Energy tips go unheeded, experts says

Data centers are literally running out of power and storage. The dramatic increase in computational performance of processors and servers is not being matched by a corresponding rise in energy efficiency, Bruce Taylor of the Uptime Institute consulting group said Tuesday.

“There is an awful lot we don’t know yet. We’re still at the beginning of looking at this problem,” Taylor, the Uptime Institute’s chief strategist, said during a panel discussion in Boston involving HP, AMD and EMC.

Technology vendors on the panel said they are finding it a challenge to build systems efficient enough to meet storage needs, which are increasing more than 50% a year. But they said data center designers and operators often fail to take advantage of existing technology and design principles that could greatly reduce power consumption.

The average data center probably uses three times more air conditioning and cooling than is needed, Taylor said. Not only do operators keep temperatures too low, designers worried about aesthetics often fail to use efficient layouts such as the hot aisle/cold aisle method, he said.

“Most data center designers do not look at the facility using the right metrics,” said Ken Baker, an infrastructure technologist at HP. “It’s a thermodynamic workflow problem. If you address it that way and do the math, it will drive you to these improvements right away.”

Automation control systems for cooling, combined with other best practices can easily make data centers 50% more efficient, Baker said.

“The best practices, in many cases, already exist,” said Dick Sullivan, director of enterprise solutions marketing at EMC. “I don’t have a lot of sympathy for those people who just discovered they ran out of power when the new DMX storage arrives on the dock. They obviously haven’t been paying attention up to that point.”

Only 10% of users are turning on power management systems that power computers down when idle, said Brent Kerby, an AMD product marketing manager.

IT departments can save both energy and money by consolidating systems that have small drives into systems with larger drives, and by using server virtualization, panelists said.

AMD is building virtualization capabilities into processors to reduce the software overhead and, hopefully, make virtualization more acceptable to network executives, Kerby said. Intel, which was not represented on the panel, is doing the same with its own processors.