Talk about cause and effect! When CIOs become responsible for paying a company’s power bills, energy use in the data center can drop dramatically.
That’s the message from Dean Nelson, the senior director of global data center services at eBay, to a group of IT managers at the recent Uptime Institute Symposium in New York. “When CIOs are paying the power bill, they really understand the impact of the decisions being made,” he stressed.
While most CIOs don’t see their companies’ power bills, eBay includes them with regular IT expenses and, as a result, has witnessed a “very aggressive” drop in power consumption. The drop has been so profound that eBay was able to pay for its newest data center – a $287 million facility in Salt Lake City – through savings achieved in lowered power costs over the past two years, Nelson explained.
As a result, eBay now considers its IT department to be “self-funding” due to greater efficiencies in power spending, Nelson said.