Russell Stevens, business development director for EMEA at Avocent looks at other ways of cutting down on power in the datacentre

The term ‘efficiency’ normally conjures up images of cost savings or productivity gains but for today’s organisations, environmental reasons are topping the list as concern over the levels of carbon emissions produced by big business becomes a real issue.

However, with more and more column inches devoted to the role that IT plays in contributing to the problem, why are so few companies developing policies to address it? Data centres are the biggest culprit, with figures from Gartner stating that energy consumed by a fully equipped, 30,000 square foot data centre will produce 44,000 tonnes of CO². Indeed the recent draft Climate Change Bill identified that data centres consume 1.5 per cent of all UK electricity.

The vast amounts of data and information which companies across all sectors now need to hold, for regulatory and business continuity purposes, has meant that storage capacity and the sheer scale and number of data centres has increased, impacting the amount of energy used to power them. Spending on power and cooling systems is also set to rise significantly, with IDC predicting that by 2008 more will be spent on this than on new technology itself. The rise in popularity of the ‘mega’ data centre housing more than a million servers is also adding to the problem.

This, coupled with the predicted three-fold rise in IT energy budgets within five years, makes it an issue that can no longer be swept under the carpet. However, businesses are not currently going far enough to reduce the impact, looking instead at individual user policies regarding PC use rather than ways of making the data centre run more energy efficiently. The figures may provide a wake up call about the extent of the problem but very few reports provide advice for managers.

The following tips can help you to reduce the carbon footprint of your data centre as well as lowering cost and improving overall efficiencies.

• Take a lights out approach – Although not a new concept in the data centre world, instead of associating the benefits with minimising operator error, increasing productivity through remote management and lowering lighting costs, turning the lights off will significantly reduce consumption and carbon emissions.

• Move towards server virtualisation – Using server virtualisation to reduce the number of servers in the data centre and make the most use of available capacity will have a great impact on the amount of processing power used, as well as providing significant cost benefits.
• Deploy environmental monitoring - Technological expansion means that the data centre, already overheating and using vast quantities of power, is becoming an increasingly difficult environment to manage. High density blade server deployments, for example, put increased importance on the role of environmental monitoring technologies to ensure that heat, humidity and other such variables do not compromise availability. In addition, standards-based monitoring technologies like IPMI, for example, facilitate the granular analysis of conditions and could, in the future, be introduced to support non-IT components of the data centre such as air conditioning or the conditions inside the server rack itself. Developments of this nature would add a further level of control and reduce the financial cost of downtime.
• Keep the doors closed – In addition to putting in place monitoring facilities, simply keeping the doors to the data centre closed will ensure power consumption levels stay low. Having staff walk in and out of the data centre will require the air-conditioning to work faster and use more power to stop equipment overheating. One way to regulate the temperature and get the most out of air-conditioning systems is to keep the doors closed to allow for better heat regulation.
• Cut travelling time – With over 70 per cent of businesses having between one and five data centres/server locations , maintaining each one will require a significant amount of travelling time. Reducing this time by managing many devices remotely, from any location, will not only allow for faster resolution of problems but will significantly lower the amount of emissions generated from driving across the country.