The efficiency accomplishments of the big cloud providers “could lead to the perception that the problem is largely solved,” said Pierre Delforge, director of the NRDC’s high-tech sector on energy efficiency, but that perception doesn’t match reality when all data centres are taken into account.
Usage growing
Data centres are “one of the few large industrial electricity uses which are growing,” Delforge said, and they are a key factor in creating demand for new power plants in some parts of the country.
Businesses that move to colocation, multitenant data centre facilities do not necessarily make efficiency gains. Customers of such facilities may be charged according to a space-based pricing model, paying by the rack or by square footage, with a limit on how much power they can use before additional charges kick in. That model offers little incentive to operate equipment as efficiently as possible.
In total, the report says, US data centres used 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity last year, “enough to power all of New York City’s households twice over and growing.” By 2020, annual data centre energy consumption is expected to reach 140 billion kilowatt-hours.
If companies adopted data centre best practices, the report states, the economic benefits would be substantial. A 40% reduction in energy use, which the report says is only half of the technically possible reduction, would equal $3.8 billion (€2.9 billion) in savings for businesses.
The report also finds that energy efficiency progress is slowing. Once the obvious efficiency projects, such as isolating hot and cold aisles, are completed, additional investment in energy efficiency becomes harder to justify — either because of the cost or because of a perception that new initiatives might increase risk. IT managers are “extremely cautious” about implementing aggressive energy management programs because they are concerned that such measures could threaten uptime, the report notes.
Gauges
There are a number of measurements used to gauge the efficiency of data centres, and the report recommends development of tools for determining CPU utilisation, average server utilisation and average data centre utilisation. It says that “broad adoption of these simple utilisation metrics across the data centre industry would provide visibility on the IT efficiency of data centres, thereby creating market incentives for operators to optimise the utilisation of their IT assets.”
The NRDC is not the first to look at this issue. In 2007, the US Environmental Protection Agency, working with a broad range of data centre operators and industry groups, released a report on data centre power usage that found that the energy use of the nation’s servers and data centres in 2006 “is estimated to be more than double the electricity that was consumed for this purpose in 2000.” It called for energy efficiency improvements.
Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld
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