Data centers increasingly going green

By Dorothy Ramienski
Internet Editor
FederalNewsRadio

As the amount of data grows, the number of data centers is growing.

This also means more energy is being consumed.

According to a 2007 report by the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2006 data centers used 1.5 percent of the total U.S. electricity consumption at a cost of about $4.5 billion.

That is only projected to grow this year.

There are solutions, though. On Monday’s Daily Debrief, hosts Christopher Dorobek and Amy Morris spoke with Steven Oberlin, chief scientist for Cassatt, a company that specializes in products and services that allow organizations to make their data centers more efficient.

Oberlin says part of the problem is that people don’t think about how much power data centers use.

If you think about that in terms of clean power capacity, that’s over half of the hydro-electric capacity that the United States has and clean power is particularly in short supply these days.

This isn’t the only challenge, though.

Another aspect that’s really important to remember is that data center power requirements are growing extremely rapidly — going up by 20 percent or more per year.

Which means, Oberlin says, that by 2009 things are going to get even more pricey.

There’s expected to be a cross over where the three year cost of powering a typical, mid-range data center server [is] actually going to . . . exceed the initial purchase price. So, it’s actually going to cost more to power it over its service life than it costs to purchase them in the first place.

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There’s another, more indirect aspect to the problem, as well. Oberlin says many data centers are running out of capacity.

It’s . . . likely that they’re just exceeding the total amount of input power that they have coming into the facility in order to be able to power their servers — or the cooling capacity for the building. That can be incredibly expensive and, in some cases it’s simply impossible to expand a data center.

That need for expansion brings its own challenges and drives up the price, as well.

Expansion might be limited by security requirements — that it’s a secure sight or . . . oftentimes data centers are located where the people are that they’re serving, and that might be a historic or metropolitan location. A lot of times data centers have applications that are mission-critical and there’s no way to expand a data center without disrupting that mission-critical operation.

As for those who argue against the movement towards eco-friendly technology, Oberlin says he feels that there’s no credence to digging in one’s heels.

Sometimes doing nothing is more expensive than taking action. . . . Here, when we’re talking about green, we’re not just talking about reducing carbon emissions or saving trees. At Cassatt we think about green as really being about increasing efficiency and efficiency almost always translates into money — and money is both a good thing to save and to make.

Oberlin says it might not be about making new purchases, either. He suggests powering down as one way to make the switch from energy hog to energy efficiency.

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On the Web:

Department of Energy – Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency Public Law 109-431 (pdf)

Cassatt – Web site

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