by Tony Bailetti
Similarly, they rarely have effective programs in place to improve their data centres' energy efficiency. At the same time, however, the personnel that operate them often encounter serious cooling, power management, budget and carbon footprint issues due to the dramatic increase in the number of servers for which they are responsible.
Advances in technology have improved server performance. However, for data centres these same advances have resulted in massive increases in power requirements, higher heat generation, and increased server density.
And so while hundreds of thousands of powerful and cheap servers continue to be deployed, the management doing the deploying often have ittle understanding of their effect on the environment or on the cost of operations. Massive amounts of electrical energy are needed to operate these servers as well as dissipate the heat they generate. According to Arnold Murphy, CEO of Lead to Win firm Strategic Clean Technology Inc. (SCTi), for every watt of power needed to drive a server at least one additional watt is required to cool and dissipate the heat generated by that server.
It is the responsibility of top management teams to improve the energy efficiency and reduce the carbon footprint of their organizations' data centres, because the personnel operating them are ill-equipped to handle the issues related to server proliferation. Senior management 's leadership, guidance, and direct involvement are needed to ensure that their data centres incorporate their organizations commitment to protect the environment and reduce operating costs.
Put simply, top management teams need to better understand what is going on in their data centres. Sadly, this information often hasn't been readily available to them in the past.
The first step is to identify the major energy consuming culprits within a data centre. Here lies a serious problem. Typically, the personnel that operate a data centre do not have an accurate and complete view of the centre's cost structure or carbon footprint. They simply lack the tools, products, experience and knowledge required to provide meaningful data to top management teams and act effectively to solve problems.
Luckily, at least one local company is helping in the fight to improve the power efficiency of data centres. SCTi uses new smart metering technology to make the operating costs of data centres visible, while providing the knowledge and tools that enable top management teams understand information on the operations of their data centres and improve their energy efficiency.
The company offers its customers: lower energy consumption, lower operating costs, smaller carbon footprint, prolonged life of centre facilities, and decrease in infrastructure investment.
Founders Arnold Murphy and Luke Connolly, the CEO and Chief Technology Officer respectively, say the company offers clients tools that illustrate how much power their ios being used; devices that monitor in real-time the air flow, temperature and humidity within a data centre; and a product that tracks configurations of all equipment within a data centre, such as rack configurations and cabling.
To provide an accurate and complete view of a data centre 's operations and identify the areas of inefficiency which unnecessarily increase energy consumption, the company monitors total power consumption as well as consumption of individual pieces of equipment.
As of right now, SCTi works with Hydro Ottawa to extend and increase the success of the latter's incentive program for new markets.
Tony Bailetti is an associate professor at Carleton University and the head of Lead to Win, a vendor-neutral business ecosystem.
