It's not exactly news that we're seeing a lot of growth in our data centers and expanding existing data centers or building new ones to accommodate this growth. I've posted about some of this growth-related activity in Large Data Center Servers, Part 2 – Rackable Systems and conservation and consolidation work in Oregon Goes Green with Consolidation Efforts, but I was shocked to discover just how much power we're consuming in our data centers.
I ran across an article in SearchDataCenter.com, a TechTarget site, reporting that power availability problems and costs will continue to rise if nothing is done to reduce server power consumption in the data center:
"A study conducted by Stanford University professor Jonathan Koomey, Ph.D., and sponsored by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) indicates that the current growth in server energy consumption levels will necessitate additional capacity equal to more than 10 1,000-megawatt (MW) power plants by 2010."
The study included some information garnered from IDC's server data and this is what really got my attention:
"The study found that between 2000 and 2005, servers in the U.S. and Europe comprise about two-thirds of the world's total electricity use, with Japan, Asia/Pacific and the rest of the world each falling between 10% and 15% of the total."
I had no idea that our data centers and servers were responsible for that level of consumption! This seemed especially bizarre in light of the following technologies that have been introduced prior to and during that timeframe, some of which are specifically intended to reduce power consumption:
- Application Workload Consolidation
- Blade Servers
- Low-Voltage Processors
- Multi-core Processors
- Network Attached Storage (NAS)
- Server Virtualization
- Storage Area Network (SAN)
Not all of the news in the article was bad; "over the next three years, the share of total server electricity use from U.S. data centers will likely decline from 40% in 2000 to about one-third". It sounds as if some of the Green Data Center initiatives are or will be taking hold. Unfortunately, the data centers in the Asia/Pacific region are expected to increase their overall consumption from 10% to 16%:
"Server electricity use in the Asia/Pacific region grew at a 23% per year, compared with a world average of 16% a year, making the region the only one with server electricity use growing at a rate significantly greater than the world average."
So, considering this dire news, what are you doing to conserve energy in your data center? Are you leveraging existing power management capabilities in your equipment? Are you retiring unused servers or consolidating underutilized servers?
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