Economies of scale within the data center are highly beneficial in controlling costs related to cloud computing, says the senior vice president at Europe’s leading provider of colocation services.
“Outsourcing cloud services helps companies that cannot afford to build or continue to expand their own data centers, thereby reducing their capital expenses and operating expenses,” writes Kevin Dean of Interxion in a recent issue of Data Center Knowledge.com. “Facility costs are growing rapidly, and according to the Uptime Institute, the true costs of running a server are often four to five times the cost of the server alone over a five-to-10-year lifetime.”
Cloud computing is shaping up to be the driving force in IT worldwide, with IDC predicting that spending on cloud services will reach $42 billion by 2012. IT organizations are already facing challenges as they confront this “cloud revolution,” and Dean is convinced that outsourcing to carrier-neutral MSPs such as EasyStreet makes the most sense.
“Using a third-party data center equates to great savings in both cost and administration for the business,” he says.
More than ever before, the high cost of power is changing dramatically companies’ plans for building data centers. Just a few years ago it seemed to make sense for companies to build oversized data centers to accommodate future growth of the IT infrastructure. But it turns out the cost of supporting unused portions has quickly outdistanced any long-range efficiencies gained by having surplus space.
“We see our customers making very different design decisions than they used to,” Steve Sams, IBM’s VP of global site and facilities services, recently told Network World. “The end result is that they’re saving 30 percent in operational costs over the lifetime of the data center.”
Today’s emphasis is on maximizing efficiency, period. In fact, Sams says a recent IBM study revealed that costs to run a data center quickly surpass outlays for designing and building the facility. If energy costs rise only a conservative 10 percent, he says, the average data center will cost five times more to run over 20 years than it cost to originally build it.
“The most energy efficient data centers in the world are the ones operating at 100 percent capacity,” he says. And in this case, efficiency equates to cost-effectiveness.
It’s interesting how barnyard animals have been written up in conjunction with data centers lately – embracing the “farm” in “server farm.”
Ten thousand cows, for example, and the resulting bi-product of their collective digestive systems, “could fulfill the power requirements of a 1-megawatt (MW) data center — the equivalent of a medium-sized data center — with power left over to support other needs on the farm.” This observation is from HP Labs in a research paper presented at the recent ASME International Conference on Energy and Sustainability.
Apparently, the heat generated by said data center can aid the anaerobic digestion of animal waste, which results in the production of methane that can be used to generate power for the data center. “This symbiotic relationship allows the waste problems faced by dairy farms and the energy demands of the modern data center to be addressed in a sustainable manner,” says HP. (I’m just hoping you don’t end up with a server farm that smells like a dairy farm.) Click here to read more about this dairy/server farm scenario.
Goats are the topic at the Yahoo! data center in Quincy, Washington. Twice a year a herd of 252 goats takes care of the invasive weeds (probably blackberries) that threaten to take over the pasture beside the facility. (Nothing was mentioned in this article about the resulting bi-product of their collective digestive systems.)
With a moo, moo here… a baa, baa there…
It may seem perplexing, but the federal Environmental Protection Agency says that a data center’s uptime has little to no bearing on its energy efficiency. Most IT folks may have thought the greater the uptime, the more redundancy the data center requires, and thus the less efficient its energy use.
Not so, the EPA now says. Its Energy Star program looked at 100 data centers last year to develop an Energy Star standard for data centers, due for release next month. The survey showed that other design factors have much greater impact than uptime.
“Tier level was not a huge predictor of energy performance,” according to Alexandra Sullivan, an engineer in the EPA’s Energy Star program. “When we looked at the data, we did not observe a significant relationship between tier and energy use.”
Capacity, for example, has a much larger effect on a data center’s energy efficiency.
“There could be a Tier 2 site with a very light load, where they have a whole bunch of excess capacity and the PUE (power usage effectiveness) will be high,” says Pitt Turner, executive director of the Uptime Institute. “Then there could be a Tier 4 site that has a load that is very close to full capacity, and its PUE is lower. The idle capacity is the biggest contributor.”
Not the best of news: Gartner’s VP of research, Rakesh Kumar, says 2010 will continue to see energy costs worsen for data centers. And he puts part of the blame on data-center managers themselves.
“Energy costs are the fastest-rising cost element in the data center portfolio, and yet data center managers are still not paying sufficient attention to the process of measuring, monitoring and modeling energy use in data centers,” Kumar says. (Of course this isn’t true of EasyStreet, with our recent hot aisle/cold aisle upgrades and new energy-saving designs to come. More later!) “They need to realize that removing a single x86 server from a data center will result in savings of more than $400 a year in energy costs alone.”
He said his 2010 forecast is similarly grim for space and technology problems affecting data centers.
