Bringing Intelligence, Control to the data center beast - By Paula Bernier

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jan 6 2010) Power and Cooling

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   Data centers last year consumed something like $23 billion worldwide on electricity. And that’s increasing by about 15 percent each year, according to reports.

    On the up side, however, power-hungry data centers are slowly becoming more intelligent and controllable beasts. That’s in large part because suppliers of data center solutions are paying more attention to the energy and environmental costs of these animals and providing solutions to tame them.

    A solution from a company called Zyrion Inc. is but one example of advances on this front. Earlier this week Zyrion came out with new software that provides a dashboard on the power consumption of various gear like servers and routers in data centers. It can also pull metrics from various air conditioning units with a data center.

    But Zyrion CEO Vikas Aggarwal tells me that this kind of solution could potentially be expanded to correlate heat and CPU load on equipment so, for example, a technician or automated system in a data center could elect to lower the cooling on a given set of gear if the CPU load on that rack of equipment was low.

    In fact, solutions that do this kind of thing are available today. For example, a company called Federspiel Controls has software that measures server inlet air temperatures and does analysis on which cooling units are needed. Intelligent controls then can be used to automatically turn off unnecessary cooling units and turn down remaining cooling units. According to the company, these smarts can be used to achieve 40 to 80 percent cooling unit fan energy savings and 10 to 20 percent total data center energy savings.

    

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