For any IT professional it’s common knowledge that energy consumption can become a serious problem very quickly. Data centers tend to consume large amounts of energy, leading to higher cost of operation and higher temperatures during high volume periods. Energy consumption has been cited as being a serious problem by several publishers, even publications not exclusively pertaining to information technology. Large scale data center energy consumption is more than just a matter of efficient operation, it’s a responsibility of data center owners and manager’s. More and more data centers are being added to watch lists of some counties and states for being wasteful of energy. The fuels used to generate the energy being wasted by some data centers has made a serious impact on the local ecosystem and economy.
Energy efficiency is a major concern for data centers in several different ways. Data centers need to maintain a certain level of cost effectiveness, and lower the overall impact they have on the environment and local economy. By wasting huge amounts of energy demand increases for energy, making it more expensive. Diesel fuel and other pollution increases as more energy is needed, creating a larger impact on the environment. Efficient operation in data centers requires that the owner or manager of the data center takes the necessary steps to optimize their servers using techniques to consolidate lightly used server, cool servers more efficiently, and use appliances that use energy more efficiently such as advanced PSU’s or PDU’s.
It’s not just a matter of using the latest hardware to run a data center, it comes down to how a data center is planned out and how power is distributed to the various servers and computers in the data center. For data center energy consumption to be efficient the operation of the servers within the data center have to be optimized with energy consumption in mind. Newer racks and power supply units offer ways of optimizing the power grid within the data center, but it will still be up to the owner or manager of the data center to plan appropriately and make the necessary arrangements to utilize those tools in the most efficient manner. Visit Raritandcim.com for more information.