Curbing IT Power Usage

New Ideas To Save Energy In Your Data Center

Thanks to energy hogs such as blade centers, data center energy costs are high. SMEs will find it hard to absorb these kinds of financial hits without some help. Fortunately, there are more than a few ways to curb power consumption.

Measure Power Consumption
According to Chris Loeffler, product manager of the data center solutions group at Eaton (www.eaton.com), one of the biggest trends in data center energy savings is toward looking at how to monitor or meter data center power consumption (through power consumption metrics).

Data centers should start by measuring their power consumption across all of IT. “SMEs can’t afford to do much submetering. But, they can afford a power consumption monitor that they can plug selected equipment in to see how much electricity is being consumed by a range of representative equipment,” says Simon Mingay, research vice president at Gartner.

For SMEs that can’t afford the power monitor setup, equipment vendors (server and air-conditioning unit companies) have power consumption numbers available. These often come from the vendor’s customers. This information can be used to model power consumption of the IT infrastructure (using simple spreadsheets), according to Mingay.

Click here to learn about data center power requirements.

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