Business Intelligence Lowdown: Energy Saving Trends

Comments

February 05, 2006

Energy Saving Trends

Of late, the spotlight has shifted to energy saving and pollution control measures to reduce environmental degradation and the greenhouse effect. A two-day conference organized by Sun Microsystems and other large technology firms in Santa Clara, to thrash out the finer points of energy efficiency and conservation in data centers, highlighted this issue.

An average-sized data center, measuring 50,000 square feet, consumes the power needed to light up 2,500 houses. The power is used to run and cool the numerous computer servers housed in a typical data center.

With companies expanding by the day, more employees are added, which in turn translates to more computer systems and more cooling units. The cooling units guzzle the same amount of energy required to keep the systems running. With uninterrupted power supplies for data centers running all day long, it is no wonder that some companies spend up to $2 million towards their data center costs.

"If we can reduce the amount of power data centers consume, we could probably reduce the number of blackouts and slow down the need for new power plants," said Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. He concurs with Sun's proposition that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should develop an Energy Star program that can be used to measure the performance of network servers by a particular metric yardstick, like on a per-watt basis. The challenge lies in providing metrics for the whole data center, he adds.

The Energy Star program is a voluntary label for all consumer appliances to certify that they use less energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Though the program was first applied to certain computers and monitors when announced in 1992, it was extended to include consumer appliances as well.

Sun, on its part, is implementing new low power consumption chips and servers on its systems.

--
Did you enjoy this post?

February 5, 2006 in Data Warehousing | Permalink