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Cost Savings in Data Centers

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

The first step towards streamlining business and preventing leakages in

budgets during times of economic slowdowns is obviously to ensure that the IT

systems work efficiently by incorporating technologies like virtualization,

consolidation, migrating to blade servers and having intelligent energy

management solutions. In spite of these deployments, most companies end up

saving only a marginal proportion of the expected outcome, bringing them back to

level zero or worse still, in a few cases, spending more and getting no results.

According to APC, the reason for this is that the IT functions better, but the

auxiliary 'facilities' like UPS systems, cooling devices and back up power

systems end up unchanged, and in spite of IT enhancements, they result in huge

leakages.

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As an illustration, consider a scenario where 10 servers that were earlier

running at 50% efficiency percentages were consolidated to 6 servers running at

80% efficiency each, eliminating the need for 4 servers and consequently the

space and cooling. Even taking into consideration, the little extra power a

blade server consumes, there is still tremendous benefits. But if the cooling

systems remain unchanged, or are modified in an incorrect manner, the new

architecture will not get sufficient cooling, resulting in malfunction, or

worse, the magnitude of cooling and power requirements will be disproportionate

to the new architecture.

An ideal starting point towards solving this problem is to understand the

magnitude of saving that can be achieved with a mix and match of 'facility'

changes. In order to aid enterprises, derive at these percentages, APC, on its

website, has uploaded a bunch of free tools (tools.apcc.com) which give you a

fair indication of what you can expect to save. For instance, The Data Center

Efficiency Calculator allows you to indicate the date center capacity, current

efficiency, current UPS systems in use, power costs, lighting details etc, and

then allows you to make indicative changes to any of these or add-ons like

blanking panels, deep raised floors, heat rejections pumps etc, and see the

savings meter change dynamically. For example, a 300 KW data center having 50%

IT load, at typical Indian electricity charges, running on legacy UPS systems,

with chilled water cooling system at single path power is likely to run at an

efficiency of 43.8% with an annual electricity cost of $ 353, 050. If row-based

cooling is deployed and a high efficiency cooling system along with blanking

panels and 'intelligent' lighting in the server room is installed, the savings

percentage climbs up to 58.6%, bringing down the annual energy cost to $ 263,

639. Whether the IT manager sees sense in these deployments for the overall cost

benefit the company would derive is his/her call, but the tool is a reasonably

comprehensive in its analysis of loss reductions.

Similarly, there is a Data Center Capital Costs Calculator, which analyses

parameters like installed labor charges, redundancy levels, and throws up pie

charts that display percentages of cost burden on UPS, generator, switchgear

etc. The Virtualization Energy Cost Calculator, on the other hand, allows the IT

manager to get comparative percentages and graphs of how many servers can be

consolidated and virtualized, depending on desired architecture of servers,

projected load, and available space.

APC hopes that with these cost saving percentages, IT managers will realize

the need to tackle the issue of inefficient hardware and consequently resort to

modular power technologies, efficient power distribution mechanism, rack-based

cooling systems which involve superior technologies like in-row cooling, where

all the hot air is collected and trapped in a corridor and processed to send air

sideways across all server racks. Bundled with infrastructure performance

monitoring tools, APC hopes that CIOs will realize the quick benefits during bad

economic times of having efficient auxiliary data center components, which will

help realize the benefits of technologies like virtualization and new-generation

servers.

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