Focusing on Data Center Efficiencies
The next time you're stoking the fire in the furnace of your data center you might want to think about how efficient the data center's operations really are.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently implemented a national data center energy efficiency information program. The program coordinates activities from the DOE Industrial Technologies Program's Save Energy Now initiative, the DOE Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) and the EPA Energy Star program.
The program engages stakeholders who are developing and deploying tools and disseminating information to assist data center operators in their efforts to reduce energy consumption at their facilities. These groups include: 7 x 24 Exchange; AFCOM; American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers; Critical Facilities Roundtable; Information Technology Industry Council; Silicon Valley Leadership Group; The Green Grid Association and The Uptime Institute.
According to the DOE, data centers consume a large portion of the U.S. energy/electricity supply due to increased demands for the services they provide. Data centers used 61 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2006 -- representing 1.5 percent of all U.S. electricity consumption, and double the amount consumed in 2000. Based on current trends, energy consumption by data centers will to grow by 12 percent per year.
Best energy management practices and technologies assist in processing digital information (i.e., energy-efficient computer servers and virtualization server software), delivering and conditioning electrical power to computers, and removing the heat rejected from data center IT equipment in an efficient manner. An EPA report estimated that if technology were adopted in data centers, energy efficiency could be improved by as much as 70 percent. However, even saving 10 percent of total energy usage would amount to energy savings of 10.7 billion kilowatt hours per year -- an amount equivalent to the electricity consumed by one million U.S. households and valued at about $740 million.
The DOE Save Energy Now program is developing a certification program for data center energy efficiency. Save Energy Now Qualified specialists will assist data center operators in identifying energy saving projects. The EPA is developing Energy Star specifications for enterprise servers, which will allow this equipment to earn the Energy Star designation. In the future, EPA will develop Energy Star specifications for additional IT equipment, possibly including data storage and networking equipment.
Here's another report on data center efficiencies, this time by McKinsey & Co.
CIOs and IT directors: Drop me an e-mail at RMitchell@advanceweb.com to tell me how you are improving your hospital/health system data center operations. We'd love to tell your story here on our Web site.