DW Energy Efficiency Guidelines

A 2007 survey revealed that 63% of data centers were running out of power, space or cooling capacity. Clearly the growth curve was misdrawn, and solutions to expand data centers are being balanced by considering more effectives ways to utilise current capacity.

When evaluating the energy efficiency of a data warehouse infrastructure, consider:

1. Power Consumption of all the equipment that makes up the infrastructure - all the hardware, including additional networking hardware and network load. Also include the higher demands the data warehouse operations place on network switch usage in terms of length of time and number of cycles.
2. Additional cooling needed - vendor specifications do not always include this information. As a standard, assume one watt of energy used requires one watt to cool.
3. Space occupied - calculate at least the area the equipment will require. In many data centers, height matters also. Also project the area required to accommodate future data growth, such as how much extra space will be used up when you add 5TB capacity?

According to a survey by ONStor, Inc. sixty-three percent of the 369 IT professionals said that running out of space or power in their data centers had already occurred.

Whilst 60 percent had already adopted energy-efficient practices in response to outages, around 40 percent said it had not prompted them to discuss green data center initiatives. Instead, they viewed such events as outages as standard operational risk, or requested more budget to purchase more generators or take over more space.

Power and space constraints will become a standard operational mode if current practices don’t change. Green computing is addressing a potential need, practiced now it will prevent recurrences of power limitations, save on energy costs, and avoid construction, by many organizations.

Replacing two boxes with one appliance that uses far less energy than the two boxes combined makes sense.

References:

ONStor Inc. “ONStor Green Data Center Survey Reveals 63 Percent Of Organizations Have Run Out Of Space, Power or Cooling Capacity Without Warning.” ONStor.com, September 18, 2007.

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