Power Consumption to Empty IT Coffers by 50%
By Neelu Lekhi
Mumbai, Dec 27, 2006

Energy costs are expected to rise to over 50% of enterprise IT budgets in the next few years, thanks to increasing energy waste incurred due to heating, ventilation and air conditioning.

Rakesh Kumar, research vice president, Gartner, predicts, "Most CIOs would struggle to justify the situation in the boardrooms." Overspending on power can have a considerable impact on the IT department's ability to grow and meet business needs in the future."

He observes during the past 12 months, there has been a significant increase in the deployment of high-density servers, which is leading to significant problems in power and cooling for data centres.

"IT's age of innocence is nearing an end," says Steve Prentice, distinguished analyst & chief of research, Gartner. "Technology's clean and friendly 'weightless economy' image is being challenged by its growing environmental footprint. While a growing number of regulations are already increasing the end-of-life costs for IT equipment, IT also has to face mounting concerns over spiraling electrical power consumption."

As energy costs continue to rise and power grid capacity is pushed to the brink, energy provisioning and consumption are emerging as critical concerns for CIOs and facility managers. "Energy costs represent the second largest line item associated with datacenter operations," says Paul Goetz, VP-consulting and management services, EMC.

There are others like Baba Sam, marketing director, Sun Microsystems, who estimate that energy bills will be second only to payroll.

Energy generation add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The emissions can be reduced if power consumption is decreased when computers are not in use.

India too is waking up to the reality. There is an urgent need for legislation for usage and dissipation of electrical energy, experts feel.

Over the years, customers have developed data centers with hundreds of old servers that have slow processors, little memory and small hard-disks. Dell asserts that it is now working with customers to consolidate these servers to some of its new ones. A new server will consume power similar to one old server, but will replace 5-10 old servers. This will impact the air-conditioning and UPS capacity requirements.

Harmeet Malhotra, Sr. PMM (PV & PC), Dell, ANZ|SA|KOREA, says, "On November 8, 2006, we introduced two energy efficient desktop models to support better management of electronic energy waste. Safe re- cycling options for old computers and providing packing materials which are 100% re-cyclable can go a long way to fight the cause."

EMC Corporation's Energy Efficiency Services are a set of assessment and planning services to help customers maximize energy efficiency in data center. The company also introduced the Power Calculator, a tool that provides customers accurate energy consumption data and cooling requirements.

A NetApp report states that a safer, smarter way to address the power and cooling crisis today is to more intelligently store data and less disk storage, thus minimizing the kW consumption for each GB of data.

According to Sam, "India is currently waking up to the reality of electronic waste. There are a lot of environmental groups that are creating a lot of buzz and the enforcement authorities are also clamping down on dumping. Maybe there is a legislation required on the lines of the stringent European Union (EU) standards."

He informs that Sun is working with the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and the EU for practical avenues to improve data center efficiency and define industry-standard metrics for energy consumption.

Last year, the EU had implemented legislation in order to create efficiency standards for all electrical equipment.

It would thus be prudent for IT managers to take stock of the data center infrastructure of the enterprise. They would do well to come up with solutions to upgrade power and cooling. There is an immediate need to replace old IT equipment with better energy-efficient processors.

In the meantime, Gartner's advice to CIOs is to focus on improving the utilisation of existing equipment to delay moves towards high density systems. Organisations should actively seek power efficient products and make effective use of existing technologies like workload balancing and virtualisation to balance growing demand for compute power from the enterprise against escalating energy prices.

"It will eventually be possible to implement systems that can operate within targeted power and thermal limits, although many of the components that will enable this kind of power management will not arrive in the next five years," Kumar feels.

"If they need to use the latest servers, they should evaluate the energy requirements and see if their current data centres can host them," he remarks.