The Greening of the CIO - ' Energy Crisis in the ' (
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Energy Crisis in the Data Center
Energy is expensive, in both dollars and environmental impact. And as energy costs have risen in recent years—crude oil prices have more than doubled since 2004, and electricity prices increased almost 11 percent from early 2005 to early 2006—IT operations have been demanding more and more of it. Web servers and the facilities that house them are power hogs, in part because the machines run hot and the buildings need extensive air-conditioning. Yet a CIO Insight survey conducted in May showed that only 28 percent of companies measure the energy consumption of their servers at least once a year.
That's the kind of costly oversight that businesses can't afford, and a prime example of the Green CIO's priorities. Using less power may help slow global warming, bring peace to the planet and make everyone involved feel good about themselves—but it is also, without doubt, good for profit margins.
Nowhere is this power problem more relevant than at big data centers. You could power a city of 40,000 people with the amount of electricity needed to run a single large data center, and, according to Braunstein, up to 40 percent of the operating cost of the building that houses the data center could be power and cooling-related expenses. "The costs are outlandish, inconceivable, out of control," he says. "Blade servers are the devil. They are great from a performance standpoint, but they produce more heat and suck up more power than their predecessors."
All those hot servers require extensive cooling systems, which add to the power bill and the environmental impact. Seventy percent of the total lifetime cost of a server goes to operations, including power and cooling costs, and just 30 percent to the expense of the actual hardware, says IDC analyst John Humphreys.
One way of dealing with the problem of energy costs is to move your data centers close to relatively inexpensive sources of power and cut bulk-rate deals with the electric companies. That approach, taken by Web giants Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp., makes some sense when small savings in electric rates can reduce costs by millions of dollars a year. But in the long run, it's not a very green solution to simply chase lower prices without addressing the fundamentals of power-consumption levels the way more efficient machines and data centers can do.
This need for more efficient devices and facilities is a big focus of the technology industry. A group called The Green Grid, organized by vendors including Dell Inc., IBM Corp. and H-P, promotes energy efficiency through conferences and publications. And energy efficiency is becoming as vital a measure of performance as speed and capacity have been in the past. "One big reason that AMD is eating Intel's lunch is power consumption," says Braunstein. "Don't tell me how fast it is, tell me the performance per watt of power. Intel is coming out with new stuff of its own, but they have lost market share for that reason." In April, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. announced that its Opteron chips hold 22 percent of the x86 server processor market, up 16 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005 and up over 250 percent compared to the first quarter of 2005. AMD now has designs on the desktop as well.
Yet Brent Kerby, the product manager at AMD for the Opteron line, says he discusses power issues much more frequently with data-center operations people than with information technology leaders. "The IT guys, aren't necessarily too concerned about energy bills. With them it's more about doing the job and fitting new equipment in with stuff they've already got," he says. "The operations guys are the ones saying, 'We have this huge power bill; what can we do?' Only recently are we seeing the operations guys working with IT, because people are seeing energy costs going way up. It's in your face."
Story Guide:
The Greening of the CIO
Energy Crisis in the Data Center
Companies Find Ways to Conserve
Safe Disposal Saves Money
Data Disposal
Sidebars:
Green Beyond Greenbacks
Solar Systems
Next page: Companies Find Ways to Conserve
