Making data centers and server rooms more green

Data centers are very inefficient in their nature and require huge amounts of energy. It is therefore of essence to try and make data centers itself very efficient. Emerson, a company specializing in setting up data centers, is providing solutions to reduce these inefficiencies.

Emerson has developed a method called energy logic (introduced in a white paper) which traces the dissipation of energy and optimizes these negatives effects in a logical manner. The results speak for itself. The energy logic approach reduces the footprint of a data center by two thirds of floor space and cooling requirements by more than 40%. This is illustrated in the following diagram:

The solution reduces the number of servers by a huge amount and thereby saves space, costs and energy usage.

There are clear benefits to businesses who have data centers to implement this technology solution:

• Reduction in power, cooling and space. These three aspects are the key drivers that cause the high requirement for energy in a data center. By reducing these aspects, energy is saved and the entire data center becomes more green.
• Costs are saved as less servers are required for the same amount of processing power. In addition, less cooling and space is required. These are great cost savings for a company.
• Consultation is a positive investment as it brings expert knowledge to a very complicated topic.

This technology approach already present in the business world and as a result there are no big challenges or serious risks associated in implementing this. It is certainly a cost issue in initially consulting a firm like Emerson to implement such solutions. If the data centers or server rooms are however set up in a proper way since the beginning, the costs will depreciate over a much longer time period.

A general problem with less servers is that each server is used more to maintain same processing capacity. This means that the servers might have to be upgraded to faster processors. This would be costly for a business and therefore difficult for management to implement.

Approaches like that provided by Emerson are basically an optimization of resource allocation. This is one of the pillars of green IT. Thus, a server room or data center is ideally not just a room of computers. It is a highly optimized room that builds the surroundings in such a way that output is maximized at both efficiency and processing power.

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