The Energy Efficient Data Centre
July 2008
Many companies strive to achieve a ‘green’ environmental sustainability status for their data centre, while also ensuring a favourable ROI. IPP Consulting Pty Ltd, one of Australia’s leading consulting firms specialising in data centres, provides its clients with cutting-edge efficiency enhancement strategies which help them pave the road to operating a true ‘green’ data centre.
When considering current data centre issues and determining an improvement strategy, it is useful to categorise data centre efficiency into the following four areas:
The Future IT Strategy
- Alternatives to high-availability strategies like active-active data centres
- Using a smaller number of servers with high processing power
- Matching appropriate data centre Tier classification levels to suit different application environments
- Centralised versus decentralised processing
- Disaster Recovery considerations
The IT Hardware Utilisation
- Powering down decommissioned servers and storage
- The virtualisation of applications
- The virtualisation of appropriate storage
- Enabling power saving features on servers
Deployed IT Energy & Power
- Selecting new-technology server power supplies that more efficiently convert AC to DC for the internal components
- Selecting equipment designed with more efficient processor chips and hard drives that provide more useful work for the same energy input
- Power off blades during periods of low utilisation – because idle blades still use 70% - 90% of the full load power
Site Physical Infrastructure
- Improve efficiencies with cooling system infrastructure
- More efficient heat exchange (sometimes through choice of site where outside temperature is constantly low
- Increase the input heat to the servers, as we don’t have to have 23C +/- 1C any more, as today’s equipment is more resilient
- Reduction in humidity control as today’s equipment is more resilient
- Improve efficiencies with UPS and batteries
- Improve efficiencies with power distribution
IPP’s approach to enabling clients to achieve their desired efficiency goals begins with a site inspection and risk assessment followed by a requirements briefing process. The final output is a strategic roadmap that, if adopted, will enable the data centre to greatly reduce energy costs and/or expand its capacity for additional systems or higher density processing within the current energy availability constraints.
So if your increasing data centre power bills are hurting your profit margin, give our experts at IPP Consulting a call to arrange a start to controlling your energy savings.
About IPP Consulting
IPP Consulting is a dynamic Australian consulting firm, specialising in information technology, risk and security solutions. Founded in 1986, IPP Consulting today is a leading independent consulting firm in several global markets. IPP is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia with projects throughout Europe and Asia. For more information, visit http://www.ipp.com.au/.
>>> Back to News Headlines
| 
