Small Steps Can Lead to Huge Power Savings

There was some news recently about a large data center being setup in the US

next to a dam, so that it could take power directly from the source. Otherwise,

it would first go to the power generation plant, and then come to the data

center through a meandering set of transmission lines. All this would increase

the cost of power.

It may sound a little far fetched, but power is certainly becoming an issue

in other countries, and they're finding all sorts of means to save it. Some of

them can be as extreme as this. There's another case where a power company is

paying data centers money to save power. So there would be an 'x' amount of

dollars paid for every Watt of electricity saved. We don't find such drastic

measures being taken in our own country, but it's not as if the power situation

is any better here.

In fact, we probably have more scheduled power cuts than any other country.

Even if someone were to match that, then nobody can really beat our

'unscheduled' power cuts. Puns aside, the fact of the matter is that there isn't

enough power to go around for everyone, and yet power requirements are shooting

through the roof. While the govt. should definitely do something about it, there

are a lot of things that we can also do, both as individuals and corporates.

Anil Chopra,  Editor

As individuals, it could be as simple as shutting down your PC before going

home from work, and also ensuring that the monitor is also turned off. If the

other hundred (or hundreds of) employees in your company also do the same, then

it adds up to a significant amount of power saving for your company. Likewise, a

lot of power can be saved simply by turning off other equipment that's not being

used.

At the corporate level, you can find measures of saving power in your data

center. It's obviously not expected that one would rip and replace the entire IT

infrastructure with energy efficient elements overnight. But things can be done

slowly. During your next IT equipment purchase for instance, do take power

saving or energy efficient features of the equipment into account. A lot of IT

equipment manufacturers today are themselves looking at building more energy

efficient products.

Slowly, as older equipment gets phased out and newer equipment comes in, your

data center automatically becomes energy efficient. Another problem is wasted

capacity. For example, consider the utilization level of servers in your data

center. Virtualization is one of the technologies being considered to increase

server utilization. With multi-core servers coming in, it might make more sense

to virtualize them and run multiple applications. It could actually reduce your

server purchase cycles. There are many other measures you can take, and we've

got a separate story on how to make your data center more energy efficient in

this issue for you to find those out.