There have been many estimates of the amount of electricity consumed by data centres, some suggesting that in the UK it could be as high as 3% of total consumption. The EU Code of Conduct for Data Centre Energy Efficiency uses a figure of 56 TWh per year for the EU as a whole and suggests that this will increase to 104 TWh per year by 2020. Whatever it is it is a lot, and it would be no bad thing to try to reduce it or at the very least curtail its growth.
Future-Tech are official endorsers of the EU Code of Conduct on Data Centre Energy Efficiency and for many years now we have been at the forefront of the data centre energy efficiency movement, delivering seminars on free cooling and “practicing what we preach” by installing the most efficient air conditioning and UPS systems on our clients’ projects
Where the Power Goes
Power used in a data centre can be broadly broken down into two parts: that used by the IT equipment and that used by the supporting infrastructure. Power used by the supporting infrastructure includes air conditioning, UPS losses, switchgear and distribution losses, lighting and ancillaries such as standby generator heaters etc. Of these the air conditioning is the greatest, followed by the UPS losses and as both of these are directly related to the IT power consumption it follows that reducing IT power should be a high priority.
IT Equipment Energy Efficiency
This falls outside of our scope as it depends on the efficiency of the hardware and software in use. Great improvements have been made in recent years with manufacturers producing equipment that is less power hungry, developers creating more efficient applications and IT managers virtualizing and consolidating their servers.
As yet though there is no agreed metric for the efficiency of the IT load as a whole, as this will require an industry agreed means of measuring and comparing the “output”. It is something that the EU CoC hopes to address in the near future.
Infrastructure Energy Efficiency
By contrast, there have been metrics for the efficiency of the data centre infrastructure for many years now and generally the Green Grid’s Power Utilisation Effectiveness (PUE) and Data Centre infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE) have been adopted.
Examples of a 100kW IT load with PUE's of 1.8 and 1.2
PUE is the total load of the data centre (IT load + facilities load) divided by the IT load so is always greater than 1 and the lower the number the more efficient the facility. DCiE is the reciprocal of PUE.
For information on saving energy in your data centre call James Wilman on 0845 9000 127 or email us.
