Ways to Reduce Data Center Energy Consumption
The increasing amount of customer data has resulted in significant growth in the number of servers powered by data centers. With the explosion of digital data, IT operators have started to upgrade their IT facility by adding more hardware equipment to support the needs, and this is requiring a good deal of electricity, leading to high energy consumption.
IT professionals can't simply look away from the fact that increase in data center operations is directly causing them to consume more energy. We know that energy related issues have been giving headaches to tech professionals for ages now. That's the reason why Facebook and many other organizations have their data centers in the cold regions. Well, not everyone can move to the north and south pole to construct their IT facility but there are alternate options to cut down energy consumption in the data center.
Server virtualization
According to researches, there are still several data centers that typically install one server to run per application. After counting in other instances such as testing, development, staging and disaster recovery, 3-5 server were used. This traditional approach of running applications leads to low utilization rate. Server virtualization provides you a way to integrate a number of servers and enables you to run multiple workloads on a single host server. Many such virtual machines can be run effectively on an individual host server. So instead of installing servers and application in equal ratio, consider server virtualization that can not only free up physical space but also result in low energy consumption as it uses fewer resources to run the same amount applications without impeding performance level.
Decommission old equipment
According to a survey, 8 to 10% of servers with no use were still running in data centers. It also found that a data center near Atlanta found was having 50% of completely unused servers in the IT facility. Researches also discovered that some data center service providers make use of equipment until it breaks down. This usually includes servers used for 5 or nearly 10 years. The older the server, the more inefficient it will become and the higher the rate of carbon footprint it will produce. Moreover, it also eats up too much energy and physical space and performs poorly for the resources it uses compared to the modern servers.
Advance power distribution
An aging UPS equipment must be replaced with newer ones because it becomes substantially less efficient and installing new UPS systems in the environment could help in reducing energy consumption by 10-15%. New UPS equipment supplies energy more efficiently, offer better DC voltage regulator, with cooling fans and processors consuming less power.
Improving facility cooling
Inefficient cooling units not only increases IT expenditure but also consumes a high amount of energy. Switching older equipment with new ones can certainly help here. Read this blog here that explains everything about data center cooling efficiency - Upgrading Data Center cooling system can improve energy efficiency .
While many data centers were quick in achieving the efficiency rate, there are yet providers delivering data center solutions the traditional way. Although these are some not-so-inexpensive option, but it will save you some good amount of money in the long run.
