14 DAY TRIAL // Power efficiency has been for a long time now one of the trends in the IT industry and companies have put a lot of effort into developing more and more eco-friendly technologies. Bill Kosik is one person that knows a few things about building efficient datacenters, and helped HP consolidate 85 datacenters into just six as managing principal consultant at EYP Mission Critical Facilities in Chicago. HP bought the consulting firm a year ago, transforming it into a new Critical Facilities Services division meant to help clients plan the building of energy-efficient datacenters or retrofit existing ones.
The reduction of energy use is among the main focuses for financial institutions, as datacenters are known to be power hungry, sometimes using as much as 30 percent of a company's energy while occupying only 5 percent of its square footage. According to Kosik, a worthy method to reduce energy usage is retrofitting the existing centers, yet it may prove quite difficult at times. “It's expensive and you can't turn the thing off. You're basically doing open heart surgery on a patient that's running around the block,” Kosik says.
Kosik believes that some datacenters waste power simply by keeping the temperature too low. “In traditional datacenters, you walk into them and they're like refrigerators,” he says. “That's really not the way to do it. If we raise that temperature five of 10 degrees you could save easily close to 40 percent on power for your cooling systems. Climate has a huge impact on datacenters.”
One method to reduce energy usage would also be going for an efficient power distribution system. According to Kosik, there are situations when more than 10 percent of power gets dissipated on its road from the edge of the building to the target inside the datacenter. “Right now, there's huge momentum in the industry to push energy efficiency, but from a more pragmatic standpoint,” he states.
Sometimes, retrofitting is not a good approach from a financial point of view, and building a new facility from scratch proves a better solution. EYP has provided consulting services to a range of financial institutions, major Internet and software companies, and high-performance computing centers, while helping HP plan two new U.S.-based datacenters.
Mark Linesch, vice president of marketing for an HP software division focused on managing and automating use of servers and storage, said that there are many datacenters that use out-of-date servers, power supplies, and building designs. “You could walk across a datacenter and see half-empty racks, and yet you're out of power,” he reveals. Moreover, some facilities often waste energy by over-provisioning power. The energy needs of a 1-megawatt datacenter can sometimes reach $2 million a year, shares Kosik, and there are bigger Internet companies that need datacenters of 20 to 30 megawatts.
This month, HP announced new technologies able to measure and control power and cooling systems, while limiting the power usage. The limits are placed accordingly to the amount of power each server needs to run.