IT grapples with overcrowded, energy-guzzling data centers

DALLAS — These days Andrew Fanara isn’t worrying about the massive amounts of electricity a big-screen TV consumes; he’s thinking about how electrical consumption in the data center is accelerating from the use of power-hungry servers and other network gear.

Fanara is program manager for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star Program, which rates consumer appliances. He spoke this week at the AFCOM Data Center World conference, where 850 data center managers and IT professionals tuned in to hear Fanara talk about the government’s efforts to promote energy efficiency in data centers.

Electricity is the lifeblood of a data center, Fanara said. “Ironically it is the inefficient use of that energy that creates the challenges that many [data center managers] are facing in terms of running out of power, having to go build additional data centers, incurring that cost, not utilizing the IT assets as much as [they] probably would like to," he said. “All of that creates significant challenges."

Several sources confirm enterprises are struggling with jam-packed data centers. A recent survey from storage vendor OnStor of 369 IT professionals found that 63% of organizations have run out of space, power or cooling capacity without warning. Further, at their current data growth rate, 43% of respondents said they could stay in their present infrastructure for only six months to one year if they changed nothing.

Those figures gibe with research from Gartner, which reports that 50% of current data centers by 2008 will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of high-density equipment.

At the AFCOM event, Fanara pinpointed the electricity-gulping x86-based server as the first target of the EPA’s attention.
“Volume servers are probably the largest consumers of energy. They are not the most efficient in terms of their energy use and thus are the biggest opportunities going forward," Fanara said.

To help spell out just how much power servers draw, the EPA plans to develop — as soon as year-end —Energy Star standards for servers that will let vendors test for energy efficiency and computing performance and brand their servers with Energy Star ratings, which were previously reserved for consumer appliances.