the software giant is concerned, data centers are at the intersection between cost and sustainability. In this context, any efforts designed to increase efficiency will also have reverberations on the environmental impact. Effectively, more efficient data centers are also greener. Christian Belady, principal power and cooling architect with Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services (GFS) group, commented that “Cost and sustainability are one and the same. We’re extremely fortunate to be in an industry where lowering cost and being green are synonymous.”
Microsoft estimated the current resources consumed by data centers at approximately 2% of U.S. power generation, an amount of energy consumption that has been growing at a rate of 15% per year. The software giant’s own data centers account for a large quantity of energy consumed, as just one facility can draw in in excess of 40 megawatts, an amount sufficient to power as much as 40,000 homes, but no less than 20,000.
Still, on the Redmond company's part, efforts are there. The continuous implementation of innovation and the introduction of comprehensive efficiency strategies means that its data centers consume from 30% to 50% less power compared to the global industry average. Still, Microsoft’s efforts will have to be industry-wide in order for an impact to be truly felt. And despite its obvious downsides, the worldwide economical downturn provides the right incentives for companies to attempt doing more with less, to cut back on expenses and increase efficiency, and to become greener, even if only as a side effect.
“We believe that it is important to track and monitor the power usage effectiveness (PUE) across all of our data centers, no matter how small or how old, in order to truly understand how well our data centers are managed and to allow us to make the right business decisions,” added Arne Josefsberg, general manager of Infrastructure Services for GFS. “When you’re managing an infrastructure of hundreds of thousands of servers, it is essential that you run it efficiently.”
