Managing the Increasing Power and Cooling Demands of Data Centers.

  by Steve Watts | 16 Mar 2009 | Permalink |

I came across this interesting article on the 42U website other week highlighting the severity of the challenge organizations face in managing the increasing power and cooling demands of data centers.

The article illustrates that IT equipment (servers and storage) are the largest consumers of power in the data center at 30%.

The article also contains some interesting sound bites:

• Uptime Institute, 42% of DC Mgrs expected to run out of power capacity within 12-24 months
• Uptime Institute, 23% of DC Mgrs claim that they will run out of power capacity in 24-60 month
• IDC estimates for every $1.00 spent on new data center hardware, an additional $0.50 is spent on power and cooling, more than double the amount of five years ago.
• Gartner, 70 percent of CIO’s are reporting that power and/or cooling issues are now their single largest problem in the data center.
• Gartner estimates that 50 percent of data centers in 2008 will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet demand with 48 percent of the data center budget being spent on energy, up from 8 percent a few years ago.

All in all this points to challenging times for organizations with the most pragmatic solution being to replace the highest power consuming servers and replace them with more efficient new models. But spotting these servers is not easy a scale and once they are found there is the knock on implications of considering the dependencies on these servers.

Tideway Foundation and Hardware Reference Data is a potential solution for organizations seeking a fast and pragmatic approach. Each month as part of its Tideway Knowledge Update release, Tideway releases manufacturers’ specification data for: rack size, heat output, and power consumption for the most common server models discovered in customer environments.

Currently this data stands at:

• 7 manufacturers (includes Dell, HP, IBM, Sun)
• 330 server models
• 970 server model configurations

A full list of Hardware Reference Data server models can be found on Configipedia:

This data enriches data discovered by Tideway Foundation enabling organizations to quickly and easily identify candidate servers for refresh.

To see a brief tutorial on this subject go to Configipedia: