In early 2007, an article in eWeek reported that the electricity bills for U.S companies totaled $2.7B in 2005. During that same year, the cost of electricity for the entire world topped $7B and the total cost to power a datacenter was about 1.2% of the $7B.
With an increasing demand for Internet services, music and video downloads along with telephony, the article estimated that the power consumption for datacenters would grow 40% by 2010. Further research shows that beginning in 2004, infrastructure costs have already exceeded the s cost of a server; in 2008, the energy cost alone will exceed the server cost ; and the combination of infrastructure cost and energy cost will be 75% of the total cost running a data center while IT will be only 25% in 2014. What does that really mean? It means that the traditional total cost of ownership (TCO) may not accurately reflect the true cost of ownership. A new model is needed to include the server cost as well as the infrastructure and energy cost. Moreover, the data center design will need to take optimization for the environment into consideration.
Research funded by Symantec, in late 2007, of nearly 1000 datacenter managers revealed that the energy efficiency was their top priority. To improve the energy efficiency, researchers identified several strategies; such as reducing the number of physical devices to manage, specifying energy efficient CPUs, using high efficiency power supplies, implementing overall cooling systems from device-specific to racks, and implementing overall electricity-distribution systems. From the manufacturers' perspective, companies are creating technologies and products to assist datacenter managers. Multi-core processors promise increasing performance in smaller footprints. Virtualization reduces the number of servers in datacenters. Finally, Next-generation power supplies architecture facilitates improved power management strategies.
These technologies and strategies point to one conclusion: future datacenters will be greener for the environment and the enterprises' pocketbook.
What do you think? Do you think green datacenters are reality? I welcome your comments.
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