Ever-Rising IT Demands vs. Energy Efficiency

There is a constant rise in demand for IT services and it will continue to grow endlessly. Due to this ever rising IT demand, energy efficiency in data centers has gradually become a bigger challenge for the data center managers. Meeting the energy efficiency goals to maintain the price level is already a difficult issue for them. In addition to this, there is pressure from the government to check and regulate the carbon footprint of data center and IT industry.

The complicated regulations from some government have confusing impressions. Firstly there is a thought that energy efficiency will mean lesser service costs. But ironically, the government is also imposing the energy regulations through carbon reduction by the means of taxation or cap-and-trade scheme; which leads to cost escalation and therefore a price rise for customers.

Now the question arises what shall be done to overcome these conflicts. Energy consumption in data centers shall be well managed and controlled. In some data centers, latest energy efficiency tools need to be installed and modern practices need to be followed.

Below are some effective ways to gain energy efficiency in data centers:

Replacing old hard drives with SSDs: Solid State Disks are faster, highly energy efficient, produce lesser heat and delivers better performance. There is no reason to stick to the hard drive and not switch to SSDs.

Use latest techniques like Flywheels: flywheels help in increasing the momentum of the machine. In case of power fluctuations, the disk continues spinning because of this momentum, producing additional power which UPS uses as the emergency brief standby power.

De-duplication and compression: These two storage efficiency techniques enable to store more data in lesser power consuming hardware.

Cloud is the ultimate solution: Cloud is the most energy-efficient storage and hosting solution. Cloud data centers are located in places where there is lesser need for energy generation (Like naturally cold places) or where the energy costs are comparatively cheaper. Cloud solutions are the best way to increase data storage capacity.