In June 2010 the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to launch new guidelines for data centre efficiency.  Falling under the umbrella of the

EPA’s “Energy Star” program, the guidelines will give data centers a tool which rates data centre efficiency on a scale of 1~100, awarding an Energy Star certification on a score greater than 75.

While similar to the European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPDN), and the more recent Code of Conduct on Data Centres Energy Efficiency, the objective of all guidance is to “inform and stimulate data centre operators to reduce energy consumption in a cost effective manner without hampering the critical function (of data centres).”

Other standards for data center design and construction, such as the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) data centres and EU Ecolabel supplement Energy Star as a method European consumers and data center operators can use to ensure that at the individual hardware level they are purchasing equipment at the most efficient energy rating.

The Problem with Data Centers

“Historically, data centres have been designed with large tolerances for operational and capacity changes, including possible future expansion. Many today use design practices that are woefully outdated. These factors lead to power consumption inefficiencies. In most cases only a small fraction of the grid power consumed by the data centre actually gets to the IT systems.” (Code of Conduct)

The Energy Star certification for data centers will use a variation of Power Utilization Efficiency (PUE) and UPS output for determining the data center grade.  PUE measures the amount of power consumed by a data centre, divided by the amount of power actually being directly applied to processing, and the result is a factor of power efficiency being used by processing equipment vs. support equipment such as UPS and air conditioning.

As with any new standard, calls of unfair generalizations and demands for compromise are expected.  However if the data center industry is indeed consuming nearly 2% of Europe’s energy, as noted in the “Green Grid Energy Policy Research for Data Centres,” then data centers throughout Europe are producing as many pollutants as the airline industry – an unacceptable condition.

Servers in traditional data centers often run at a low utilization levels of 10% ~ 15%. In particular, industries with seasonal or event-driven markets and applications may only use their full design capacity a few times during the course of a year.  The result is often significant waste of resources supporting data centres through purchases and operation of redundant hardware, memory, network devices, and power supplies.

Today, enterprises must deploy excess processing and storage capacity to meet both seasonal or event demands, as well as for data security and disaster recovery.  Adding the financial stress of a tough economy to this mix, with an emphasis on managing OPEX/CAPEX, organisations are forced to consider strategies to reduce data centre operational costs.

How Outsourcing Infrastructure and Cloud Computing Contributes to Green ICT

Cloud computing, with access to computational power and storage space hosted by a third-party service provider such as ScaleUp Technologies, lowers or eliminates demand for physical servers in your data centre – or eliminates the need to operate an internal enterprise data centre entirely.  

Cloud service providers construct their data centers with the latest technologies in hardware, data centre design, and compute/storage resource management, relieving the enterprise of the burden and cost of operating their own facility.

A cloud service provider then provides an on-demand compute and storage resources scaled to meet existing – as well as processing spikes and future growth of your business.  Physical servers are added to the compute resource as needed to meet a shared customer demand in a single location – or interconnected locations, centralizing processing into larger, more energy efficient pools of compute resource.  With servers in data centres using virtualization across the infrastructure running at greater than 85% CPU utilization, the result is a much more favorable PUE.  A favorable PUE= energy efficiency = green.

Whether an organization simply accesses on-demand infrastructure and platform resources, or takes advantage of outsourcing their applications (through software as a service/SaaS) providers), the result provides organizations with both a better economic model, in addition to reducing their expenses through potential elimination of physical data center infrastructure within the organization.

One less data center, one less potential source of inefficient power consumption, one less source of carbon dioxide producing energy consumption – a good economic, green outcome for business and community.

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