According to a report from a respected industry research body, for every rand spent on computer hardware in 2010 another 50 cents will be spent on energy to power it. This trend is expected to worsen and within the next several years, energy costs could consume up to one-third of IT budgets in total, says Philip Hampton, chief technology officer at Powermode.
“Curtailing energy consumption is a significant global challenge that must be addressed by all stakeholders today,” he stresses.
According to Hampton, there are encouraging signs that larger organisations are placing energy saving issues higher on their priority lists, particularly in their power hungry data centers.
“As a rule, approximately 30 percent of the energy used in a data centre is consumed by IT loads. The other 70 percent goes to supporting the network-critical physical infrastructure equipment through air conditioning, heating and humidification equipment. Uninterruptible power supply equipment alone consumes around 18 percent of the power.”
He says power wastage is also high due to inefficiencies in basic designs.
“For instance, the average PC wastes about half of the power it consumes, while the average server squanders about one third. As a result, a significant percentage of all the energy consumed by the data centre ends up as waste heat, which is released into the atmosphere.”
Hampton says efforts to reduce energy consumption through server power management and similar initiatives do not go far enough.
“It’s important to understand that moves to reduce overall energy consumption of IT equipment can also reduce the power demands – and the power rating – of the physical infrastructure. It’s the difference between reducing energy consumption temporarily and reducing it permanently.
“In other words, permanent or structural changes such as the installation of high efficiency servers or high efficiency UPS systems reduce both the electricity costs and the infrastructure costs.”
Hampton says the way is being shown by a coalition of technology companies led by Google and Intel who, together with environmental groups, have launched an initiative to conserve electricity and curb global warming emissions by making the world’s computers and servers more energy-efficient.
“The Climate Savers Computing Initiative aims to reduce the amount of electricity computers consume by 50 percent by 2010, which is expected to reduce CO2 emissions by 54 million tons annually.
“For almost all companies, the goal of reducing power consumption makes sense from an economic perspective. But minimising energy use also has an environmental impact and in today’s business climate having a ‘green strategy’ in place makes good business sense,” he adds.
