Data Centre Energy Efficiency Management

Business Issue

The increasing cost of energy as a proportion of overall data centre costs has alerted the IT industry to the potential benefits that can be achieved from managing the acquisition and consumption of energy to deliver IT services.

Figure:1 Power Breakdown of the Data Centre

While energy has been considered a low but necessary cost item of the data centre budget, it was considered an acceptable overhead of doing business, however, energy is now at a premium, not only in its cost of purchase but also in procuring supply, especially in highly populated urban areas. The problem is compounded when the breakdown of power usage in the data centre is considered, as in many cases less than half the power consumed actually powers the IT equipment used to deliver IT Services.

Governments are now also beginning to apply regulatory pressures, based on politically based carbon-related initiatives, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the impending next agreement on global carbon management controls.

Data Centre Managers are now being offered a comprehensive range of potential solutions that purport to helping to solve these problems, but how can they ensure that they are going to get the best value on the investment of their time, personnel and cash resources.

Although there are many solutions that can help with energy efficiency, such as virtualisation, data deduplication, thin provisioning and free-air cooling, available, fundamentally each of these is a tactical approach to the problem and does not offer a strategic long term approach to energy management of the data centre.

Business Solution

Data Centre Energy Efficiency Management is a strategic business-aligned approach to managing the current and future energy requirements of the data centre and smaller IT computer rooms.

It provides a considered approach to establishing an energy management strategy that considers the current environment, incorporates evolving and planned business requirements and is based on industry recommended best practices.

Data Centre Energy Efficiency Management is a process-focused approach to cross-discipline energy planning and management of an organisation's IT services infrastructure. Working with the common interests of all interested parties (stakeholders) of the data centre it applies, works with and exploits existing management frameworks and methodologies such as ITIL, Six Sigma and TQM.

Taking the approach of understanding the energy management requirements for IT, Data Centre Energy Efficiency Management is not concerned with any particular vendor's product or technical solution but instils the process of regular and repeatable consideration of industry best practice to be reviewed and applied in accordance with a pragmatic, considered and regulated programme of change for the data centre. This approach ensures focus on the business requirements placed on the data centre and enables the evolvement of the data centre infrastructure based on business-led as opposed to technically-led requirements.

Being concerned with all aspects of data centre infrastructure Data Centre Energy Efficiency Management implements a standard iterative management cycle of assessment, planning, implementation, review and modification and in this way it is therefore no different to any other management discipline conducted in the data centre or wider business.

Embracing Data Centre Energy Efficiency Management

With the pressure to deliver quick solutions to the current cost and power management issues affecting data centre management, it is understandable why tactical solutions from an energy efficiency viewpoint, but strategic from other perspectives, are adopted ahead of, and in some cases instead of, the time and investment necessary to implement a comprehensive Data Centre Energy Efficiency Management programme.

Figure:2 Projected Power Breakdown of the Data Centre

However, the benefits of adopting a strategic data centre management level approach will deliver longer term and more valuable benefits to the data centre and its ability to respond to changes in business requirements. Figure 2 portrays this through the IT Equipment's high percentage of power consumed compared to the support services that are necessary to sustain it's operation. The long term objective is to implement an energy efficient data centre infrastructure, however, greater benefits, such as increased productivity of the IT Equipment and therefore a reduction in energy consumption per unit of work, and cost, are potentially possible through strategic analysis and deployment of efficient energy-oriented IT solutions.

As all other aspects of the data centre are managed according to well established processes and procedures, formalisation of energy management as an integral component of service delivery is overdue and the adoption of Data Centre Energy Efficiency Management can fill this void.