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Data Centers: A New Generation of Denser, More Power-Efficient Computing Centers
“A 10-megawatt (MW) data center can use the energy of a small town at a cost of around $300,000 a month. Couple that with the fact that there are over 500,000 data centers in the world, and we’re talking about 2% of all electrical energy used globally. So, running the internet uses upwards of 406 terawatts per year, assuming 20.3 petawatt-hours as the world’s annual electrical energy consumption,” reports CleanTechnica.
Making data centers more efficient can save tremendous amounts of both electric power and money. Increasingly data centers are focusing on reducing their size and improving kilowatt-per-hour performance. This is leading to a strong focus on creating energy-management information systems which can monitor performance and promote efficiency.
In order to become more energy efficient, data centers are increasingly refreshing the servers that they house at a faster rate. Typically servers are refreshed about every four years, but when potential energy cost savings are factored in, it is actually better to instead replace servers every two years. Doing that, provides more CPU horsepower for the same amount of power and cooling within the same footprint.
David Cappuccio, chief of research for infrastructure teams at Gartner, said that “many times, datacenter managers or facilities teams start with the following assumption: We are out of (or near) capacity in our datacenter, therefore when we build next we will need more space. If we have 5,000 square feet today we must need at least 7,500 or more to sustain our growth. The error is that the focus is on square footage, not compute capacity per square foot (or per kilowatt)… A data center manager who rethinks his organization’s floor plans, cooling and server refreshes can house the increased computing capacity in the original floor space, and help meet growing business needs indefinitely. We will witness small data center environments with significant computing growth rates maintaining exactly the same footprint for the next 15 to 20 years.”
