How to cut your IT energy costs

The Internet doesn’t produce belching smokestacks or toxin-spewing drainpipes. Instead, the environmental impact of the data centers that power the Web and private networks is about as visible as the electrons moving around a company’s servers.

But visible or not, the ecological and economic costs of those servers are massive. A report released last week by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that U.S. data centers (collections of computers used to power businesses’ and government agencies’ IT infrastructures and Web sites) consumed around 61 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006 at a cost of about $4.5 billion.
That’s about 1.5 per cent of total US electricity consumption, more than the electricity used by American televisions, or equivalent to the output of about 15 typical power plants.

As the Internet expands and data centers multiply, networking hardware is only getting more power-hungry. U.S. server energy consumption is more than twice what it was in 2000, the EPA’s report says, and by 2011, it’s expected to nearly double again.

But there’s also good news: In an industry where yesterday’s servers are tomorrow’s doorstops, that data center power-crunch could potentially be outpaced by innovation. Moore’s Law, which states that computing power doubles every two years, also applies roughly to server efficiency, says David Douglas, Sun Microsystem’s vice president of eco-responsibility. That means new, energy-saving servers quickly pay for themselves.

The biggest hope for that technological transformation may be a process called virtualisation. Most traditional servers do nothing for about 90 per cent of their lives and continue to burn about half their peak energy consumption even while idle.

Virtualisation turns each of those underperforming machines into pieces of software and packs them together on a single physical server that runs continuously.

The savings from that consolidation can be dramatic. “The result is that a hundred physical servers turns into seven,” says Steve Kaplan, chief executive of the IT consultancy AccessFlow.

Rediff