Save Big on Power Costs: 3 Approaches to Make Your Data center Greener

Posted by zimmawureeves on December 26th, 2019

There is a dire need to practice environmental awareness and create a greener work environment. With environmental change being the biggest cause for concern, having an energy-efficient IT infrastructure or data center will help reduce carbon footprint and money in the long haul.

Today, data centers expend about 2% of power around the world; that could ascend to 8% of the worldwide aggregate by 2030, as per research by Anders Andrae, who looks into sustainable ICT at Huawei Technologies Ltd. Looking forward to 2021, cloud computing will represent 95% of data center traffic, with cloud taking care of more than 94% of superior high-performance computations.

There are various factors that drive organizations to work towards green IT. These include publicity by promoting that they are a green organization or genuine consideration for nature. Be that as it may, most associations work for green IT for a single reason: saving money. For example, the money spent on electricity during the lifetime of a server can be a lot higher than the expense of the server itself.

Zimmawu Robert Reeves, an experienced Infrastructure Engineer, explains that saving energy means saving a lot of money on electricity bills.

There are three methods to creating a greener data center, which saves money and the environment.

1.      Optimize Existing Equipment

To optimize your data center, start by using blade servers which help share the use of power suppliers and thus only use 70% of the power used by rack-mounter servers. Then replace rotating disks with flash disks as they do not have any moving parts. This means that they would consume much less energy than rotating disks. Moreover, rotating disks rotate 24x7, which adds to the consumption of power whereas, flash disks do not use any electricity when not in use. Also cut down on using power-hungry servers, such as a high-end CPU using 200 watts. Instead, use an Intel Atom CPU that only uses 30 watts.

2.      Use an Efficient Cooling System

The components of a data center do use up a lot of energy, but that doesn’t mean that the data center itself won’t use up power. Instead, it uses electricity for its cooling. The power used by a server is measured in Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), which equates to the power used by the server divided by the power used to run its equipment. The more the PUE approaches 1, the better the efficiency.

For example, if the IT equipment in the data center uses 1 MW and the data center itself uses 2 MW, then the PUE would be 2. That means that the total cost of electricity (TCE) can be calculated as follows:

Avg. cost of electricity = --content--.10 per kWh

ð  TCE for data center for a year = 2 x 1000 x 0.10 x 24 hours x 365 days = ,752,000

That’s a lot of money!

If you decrease the PUE to 1.5, the TCE will be ,314,000. That means, you end up saving 8,000 (,752,000 - ,314,000). That is almost half a million!

Reeves recommends that decreasing the PUE can be done by implementing efficient data center cooling systems.

3.      Implement Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Cooling against load can be balanced by using AI for managing data centers. This way, the server will send an alert in case some equipment needs maintenance. It will also generate reports on its efficiency and will automatically optimize itself to work efficiently without manual intervention. This is an excellent strategy to make a greener data center by reducing the carbon footprints of IT infrastructure. Another approach Reeves recommends is to use virtualization to reduce the number of active machines, which helps by switching off the machines that are not in use.

Servers are significantly power-hungry and will be in the spotlight as the need to preserve the earth increases with time. Setting up green measures could help data centers stay away from the fierceness of the green lobby.

Zimmawu Reeves is an established senior information technology professional with over 17 years of IT and infrastructure architecture and with professional experience spanning medium and large-scale environments. He helps make IT data centers greener by auditing the infrastructure and looking for any causes and resolutions of excessive power usage.