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Data center facilities are the energy and power intensive spaces. These facilities enable enterprises to efficiently manage the receipt, transmission, dispensation, and retrieval of digital data and information. These units require redundancy in infrastructure, storage space, and energy consumption to cool down various computing equipment as well as manage the heat coming out of these equipments.
According to industry experts, data center facilities on an average consume over 100 times greater energy when compared with the standardized office spaces. According to a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy, the energy consumption in data centers almost doubled between the years 2000 and 2006. As a result, it is imperative for companies to save energy by following operation practices facilitating low power consumption.
This blog attempts to outline various strategies to optimize energy consumption in the data center spaces.
There is no denying the fact that enterprises can considerably reduce IT equipment loads in their data center infrastructure by efficiently using their tools and equipments. This, in turn, will downsize the devices that are required to cool down these equipments. Other significant ways to reduce equipment loads in a data center are purchasing energy efficient processors, superior quality network equipments, consolidating data storage devices and power supplies, and adopting cloud computing. Let us discuss them in detail:
Energy Efficient Processors: As servers consume the maximum space in a data center while driving the entire operational process, it is imperative to minimize energy wastage occurring due to them. Moreover most of the servers are known to run below 20% of the utilization, hence it is highly recommended to select products that have fans with variable speed in comparison to fans with constant speed to cool their internal components. In addition, a throttle down drive is capable of reducing energy consumption on the idle processors. Moreover, IT departments can put their servers to sleep to effectively manage power consumption in their data centers.
Superior Quality Network Equipments: The new generation network equipments are capable of delivering more throughput per power unit. It is considered as one of the active energy management techniques to minimize energy utilization since the network demand differs. Such techniques include memory access algorithms, I/O (Input/Output) buffer reduction, idle state logic, and gate count optimization. Some companies employ Ethernet networks to substantially improve energy consumption by swiftly switching the network speed connected to the amount of information transmitted across the network.
Implementing Cloud Computing: A study by Pike Research revealed that by adopting cloud technology, companies can reduce their energy consumption by 139.8 TWh by the year 2020. This means a total decline of 31% from nearly 201.8 TWh. This will further drive down total energy expenditures in a data center from approximately $23.3 bn in the year 2010 to approximately $16.0 bn in 2020.
To conclude, companies in the current business landscape are striving to reduce their data center loads and reversing the trend of higher energy and power consumption in their facilities.
