Lawrence Berkeley National Labs threw out a statistic that stated data center energy costs can be 100 times higher than those of typical buildings. Another statistic thrown around by EPA is that data centers accounted for 1.5% of overall US electrical spend in 2006 and it is expected to increase by 1% or more by 2011. Poor energy efficiency can obviously have a dramatic effect on the bottom line, reduce the competitiveness of the data center and may even reduce up time which is so crucial to the data world.
Typically data centers have been reluctant to participate in Benchmarking of energy performance through EnergyStar because they do not want to document how costly poor data center management and design is, and they fear the looming carbon tax through cap and trade. It is understandable that the industry is concerned about being an open book for criticism given some of the real constraints on server rooms in terms of temperature control, power reliability and particulate reduction. Being from an industry that needs data and servers to work flawlessly every minute of every day, we understand this, but every one already knows you are typically a high energy user.
The good news is that starting at Benchmarking and allocation of energy end uses within a building with data centers, we can understand how energy is used and begin to clean up the inefficiencies. Benchmarking is a tool for understanding across an organization and can serve these important purposes:
- to establish a baseline of typical energy use
- to provide comparison to similar facilities
- to highlight improvement opportunities
- to highlight maintenance and operating issues
- to highlight best practices for future improvements
In this day and age it should be universally understand that awareness, i.e. know where you are at, always leads to a better place. Energy cost reduction drops to the bottom line and in the case of data centers can reduce inefficient operation, provide more uptime and customer satisfaction, and positions you for the future where that energy savings translates to less carbon use and cash through trading on an open market. Its almost like double-dipping on the profits from energy reduction. How can that be bad?
