U.S. data centers footing enormous electric bill.
A new report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
predicts that data center electric bills will grow exponentially
over the next four years. Even with existing efficiency trends
factored in, the U.S. data center power bill will mushroom from
$4.5 billion in 2006 to an estimated $7.4 billion in 2011.
In December 2006, Congress requested that EPA develop the report
to examine market trends in the growth and energy use of servers
and data centers. The growing use of these systems, and the power
and cooling infrastructures that support them, have increased energy
use and greenhouse gas emissions, and raised concerns about power
grid reliability.
Data centers consumed about 60 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in
2006, roughly 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption
and enough electricity to power 5 percent of homes in the U.S.
Federal servers and data centers alone account for approximately
6 billion kWh (10 percent) of this electricity use, at a total
electricity cost of about $450 million per year. The energy consumption
of servers and data centers has doubled in the past five years
and is expected to almost double again in the next five years to
more than 100 billion kWh.
Action Items
Existing technologies and strategies could reduce typical server
energy use by an estimated 25 percent, with even greater energy
savings possible with advanced technologies. The EPA Report on
Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency shows that data centers
in the U.S. have the potential to save up to $4 billion annually
in electricity costs through more energy-efficient equipment and
operations and the broad implementation of best management practices.
The report recommends priority efficiency opportunities and policies
that can also lead to additional savings using state-of-the-art
technologies and operations.
According to Info-Tech Research Group, government needs to take
a leadership role to stem the excessive power consumption curve
by data center operators in North America. The high-tech research
firm says that the findings of the report are no surprise given
that enterprises lack guidelines on acceptable power usage.
"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 U.S. 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. There should be a
sense of urgency around this issue that is not evident today."
Standards Needed
Although many IT managers are seeing electricity costs consume
an ever-larger chunk of their budgets, few have been able to take
steps toward implementing energy-saving technologies.
"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," Hay said.
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
said.
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