Data center power: the cost reality

…More IT executives are coming to grips with a grim reality: Data-center power and cooling costs are the hidden enemy of IT departments. They creep up on unsuspecting CIOs like deadly mists and choke off their ability to deploy new equipment and applications.

“If a CIO has not had to build a new data center recently, this is likely to be a huge surprise,” says Ken Brill, founder and executive director of the Uptime Institute, which provides consulting services to more than 100 data center operators.


“Oftentimes, the people who pay the power bill aren’t in the IT department, they’re in the facilities department. Where it shows up is in the capital cost for the data center,” Brill says. “This all happens invisibly until you run out of capacity.”

CIOs who get data-center power and cooling under control can reduce IT operations costs significantly, bolster corporate profits and gain a strategic advantage over their competitors, experts say.

Network World