50% of respondents in North America said that energy efficiency was an important consideration. Last year this was a slightly higher percentage – 52%. The decrease in interest was also more marked in smaller data centers. This may be due to their inability

Furthermore, five out of six report reliance on data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software. Although these measures don't represent the totality of possible energy-efficiency improvements, they demonstrate serious reliance on common practices

For 10 years, Energy Trust has worked to increase energy efficiency in the state and saw a prime opportunity in traditional, energy-gulping data centers. The organization recently created a special data center solution that accommodates not only large-scale

Use-Case Examples: Energy Controls Lower Consumption. A wealth of data is available on the subject of energy efficiency in the data center; much of this data is driving energy-efficient DR best practices. Organizations such as the Open Data Center Alliance

Adding another feather to their cap, the first HPC or high performance computing data center would be going live very soon, which is supposed to top the list of global data centers in terms of energy efficiency. The basic principle behind this amazing design is

In looking to decrease your data center's environmental impact, you might be considering either (or both) energy-efficiency measures or alternative energy sources. Generally, energy efficiency is the more accessible of these two possibilities. 

The ongoing quest for energy efficiency in data centers, driven in part by the looming potential for regulations and taxes, motivates a desire for a simple means of benchmarking a facility over time and against other facilities. Since 2007, The Green Grid’s PUE (power usage effectiveness) metric has been the staple of companies in this regard, but it’s not an approach that pleases everyone. With all the alternative, albeit less popular, standards in use or under development, should PUE remain the top choice?

Take your pick of studies and publications listing priorities for data center operators in 2013 and beyond—energy will almost certainly be in there somewhere. It has become a perennial issue for companies, and given the various economic and political factors surrounding it, this situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. So, why is energy such a mantra in the industry and in the technology press?

This week, Industry Perspective asks Lisa Rhodes about the relevance of energy efficiency and renewable energy sources for data center operators. Lisa is vice president of marketing and sales for Verne Global, a data center company that owns and operates a facility in Keflavik, Iceland.

As data centers consume more energy to meet rising demand from customers (both businesses and consumers), efficiency is becoming a greater focus. The prospect of rising energy prices and more-stringent government regulations is also driving data center operators to reduce consumption (or at least the growth thereof). Although the industry has made great strides, work still remains to reduce the energy demands of cooling.

Recently, the US energy policy has seen a movement away from the idea of green energy towards a more grounded idea of producing shale oil and shale gas. This is with the view to cut costs of production and bring back manufacturing into USA. Britain is also showing similar policies – all of which is important for the data center industry since it is hugely dependent on energy policy decisions. 

Looking to save money, enhance sustainability and ease compliance with environmental regulations, data center operators around the world are eagerly investigating new energy efficiency strategies. However, many rightfully struggle with the adoption of unproven models that may impact reliability.

Energy is the lifeblood of data centers, and as it becomes scarcer and as its cost increases, more companies will consider the feasibility of generating their own power. Although the perceived benefits of on-site power generation—especially with renewable sources like wind and solar—are tempting, the decision to pursue either supplemental or exclusive generation is one that must be made carefully. 

Since the first computer rooms of the 60’s, airflow has been an important, but often misunderstood component of data center design.  With the low density computing of the past, it didn’t need to perform very efficiently to do its job.  Today however, with high performance servers doing many times the work of their predecessors in a much smaller space, data center airflow needs to keep pace. The first tenet of effective and efficient data center cooling and airflow is to “reduce or eliminate mixi

This article is part three of a three-part series on energy management in the data center. (See parts one and two.) If you read parts one and two, you recall this series about energy in the data center started with money—wasted money, to be exact. Approximately $24.7 billion is spent each year on server management, power and cooling for unused servers. This final installment circles back to money. Read about practical how-to advice for introducing best practices that drive up energy efficiencies

Energy is critical to data centers; rising prices, potential new regulations and taxes, and limited supply make it a topic that is foremost on the minds of both data center managers and industry observers. But another resource used heavily by data centers bears remembering: water. What should companies do about water when it comes to their data center facilities? All data centers consume energy, making energy the biggest concern for a variety of parties (companies, environmental groups and other

More and more companies are occupying space in data centers. This leads to the requirement for IT decision makers to look at issues like power, data sovereignty and security issues. Such considerations need to be examined very carefully before the company decides to take up residence in the data center. Physical security needs to be analyzed carefully. This security becomes even more important when one is talking about defense organizations using the data center space. The provider’s environment

This article is the part two of a three-part series on energy management in the data center. (See part one here.) Last week, I wrote about the past approaches to data center power management and the state of rising inefficiency. I presented a case for more accurately assessing current power consumption and explained why past approaches for calculating power requirements or manually measuring power were insufficient for establishing proactive energy-management policies.

Estimates of the number of pages in the U.S. Code and the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations differ, with some reaching into the hundreds of thousands of pages. With that much verbiage, you are guaranteed that whatever you’re doing now, it’s probably covered in some regard (and you’re likely breaking some rule or regulation right now). The Internet and, to some extent, data centers have managed to avoid some regulations thus far, but those days may be numbered. In particular, energy efficiency is

Jeffrey S. Klaus September 12, 2012 1 Comment » An Audit of Data Center Power Efficiency—or Inefficiency This article is the part one of a three-part series on energy management in the data center. Today IT organizations face extreme pressures to cut costs and drive efficiency at every level. Approximately $24.7 billion is wasted each year on server management, power and cooling for

As the digital age progressed, significant advancements in information technology were followed by an increased demand for information technology based services.  Many data center owners and operators soon faced a rapidly changing consumer environment and an increased demand for space, power and cooling growth at a rate faster than most businesses were prepared to respond to.  By the early dot com bubble ages, there was a rush to build to meet the demand. Post dot com bubble gives

Video consumes a tremendous amount of Internet bandwidth—some reports indicate that Netflix alone consumes 28% of all bandwidth in the U.S. (“Report: Netflix hogs 32 percent of peak Internet bandwidth”). A new video compression technology, HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) could reduce the burden that video places on bandwidth, however. This technology could reduce usage by half, if Ericsson’s claims are to be believed (“New video compression tech will cut bandwidth use in half, Ericsson says”

The growing adoption of smartphones, PCs and tablets is increasing demands on data center processing. For every handheld device attached to the cloud, a data center somewhere is processing the information. The resulting growth in data center demand is expected to continue to rise at the rate of 14% per year, according Tier 1 Research.* To compete in this market, data center designers and operators are squeezing the most out of the energy envelope. This is especially important to colocation providers who compete on the basis of operational overhead with other providers in their market. If they can deliver IT processing capacity at lower cost, they gain a distinct competitive advantage. Over the past several years, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling has proven to be a reliable method for optimizing the energy efficiency of the data center as well as accurately predicting the failure-mode conditions associated with cooling system failure.