Data Center Power Consumption - A Hot Topic
Over the next few years, power consumption will become the number one concern of data center managers. With increasing instability of global oil production and a continued rise in the world’s demand for oil, energy prices will only continue to go up. In addition, as our leaders accept the reality of Global Warming, you can expect carbon mitigation and alternative energy costs to be included in the price of the electricity you buy. Even at today’s increased electricity prices, industry pundits claim that the cost of the electricity to run your servers during their lifetime will equal their purchase cost. For owners of existing data centers, power consumption also limits their ability to add capacity, since as server density rises both the power consumption per rack and the total heat output of their equipment may exceed their facility’s capabilities.
To manage power consumption, you have to understand how power is used in your data center. While all the power used generates heat, only some of the power is actually used to perform computations for your business. The rest is lost to inefficiencies and cooling costs. Most of today’s servers have an AC power supply in them that is about 65% efficient. So, in a typical server with a 400 watt power supply, 140 watts are lost as heat due to power supply inefficiency, and 40 more watts due to fans that remove the waste heat from the server case, delivering only 220 watts to the CPU, memory, disk drives, and motherboard components, or wasting $0.45 of every electrical power dollar you spend. When you take into account the energy you need to blow the hot air out of your rack, through your air handler, and to run the chillers or air conditioners, your overall efficiency can easily drop below 50% - only half the electricity you buy is actually serving your business!
In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing some articles detailing how you can reduce power consumption in your data center, both by increasing efficiency as well as increasing utilization of your servers. You can pick them up later by bookmarking the ENKI infrastructure blog page.
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