Data Center Power Consumption, Part IV: Putting it all together
Over the last few months, I've written about how to analyze and reduce power consumption in your data center. I'll continue to write updates as I learn more that I can share with you. What I've noticed is that this topic is of great interest to you - I get more hits on this website from power consumption searches than from any other kind of search. It's almost as though some of you are desperate to reduce power consumption. Or is it cost? (Leave me a comment or email - I'd love to hear from you.)
I've avoided giving stock, off-the-shelf solutions for this problem up until now. Depending on the design of your data center and how your company is structured, the answer is obviously different for each of you. In fact, you may want to engage a consultant to help you with it. However, there is one answer that is so big, so obvious, so landscape-changing that it is the Elephant in the Living Room, and I didn't think to suggest it until now. It's to outsource your data center! Now, you'll probably say to yourself that I must sound insincere, that I couldn't possibly have missed this, considering that it is ENKI's business. However, ENKI wasn't always in this business: we used to focus on helping clients with their own data centers, which is why these articles got started. Also, like a good engineer, I was focused on reducing power - but not to zero!
What's really in play here is that if you're interested in reducing power in your data center, you're really looking at *cost.* For those of you who want to do the Earth a favor and run a green business, I applaud you but in my opinion the choice to run a green business isn't an option anymore: nowadays, efficient business *is* green business. So what we're really talking about is cost, which drives green considerations as well. And that's where outsourcing your data center comes in. For many companies, the staff, management attention, and necessary skills to run a small to medium-sized data center efficiently and reliably are not economically justifiable anymore. You can see an example I worked up based on the experience of Digg here.
Instead, you should be looking for an OaaS (outsourced operations as a service) provider that can partner with your company in a way that allows you to trust them with your information technology infrastructure. We have created ENKI to be just such a provider. Our committment to win-win business relationships means that we are always open to negotiating a solution that works for you, even if it doesn't appear in our website or documentation. Our virtual private data center technology means that your data center architecture can be moved to our hosting environment without change, but with the added advantages of automatic failover and nearly instant provisioning of multiple copies of your application - perfect for testing, pre-deployment, or software-as-a-service providers.
And of course, we're following the power consumption best practices that I've been writing about, not the least of which is using virtualization to use our hardware as efficiently as possible while providing you service at the best possible value. So you can sleep well and be green at the same time.
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