Taming The DC Energy Monster: Here's How

Requirements from a datacentre (DC) in terms of business support are rising exponentially. This means packing in more computing power into the DC while keeping down the cost of space and power at reasonable levels. CIOs and DC managers are challenged to find the right balance, walking on the ‘growth-cost’ tightrope. To even out this equation, enterprises will need to adopt a mix of standard and innovative practices to help bring down the exorbitant DC power bills. To be specific, optimisation of power usage in DC holds the answer to achieving this balance.

Datacentre Woes

According to Shailendra Shukla, Country Sales Manager– APC (Schneider Electric), one of the biggest problems faced by a CIO from a DC perspective is related to power and cooling. To add to this, not much attention is paid by Indian enterprises towards the reduction of their DC energy bills. As per a survey conducted by Connection Research in April 2010 of Indian CIOs regarding power consumption in the DC, less than half of them didn’t even know how much power they were consuming. According to Graeme Philipson, Research Director- Connection Research, “They obviously know about the total intake of energy from the grid but some of it is mixed up with the total organisational consumption. Thus, a precise measurement of the total DC energy consumption is not possible.”

Also, the latest findings of Gartner suggest that DC power, cooling, energy supply and cost problems are likely to worsen over the next few years with organisations growing their technology infrastructure as they emerge from a recessionary period. This situation calls for concern.

Advanced DC Technologies

Given this fact, many startups and top of the chart companies in India have already started adopting advanced DC technologies to keep costs at the minimum. Some of these technologies include: green DC to reduce power and cooling consumption and also help in reducing the actual use of real estate space; virtualisation to help make effective use of enterprise applications. Besides these, there are various kinds of cooling technologies that can help optimise energy usage.

Financial services provider, Orbis Financial cites examples of advanced DC technology deployments, “Our DC is completely built on virtualisation with blade server technology and next generation environmental control system with redundancy at every level. What this means to Orbis is an energy efficient system that reduces power and cooling consumption. It also helps us in reducing the actual use of real estate space,” informs Atul Gupta, MD– Orbis Financial.

HDFC Bank has also designed its DC to further improve the overall efficiency in terms of power consumption and also rationalise usage of resources. “We have cooling related probes that trigger alerts if the DC temperature overshoots the 26–28 Degree Celsius range,” says Ram Sambasivan, former Sr.VP IT and Head Datacentre, HDFC Bank. The bank has designed a precision cooling approach that provides cooling to selective areas in the DC where the usage of IT infrastructure is more. “We also have to make sure that monitoring of the Precision AC is done both manually and via automated alerts coming to our Network Operations Centre (NOC),” he adds. On the cable management side, most of the cables are laid out on the ceiling with minimal presence on the ground to facilitate faster cooling.

Virtualisation: Panacea To Energy Woes

Virtualisation is also a widely adopted technology that encourages energy optimisation. Ranganathan Ramani, VP IT Infrastructure- Vodafone Essar talks about the company’s massive consolidation project that is expected to benefit them with tremendous savings. “In the first year of the project, we have consolidated 900 physical servers into about 400. This will not only reduce the server footprint but will also increase capacity of the applications,” he explains.

Nareshchandra Singh, Principal Analyst, Networking & Communications, Datacentre, Gartner concurs and says, “On the server side, they can be virtualised giving additional benefits in terms of utilisation. It also results in optimisation of server usage, bringing down the requirement for more servers.”

Measuring Is Key

What about organisations that have already made heavy investments in their DCs, including some of the above mentioned advanced technologies, and are now wanting to optimise usage of their current IT Infrastructure to cut down on DC power costs?

Measurement of power consumption of the IT resources within the DC is the first step towards effectively solving this puzzle.

According to Philipson, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) has become an industry standard. It measures the proportion of power utilised by IT equipment of the DC, versus the proportion that’s being utilised by cooling and ancillary equipment such as lights and humidifiers.

According to Gartner, PUE will become the norm for most large DCs, and by 2015 around 80 percent of new large DCs will report continuous PUE readings across all hardware.

“Currently the average PUE in India is around 2.5, while there are companies that are trying to achieve the 1.5 to 1.6 level mark,” says Shukla. Ideally, enterprises should keep ‘1’ as the target PUE and the closer they are to ‘1,’ the better is their DC efficiency.

Reducing DC Power Costs Sans Vendor Solutions

After measuring the PUE, it is time to take concrete steps for cutting down on power consumption. While there are vendor solutions available, there are simple steps that can be taken to reduce power bills without any monetary investment. These can bring tremendous results if customised for typical requirements.

For example, most DCs run at an unnecessary cooling temperature range of 20-23 Degree Celsius. It is now established that DC temperatures can go as high as 26 Degrees. “This might not sound like a big difference but the difference in energy consumption in cooling DCs at 20 and 26 Degree Celsius is significant,” explains Philipson.

There is another technique, namely ‘hot aisle and cold aisle’, wherein the servers are set up in such a way that cold air is circulated to the front of the servers and hot air is accumulated at the back. This eliminates the possibility of hot air shifting into the nearby equipment cabinet.

There are various simple techniques that can help rationalise energy usage in DCs and can be incorporated within the architecture without the need to hire an consultant. Some information is even available in the public domain through websites like thegreengrid.org . However, what is most critical is the need for a fundamental shift in the mindset and the way organisations approach their DC energy consumption.