Government needs to take a leadership role to stem the excessive power consumption curve by data center operators in North America, says Info-Tech Research Group, a global leader in providing tactical, practical Information Technology research and analysis. A recent US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report predicting data center power bills will grow exponentially over the next four years is no surprise given that enterprises lack guidelines on acceptable power usage, the IT research firm said.
"Greening of the large enterprise data center is just a pipe dream at the moment because there's no motivation or support for IT departments to change," said Aaron Hay, research consultant at Info-Tech Research Group. "The US and Canadian governments need to work with data center operators, vendors, and industry associations to facilitate setting practical and actionable targets for immediate reductions in data center power consumption."
The EPA Report on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency, released earlier this month, predicts that even with existing efficiency trends factored in, the US data center power bill will mushroom from $US 4.5 billion tabulated for 2006, to an estimated $US 7.4 billion in 2011. The report states that US data centers consume enough electricity to power five per cent of homes in the US.
"There should be a sense of urgency around this issue that is not evident today," said Hay. "That's because without standards or metrics for what energy consumption overall in data centers should be, IT managers have no bottom line numbers to convince management of the cost and performance improvements that can be achieved."
Fortune 500 enterprises can help by putting pressure on vendors to make rigorous product improvements to reduce power drain, and by encouraging vendors to work together to establish industry benchmarks, said Hay. Smaller enterprises can help reduce power consumption through immediate improvements such as virtualization, where fewer servers can manage tasks previously done by many servers. Data center operators can then reduce the power drain of air conditioners required to cool servers. But government leadership is needed to motivate the industry to develop a standard metric that can measure whole data center power consumption.
"Until we have a standard measure of data center power consumption, it is doubtful that we will see changes on a widespread level," Hay concluded.